Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721) created early depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations, as well as ornate hunting still lifes and portraits of colonial elites. Edited by Willem de Rooij and Karwan Fatah Black, this volume combines a catalogue raisonné developed in collaboration with the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague – and a critical reader featuring newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars. It is conceived as a pendant to De Rooij’s installation Valkenburg, which opened at the Centraal Museum Utrecht in September 2025. This book and the exhibition together invite reflection on how 18th-century visual culture helped normalize colonial ideology.

Karwan Fatah-Black (b. 1981) is lecturer in social and economic history at Leiden University and senior researcher at the Royal Dutch Institute of South-East Asia and Caribbean Studies. He is a scholar of Dutch colonial history specialized in the Atlantic world and slavery. He is a prolific author and participant in public debates on the future of the colonial past.Willem de Rooij (b. 1969) creates temporary installations that explore the politics of representation across various media. Appropriation and collaboration are central to his artistic method, and his projects have stimulated new research in art history and ethnography. In 2000 De Rooij won the Bâloise Art Prize, and he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Award in 2004 and the Vincent Award in 2014. He was a Robert Fulton Fellow at Harvard University in 2004 and a DAAD fellow in Berlin in 2006. He represented the Netherlands at the 2005 Venice Biennale with Jeroen de Rijke, his collaborative partner from 1994-2006. Recent solo exhibitions took place at Portikus Frankfurt (2021), LAXart, Los Angeles (2019), IMA Brisbane (2017) and Consortium, Dijon (2015). De Rooij has taught and lectured extensively since 1998. He is Professor of Fine Art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main since 2006, and advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam since 2015. In 2016 he co-founded BPA// Berlin program for artists, and became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. De Rooij’s works can be found in the collections of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MUMOK, Vienna; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, Los Angeles and MOMA, New York. Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636-1695), Willem de Rooij and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer (eds.), Volume 2 from Intolerance, published for an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Dusseldorf (Feymedia Verlagsgesellschaft) 2010

Foreword - Bart Rutten
Designing Difference - Willem de Rooij and Karwan Fatah-Black
ESSAYS
Life and Work
Appraisal
Tropics
Visual Culture
Afterword
CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ
Dirk Valkenburg’s Estate Inventory: A Transcription
Bibliography
Archives
Databases
Author Biographies
Index
INSTALLATION VIEWS
List of Exhibited Works