Celebrating in the Golden Age - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9056628356 ISBN 13: 9789056628352

Publisher: NAI Publishers, 2011

Synopsis

From peasant fairs and carnival celebrations to lavish "al fresco" parties, processions and civic guard banquets, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century was a golden age of partying. "Celebrating the Golden Age" provides a pageant of people making merry through the eyes of Dutch masters Esaias van de Velde, Dirck Hals, Willem Buytewech, Jan Miense Molenaar, Frans Hals and Jan Steen, who was perhaps the ultimate painter of these festivities. This volume brings to life the painted party, with scenes of celebration at weddings, elegant garden parties, carnivals, Twelfth Night and May festivities, masquerades and family gatherings on Saint Nicholas' Eve. A series of essays explicates these narrative scenes: their often sly and humorous views of the values of their time, the role of alcohol and bawdy humor, the ways in which painters persuaded their subjects to pose and what costumes and gestures can reveal when the seventeenth century lets its hair down.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

After the highly successful 'Haarlem: The Cradle of the Golden Age' exhibition, the Frans Hals Museum is turning its attention to painted festivities from the seventeenth century. Celebrating in the Golden Age is the publication that accompanies the eponymous exhibition, a lavish volume that offers a surprising glimpse of people making merry, seen through the eyes of seventeenth-century Dutch masters. Celebrating in the Golden Age provides the first overview of various seventeenth-century revels in paintings. It acquaints readers with some of the very finest examples and sheds new light on the clothes, the poses and expressions of the figures, the artistic challenges facing the painters and the culture of humour and celebration in the seventeenth century.
In their colourful paintings, artists like Frans Hals, Dirck Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer and Jan Steen depicted all manner of merrymaking people and high-spirited companies, ranging from peasant festivities and carnivals to elaborate al fresco parties, rhetoricians' processions and civic guard banquets. These festive scenes often have witty yet barbed undertones. They show people laughing infectiously, merry fancy dress parties and elegant manners, but also uninhibited debauchery and comical contrasts between rich and poor. Parties were an exceptionally popular subject in paintings of the Golden Age, a period when more contemporary festivities were depicted than ever before.

About this edition

• Publisher: NAI Publishers
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 9056628356
• ISBN 13: 9789056628352
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180