Gallery and Art Collection Painting
Gallery paintings appeared in Antwerp around 1610, and developed—like architectural interiors—from the compositions of Hans Vredeman de Vries. One of the earliest innovators of this new genre was Frans Francken the Younger, who introduced the type of work known as the Preziosenwand (wall of treasures). In these, prints, paintings, sculptures, drawings, as well as collectable objects from the natural world like shells and flowers are collected together in the foreground against a wall that imitates encyclopedic cabinets of curiosities. A similar variation of these collections of artistic wealth are the series of the five senses created by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens (Prado Museum, Madrid). Willem van Haecht (1593–1637) developed another variation in which illustrations of actual artworks are displayed in a fantasy art gallery, while connoisseurs and art lovers admire them. Later in the century, David Teniers the Younger, working in the capacity of court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, documented the archduke's collection of Italian paintings in Brussels as gallery painters as well as in a printed catalogue–the Theatrum Pictorium. Flemish Gallery and art collection paintings have been interpreted as a kind of visual theory of art. Such paintings continued to be made in Antwerp by Gerard Thomas (1663–1721) and Balthasar van den Bossche (1681–1715), and foreshadow the development of the veduta in Italy and the galleries of Giovanni Paolo Pannini.
Read more about this topic: Flemish Baroque Painting
Famous quotes containing the words gallery and, gallery, art, collection and/or painting:
“It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serves a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island girls; their stiffness, formality, and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de’ Medici placed beside a milliner’s doll.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
““Modernity” signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“You know, many people believe that we archaeologists are just a collection of old fogies digging around in the ruins after old dried up skulls and bones.”
—Griffin Jay, and Harold Young. Stephen Banning (Dick Foran)
“For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)