A Tentative Map of Influences Between Urban Centres of Genre Painting in the Dutch Golden Age - An Exercise in “Slow” Digital Art History

In this work we explore the creative influences between Dutch cities in terms of the uptake of genre painting motifs developed or elaborated upon in one city by painters from other cities. Concentrating on the seventeen leading genre painters of the period 1650–1675, we use data about their whereabouts and judgments about pairwise directed influences between these painters’ individual works which have been collected as part of the international exhibition project Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry (2017–2018) organised by the National Gallery of Ireland in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. We use three different ways to quantitatively aggregate art historians individual judgements on paintings to estimate the role Dutch towns played as centres of genre painting. Finally, we compare this with the corresponding ‘gut feeling’ of one of the art historians involved.

1. 1.

   Some authors would likely argue that our approach should be called “capta driven” as our atomic units of information are not objective measurements, but individual expert observations (cf. [3]).

2. 2.

   Cf. also http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/ecartico/ (last accessed 1/3/2018).

3. 3.

   Cf. [10, p. 254], where Dou, ter Borch, Steen, Metsu, de Hooch, Vermeer, Maes, van Mieris, van der Neer and Netscher are singled out as “the ten most significant genre painters active in the third quarter of the seventeenth century” (ibid).

4. 4.

   The values between the extremes of 1 and 10 were thus calculated according to the following formula: \(f(x) = (10^\frac{1}{4})^{(x-1)}\).

5. 5.

   Note, that the second aggregation scheme (‘probability only’) results from setting all the c(i) to 1 in Eq. 1.

The authors would like to thank everyone involved in the exhibition project Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry who supported and enriched this research and made it possible in the first place, as well as three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback and suggestions.

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

   Daniel Isemann & Tuan Anh Tran

2. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland

   Adriaan Waiboer

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Isemann .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Media and Information Technology, Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Sachsen, Germany

   Sander Münster

2. University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

   Kristina Friedrichs

3. University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

   Florian Niebling

4. University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland

   Agnieszka Seidel-Grzesińska

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