Art, Commerce, and Colonization in the Dutch Republic

Catalog description

Examines Dutch painting and graphic arts together with the abundant material goods acquired through trade and travel on a global scale through prosperous Dutch sea-faring merchant fleets. At once local and global, worldly and mundane, Dutch art embodied an intense curiosity about science, nature, history, and other cultures, but also the exploitative forces at work in Dutch colonialist practices, above all in Brazil, where sugar plantations and other enterprises entailed coerced labor of both Indigenous populations and enslaved Africans. Students will gain skills for critically evaluating the intersection of pictorial, social, and economic factors within diverse art forms, from the intense narrative dramas of Rembrandt, to the enigmatic figural scenes of Vermeer, to Albert Eckhout’s representations of natural and social life in Brazil. Prerequisite(s): one 100 or 200 level Art History course or permission of instructor.