Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference (HNA Boston, MA, July 14-17, 2027)
Session chairs: Elizabeth Rice Mattison (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth) & Laura Tillery (Hamilton College)
When nineteenth-century art historians and connoisseurs sorted out a history of Netherlandish painting, they created prized collectibles and commodities, fundamentally altering objects’ meaning. For curators, scholars, and dealers, such new designations for historic objects and their integration into institutional frameworks changed conditions of viewing and display. For instance, the Netherlandish altarpiece, a multimedia and three-dimensional object, was scattered and divided by various agents. Consequently, scholars and audiences saw isolated paintings. Only recently have scholars reconsidered altarpieces as complex works, reassessing their function and multimedia display. The history of Netherlandish art has thus been predicated on the deconstruction and decontextualization, driven by the nineteenth-century art market, growth of museum collections, and imperial ideologies.
This session gathers papers that analyze nineteenth-century exclusions to chart forward new possibilities for our field, especially with respect to collecting and display. How did museum development and collection formation in the long nineteenth century gave rise to the present-day canon of Netherlandish art? Our leading premise is that museum practices, past and present, are inseparable from how we think, classify, and interpret Netherlandish art. The separation and hierarchization of media, along with formation of national institutions, contributed to the delineation of the field. Moreover, defined in tandem with European imperial ambitions, Netherlandish art took part in nationalist projects.
Papers will address the mechanisms that shaped Netherlandish art in the long nineteenth century, including acquisition, purchase, marketing, sale, and collecting. We especially welcome papers that attend to larger structures governing the development of Netherlandish art and clarify lacunae we have inherited.
Topics may include:
- Collecting practices from the Napoleonic era through WWI
- Collection biographies
- Reconstructing deconstructed objects
- Reproduction histories across media (plaster casts, electrotypes, reproductive prints, photography)
- Auctions, curators, and dealers who acted as agents in forming a Netherlandish canon
- Role of connoisseurship of Netherlandish art
- History of object displays in exhibitions
- Market history of paintings versus other media
- Role of Netherlandish art in the development of national and nationalist collections
Please send an abstract (up to 250 words) and a short C.V. to: Elizabeth Rice Mattison
(Elizabeth.R.Mattison@
Proposals are due by 15 September 2026.