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Images of the Tropics critically examines Dutch colonial culture in the Netherlands Indies through the prism of landscape art. Susie Protschky contends that visual representations of nature and landscape were core elements of how Europeans understood the tropics, justified their territorial claims in the region, and understood their place both in imperial Europe and in colonized Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book thus makes a significant contribution to studies of empire, art and environment, as well as to histories of Indonesia and Europe. Surveying a rich visual culture developed over a period of some 350 years of Dutch colonial engagement with Indonesia Sus...
In 1724-1726, the Dutch clergyman François Valentyn published a 5,000-page account of the Dutch East India Company’s empire. It was the first and, for a long time, the only survey of the Dutch establishments in Asia and South Africa. Shaping a Dutch East Indies analyses how Valentyn composed this work and how it largely determined the Dutch perspective on the colonies in Asia until the 1850s. It seeks to highlight both the great diversity of knowledge gathered in Valentyn’s book and its geographical spread, from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, with a focus on the Indonesian archipelago. Huigen’s book is the first in-depth study of Valentyn’s work, which is a foundational text in the history of Dutch colonialism.
In The Shock of Recognition, Lewis Pyenson uses a method called Historical Complementarity to identify the motif of non-figurative abstraction in modern art and science. He identifies the motif in Picasso’s and Einstein’s educational environments. He shows how this motif in domestic furnishing and in urban lighting set the stage for Picasso’s and Einstein’s professional success before 1914. He applies his method to intellectual life in Argentina, using it to address that nation’s focus on an inventory of the natural world until the 1940s, its adoption of non-figurative art and nuclear physics in the middle of the twentieth century, and attention to landscape painting and the wonder of nature at the end of the century.
Presents a collection of the drawings of Vincent Van Gogh, providing images of his works in charcoal, chalk, ink, graphite, and watercolor, and including essays the place each drawing in its historical context, explaining its significance.
In Europe within Reach Gerrit Verhoeven traces some sweeping evolutions in the early modern travel behaviour of Dutch and Flemish elites (1585-1750), as the classical Grand Tour was slowly but surely overshadowed by other types of travelling. Leisure trips to Paris, London or Berlin, a cours pittoresque along the Rhine, domestic trips in the Low Countries and a series of other destinations gained ground, while new sorts of travellers cropped up: female and middle-class travellers, domestic servants, children, youngsters and the elderly. Verhoeven does not only trace these evolutions, but also explains why Netherlandish travellers gradually turned into art connoisseurs; why they were spellbound by sites of memory and by rugged landscapes; or why all sorts of fashionable gadgets and thingies were bought on the way.
This superb book presents 100 notable examples from the Harvard Art Museums’ distinguished collection of Dutch, Flemish, and Netherlandish drawings from the 16th to 18th century. Featuring such masters as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van Rijn, the volume showcases beautiful color illustrations accompanied by insightful commentary on prevalent styles and techniques. Genres that define this artistic period—landscape, scenes of everyday life, portraiture, and still life—are explored in detail. The book also presents the results of new conservation and technical study, including infrared analysis and scientific examinations of drawing materials. This revelatory new research has allowed previously illegible underdrawings and inscriptions in many of the artworks to surface for the first time, shedding light on longstanding mysteries of production and provenance.
This provocative and readable study examines the norms, values, and beliefs that contribute to modern environmental problems. Criticizing the environmental abuses inherent in the acquisitive values of consumer society, the argument presented contends that individuals must simplify their lifestyles and exhibit moderation and self-restraint to avoid waste and maintain the earth's resources. In this vision, governments must translate moderation and limitation into effective policy measures and adapt economic, social, and political institutions accordingly.
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Vincent van Gogh believed that one had to learn to read, just as one had to learn to see and learn to live. Van Gogh conveyed a message in his work about the path that he himself followed that was "more true to life," the path that human beings walk in their turbulent existence, the pilgrimage along the various stages of the road of life. He does not speak about the meaning of life but about the true art of living. It is fascinating to see and read the moving way in which he wrestled with the deep human questions of the whence, why, and whither of life. He did not see himself doing this on his own but acknowledged kindred spirits and allies in preachers, preacher-poets, painters, writers, an...