17th-Century Flemish

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

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

17th-Century Flemish