Max J. Friedländer (1867-1958). Art and Connoisseurship, a Life dedicated to Early Netherlandish Painting, aims to elucidate the life and work of Max Friedländer on the basis of a number of themes, especially his connoisseurship and its meaning for the exploration of early Netherlandish painting. Already during his career connoisseurship was judged as unscientific and consequently was therefore unfit to be called a methodology. In spite of the criticism, Friedländer stood by connoisseurship as a manner of approach by which solid academic results could be achieved. The core question of this dissertation is to what extent and in what manner Friedländer contributed to art historical questions that determined the discourse in his time and how he resisted the arguments of other protagonists. Chapter 1 is dedicated to Friedländer’s personality and his relationship with his superior, Wilhelm Bode, with whom he formed a seamless partnership. This is presented on the basis of two cases: the purchase in 1898 of seven seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings from the Hope collection and the acquisition in 1902 of a painting by Geertgen tot Sint Jans. Chapter 2 explores more thoroughly the essence of connoisseurship and the manner in which Friedländer tried to express this, in particular in the publications devoted entirely to the various aspects of connoisseurship. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the shadowy side of the practice of connoisseurship. In the first place in relation to the phenomenon of forgery. Contemporaries of note are in this respect the Bruges collector Emile Renders, who in close cooperation with the restorer Jef Van der Veken within a short time amassed an impressive collection of Flemish primitives. Secondly, attention is devoted to the so-called expertise industry. While Friedländer recognised all too well the dark side of it, he nevertheless got into trouble. This eventually led to his emigration to the Netherlands, as described in chapter 5. Friedländer’s significance for the research on ...