Presents a catalog that surveys the Dutch paintings found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This is a showcase of 11 major works by Frans Hals. The author also discusses the formation of Hals's style and considers his work in the context of broader European trends.

Walter Liedtke, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has assembled a splendid catalog of Vermeer and his artistic milieu. Seven lengthy, well-illustrated chapters (Liedtke wrote five, Dutch art historians Michiel Plomp and Marten Jan Bok wrote the others) describe life in the city of Delft; the painters Carel Fabritius, Leonart Bramer, and others who preceded Vermeer; the careers of Vermeer and De Hooch; the making of drawings and prints in 17th-century Delft; and the collecting of art in the same period. The catalog follows: each painting, print, and drawing accompanied by a lengthy catalog essay. Oversize: 12.25x9.75". c. Book News Inc.

This stunning book presents the very best still lifes produced in the Netherlands at the height of the genre, from the early beginnings in the 16th century, with Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer, to the late highlights in the 18th century, with Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum. Despite the popularity and abundance of flower paintings in modern collections, the book includes a wide range of subjects and styles, from the simple to the complex, the charmingly small to the opulent and extravagant, and from flowers to hunting still lifes or objects in the corner of a painter's studio, along with an occasional trompe l'oeil. The visual delights of still-life painting have a strong historical context. Collectors and connoisseurs purchased them because of their realism, visual appeal, and relevance to their own lives. Poets praised the wonders of still-life paintings and evoked the power of painting to transcend the seasons and the passing of time. Contemporary observers lauded the expensive and elaborate objects often on display. The book therefore considers the visual achievement of the Netherlandish still life painters in the context of contemporary reactions to pictures, art theory, and issues of patronage. Numerous artists were tempted to try their hand at still life, drawn by a new and enchanting genre that allowed an artist to create independent worlds of inanimate objects on the flat surface of a picture -- imaginary realms that had an exceptional following among connoisseurs of the time. These images continue to work their magic on present-day art lovers.

In this catalogue for the exhibition, Walter Liedtke, Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan, drawing on the Museum's five Vermeers, scenes by other Dutch masters in the Museum's collection, including Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, and Emanuel de Witte, and several works on paper, places the picture in the context of the artist's brief career and relates it to contemporary developments in Dutch art. In addition to an extended discussion of the painting's provenance, he provides a detailed study of the composition, the several revisions made during the course of execution, and the subtle relationships between light and shadow, color, contour, and shape. And he proposes a most intriguing argument for an erotic subtext, pointing out that, like maids and kitchen maids in earlier Netherlandish art, the figure in The Milkmaid was meant to attract the male viewer, to rouse in him temptation and restraint, desire and reservation, while the kitchen maid herself, endowed with traits typically reserved for higher-class women and surrounded by references to romance both literal and oblique, is presented as having amorous thoughts of her own.