Enfilade

From Duke UP, with a talk on Thursday at BGC:

Caroline Fowler, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1478028093 (hardcover), $125 / ISBN: 978-1478031321 (paperback), $30.

In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property. Fowler demonstrates how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion. Moreover, she considers how the development of one of the first art markets was inextricable from the trade in human lives as chattel property. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery’s grasp.

Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Institute. She is the author of The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas and Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Transubstantiation across Atlantic Worlds
1  Art Markets and Futures Speculation
2  Seascapes and Landscapes
3  Monuments and Architectural Painting
4  Domestic Interiors and Natural History
Conclusion: Historiography and Race

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art | A Conversation with Caroline Fowler and Helga Davis
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 13 February 2025, 6pm

Caroline Fowler will speak with renowned artist and podcaster Helga Davis about the book Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, thinking about the role of poetics in writing history, the importance of Black feminism in rethinking art history, and the ways in which ‘Old Master’ painting continues to impact how the world is seen and interpreted.

Registration is available here»