In the seventeenth century, Dutch merchants sailed across seas and oceans, joining trade networks that stretched from Asia to the Americas and Africa. This unprecedented movement of goods, ideas, and people gave rise to what many consider the first age of globalization and sparked an artistic boom in the Netherlands.
Dutch Art in a Global Age brings together paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Jacob van Ruisdael, Maria Schalcken, and other celebrated artists from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s renowned collection. These are joined by four Dutch paintings from the Kimbell’s permanent collection, along with prints, maps, and stunning decorative objects in silver, porcelain, and more, from the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Exploring how Dutch dominance in international commerce transformed life in the Netherlands and created an extraordinary cultural flourishing, the exhibition also includes new scholarship that contextualizes seventeenth-century Dutch art within the complex histories of colonial expansion, wealth disparity, and the transatlantic slave trade during this period.
Catalogue
The seventeenth century has long been considered a “golden age” for Dutch art, fueled by the Dutch Republic’s growth as an economic world power. Nourished by an innovative stock market and burgeoning global trade network, this vibrant economy not only provided artists with a rich context in which to make their art, but also directly influenced the art itself—in its subject matter, materials, meaning, and interpretation. The genre scenes and still lifes that today seem quintessentially Dutch actually project a global vision, and often address the positive and the negative of economic and global expansion.
Drawing on the world-renowned collection of Dutch paintings, works on paper, decorative arts, and illustrated books at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this book offers a fresh look at seventeenth-century Dutch art, accompanied by authoritative essays that ask readers to consider the global context in which this work was made.
Hardcover; 224 pages; 150 color illustrations. Edited by Christopher D. M. Atkins.
All venues
Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
– North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (16 September 2023 – 7 January 2024)
– High Museum of Art, Atlanta (19 April – 14 July 2024)
– Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (10 November 2024 – 9 February 2025)