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Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland

Portraiture and the Production of Community

Ann Jensen Adams author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:30th Mar '09

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Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland cover

This study is an examination of four Dutch portrait genres of the seventeenth century.

During the seventeenth century, Dutch portraits were actively commissioned by corporate groups and by individuals from a range of economic and social classes. Ann Jensen Adams examines four portrait genres - individuals, the family, history portraits, and civic guards.During the seventeenth century, Dutch portraits were actively commissioned by corporate groups and by individuals from a range of economic and social classes. They became among the most important genres of painting. Not merely mimetic representations of their subjects, many of these works create a new dialogic relationship with the viewer. Ann Jensen Adams examines four portrait genres - individuals, the family, history portraits, and civic guards. She analyzes these works in relation to inherited visual traditions, contemporary art theory, changing cultural beliefs about the body, about sight, and the image itself, as well as to current events. Adams argues that as individuals became unmoored from traditional sources of identity, such as familial lineage, birthplace, and social class, portraits helped them to find security in a self-aware subjectivity and the new social structures that made possible the 'economic miracle' that has come to be known as the Dutch Golden Age.

"Adams’s book deserves appreciation for its innovative, insightful approach to a type of art whose value neither historians nor art historians have fully appreciated." -Benjamin Kaplan, Journal of Modern History
"Her emphasis on multiple social identities that crossed regional, class, and religious boundaries evokes the important social role of the pictures she examines for a culturally diverse society and consequently the centrality of context for understanding how they were viewed." -CATHERINE LEVESQUE,The College of William and Mary
“This long-awaited cultural study comes out to much anticipation, and it does not disappoint.” –-Seventeenth-Century News
“In summary we can say that Public Faces and Private Identities is a well-written and inspiring text, systematically constructed toward the author’s closing arguments. The book is a welcome addition to the existing literature on the still underrated portrait genre.” –-Historians of Netherlandish Art

ISBN: 9780521444552

Dimensions: 258mm x 185mm x 28mm

Weight: 1200g

412 pages