Dutch Painters Research Articles

Catherine Scallen. Review of "Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age" by Joaneath Spicer.

Catherine Scallen. Review of "Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age" by Joaneath Spicer.

:Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age

Artists active in Utrecht during the first half of the seventeenth century created some of the most beautiful and luminous paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Combining Italian theatricality and innovative lighting with Dutch sensitivity to nature, these painters produced a warm, light-filled art that celebrates the senses and the imagination. This innovative study is the first in English to present a comprehensive treatment of the achievements of this school -- the sensuous, idealized landscapes and animal paintings as well as the figure and flower paintings.Eminent authorities discuss the cultural, religious, and political conditions in Utrecht that prompted artists to develop a style different from that of artists in the rest of the Netherlands. In a country often thought of as middle-class and Protestant, the patronage of the aristocracy and an important Catholic community had a major impact on Utrecht artists, encouraging imaginative solutions to traditional subjects. In addition, a majority of Utrecht artists traveled to Italy, and their experiences in that country permeate their work.The book focuses on some eighty of the finest paintings of this group, including those by the most famous artists of the era: Abraham Bloemaert, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst, and Ambrosius Bosschaert. A wealth of comparative illustrations convey the richness of the school at its height.This beautiful book is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, September through November 1997; the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, January to April 1998; and the National Gallery, London, May through July 1998.

Utrecht's Shining Moment

Joaneathan A. Spicer with Lynn Federle Orr Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht During the Golden Age

Masters of light: Dutch painters in Utrecht during the golden age

Masters of light: Dutch painters in Utrecht during the golden age

Mortality Patterns among Commercial Painters in The Netherlands.

In an epidemiologic study, the mortality patterns of commercial painters in The Netherlands were investigated. The hypothesis that painters are at an increased risk of cancer, especially lung cancer, was tested in collaboration with the Dutch Social Fund for painters. This fund manages the pensions of Dutch painters. In the group of painters eligible for pensions, 9,812 deaths were observed between 1980 and 1992. Proportionate mortality ratios were calculated. The results support previous findings of an increased risk of lung cancer in painters. Although no statement can be made about the actual causal agent, the authors believe that the sanding down of old paint layers may expose painters to particulates that contain carcinogens such as lead chromates and asbestos. The decreased risks of mortality from some neoplasms and circulatory and digestive problems, pneumoconiosis, and "other causes" observed in the painters lack a plausible explanation. Chance or the known limitation of proportionate mortality ratio analysis might play a role.

Symptoms indicative of the effects of organic solvent exposure in Dutch painters

The report describes the results of a cross-sectional study among two groups of young and older painters and two age-matched control groups. The study was intended to gather information on the occurrence of solvent-exposure symptoms among Dutch workers using a mailed questionnaire. Results indicated that among young painters and to a lesser extent among older painters what is commonly accepted as specific symptoms and additional solvent-related symptoms showed a higher frequency than among the controls. The most interesting observation was a significant relationship between the frequency of periods of heavy exposure and the severity of most symptom categories, whereas there was a lack of consistent relationships with other exposure parameters.

Det nordiske i tysk landskabsmaleri

Summary Late nineteenth century thinking was inclined to biological explanations. That art was created by artists was not a triviality. The work of art was the output of an outstanding personality, different from the rest of mankind. The style of the single work of art as the style of a movement was understood as expression of the single artistic personality or a group of artistic personalities. The concept of the “Zeitgeist” was to a degree replaced by the belief in the psychological, emotional and moral entity of an ethnic group. The Nordic man was the creator of a Nordic civilisation and a Nordic art. The creations of this Nordic man were the mirror or the materialisation of a Nordic mentality, the Nordic genius. The odd and puzzling side of this view of the world was that the Nordic man crystallized in two very different kinds of personalities. One is the “Hamlet'‐figure. A person troubled by doubts, an intelligent dreamer, always doubting his impulses, especially his own ability to solve any problem. The other is the “blond beast”. A man who acts without thinking, a mercenary leader, a “Tarzan”. The man of will, who follows his own interests, his need for power and glory over the dead body of his enemy or any passive bystander. Whereas the intelligent and sensitive “Hamlet” leaves behind ultimate destruction, the “blond beast” is aman, who cures the diseases of civilisation and is the builder of new worlds. In Denmark we meet “Hamlet” in the writings of Herman Bang and J.P. Jacobsen, and the “blond beast” in the novels of Johannes V. Jensen. All had an impact on German intellectual life. Figure painters as Böcklin, Hodler, Fidus (Hugo Höppener) and Agnes Slott M⊘ller ("Niels Ebbesen") embody the man of action as plain brutal, as we know it from the latest Hollywood movies. German landscape painters explored the lyric, sensitive Nordic nature of man in images of flat, misty, unpicturesque landscapes. By doing this they had a choice between three important traditions in European landscape art. The classical Italian landscape, which had a great impact on early and mid nineteenth century German painting was discharged. The new analytical French landscape was (for a moment) put aside. The Nordic concept of a landscape as an image of a state of mind became the leading theme. The Dutch painters, the romantic English painters and some younger Scandinavian painters became ideals. German artists settled in Dachau and Worpswede as a parallel to the Skagen School. The German expressionists in the beginning of the twentieth century were sceptical about the dreamy world of the turn of the century. French, Russian and primitive art came as a revelation in the search for the real roots. Der blaue Reiter in Munich and Der Sturm in Berlin joined the modernistic movement in a way, that was soon to be criticised by the conservatives for not being German and degenerate. A leading expressionist, namely Emil Nolde, remains true to the Nordic inclination. Born in Schleswig, an old Danish territory, he travelled to Copenhagen in 1900–1901, studied Danish painters and tried to make a break through in the Danish art world. In this he failed, but he retained his Danish relations, living in the borderland between Germany and Denmark and showing his works in Berlin. In Noldes later paintings there is a mixture of the “new savage painting”, exoticism and Nordic mysticism. The landscape motives from the flat fields and the coasts of western Schleswig have a similarity to the landscapes around 1900 by L. A. Ring. The relations between Nolde and Danish landscape painters is of a kind, that matches the relations between the landscapes of Edvard Munch and Karl Schmidt‐Rottluff.

Behavioral effects of exposure to organic solvents in Dutch painters

The report describes the results of a cross-sectional study of solvent-exposed young and older Dutch painters and two age-matched control groups. Both traditional and computerized neurobehavioral tests were applied. The study did not detect any major differences between the two groups of painters and their two age-matched control groups. It is argued that this absence of differences is probably not due to a lack of sensitivity of the tests applied or the size of the groups studied. The level of exposure was estimated to be within a range at which previous authors have reported solvent-induced CNS effects.

Dutch Painters and British Novel-Readers: Adam Bede in the Context of Victorian Cultural Literacy

Dutch Painters and British Novel-Readers: <i>Adam Bede</i> in the Context of Victorian Cultural Literacy

Neuropsychiatric disorders among solvent-exposed workers

This case-control study was undertaken to determine whether exposure to organic solvents, as experienced by Dutch painters, causes an increased risk of disability due to neuropsychiatric disorders. Cases and controls were selected from the Dutch Painters' and Construction Workers' Organizations. Cases were defined as male persons receiving disability benefits due to neuropsychiatric disorders. The controls consisted of a random sample of 1000 male persons from the total study population. Cases (n = 252) and controls (n = 822) participated in our study by returning the completed questionnaires. The questionnaire was used to collect information about occupational history and the presence of potentially confounding factors. The adjusted Odds Ratio for the total group of neuropsychiatric disorders did not reach a statistically significant level (OR = 1.17; P less than 0.30). Although a stronger association was suggested between "neuroses" (ICD 300) and exposure to organic solvents (OR = 2.30; P less than 0.05), there are indications that this relationship is merely the result of classification bias. The results of this study do not confirm, but also do not completely exclude, that Dutch painters are at increased risk of being prematurely disabled due to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Prenarcotic and neuraesthenic symptoms among Dutch workers exposed to organic solvents.

A population of 379 Dutch workers exposed to organic solvents was compared with a non-exposed population of 443 workers with regard to the prevalence of prenarcotic and neuraesthenic symptoms. Participants completed a questionnaire to collect information about their occupational history, exposure to organic solvents, and the occurrence of symptoms. The results of the study indicated that workers exposed to solvents have a higher reporting rate of prenarcotic symptoms than workers not exposed to solvents. The prevalence of chronic neurotoxic effects, however, in the form of neuraesthenic symptoms was only weakly associated with reported exposure to organic solvents. The influence of work stress in the development of these symptoms is perhaps more important than the role of exposure to organic solvents. It is concluded that the organic solvent syndrome type I, as defined by an international workshop, is not an important health hazard among Dutch painters.

Philips Angels Lof der schilder-konst

AbstractPhilips Angel's Lof der schilder-const (In Praise of Painting, 1642) is one of the few pieces of writing we have as a source of notions on the theory of painting in the Netherlands. Yet it was not intended as an art-theoretical treatise: Angel read the text at a St. Luke's feast as part of the activities that were being undertaken to acquire guild rights for Leiden painters. In order to assess the value of the theoretical notions on which the paper is based, it is therefore necessary to analyse as far as possible the circumstances of its writing. First the Angel family is examined. Orginally from Antwerp, the Angels moved north in the 1590s, probably because of the Eighty Years' War, settling in Middelburg and Leiden. They were fairly prosperous middle-class citizens, mostly schoolteachers, painters and small shopkeepers. Both the Middelburg and Leiden branches produced painters called Philips Angel. The Middelburg Philips, almost certainly identical with a painter called Philips Angel who was active in Haarlem, is known to have produced quite a lot of paitings. Only one small etching by the Leiden Philips has survived; nothing is known of any paintings by him. The Leiden Philips, the author of Lof der schilder-const, had a turbulent career. He joined the painters who pressed for guild rights in Leiden, to which end he held his speech in 1641. As early as 1645, though, he gave up painting and travelled as an employee of the United East-Indian Compary to Indonesia. From there, promoted to the high rank of chief merchant, he was sent to Persia. He was dismissed on grounds of embezzlement, but managed to procure the post of court painter to the Shah. By 1656, however, he was back in Batavia (Jakarta), where he again obtained a number of highly regarded positions. Fired again for mismanagement and defalcation, his end was inglorious. The Lof der Schilder-const shows evident signs of a general tendency among Dutch painters of the mid-seventeenth century to claim a higher status for their profession. The text is duly meant less as a theoretical treatise than as a rhetorical amplificatio of the painter's profession. The author seems to have been reasonably well-read, although by no means scholarly; nor was he very conversant with the Italian art theory of his day. Scrutiny of the text reveals his superficial and undiscerning paraphrases of the few sources at his disposal (mainly Karel van Mander's Schilder-boeck and the Dutch translation of Franciscus Junius' De pictura veterum). Much of his eulogy is a summing-up of the distinguished characteristics a painter ought to have. The remarkable thing is that not one of those characteristics provides specific insight into the professional practise of the Leiden painters around 1641. As far as they are at all relevant to what was being painted in Leiden at that time - take the Leiden 'Precise School' of Gerard Dou's circle -, his remarks provide little more insight than a superficial consideration of the paintings would arouse in any layman.

GRIST TO THE MILL

The Age of Vermeer and De Hooch: Masterpieces of Seventeenth‐Century Dutch Genre Painting, University of Pennsylvania Press and the Symposium: Images of the World: Dutch Genre Painting in its Historical Context, Royal Academy of Arts, 9–10 November 1984.The Golden Age. Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth‐Century by Bob Haak, London: Thames &amp; Hudson, 1984, 536 pp., 1117 ills (74 in colour), £40The Dutch Arcadia. Pastoral Art and its Audience in the Golden Age by Alison McNeil Kettering, New Jersey: Montclair, 1983, 339 pp., 200 b &amp; w ills, £45

Ary Scheffer, een Nederlandse Fransman

Ary Scheffer, een Nederlandse Fransman

Aantekeningen over Venus en Adonis-taferelen van Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert en zijn invloed op de Hollandse schilderkunst

AbstractAttention is drawn to an unpublished oil sketch belonging to Mr. Guy Folkner of Brussels (Fig. 11), which is a modello for the signed painting by Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert (1613/14-54) of Venus Lamenting Over Adonis in Jagdschloss Grunewald near Berlin (Fig. 2, Note 1). Another version, not signed and formerly attributed to Anthony van Dyck, is in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Fig. 3, Note 2). The pose of Adonis is derived from the figure of Christ in the central panel of Rubens' Descent from the Gross (1611-12) in Antwerp Cathedral (Fig. 4, Note 3) it should be noticed that the left arm of Adonis is a reverse rendering of the right arm of Christ (Fig. 5). However, the figures are treated by Willeboirts in the more elegant style of Van Dyck, the predominant influence on Flemish history painting shorty after 1640 or thereabouts. Two paintings by Willeboirts, ectch representing a different episode in the story of Venus and Adonis, are known to have belonged to the collections of the House of Orange: the Venus Lamenting Over Adonis now at Jagdschloss Crunewald and an Adonis Leaving Venus, formerly in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which was destroyed by fire in 1940 in Middelburg, where it was on loan (Fig. 6). It is not easy to determine which of the two corresponds with the picture that Willeboirts painted for the Stadholder Frederick Henry in 1642 and which thus belonged to the first, commission received from him (Note 7), since in the documents concerned this is referred to only as Venus and Adonis. However, some characteristics of the painting formerly in the Mauritshuis are to be found in other works by Willeboits dating from 1646 and 1647 (Notes 20- 22) , so that it must have been done at about the same time as these. The painting at Grunewald may represent a somewhat early tage in his artistic evolution and might thus correspond with the one made for Frederick Henry in 1642. The discovery of this modello brings the number of known oil sketches by Willeboirts up to four, of which it is the earliest. The others are: a bozzetto in the Louvre for the large painting of The Princes Maurice and Frederick Henry on Horseback, commissioned by Amalia van Solms in 1649-50 for the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch (Note 24), a sketch for the large altarpiece of The Immaculata painted for the high altar of the church at Fuensaldana in 1652-4 and now in the Museo Nacional at Valladolid (Note 25), and an oil sketch in the Musée de Picardie at Amiens for The Assumption of the Virgin in the Church of Our Lady at Duffel (Note 26). A fifth sketch, a Venus and Adonis on paper belonging to the Earl of Wemyss (Note 27), proves to be the model for another Adonis Leaving Venus (Fig. 9), attributed to Willeboirts by Ludwig Burchard, which was on the art market in Berlin in 1930 (present whereabouts unknown). Here we see the same type of Venus as in, for example, The Toilet of Venus signed and dated 1644, which probably belonged to the House of Orange (Fig. 10, Note 29) and which came up at an auction in Stockholm in 1981. It seems likely that the paintings which Willeboirts and other Flemish painters made for the court in The Hague exerted some influence on Dutch painters active at the same period. Mythological pieces by Ferdinand Bol (Fig. 12, Note 45), Jacob Backer (Note 50), Caesar van Everdingen (Note 51) and others, in which a 'elassistic' tendency appears after about, 1650, do indeed show a rather similar elegant style and are characterized by the same idyllic mood. However, this is a matter which still requires further study.

Om realismen i holländsk bildtradition

Summary Towards the middle of the 15th century the cathedral of Utrecht was embellished with cloisters of exquisite workmanship. Above the arches were carved episodes from the life of St. Martin, patron saint of the cathedral, and in the traceries the fleur‐de‐lis was a recurring symbol. However, only little now remains that is original. After almost total decay, the cloisters were reconstructed during 1876–1896 by P. J. H. Cuypers, who for the traceries and the lilies had recourse to a drawing by Saenredam (Fig. 2). When Cuypers started this work, at least one bay was still in rather good condition, and he is to be commended for not having tampered with the traceries, which here play the part of a happening. They have, as it were, fallen apart and ropes of stone have been added to hold the parts together (Fig. 1). By their objective precision, the ropes reveal a will to illusionism, which in its Dutch context is surely more than a coincidence. It is just that sort of visual deception in which the painter...

Notes pour une histoire sociale du piano

Entrepreneurial Patronage in Nineteenth-Century France The Art collections which acquire in the nineteenth century importance as indicators of social status for financiers and industrialists are less the expression, in the first half of the century, of personal taste than a means of imitating the aristocracy. These collections constitute the primary means by which businessmen were able to influence artists. All periods of art are represented by the paintings in these collections but Dutch painters of the seventeenth century bulks particularly large and its influence was of the first importance for French art of the period. By degrees, however, these collections tend to express the personality of their owners and avant-garde art gradually becomes more popular than ancient or academic art. Thus the increasing variety of Schools of painting and the cuit of originality finds an immediate outlet and a source in the expectations of the collectors of the latter part of the century. For example, I. de Camondo and J. Dollfus are avid collectors of Impressionists, the master fashion designers Poiret, Doucet and J. Lanvin sponsor the Fauvists. Nineteenth century patronage takes other, perhaps less noble forms too, but of more decisive implications for the artists themselves; editors of illustrated books, whether of standard editions or special collectors editions, provide artists with a means of getting themselves known and keep them supplied with materials. Art dealers become the principal intermediaries between painters and art-lovers. Their role, like that of the Collectors', is a symbolic as well as economic one. Cadart, for example, originates the renewed interest in the etching. Durand-Ruel publieizes the Impressionists in America. Vollard supported Cezanne and proposed new means of expression to the painters he patronized. Spitzer and Bing were the true promotors of «Art Nouveau» and the renewal of interest in the decorative arts at the turn of the century. The multiple ways in which these different elements link up calls into question the traditional views of the philistine bourgeois and the accursed artist.

Omkring Ehrenstrahls tidigaste kända arbeten

Summary The Swedish painter David Kloker Ehrenstrahl proves to be pure German in his artistic ideas, especially in his early works. He was born in Hamburg and worked in Holland for a couple of years together with his countryman Jurian Jacobsz. It has therefore been stated in all the literature about him that Dutch influences were observable in his works, which is not true. He employs a method that is common among German artists and quite different from the manner in which the Dutch painters worked. After his visit to Holland Ehrenstrahl came to Sweden, but whether in 1651 or in 1652 is not quite certain. There are eight of his early works in the collection at the castle of Skokloster on Lake Malar, not very far from Stockholm. They are signed and dated 1651 or 1652. It is now clear, however, that Ehrenstrahl did not take the direct way from Holland to Sweden. Ehrenstrahl was summoned to Wolgast, the residental capital of Pomerania, by Count Charles Gustavus Wrangel, a Swedish General famed in the thirty Y...

Dutch and Flemish Painters

Dutch and Flemish Painters

Dutch and Flemish Painters.By Carel van Mander

(1937). Dutch and Flemish Painters. By Carel van Mander. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 131-131.