Painting Flanders Abroad: Flemish Art and Artists in Seventeenth-Century Madrid - Hardcover

by Abigail D. Newman (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Abigail D. Newman (Ph.D., Princeton University) works at the Rubenianum and Rubenshuis and teaches at the University of Antwerp. She has written for journals and exhibitions - including her monograph, Rubens's St. Andrew "de los Flamencos" Altarpiece Enframed by a Spanish-Flemish Community (Rubenshuis/BAI, 2018) - and co-edited Many Antwerp Hands: Collaborations in Netherlandish Art (Harvey Miller Publishers/Brepols, 2021).