front cover of Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting
Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting
Repetition and Invention
Angela K. Ho
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
In the mid- to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative use of repetition-such as crafting virtuosic, self-referential compositions around signature motifs, or engaging esteemed predecessors in a competitive dialogue through emulation-to project a distinctive artistic personality. The resulting paintings enabled purchasers and viewers to exercise their connoisseurial eye and claim membership in an exclusive circle of sophisticated enthusiasts-making creative repetition a successful strategy for both artists and viewers.
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front cover of Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing
Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing
Bryan Jay Wolf
University of Chicago Press, 2001
This book begins with a single premise: that Vermeer painted images not only of extraordinary beauty, but of extraordinary strangeness. To understand that strangeness, Bryan Jay Wolf turns to the history of early modernism and to ways of seeing that first developed in the seventeenth century. In a series of provocative readings, Wolf presents Vermeer in bracing new ways, arguing for the painter's immersion in—rather than withdrawal from—the intellectual concerns of his day.

The result is a Vermeer we have not seen before: a painter whose serene spaces and calm subjects incorporate within themselves, however obliquely, the world's troubles. Vermeer abandons what his predecessors had labored so carefully to achieve: legible spaces, a world of moral clarity defined by the pressure of a hand against a table, or the scatter of light across a bare wall. Instead Vermeer complicated Dutch domestic art and invented what has puzzled and captivated his admirers ever since: the odd daubs of white pigment, scattered across the plane of the canvas; patches of blurred surface, contradicting the painting's illusionism without explanation; and the querulous silence that endows his women with secrets they dare not reveal.

This beautifully illustrated book situates Vermeer in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, and it demonstrates how powerfully he wrestled with questions of gender, class, and representation. By rethinking Vermeer's achievement in relation to the early modern world that gave him birth, Wolf takes northern Renaissance and early modern studies in new directions.
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