Painting

The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678): Painter, Writer, and Courtier (Amsterdam University Press - Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age)

The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678): Painter, Writer, and Courtier (Amsterdam University Press - Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age)

Language: English

Pages: 296

ISBN: 9089645233

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Samuel van Hoogstraten was not only one of Rembrandt’s most successful pupils but also a versatile painter in his own right. His experiments in optical illusion also attracted the interest of the natural scientists of his time, and he wrote some of the first Dutch novels, plays, and a treatise on painting. This rich interdisciplinary study examines how van Hoogstraten understood the relationship between art, literature, and science and how these reflected the general views of his time. Bringing to the fore hitherto unknown works, the book is an important contribution to our understanding of van Hoogstraten’s life and art. 

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probable that Van Hoogstraten, imitating Rembrandt, had his own small library and collection of man-made curiosities and exotic natural objects. His treatise mentions not only Saxon antiquities, Japanese lacquerware, and Amerindian feather images but also shells, gems, suggestively shaped rocks, bezoar stones, and mandrakes.12 These were typical items in scientific cabinets: the visitor’s ingenium was essential to identify the unusual objects’ meaning in the framework of the Creator’s design.

associates with a Deistic trend in Houbraken’s thought, must have been a predominant theme for Van Hoogstraten too. The conception of nature as a ‘second Bible’, that inspired so many investigations in natural science in the Dutch Republic,23 should remind us that analyzing Van Hoogstraten from the perspective of the history of knowledge does not necessarily involve an interpretation of his art as a ‘modern’ or secular one. After all, the Dordrecht master famously quoted Calvin that even though

rare example of the way in which he gave his unvarnished opinion of a drawing by one of his students, whom he accused of shortcomings such as inept anatomy.36 The first works Van Hoogstraten’s self-portrait belongs to his earliest known work. It is a striking fact that Rembrandt regularly required his students to draw their own person. In 1648 he rendered an etched example of such a self-portrait, in which he sits drawing at an open window.37 We also know of small self-portraits by his pupils

perspective.2 In what follows, I shall put forward another, more ‘domestic’ suggestion with regard to what may have moved Samuel van Hoogstraten in creating his perspective box. In his book De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen of 1718-1721, Arnold Houbraken gave a rare insight in the pedagogical gifts of Samuel van Hoogstraten, to whom he was once apprenticed. The following remarkable passage suggests that Van Hoogstraten’s works must always have been purposeful

crossing the Apennines in order to see Loreto, an unlikely choice for a Dutch Mennonite because Loreto was the most famous pilgrimage destination for Roman Catholics in the seventeenth century.12 Probably for purely artistic purposes, Van Hoogstraten went to Florence, to Siena and Pisa, before crossing once more the Apennines through the valleys that nowadays accommodate the railway track to Bologna. After visiting Ferrara and Parma, he returned via the Brenner Pass and Innsbruck (not mentioned

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