This lavishly illustrated book is the catalogue for an exhibition of the works of Jan Steen, coorganized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
In The Drawing Lesson, Jan Steen celebrates the art of the painter as teacher, placing his subjects in a familiar Dutch interior. This fascinating study of the painting - a masterpiece of the Museum's collection - examines the individual parts and larger patterns of the work and also recounts Steen's career and a history of the picture itself.
Jan Steen, one of the most popular painters of the Dutch Golden Age, is known for his humorous depictions of dissolute households, tavern interiors, quacksalvers and love-sick young women. He was unrivalled in poking fun at every conceivable human weakness and vice. A lesser known fact is that he also painted history pieces: scenes based on episodes from the Bible, apocryphal writings and mythology - stories full of excitement, drama and passion. As he did in his genre pieces, Steen devoted a great deal of attention in his history paintings to the interaction between the figures, and was keenly aware of the satirical possibilities of every story. In contrast to what his later image suggests, Jan Steen was a versatile and ambitious artist with a profound knowledge of art history and literature: knowledge that comes to the fore in his history pieces. This richly illustrated publication, written by experts on Jan Steen, focuses on this little-known part of the artist's oeuvre. AUTHORS: Ariane van Suchtelen, curator at the Mauritshuis, is the author of an introduction to the life and work of Jan Steen, in which she discusses the place occupied by history painting in his (otherwise humorous) oeuvre. Which themes did he prefer? What were his sources? For whom were these paintings intended? Wouter Kloek, former curator at the Rijksmuseum, writes about the form and content of Steen's history paintings, and the thin line that separates representations of biblical and mythological themes from scenes of everyday life. Mariet Westermann, executive vice president of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, writes about Steen's exceptional ambition as a history painter. Her essay clarifies the national and international context in which these paintings originated. SELLING POINTS: * For the first time in book form, presenting history-pieces by Jan Steen * 17th century paintings from the Dutch Golden Age * Contributions by Ariane van Suchtelen, Wouter Kloek and Mariet Westermann 125 colour, 25 b/w images
Historians and art historians provide a critique of existing methodologies and an interdisciplinary inquiry into seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture.
The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists - Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou and others - have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections and its prejudices. The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in their political, cultural and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. Luxuriously illustrated and with a full representation of the major artists and the cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars and general readers alike.
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Award winning photography and lithography sets this "coffee table" book apart from others of its type.
Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art celebrates an unprecedented era in the history of art. Drawn from the superb collections of Amsterdam's famed Rijksmuseum, the works of art featured here are a testament to the richness and variety of the paintings, prints, and decorative arts produced in the Netherlands in the 17th century. In a unique approach, Ruud Priem leads the viewer through the highlights of the Golden Age, beginning with the artists themselves and their studios, emerging into busy city streets and the bucolic Dutch countryside, and sampling the variety of 17th-century life and culture. Featured are ninety dazzling works by preeminent Dutch artists--Rembrandt van Rijn, Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Pieter de Hooch, and Jan Steen, among them.
A landmark exploration of the engaging network of relationships among genre painters of the Dutch Golden Age The genre painting of the Dutch Golden Age between 1650 and 1675 ranks among the highest pinnacles of Western European art. The virtuosity of these works, as this book demonstrates, was achieved in part thanks to a vibrant artistic rivalry among numerous first-rate genre painters working in different cities across the Dutch Republic. They drew inspiration from each other's painting, and then tried to surpass each other in technical prowess and aesthetic appeal. The Delft master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is now the most renowned of these painters of everyday life. Though he is frequently portrayed as an enigmatic figure who worked largely in isolation, the essays here reveal that Vermeer's subjects, compositions, and figure types in fact owe much to works by artists from other Dutch cities. Enlivened with 180 superb illustrations, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting highlights the relationships - comparative and competitive - among Vermeer and his contemporaries, including Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, and Frans van Mieris. Published in association with the National Gallery of Ireland Exhibition Schedule: Musee du Louvre 02/20/17--05/22/17 National Gallery of Ireland 06/17/17--09/17/17 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (10/22/17--01/21/18)