Knowledge and practice pictured in the artist’s studio. The ‘art lover’ in the seventeenth-century Netherlands

This article examines the long overlooked representation of the ‘art lover’, or liefhebber, in the artist’s studio in the seventeenth-century Netherlands and the ways in which the liefhebber’s image coalesced with a larger cultural discourse of connoisseurship, amateurship, and artistic practice. It situates these images in the iconographic tradition of the Flemish collector’s cabinet, and demonstrates how the values inherent to the konstkamer became part of the visual language and meaning of the studio visit. Drawing academies, manuals, and art theoretical treatises reshaped the role of the a... Mehr ...