Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, March 14, 2012 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery.

After Rembrandt, Adriaen van Ostade was the major Dutch etcher of the seventeenth century. An exhibit of Ostade’s etchings from the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery will be on display from March 15 through May 11 in the Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus. The opening reception is on Thursday, March 15, from 5 to 7 pm.

Ostade was one of a number of seventeenth-century Dutch artists who specialized in genre themes, scenes drawn from daily life rather than from religious, mythological, or literary sources. Ostade’s work deals primarily with peasant life, a topic explored in the previous century by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Of the 50 known etchings by Ostade, Vanderbilt holds 34 as part of our collection of Dutch prints that numbers more than 100 works. Several included in this exhibition are early states of individual prints illustrating Ostade’s working methods. The etchings are representative of Ostade’s range of subjects: images of rural tradesmen, parents with their children, village fairs, itinerant peddlers, and quack doctors.

As a complement to the works by Ostade on view, a selection of prints by several of his contemporaries, including Nicolaes Berchem, Ferdinand Bol, Cornelis Dusart, and Rembrandt van Rijn, are featured, along with a sixteenth-century engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Reflections of the Dutch Golden Age: Etchings by Adriaen van Ostade from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is organized by the Fine Arts Gallery and features the research of Fine Arts Gallery interns Rebecca Bratt, Katherine Calvin, and Katherine Bookout. The exhibition is curated by Joseph S. Mella, director.