Rembrandt Vermeer And The Gift In Seventeenth Century Dutch Art

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe, and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a love of art, not materialistic gain. In the merchant republic’s vibrant market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce, revealing a unique chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and art making.

Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

This spectacular slipcased two-volume set is the first in a series of four catalogues that will showcase the holdings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which owns the world's largest and most representative collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. Focusing on 445 works by such masters as Hendrick Avercamp, Balthasar van der Ast, Hendrick ter Brugghen, and Esaias van de Velde, "Volume I" presents the work of some 100 painters who together provide a comprehensive overview of the dawn of 17th-century Dutch art. An up-to-date biography is provided for each artist as is the complete known provenance for each painting. The paintings have been fully researched and described, and all are reproduced in full color. An appendix of photographed signatures is also included. For every admirer of the Dutch masters, this set is both a treasure trove of information and a delight to the eye.

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Paintings in South Africa