224 pages, paperback, 270 x 240 mm, 75 colour, 75 b/w illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
ISBN: 978 1 898519 19 5
‘Dutch Italianate painting' is an important as well as appealing strand of landscape painting in the seventeenth century. Some of the artists who practised it - Jan Both, Jan Asselyn, Jan Baptist Weenix, Nicolaes Berchem - had visited Italy, others, most famously Aelbert Cuyp, had not. Both groups produced utterly distinctive visions of golden light and bluer skies, of happier peasants, of more evocative ruins, and yet both were as Dutch as Ruysdael or Rembrandt, and need to be considered as an integral part of the history of Dutch art.
What was the nature of the appeal of these paintings? How was the fascination of a life lived by peasants, travellers and shepherds descended from Virgil's conveyed, when these painters eschewed nymphs and fauns but observed real life, human and animal, with Netherlandish naturalism? Excellent plates give the savour of the crisp and fatty brushwork of these skilful and influential painters, who have been unjustly sidelined as not true to their own land and weather.
Laurie B. Harwood has previously written a monograph on Adam Pynacker.
Distributed for Dulwich Picture Gallery
This exhibition and catalogue celebrates the most gifted, inventive and eccentric amateurs of the 18th and early 19th centuries with a selection of drawings, engravings and portraits gathered from Soane's collection and other museums, archives and private houses around the country. More