Volume 12, Issue 1 (Winter 2020) On Gerard de Lairesse’s “Frenchness,” His Liège Roots, and His Artistic Integration in Amsterdam Eric Jan Sluijter
[email protected] Recommended Citation: Eric Jan Sluijter, “On Gerard de Lairesse’s “Frenchness,” His Liège Roots, and His Artistic Integra- tion in Amsterdam,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 12:1 (Winter 2020) DOI: 10.5092/ jhna.2020.12.1.2 Available at https://jhna.org/articles/on-gerard-de-lairesses-frenchness-his-lige-roots-and-his- artistic-integration-in-amsterdam/ Published by Historians of Netherlandish Art: https://hnanews.org/ Republication Guidelines: https://jhna.org/republication-guidelines/ Notes: This PDF is provided for reference purposes only and may not contain all the functionality or features of the original, online publication. This PDF provides paragraph numbers as well as page On Gerard de Lairesse’s “Frenchness,” His Liège Roots, and His Artistic Integration in Amsterdam Eric Jan Sluijter This article demonstrates how Lairesse’s style, his knowledge of contemporary Italian art and ideas, and his understanding of the art of antiquity was fully developed by 1670 and had been shaped by the Romanist-classicist tradition in Liège and through confrontation with the art in Amsterdam, without any significant intervention of French painting and art theory. 1 In the second half of the nineteenth century a positive view of seventeenth-century Dutch art (realist, honest, the art of the common people) came to oppose a negative view of French art (idealized, academic, aristocratic) of the same period.1 Dutch painting of the later seventeenth century was therefore perceived as ruined by the French influence, and Gerard de Lairesse, who functioned within this framework as the epitome of “Frenchness,” became the scapegoat.