Popularity
Willem Claesz Heda’s skill was recognized in his own time by Samuel Ampzing, the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, and Theodorus Schrevelius. Though Heda would clearly not be included in Het schilder-boeck of Karel van Mander, as its 1604 publishing fell before his rise to prominence, it would be expected that he would be included in the work of the next great Dutch art biographer Arnold Houbraken Houbraken briefly mentioned Heda in the third volume of his work based on the biography by Schrevelius. Houbraken’s paltry inclusion of Heda in hisGroote Schouburgh was probably due to nothing more than the lack of information about the artist. Houbraken’s antiquarian approach to artists’ biographies meant that he published all of the information he had on each individual, and had he seen one of Heda’s pieces, he would have likely written more.
Houbraken’s scant mention of Heda was reflected in the works of his followers, Johan van Gool and Jacob Campo Weyerman. Neither of these individuals included Heda in their respective books.
Thanks to the decline of Dutch art, after the Dutch Golden Age, many countries began to ignore Netherlandish artworks. Jean-Baptiste Descamps a French artist who briefly studied in Antwerp became the first among modern art writers outside of the Netherlands to acknowledge the nation’s artistic importance. Although Descamps' writings included many inaccuracies, he described the Netherlandish masters, the van Eyck brothers among others, with personal observations that set him apart from many who ignored this genre. Following Descamps, Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville, a French writer and art connoisseur, cemented the shift in attitudes about the Dutch low genres. D’Argenville support for their unique style of genre painting. D’Argenville was in favor of treating all styles equally and believed that the preeminent artists of all fields should be valued for their skill over their subject matter. After attitudes towards genre paintings were changed, and Dutch art was once again in vogue, Willem Claesz Heda returned to prominence in the art world.
Heda was rediscovered by the French art critic Théophile Thoré in the 1860s. After seeing an example of his work at the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, Thoré praised Heda’s ability to make‘pétite nature into a splendid celebration of life.
Read more about this topic: Willem Claeszoon Heda
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)