M&NL Talk: Dutch Baroque Art including "The Goldfinch" and "The Girl with a Pearl Earring

The Mystic & Noank Library presents a talk with Professor Robert Baldwin on Monday, June 23, 2014 at 7:00 p.m. entitled “Fabritius’ Goldfinch, Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, and Kalf’s Still-Life: Humble Subjects and High Aestheticism in Dutch Baroque Art.” As the only country in seventeenth-century Europe where ordinary citizens ruled themselves, the Netherlands favored an art of everyday Dutch life. Most Dutch Baroque art depicted local, Dutch landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, still-life objects, and scenes of everyday life, both urban and rustic. To raise these mundane subjects to the high level of “Art,” a few Dutch artists such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Fabritius, and Kalf developed hyper-aesthetic styles featuring dramatic light, poetic color, and abstract brushwork. This talk examines three works of Dutch art as examples of a new self-conscious aestheticizing in Dutch art, irrespective of subject matter. 
Robert Baldwin is Associate Professor of Art at Connecticut College. He specializes in the social history of Late Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art (1300-1700), exploring the intersection of class and gender with political, social, moral and aesthetic values. He is the author of a CD-ROM textbook project, A Social History of Western Art, 1300-2000.
The program is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Library at (860) 536-7721 or email info@mysticnoanklibrary.org.