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.

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.

In this sumptuous exploration of food images in European and American painting from the early Renaissance to the present, Kenneth Bendiner sees food painting as a separate classification of art with its own history.

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Published to accompany an exhibition held in Sept. 2002 by the Albany Institute of History and Art.