Confronting the Golden Age
Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting 1680-1750
Distributed for Amsterdam University Press
Drawing on archival documents, sales catalogs, and other texts, Aono closely analyzes a range of genre paintings—many of them handsomely reproduced in this volume. In the process, she deepens our understanding of these works and reveals how they illuminate the relationships between painters, collectors, and the dominant artistic currents of the time.
CHAPTER I
Confronting the Heritage of the Golden Age: the Situation around Dutch Genre Painting 1680-1750
Introduction
1 Painter and collector in transition: the search for a new relationship
2 The collector ’s taste: in praise of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting
3 Popular subject matter of genre painting in eighteenth-century collections
4 The painter ’s choice: updating seventeenth-century genre painting
CHAPTER II
Reproducing the Golden Age: Copies after Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Genre Painting in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
1 Commercial misuse of copies: discussion between Johan van Gool and Gerard Hoet
2 Copies as substitutes for seventeenth-century painting
3 The painter ’s choice: in search of a favorite painte and subject matter
4 Case study: the candlelight scene as popular subject
5 The function of copying: looking back to the Golden Age
CHAPTER III
Emulating the Golden Age: The Painter’s Choice of Motifs and Subject Matter in Dutch Genre Painting of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
1 The painter ’s choice of subject matter
1.1. Willem van Mieris and his genre painting
1.2. Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam: a devotee of genre painting
1.3. The case study of A Grocer’s Shop by Willem van Mieris
2 Competing with the “old masters”: pendants by Gerard Dou, Willem van Mieris and Hieronymus van der Mij
3 “Pleasurable enjoyment of dissimilar similarity”
CHAPTER IV
Ennobling Daily Life: A Question of Refinement in Early
Eighteenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting
1 Gerard de Lairesse’s attempt to ennoble genre painting
2 The painter ’s practice of idealizing figures in genre painting
3 To meet new demands of collectors: seeking ideal versatility
Art: European Art
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