"The National Gallery of Art's collection of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings is relatively small, numbering less than sixty, but exceptional in quality. At the core of the collection are twelve paintings by Sir Peter Paul Rubens and his school and seventeen paintings by Sir Anthony van Dyck, including some of their finest masterpieces. Also represented are excellent works by other important Flemish masters, among them Osias Beert the Elder, Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Brueghel the Elder, and David Teniers the Younger." "This catalogue of the Gallery's remarkable collection of Flemish paintings offers new information about each of the individual works. Stylistic characteristics of the paintings have been analyzed; historical circumstances related to their creation have been assessed; and their provenances have been reexamined. A number of the paintings have undergone conservation treatment, while the technical characteristics of other works have been thoroughly studied. This exhaustive research has indicated that the titles, dates, and even attributions of a number of works needed to be changed, and the catalogue includes a concordance of these revisions."--BOOK JACKET.

"In Painting Flanders Abroad: Flemish Art and Artists in Seventeenth-Century Madrid, Flemish immigrants and imported Flemish paintings cross the paths of Spanish kings, collectors, dealers, and artists in the Spanish court city, transforming the development and nature of seventeenth-century Spanish painting. Examining these Flemish transplants and the traces their interactions left in archival documents, collection inventories, art treatises, and most saliently Spanish "Golden Age" paintings, this book portrays Spanish society grappling with a long tradition of importing its favorite paintings while struggling to reimagine its own visual idiom. In the process, the book historicizes questions of style, quality, immigration, mobility, identity, and cultural exchange to define what the evolving and amorphous visual concept of "Flemishness" meant to Spanish viewers in an era long before the emergence of nationalism"--

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.