The six themes that comprise Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an exhibition on view April 19th through July 14th at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, convey a complex story of a very small nation-state that grew rapidly into an empire whose reach circumnavigated the globe.
It is a story of the transition from a local, feudal, agricultural world to a world based in trade that saw a more open exchange of peoples, goods, and ideas as new avenues to political and economic power. Fleets of merchant ships and investors brought luxury products such as Asian porcelains, textiles, and papers—at great risk and to great profit—to the Netherlands. Yet power came at a significant cost to other peoples across the oceans who were enslaved to provide newly desirable commodities like sugar and tobacco.
At the same time, though, the rise of the Dutch Republic and its dominance through the 17 century led to an incredible proliferation of the arts at home, one whose legacy is nowhere more evident than in visual culture. The first line from Christopher D.M. Atkins’s “Centering the Global,” an essay in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, paints the picture: “Scholars estimate that as many as five million paintings were produced in that period, a truly remarkable number for a geographic area that is about the size of the state of Maine.”
