17th-Century Flemish

Rubens. The Henri IV Series

By Alexis Merle du Bourg

Translated from the French by Jane MacAvock and Abigail Newman (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XIV, 2). London: Harvey Miller Publishers, an Imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2017. 483 pp, fully illus. in color and b&w. ISBN 978-1-909400-96-2.

Review published February 2019

Artistic failures can make for successful art history. In his magisterial new contribution to the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Alexis Merle du Bourg charts the inception, development, and [...] Read More

Rubens and the Human Body (The Body in Art)

By Cordula van Wyhe, ed.

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2018, 366 pp, 3 b&w illus., 166 colour illus. ISBN 978-2-503-57775-3.

Review published August 2018

The book under review is the third in a series of Brepols monographs addressing the human body in early modern visual arts. Given the stated aim of this series – to explore new approaches and [...] Read More

Rubens. Painter of Sketches. [Exh. cat. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, April 9 – August 5, 2018; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, September 8, 2018 – January 13, 2019.]

By Friso Lammertse and Alejandro Vergara

Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado / Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2018. 247 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-84-8480-471-0.

Review published July 2018

Peter Paul Rubens dominates Baroque art to a degree rivaled only by his Italian counterpart in sculpture, Bernini. This exhibition catalogue of oil sketches, presented and authored by Friso Lammertse [...] Read More

Dutch and Flemish Paintings: Dulwich Picture Gallery

By Michiel Jonker and Ellinoor Bergvelt

London: Dulwich Picture Gallery in association with D. Giles Limited, 2016. 352 pp, numerous illus. ISBN 978-1-907804-74-8.

Review published May 2018

The collection catalog is an unforgiving literary genre. Its purpose is to serve as a work of reference for scholars seeking information about individual works for their own purposes. At a minimum, it [...] Read More

Power and Grace. Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens

By Ilona van Tuinen

[Cat. exh. The Morgan Museum & Library, New York, January 19 – April 29, 2018.] New York: The Morgan Museum & Library; London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2018. 108 pp, 67 color illus. ISBN 978-1-911300-37-3.

Review published May 2018

Exhibited in the inner sanctum, the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery at The Morgan Library & Museum, Ilona van Tuinen assembled a beautiful, small collection of eighteen works by Rubens, Van Dyck and [...] Read More

The Life of Christ before the Passion. The Ministry of Christ, with an introduction by Paul Huvenne. Translated from the Dutch by Abigail Newman (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, V, 2)

By Koen Bulckens

London: Harvey Miller, an imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2017. 360 pp, 149 b&w and 46 color illus. ISBN 978-1-909400-86-3.

Review published March 2018

This recent volume of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard offers Rubens scholars another important, well-documented, and occasionally surprising contribution to the invaluable series. With catalogue [...] Read More

Jan van Kessel I (1626-1679): Crafting a Natural History of Art in Early Modern Antwerp (Studies in Baroque Art, 5)

By Nadia Baadj

London: Harvey Miller Publishers, an Imprint of Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2016. vi, 208 pp, 50 b&w, 52 color illus. ISBN 978-1-909400-23-8.

Review published March 2018

The book consists of four chapters referring to the main areas of the work of the Antwerp artist Jan van Kessel I (1626-1679). Clearly structured, Van Kessel’s essential paintings are analyzed on the [...] Read More

St Jacob’s: Antwerp Art and Counter Reformation in Rubens’s Parish Church (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 253; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 13)

By Jeffrey M. Muller

Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016. xxiv, 631 pp, ill. in color and b&w. ISBN 978-90-04-31186-2.

Review published February 2018

This book is as monumental and rich as the church that is its subject. In fact, rather than a study of a building, it is a wide-ranging narrative of the community that built it over a period of two [...] Read More

De l’expertise artistique à la vulgarisation au siècle des Lumières: Jean-Baptiste Descamps (1715-1791) et la peinture flamande, hollandaise et allemande

By Gaëtane Maës

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016, 608 pp, 89 b&w, 20 color illus. ISBN 978-2-503-56770-9.

Review published December 2017

Jean-Baptiste Descamps was born in 1715 in Dunkirk, formerly a Flemish city which in 1662 had become annexed by France. He sought a profession as a painter and clearly wanted to orient himself towards [...] Read More

Rubens. Portraits After Existing Prototypes (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX, 4)

By Koenraad Jonckheere

London – Turnhout: Harvey Miller, an Imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2016. 340 pp, 217 colored and b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-909400-58-0.

Review published October 2017

Koenraad Jonckheere’s recent addition to the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Portraits After Existing Prototypes, makes an important contribution to the understanding of a neglected but fascinating [...] Read More

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing (Visual Culture in Early Modernity)

By Catherine H. Lusheck

London/New York: Ashgate/Routledge, 2017. 312 pp, 40 color Illus., 55 b&w Illus.illus. ISBN 978-147247-712-5.

Review published October 2017

Catherine H. Lusheck’s book Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing is a new publication on Rubens’s drawings in Routlegde’s Visual Culture in Early Modernity series. Lusheck examines Rubens’s early [...] Read More

Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale

By Elizabeth Alice Honig

University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. 265 pp, 152 illus. ISBN 978-0-271-07108-4.

Review published October 2017

This beautifully illustrated book is a welcome interpretive study of Jan Brueghel the Elder, the result of nearly twenty years of immersion in his work that began on the completion of the author’s [...] Read More

Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and the Academy in Rome and Brussels

By Lara Yeager-Crasselt

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015. 340 pp, 33 color, 67 b&w illus. ISBN 978-2-503-55530-0

Review published October 2017

Modern scholarship has routinely presented the Brussels-born Michael Sweerts as an ally of the Bamboccianti, those mainly Netherlandish genre painters in Rome notorious for disregarding conventional [...] Read More

The Art of Clara Peeters

By Alejandro Vergara, ed.

With essays by Alejandro Vergara and Anne Lenders. [Cat. exh. Museum Rockoxhuis, Antwerp, June 16 – October 2, 2016; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, October 25, 2016 – February 19, 2017.] Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016. 136 pp, fully illus. in color. ISBN 978-84-8480-324-9

Review published April 2017

The Art of Clara Peeters was an especially welcome exhibition shown at the Rockoxhuis in Antwerp and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid not only because of the attraction generally held by [...] Read More

Das Paradies auf Erden. Flämische Landschaften von Bruegel bis Rubens

By Uta Neidhardt and Konstanze Krüger, eds.

[Cat. exh. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, October 1, 2016 – January 15, 2017.] Translations from Dutch by Susanne Henriette Karau and Rolf Erdorf. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2016. 368 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-3-95498-252-3

Review published April 2017

The Gemäldegalerie in Dresden has a rich collection of Flemish landscape paintings of the highest quality. Of the approximately 150 works from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, roughly [...] Read More