| abstract | In the last twenty-five years or so, the study of the arts in the early
modern Low Countries has been revolutionised by an infusion of
economic and social history. Not only have economic historians
broadened the agenda, by including such new topics as output measurement,
marketing, and innovation, their research has also helped
to provide new interpretations of the changing faces of sixteenth- and
seventeenth century art. As a result of this work we now know, for
instance, that the number of paintings produced in the Dutch Republic
during the seventeenth and eighteenth century was simply enormous,
an observation that has fundamentally altered our appreciation of the
balance between what has been preserved and what is lost, and also highlighted the fact that the majority of Dutch painters were not Rembrandts
or Vermeers, but rather poor craftsmen, struggling to make
ends meet. Work on art markets in the Low Countries has demonstrated
the extent to which this art reached far beyond the borders of
the Low Countries, to find customers in the rest of Europe, as well as
in Latin America. It has demonstrated, in other words, how, during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but continuing into the eighteenth,
painting developed into a veritable export industry. And rather
than the traditional focus on “genre”, i.e. the scenes from everyday
life deemed typical of the Holland School, we can now see how Dutch
painters actually developed a whole range of new topics, designed to
target a variety of niche markets. |
