History of Art & Architecture
Re-Covering Gerrit Dou: Making a Case for the Cultural Work of Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting
My dissertation focuses on paintings by Rembrandt’s first and most financially successful pupil, Gerrit Dou (1613-1675). Dou’s generally small, meticulously executed scenes of women in domestic interiors epitomize the mimetic aims praised in seventeenth-century Dutch art theory. However, our experiences of Dou’s astonishing miniature worlds are incomplete today. Collectors’ inventories reveal that at least eight of Dou’s works were originally fitted within cases that featured illusionistic painted still lifes on their outer surfaces. While only two of the recorded covers survive, they feature everyday objects, varied surface textures, and lighting effects that exhibit a level of artifice true to the goal of painting professed in Dutch art theory: schijn zonder zijn (“semblance without being”). Scholars have considered these still lifes as examples of Dou’s virtuosity and often reduce them to symbolic commentary on the figural paintings they once concealed. I argue their mimetic appearance and exterior location appealed to somatic impulses in order to actively foster an embodied relationship between the beholder and the painted panels in the context of the art collections for which they were destined. These pictorial devices fooled not only the eye of the viewer, but the hand as well since they literally required the beholder to touch the painted objects in order to open the case, thereby revealing Dou’s deception. My study ultimately explores the ways in which Dou’s still life covers and René Descartes’s natural philosophy exhibit a shared and contemporaneous distrust of the senses through an epistemology of doubt and deceit.