Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

The volume contains entries for paintings in the National gallery that were produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by artists from the Netherlands. The entries are arranged alphabetically by artist; a short biography and bibliography for each artist is followed by individual entries on the paintings, each in order of acquisition. The authors address traditional questions of attributes and iconography; in addition, they examine the social, economic, and religious context in which the individual work of art functioned. The volume is also probable the first museum catalogue to include the results of examination by infrared reflectography and dendrochronological analysis.