This week saw the publication of Gesina ter Borch by Adam Eaker, the first major biographical account of one of the best-documented female artists of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.
Gesina ter Borch (1631-1690) was a Dutch watercolorist and draftswoman whose work survives primarily in the form of three albums of watercolors and calligraphy, now held at the Rijksmuseum. Despite the fact that her oeuvre is securely attributed and thoroughly catalogued, Ter Borch has surprisingly never been the subject of a dedicated monograph, until now.
This book highlights Ter Borch’s watercolors and calligraphy in their own right, as well as her work as an art teacher, an archivist, and an artist’s model, and questions a historiography of women’s art that frequently values oil painting over other media, and work for the market over ‘amateur’ production. Adam Eaker revisits Gesina ter Borch’s role in the genesis of Dutch ‘high-life’ genre painting and its construction of gender and social class, comparing her art with that of her brother Gerard, and in so doing allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ideologies and achievements of Dutch genre painting.
Gesina ter Borch
Adam Eaker
144 pages and 81 color ills.
London (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd) 2024
ISBN: 9781848225206