Confronting the Golden Age
Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting 1680-1750
Distributed for Amsterdam University Press
- Contents
- Review Quotes

CHAPTER I
Confronting the Heritage of the Golden Age: the Situation around Dutch Genre Painting 1680-1750
Introduction
1 Painter and collector in transition: the search for a new relationship
2 The collector ’s taste: in praise of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting
3 Popular subject matter of genre painting in eighteenth-century collections
4 The painter ’s choice: updating seventeenth-century genre painting
CHAPTER II
Reproducing the Golden Age: Copies after Seventeenth-Century
Dutch Genre Painting in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
1 Commercial misuse of copies: discussion between Johan van Gool and Gerard Hoet
2 Copies as substitutes for seventeenth-century painting
3 The painter ’s choice: in search of a favorite painte and subject matter
4 Case study: the candlelight scene as popular subject
5 The function of copying: looking back to the Golden Age
CHAPTER III
Emulating the Golden Age: The Painter’s Choice of Motifs and Subject Matter in Dutch Genre Painting of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
1 The painter ’s choice of subject matter
1.1. Willem van Mieris and his genre painting
1.2. Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam: a devotee of genre painting
1.3. The case study of A Grocer’s Shop by Willem van Mieris
2 Competing with the “old masters”: pendants by Gerard Dou, Willem van Mieris and Hieronymus van der Mij
3 “Pleasurable enjoyment of dissimilar similarity”
CHAPTER IV
Ennobling Daily Life: A Question of Refinement in Early
Eighteenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting
1 Gerard de Lairesse’s attempt to ennoble genre painting
2 The painter ’s practice of idealizing figures in genre painting
3 To meet new demands of collectors: seeking ideal versatility
Art: European Art
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