Perry Chapman | University of Delaware (original) (raw)

Papers by Perry Chapman

BRILL eBooks, 2013

Ann-Sophie Lehmann, How materials make meaning Michele Tomasi, Materiaux, techniques, commanditai... more Ann-Sophie Lehmann, How materials make meaning Michele Tomasi, Materiaux, techniques, commanditaires et espaces. Le systeme des retables a la chartreuse de Champmol Kim Woods, The Master of Rimini and the tradition of alabaster carving in the early fifteenth-century Netherlands Aleksandra Lipinska, Alabastrum, id est, corpus hominis. Alabaster in the Low Countries, a cultural history Koenraad Jonckheere, Images of stone. The physicality of art and the image debates in the sixteenth century Ralph Dekoninck, Between denial and exaltation. The material of the miraculous images of the Virgin in the Southern Netherlands during the seventeenth century Thijs Weststeijn, The gender of colors in Dutch art theory Nadja Baadj, A world of materials in a cabinet without drawers: Reframing Jan van Kessel's The four parts of the world Martha Moffitt Peacock, Paper as power. Carving a niche for the female artist in the work of Joanna Koerten Frits Scholten, Malleable marble. The Antwerp snow sculptures of 1772

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Mar 1, 2023

Art History, Sep 1, 2009

Fiction about artists and art reveals a parallel extra-academy, extra-museum art history. This es... more Fiction about artists and art reveals a parallel extra-academy, extra-museum art history. This essay examines three recent novels that draw on and to varying degrees fictionalize early modern Netherlandish painters and paintings. Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring is 'art-historical fiction' that uses real paintings to craft a fictional Vermeer; Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue is 'provenance fiction' that brings to life the history of ownership of a fictional painting by Vermeer; and Michael Frayn's Headlong, a tale of a modern-day amateur art historian's quixotic quest for a long lost picture by Pieter Bruegel, is 'art-history fiction'. These novels centre on paintings of daily life, which they situate in commonplace domestic settings, whether home or studio (Vermeer's studio was in his home). All rely on stylistic strategies of Dutch and Flemish genre painting to craft stories of ordinary lives that are made extraordinary by art. Held up as mirrors to our scholarly practices, each of these novels provides us with a glimmer of the gut-wrenching power of art; together they confront us with the popular ramifications of recent scholarly approaches to works of art and their makers. In recent decades art-historical fiction has thrived and art history has pervaded other fiction genres, especially detective and espionage novels. I have chosen to focus on these three novels, all published in 1999, because of the different ways in which they buy into, challenge or subvert some of the levelling tendencies of recent art history. In the face of the death of the artist and the commodification of the work of art, they insist on art's emotional hold and play on our fascination with the engaged creative individual. They expose what happens in the popular imagination when the art historian turns social historian and philosopher, challenges the canon, researches the art market, and examines objects through the lens of science. Art history, especially in the field of Dutch and Flemish art, has been particularly focused on the art market and the economics of art, and the authors of these three novels have absorbed socioeconomic investigations into the production and consumption of Dutch art. 1 Each novel is driven, in part, by money; yet each reminds us that what is one person's commodity is another's passion. One outcome of the broader social history of art has been an (over)emphasis on art as the product of its culture rather than of an individual maker. This way of thinking has consequences for Chevalier's novel. The rise of reception theories that emphasize the viewer's response and thereby shift attention from artist to work of art is filtered through the novels by Vreeland and Frayn. Post-modern

Art Bulletin, Mar 1, 1993

... theatricality, painter and "stage-poet."'7 Hoogstraten himself had... more ... theatricality, painter and "stage-poet."'7 Hoogstraten himself had invoked the theatrical metaphor in his ... story-telling re-gains its integrity and comes to seem more deliberate than intuitive. ... JanSteen Though Steen was not a paradigmatic history painter like Lairesse or Van der ...

Nederlandsch kunsthistorisch jaarboek, 2009

In the Lute-Playing Painter (fig. I), a work of the 1650S by the Leidener Johannes Cornelisz. van... more In the Lute-Playing Painter (fig. I), a work of the 1650S by the Leidener Johannes Cornelisz. van Swieten (c. 1635-1661), contrasting figures of the artist vie for our attention. We are drawn, first, to the painter in the foreground, who has set aside his palette to strum a lute. Honoured and theatrically framed by a curtain draped over monumental architecture, he wears a black doublet and an elegant shirt with flowing white sleeves, enlivened by red ribbons at the wrists. His fanciful garb, especially the red stockings, prefigures that of the painter shown from the back in Vermeer's Art ofPainting (fig. 10) of the following decade. More forthrightly than the Delft master, Van Swieten has portrayed his lute-player as an elite artist through his attitude, clothes, array of accoutrements and setting. The figure's heavenward gaze-which parallels that of the hermit in the painting on his easel-suggests that this artist is divinely inspired. The black beret, an accessory of the learned painter, sports a feather, symbol of the poetische geest or poetic spirit that linked the visual and the verbal arts in humanist discourse.' Music, too, was thought to induce creativity and was associated with love, the first of the three classic motivations for art, encompassing and surpassing honour and profit. ' The ideal 'work' of art is a labour of love. Wine was another form of creative stimulation and the tall wine glass on the table in Van Swietens work is paired with a timepiece indicating the virtue of moderation. Unlike the notoriously unruly community of Netherlandish artists in Rome, against whom Karel van Mander warned prospective travelers, ' this fortunate artist enjoys the transformative fruits of Bacchus without abandoning intellectual control and social restraint. While the painting on the easel depicts an ascetic, focused on God, the elegant figure beside this image-identified with it in part through visual juxtaposition, in part through the established trope that 'every painter paints himself's-also enjoys and is inspired by the pleasures of this world. The informal still-life on the table extends to the floor, where a skull evokes the artist's intimate and ambivalent relationship with death. His quasi-divine capacity to create, enliven and immortalize are inseparable from the consciousness of absence and loss that render representation necessary. Beside the skull , a book and a globe, familiar from the many studio scenes painted in Leiden by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) and others, Detail figure 3,

Art Bulletin, Dec 1, 1990

H. Perry Chapman has produced the first comprehensive treatment of the entire body of Rembrandt&#... more H. Perry Chapman has produced the first comprehensive treatment of the entire body of Rembrandt's self-portraits in their cultural and historical setting and in the context of the artist's life. Prevailing scholarship has tried to discredit the idea that the self-portraits stemmed from any particular inner need, but Chapman counters by presenting fascinating evidence that they represent a conscious and progressive quest for individual identity in a truly modern sense. "H. Perry Chapman, in my view, gives us the Rembrandt we need in the 1990s. . . . [Her] sensitivity to questions of style and expression, combined with original research, leads to a conclusion . . . that Rembrandt's lifelong preoccupation with self-portraiture can be seen as a necessary process of identity formation or self-definition'--in short, autobiography."--Walter Liedtke, The Journal of Art "Chapman is a graceful writer. Her arguments are balanced, well documented, and vigorously pursued. . . . The publication of this book is cause for gratitude and joy."--Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

Waanders eBooks, 2010

This volume is concerned with images and discourses of the artist in the Netherlands from the lat... more This volume is concerned with images and discourses of the artist in the Netherlands from the late 15th century until the mid 17th century, when the relationship between a community of craftsman and elite individuals, between consciousness of a native tradition and membership of international humanist society, between image and word, between hand, mind and spirit, were being actively negotiated.

Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 1990

Renaissance Quarterly, 2019

The centrality of liefhebbers' desires to their manifestations in artistic production is reinforc... more The centrality of liefhebbers' desires to their manifestations in artistic production is reinforced throughout, at times threatening to eclipse analysis of other factors. However, Ho balances attention to aficionados with close readings of paintings and a keen eye for stylistic and technical signatures. The result is a book that often hovers attentively over the connoisseur's shoulder but lingers longest and most satisfyingly at the painter's side.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020