‘The current state of research on Dutch Golden Age painting’: The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century edited by Wayne Franits, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016

Abstract

This review examines Wayne Franits’ edited volume, The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art. The collection of nineteen essays is organized into sections addressing genres, major artists (Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer), art movements, media other than painting, and areas of further research. The essays summarize the major developments in research produced in the last thirty to thirty-five years on their respective topics. This volume is an invaluable resource for scholars of Dutch seventeenth-century art; however, the structure of the book reinscribes some of the stereotypes and methodological problems directly addressed by many of the authors as needing to be done away with, or in some cases, already firmly consigned to the past. This review provides summaries of the main findings of each essay, while also addressing some of the broader themes that characterize these essays.

Keywords

• early modern
• Dutch
• state-of-the-field
• Golden Age
• seventeenth century