Abstract
In 1690 Gerard de Lairesse met the most dreaded destiny a painter can meet. He went blind. The last twenty-one years of his life he spent in darkness, pondering on art and conceiving a program that was meant to help future painters create images of unparalleled beauty and perfection. De
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Lairesse’s concepts first materialized in theGrondlegginge ter teekenkonst of 1701, and ultimately in the 1707 Groot Schilderboek,which was his greatest achievement. In art history, however, his magnum opus has often been misinterpreted and considered to be no more than a boring spin-off of earlier French art theory. This is making things too easy though, especially because De Lairesse’s encyclopedic treatise not only mentioned more of the so-called lower genres, but also proposed a coherent program for their reform. It is this aspect of De Lairesse’s work in particular that still represents much uncharted territory, and I have therefore chosen it as the focus of my dissertation. That De Lairesse devoted so much space in his Groot Schilderboek to the lower genres was not at all a bad idea, for by the time he was dictating his thoughts to his sons, genre painting, landscape, portraiture and still-life dominated Dutch art production. Their evident popularity had led painters to specialize, and De Lairesse was sufficiently practical not to neglect or condemn this, but to take these specializations seriously and try and develop an agenda which might ennoble them. Another reason why these different genres played such an important role in De Lairesse’s writings on art, was because they had come to occupy an important place in the grand interiors of Amsterdam mansions, many of which De Lairesse had decorated himself. His elaborate painted ensembles in a classicist style would look best in combination with serious and elegant pictures in the collections of his patrons too. Completely in tune with this ideal, which most late 17th-century Dutch art lovers must have shared, the Groot Schilderboek provided painters with detailed instructions on how to bestow their works of art with the qualities of the antique, no matter what genre they worked in. In this fashion De Lairesse not only tried to convert others to his own artistic idiom, but also helped his fellow artists to cope with the ebb and flow of the Dutch art market, which at that time was indeed undergoing a major transformation. Comparing and contrasting the program for the lower genres as presented in the Groot Schilderboek with what is found in earlier art literature, as well as contextualizing it within contemporary Dutch theory and practice, this book will present De Lairesse as a true pioneer in the domain of art theory. It will explain how he employed the antique to transfer the qualities of history painting onto its less important kin, so as to uplift these lesser genres, to make them worthwhile of an enlightened patron’s interest, and perhaps even fit to be presented next to the finest of histories
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