Today marks the publication of Willem de Rooij – Dirk Valkenburg, A Critical Analysis of Visual Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands. Edited by Willem de Rooij and Karwan Fatah-Black, the volume was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Willem de Rooij – Valkenburg by Willem de Rooij at the Centraal Museum.
The publication combines the first complete catalogue raisonné of the Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721), developed in collaboration with the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, with a critical collection of newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars. Uniting voices from art history, anthropology, postcolonial and queer studies across Europe and the Americas, it contextualizes Valkenburg’s oeuvre through interdisciplinary and transcultural dialogue.
Valkenburg produced some of the earliest depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations – idealized images that conceal the violence of colonialism. He also painted ornate hunting still lifes and portraits of patrons whose wealth derived from colonial trade and slavery. Through this very variety of genres, Valkenburg’s paintings demonstrate the workings of the ‘white gaze’.
Willem de Rooij – Dirk Valkenburg
A Critical Analysis of Visual Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands
Willem Rooij, Karwan Fatah-Black (eds.)
Hardcover, 600 pp.
Amsterdam (Amsterdam University Press) February 2027
ISBN 9789048573714