Preface

Slive, Seymour

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Preface

Seymour Slive

Dutch Painting, 1600–1800

~This book is based on the sections devoted to painting in Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600–1800 by Jakob Rosenberg (died 1980) and me, first published in the Pelican History of Art series in 1966. Apart from a few minor changes to the text and notes, and some additions to the bibliography made in the 1972 and 1977 editions, our work has...

Author

Seymour Slive

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23910

Preface

This book is based on the sections devoted to painting in Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600–1800 by Jakob Rosenberg (died 1980) and me, first published in the Pelican History of Art series in 1966. Apart from a few minor changes to the text and notes, and some additions to the bibliography made in the 1972 and 1977 editions, our work has been published in more than a half-dozen reprints as it originally appeared.

Soon after Yale University Press acquired the Pelican series in 1992, one of its representatives asked if I would consider revising the painting sections for a new edition the press planned to issue. My response was negative. At the time I was working on a rather large, long-term project which I had firmly resolved to complete before putting another morsel on my dish. At my age I find it prudent to limit my liability.

The press countered my rejection with another proposal: would I consider writing a brief, new introduction for a projected reprint? The alternative suggestion was reasonable and not without appeal. After all, a steady stream of significant work on Dutch painting has been published in monographs, articles, and exhibition catalogues since Jakob Rosenberg’s and my effort appeared a generation ago. Diligent archivists also have made important finds, and conservators and scientists working in the laboratories of museums and institutes have broadened our knowledge of the art of the period. Perhaps a short essay on the differences between the subject’s status when we began our joint effort in the early 1960s and its current state would interest general readers and students. Attractive too was the hunch that such an essay probably could be written relatively quickly. However, before giving a final answer to the new proposition, it seemed sensible to freshen my memory of the entire text by rereading it from beginning to end — something I confess I had not done since the 1966 edition appeared.

Re-reading the text produced mixed reactions and a change of heart. It compelled me to abandon the notion of doing nothing more than writing a new introduction, and although it leaves me open to the charge of fickleness, it also made me disavow my categorical assertion that I would not consider revising the text until the undertaking I had been working on was finished. That project was put on a back-burner.

To be sure, some aspects of Dutch painting that are surveyed in our pages are, in my view, still satisfactory and need little or no adjustment. However, other parts patently demand expansion, revision, or correction in light of recent research, discoveries, new interpretations, and changes in my own opinions. (I have no doubt that my co-author and close friend Jakob Rosenberg would have agreed that if you do not change your mind about some matters during the course of a generation you probably do not have a mind to change.) Rather than generalize about the needed adjustments in an introductory essay, it seemed best to go through the volume and place them where they belong.

The most prominent change is an increase in the number of illustrations by more than fifty per cent with the text and notes adjusted accordingly. Other modifications include recasting of some parts on Frans Hals, on Rembrandt and the master’s pupils and followers, and on Vermeer. Chapters devoted to the diverse branches of painting that became Dutch specialities have been expanded, and sections on late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists have been reshaped. There is also more material on traditional biblical and historical subjects painted during the period as well as on patronage and trends in art theory, criticism and collecting. Recent iconological studies have been considered too, but, as noted in various passages in the book, not all the conclusions offered by contemporary specialists have been endorsed. Iconologists who attempt to find hidden symbolic meaning in every shoe, fallen tree, storm-tossed boat, or piece of cheese painted by Dutch artists bring to mind Freud’s reputed word to a colleague who was making too much of the symbolism of cigars: ‘Sometimes a cigar is simply a cigar.’ The bibliography has also been brought up to date, and, as in earlier editions, some items are briefly annotated.

The present volume does not include the sections on sculpture and architecture by E.H. ter Kuile (died 1988) that are in earlier editions of the book. In light of recent research, they too want revision and expansion. In due course Yale University Press plans to fill the need by commissioning a separate volume for the Pelican series devoted to these important subjects in the history of Dutch art.

At Yale’s press I am beholden to John Nicoll for his infectious faith in the merit of revised and expanded historical texts and to Sally Salvesen for her superior editorial work and handsome design of the volume. I am also indebted to Bridget Swithinbank, Alice Carman and Antien Knaap for typing an almost illegible manuscript and I owe special thanks to Alice I. Davies for proofreading the typescript, galleys, and page proofs.

Finally an editorial note: following Dutch usage, patronymics have been abbreviated in the text. Those ending in sz or sdr should be read as ‘-zoon’ or ‘-dochter’, that is, the son or daughter of. Put another way, Fransz means Franszoon (the son of Frans), and Harmensdr means Harmensdochter (the daughter of Harmen).

S.S.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 1995

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