Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age
In this exhaustively researched, mostly accessible, and richly illustrated volume, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, a professor of art history at the University of Iowa, examines the relationship of Dutch still-life painting and Holland's burgeoning international trade in the seventeenth century. In clear prose that lapses only occasionally into scholar-speak, Hochstrasser shows how many of the greatest artists of the day glorified and at times tacitly critiqued what Simon Schama has called that country's "embarrassment of riches." The painters weren't simply documenting their national elite's conspicuous consumption of cheeses, bread, fish, and salt, they were patriotically exalting its great wealth and, at the same time, acknowledging the continuing reality of hunger among the poor. And by depicting the import of refined sugar, tropical fruits, textiles, silver, and other luxuries from around the New World, the artists provided, consciously or not, a context in which to tally up the human costs associated with the production of said goods, including slavery in Dutch-controlled territories in Brazil, West Africa, and elsewhere. Nance, Kevin