The RKD — Netherlands Institute for Art History published the proceedings of the international conference ‘Close Encounters: Cross-Cultural Exchange between the Low Countries and Britain 1600-1830’, which was held at the RKD in September 2022.
The conference was organized on the occasion of the launch of Gerson Digital: Britain, an annotated and illustrated English version of Horst Gerson’s chapter on Britain from his Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (1942). Fourteen of the conference papers – by specialists from the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands – are included in the publication.
The RKD database contains 838 artists from the Low Countries who traveled to Britain before 1800. Some famous examples of Dutch artists who worked in Britain are Samuel van Hoogstraten, Gerard van Honthorst and Willem van de Velde. The publication contains chapters on them and on various art-historical themes: cross-cultural networks and collaboration, the relationships of Netherlandish artists to British patrons, collecting and the trade in artistic goods.
Close Encounters was edited by Karen Hearn, Angela Jager, Sander Karst, Rieke van Leeuwen, David Taylor and Joanna Woodall. It is available on rkdstudies.nl.