Examining a Changing World: Dutch Art in a Global Age

In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam became a center of unprecedented economic and intellectual prosperity. Alongside the Dutch Republic’s rapid rise to international influence, a maelstrom of tension came to define Dutch art as artists used burins, brushes, and print blocks to reckon with the changing world around them. Organized around objects in the exhibition Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and in the High’s collection, this four-week course will explore the relationships between local and nonlocal, nature and artifice, religious and secular, and freedom and control. Central to the examination of prints, paintings, decorative objects, and more will be an awareness of the human costs associated with globalization and how art can highlight and elide complex historical narratives.

This class will meet on Tuesdays May 21, 28 and June 4, and 11 . On the first day of class, please make your way to the Admissions and Information desk to have your ticket scanned before heading to the Lecture Room located in the Stent Family Wing, Lower Level in the Greene Family Education Center.

Iain MacKay is a PhD candidate at Emory University and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. His dissertation considers the role of seventeenth-century Dutch art in constructing, navigating, and grappling with moral and religious concerns in a global age.