For a general book on Dutch seventeenth-century painting, yesterday I wrote a text on the winter landscape, represented by a painting by Isaac van Ostade in the National Gallery, London. I’m afraid it reads more like a column than part of a survey. It may not make its way into the book, but I don’t want it to vanish, so I have expanded it into … a column.
Genres
429 How to convert indigenous Formosans to Calvinism
A buildup for a lecture that I gave online for the National Museum of Taiwan History, now on YouTube. It’s about an extraordinary painting of a Dutch minister who in the 1630s and ‘40s converted thousands of Formosans to the true Christian faith. The painting shows 121 men and boys and 110 women, children and infants in the thrall of the teachings and ruthless ministrations of Robertus Junius.
Continue reading “429 How to convert indigenous Formosans to Calvinism”
424 The transparent connoisseur 8: An ill-judged attribution in Den Bosch
A Dutch museum features a fascinating painting of the art of painting itself, in the guise of a woman artist at the easel. The museum ignores overwhelming evidence for its origins in a collaboration between Jan Brueghel I and Frans Francken II and wrongheadedly gives it to Jan Brueghel II.
Continue reading “424 The transparent connoisseur 8: An ill-judged attribution in Den Bosch”
Lady Pictura painting flowers
“Lady Pictura painting flowers,” Tableau 15 (1993), nr. 6, Summer, pp. 66-81
The editors of this art magazine asked me to write about a newly discovered, exceptional kunstkamer painting. The deadline was short, but I plunged into it, telling them that I would not be able to go in search of those paintings within the painting that could not easily be identified. Fortunately, my lapses in this regard were corrected in the following issue by Edwin Buijsen.
Lady Pictura painting flowers – the painting. (A press photo from the Noordbrabants Museum, in connection with an exhibition on the Brueghel family. Credit line, with a different attribution and dating than mine: Jan Brueghel de Jonge, Allegorie op de schilderkunst, ca. 1625-1630, olieverf op koper, 49 x 77 cm. JK Art Foundation. Foto Peter Cox).
“Lady Pictura painting flowers” – the article (6.7 MB)
Edwin Buijsen, Schildersportretten in een Antwerpse kunstkamer
Comparative images that are illustrated across two pages in the magazine:
Jan Brueghel I and eleven other Antwerp painters, including Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Francken II, Allegory of sight and smell, 1618. Madrid Museo del Prado
Jan Brueghel I and Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory of sight, 1617. Madrid, Museo del Prado
Click on the images to enlarge and view the delicious details.
See also Schwartzlist 408, “The Sephardi iconophile in me”
and
Schwartzlist 424, “The transparent connoisseur 8: an ill-judged attribution in Den Bosch”
418 Naaman the leper and Elisha his healer: the trailer (in memory of Magdi Tóth)
On 1 July I will be lecturing (in Dutch) at the Hermitage Museum Amsterdam on a painting from the current exhibition, Rembrandt and his contemporaries: History paintings from The Leiden Collection. The painting is a depiction of the prophet Elisha declining to accept the gifts of the Syrian army commander Naaman, offered in thanks for curing his leprosy. Here is a preview, the part about leprosy. Seating still available.
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417 The transparent connoisseur 7: Explaining away Early Netherlandish discrepancies
On Monday, 8 May, in Berlin, Schwartz heard a top connoisseur account for differences in finish between two paintings by Hugo van der Goes as acceptable variations within a single artistic personality, and on 12 May, in Den Bosch, heard another top connoisseur denying the very possibility of such a thing concerning two paintings by Jheronimus Bosch. What a week!
411 Vermeeren of verminderen: in memory of Albert Blankert
Translation: Increase or decrease [the number of paintings by Vermeer, whose name is baked into the Dutch word for increasing.] My oldest and dearest friend in the Netherlands, Albert Blankert, died last Tuesday. I am channeling and seconding his inspired take on a current Vermeer dispute.
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408 The iconophile Sephardi in me
Do you feel kin to people who lived in your house in the past? Schwartz indulges in the exercise, finding out that he is the successor to members of an intertwined Sephardi clan of jewelers and merchants in diamonds and pearls, members of which were Rembrandt’s next-door neighbors, while another commissioned a staggering Antwerp painting he has studied.
Love in the kunstkamer: additions to the work of Guillam van Haecht (1593-1637)
An exploration of the riches of beauty and meaning invested in and taken from art by Guillam van Haecht and his patron Cornelis van der Geest. Published in the Dutch art magazine Tableau, the summer issue of 1996, pp. 43-52.
405 Early Vermeer body fluids
Did Vermeer’s Kitchen maid, an icon of Dutchness, have an older, Italian sister? Schwartz finds her resemblance to an earlier, unjustifiedly doubted, Vermeer copy after an Italian painting of a saint so convincing that he sticks his neck out to argue that she does.