The Global History of Dutch Art

Catalog description

The context of the 17th-century Dutch Republic presents a distinct case for a global approach to art history, poised for the exchange of images, objects, and knowledge through the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the West India Company (WIC), the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and as both a young republic and a colonial empire. In this course, we will look at paintings, prints, drawings, maps, sculpture, and decorative art, investigating efforts by Dutch artists to visualize global encounters and distant places, Dutch interests in collecting and displaying rarities, and various types of artistic exchange and influence. We will consider connections not only between the Dutch Republic and its territories in current-day Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa but also those established through trade and diplomacy elsewhere, including cross-border with the southern Netherlands, with other European cultures, with Asia, and with the Americas. Rejecting methods of world history or of comparative history across cultures, as well as the fallacies of Eurocentrism and center-versus- periphery, this course will employ the lens of global integration. We will consider processes and mechanisms of early-modern globalization, including imperialism, enslavement, colonization, evangelization, trade, consumption, collecting, and the diffusion of prints. This course will involve visits to area museums to study 17th- century objects in person. Art in the Age of Empire, 1790–1900