Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art [Hardback]

"In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler considers the archive of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, arguing that it lacks adequate visual history depicting the ways in which life transformed into commodity. To address this, Fowler turns to Dutch art of the seventeenth century, showing how the specter of the plantation economy in the Americas overflows into the visual sites of these works. For example, Fowler examines the paintings of Frans Post (1612-1680), analyzing Post's coastal studies of salt mining in the Cape Verde islands and his depiction of the Brazilian sugar plantations alongside the account books, inventories, and written materials that travelled beside his pictorial record"--

Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art.

In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property. Fowler demonstrates how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion. Moreover, she considers how the development of one of the first art markets was inextricable from the trade in human lives as chattel property. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery’s grasp.