Jacob Campo Weyerman and his Collection of Artists’ Biographies

Lyckle de Vries (*1937) retired from Groningen University in 2000. Apart from writing monographic studies on 17th-century Dutch artists, he analysed contemporary printed sources on Dutch art and art theory, Gerard de Lairesse (1998, 2011), and Johan van Gool (1990).

• PrefaceList of IllustrationsIntroduction1 Contents of the Levens-Beschryvingen2 Weyerman’s Opinions1 Painted and Written Genre Scenes1 Urban Genre2 Low Life Genre3 Italianate Scenes4 Large-Scale Genre Paintings5 Fine Painting2 Failed Artists1 Pretentions of Nobility2 Social Skills3 Marriage4 Painterly Studios5 Intemperance6 Mental Problems7 Art Dealers and Their Victims8 Copying9 Antwerp’s Vrijdagsmarkt10 Street Vendors and Itinerant Painters3 Portraiture1 London2 The ‘Byway’ of Art3 The Sitter’s Identity4 Good Manners, Flattery and Beauty5 The Netherlands6 Other Group Portraits4 Art in the Public Space1 Altarpieces2 Stained Glass Windows3 Wall Tapestries4 Princely Commissions5 Government Commissions6 Municipal Commissions7 Festive Entries8 Private Commissions5 Art Criticism1 Choice of Subject Matter2 Composition3 Human Figures4 Pictorial Space5 Reddering6 Colouring7 Handling of the Brush8 Welstand6 Pliny, Durand and Weyerman1 Weyerman’s Ideas in Perspective2 Beauty3 Grace4 Art and Nature5 The Purpose of Art6 Classification7 ConclusionEpilogueAppendix 1: Biography of Willem de FouchierAppendix 2: Disquisition on the Art of the AncientsBibliographyIndex

“Jacob Campo Weyerman and his Collection of Artists' Biographies is a great book. Not cheap, but the first 141 pages, Part One, will serve as a new benchmark in Weyerman Studies.”Peter Altena, in JCW 43.2 (Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman)"The fact remains that, whatever [Weyerman's] motivations, he demonstrated (and de Vries amply acknowledges it) that he had an art critic training, that he mastered a technical vocabulary that deserves to be studied precisely because it is specific to a reality and an era and, in short, that he was a man fully immersed in his time. Probably these findings (and the many references to the situation of the art market in the Netherlands [...] would today satisfy more those who deal with social history of art, rather than history of art in the strict sense; however, they allow us to reconsider the importance of a work that, in Schlosser's time, seemed inevitably destined for oblivion and ignominy."Giovanni Mazzaferro, in: Letteratura artistica: Cross-cultural Studies in Art History Sources, August 2020