Gerard de Lairesse produced an astonishing number of paintings during his active years in Amsterd... more Gerard de Lairesse produced an astonishing number of paintings during his active years in Amsterdam from 1665 to 1689. Given his numerous pupils, known through biographers, one may wonder to what extent De Lairesse's masterpieces are collective undertakings. This essay proposes a new approach to studying workshop practice in the seventeenth century through a combination of quantitative analysis and biographical research. This essay visualizes the overall trend of the artist's painting production and situates the pupils' training periods in the master's career timeline. The analysis shows that De Lairesse's painting production fluctuates with the change of the quantity and quality of pupils present in his workshop. This essay further reveals the workshop's participation in large-scale commissions for decorative paintings, which also explains why and when the master had more time for making collector's paintings by himself.
This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch... more This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was connected artistically, and how such connections were translated into artistic innovations that fuelled the rapid flourishing of Dutch arts and the art market. It does so by conceptualising and visualising an art-historical network of iconography that, for the first time, connects artists not through social relations but through shared subject matters. Using network analysis, this study revisits the definition of product innovations used by the socio-economic art historian John Michael Montias. It further demonstrates that painters’ choices of subject matter, styles, and qualities were often unrelated while artists’ thematic connections had little to do with their social relations and the location of their residence. Rather, the choices of subject matter were subject to market forces and rooted deeply in an artist’s ability, ambition, and marketing strategy. Lastly, this ar...
The surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art and the Dutch art market from the late 16th centu... more The surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art and the Dutch art market from the late 16th century to the mid-17th century have propelled scholars to quantify the volume of production and to determine the source of its growth. However, existing studies have not explored the use of known paintings to specify and visualize the fluctuations of painting production in the Dutch Republic. Employing data mining techniques to leverage the most comprehensive datasets of Netherlandish paintings (RKD), this paper visualizes and analyzes the trend of painting production in the Northern Netherlands throughout the 17th-century. The visualizations verify the existing observations on the market saturation and industry stagnation in 1630–1640. In spite of this market condition, the growth of painting production was sustained until the 1660s. This study argues that the irrational risk-taking behavior of painters and the over-enthusiasm for painting in the public created a “social bubble” and the sub...
Gerard de Lairesse produced an astonishing number of paintings during his active years in Amsterd... more Gerard de Lairesse produced an astonishing number of paintings during his active years in Amsterdam from 1665 to 1689. Given his numerous pupils, known through biographers, one may wonder to what extent De Lairesse's masterpieces are collective undertakings. This essay proposes a new approach to studying workshop practice in the seventeenth century through a combination of quantitative analysis and biographical research. This essay visualizes the overall trend of the artist's painting production and situates the pupils' training periods in the master's career timeline. The analysis shows that De Lairesse's painting production fluctuates with the change of the quantity and quality of pupils present in his workshop. This essay further reveals the workshop's participation in large-scale commissions for decorative paintings, which also explains why and when the master had more time for making collector's paintings by himself.
This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch... more This article demonstrates how an expanding population of artists in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was connected artistically, and how such connections were translated into artistic innovations that fuelled the rapid flourishing of Dutch arts and the art market. It does so by conceptualising and visualising an art-historical network of iconography that, for the first time, connects artists not through social relations but through shared subject matters. Using network analysis, this study revisits the definition of product innovations used by the socio-economic art historian John Michael Montias. It further demonstrates that painters’ choices of subject matter, styles, and qualities were often unrelated while artists’ thematic connections had little to do with their social relations and the location of their residence. Rather, the choices of subject matter were subject to market forces and rooted deeply in an artist’s ability, ambition, and marketing strategy. Lastly, this ar...
The surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art and the Dutch art market from the late 16th centu... more The surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art and the Dutch art market from the late 16th century to the mid-17th century have propelled scholars to quantify the volume of production and to determine the source of its growth. However, existing studies have not explored the use of known paintings to specify and visualize the fluctuations of painting production in the Dutch Republic. Employing data mining techniques to leverage the most comprehensive datasets of Netherlandish paintings (RKD), this paper visualizes and analyzes the trend of painting production in the Northern Netherlands throughout the 17th-century. The visualizations verify the existing observations on the market saturation and industry stagnation in 1630–1640. In spite of this market condition, the growth of painting production was sustained until the 1660s. This study argues that the irrational risk-taking behavior of painters and the over-enthusiasm for painting in the public created a “social bubble” and the sub...
Uploads
Papers by Weixuan Li