Painting Flanders abroad: Flemish art and artists in seventeenth-century Madrid

Abstract

"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"--

Contents

Flemish immigrant painters in Madrid : a portrait -- Food and flowers : the visual seductions of Flemishness -- Países flamencos : picturing Flemish distance -- Coda : Rubens and the end of "Flemish" art in Spain.