SCHILDEREN IN EEN LAND ZONDER SCHILDERS. De Nederlandse bijdrage aan de opkomst van de Britse schilderschool, 1520-1720

Abstract

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, several dozen painters left the Netherlands for Great Britain to start a new life there. In contrast to the Netherlands, the pictorial arts in Britain were still hardly developed at the time. This only changed in the course of the eighteenth century with the appearance of artists such as Hogarth and Gainsborough.

In his dissertation, Sander Karst shows that this first generation of British artists benefited from the many Dutch painters in Great Britain. From the sources it becomes clear that these Dutchmen introduced the British public to genres that were new to them, such as landscape painting, and that they passed on their knowledge and skills to beginning British painters. Karst demonstrates how the flowering of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century thus contributed substantially to the development of British painting.

The research conducted for this dissertation revealed that the Dutch, who were initially unwelcome, were later encouraged to cross the Channel. This open migration policy was spurred on by various crises that hit the British, including the outbreak of the plague in the 1660s. From the 1670s onwards, their hospitality began to pay off and the arts were just one of the many fields that benefited when the center of European economy shifted from Amsterdam to London.

This dissertation tells the still valid story of arrears being turned into an advantage through clever policy and how crises can be used to accelerate this.