Gouda, Leiden and Dordrecht:

Three Dutch Cities and Their Artists

Online Course

SNAPSHOT

Lecturer: Dr Sophie Oosterwijk
Sessions: 3 x 90 minutes
Dates: 30 May, 6, 13, June, 2024
Times: Thursday @ 7.30pm AEST
Group Size: Maximum of 15 screens
Price: $150 AUD

TWO WAYS TO WATCH

Can't make a date above? Don't worry... this course will be recorded, allowing you to watch each session at your convenience for up to 14 days. Simply sign up below and we'll send you a link on the first business day following each live session, ensuring you never miss a class!

Overview

In this short course Dr Sophie Oosterwijk will introduce three historic cities in Holland and the artists who lived and worked there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Gouda is famous for its renaissance stained-glass windows and the surviving original cartoons by the Crabeth brothers Dirck and Wouter. In Leiden the fijnschilders Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris followed in the footsteps of the young Rembrandt. Dordrecht was the home of many artists - including Nicolaes Maes and father and son Cuyp - but this course will focus on Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten, who will be the subject of two special exhibitions in Vienna and Amsterdam (2024-25).

Join art historian Dr Sophie Oosterwijk to take a deep dive into three magnificent Dutch cities and the intriguing work that three artists produced whilst living there.

 

YOUR EXPERT LECTURER

Dr Sophie Oosterwijk is a Dutch art historian who has lived and worked in the UK for over 20 years. She specialises in Medieval, Flemish and Dutch art and has led and designed tours to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and the United Kingdom since 1994.

Sophie holds an MA and PhD in English literature from Leiden University, an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Leicester. She has taught at the universities of Leicester, Manchester and St Andrews, and is a regular guest lecturer in Continuing Education for the University of Cambridge.

 Session info

  • The Janskerk in Gouda is world-famous for its renaissance windows, many of them designed by the local Crabeth brothers Dirck (1501-1574) and Wouter (1510-1590). The original cartoons reveal their astonishing draughtsmanship.

  • Rembrandt’s first pupil in Leiden was Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), who adopted his master’s early meticulous technique and propagated a local style of genre and portrait painting along with his star pupil Frans van Mieris (1635-1681).

  • Many famous artists worked in 17th-century Dordrecht, including local painter, poet and writer Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) whose illusionistic paintings and perspective ‘peepboxes’ (National Gallery, London) continue to intrigue.

 Suggested materials List

Online introduction of the stained-glass windows in Gouda at https://www.sintjanskerkgouda.nl/media/glazen-cartons/cartons_nl.html (in Dutch only, but with great images of cartoons and glass together).

Bakker, Piet, three essays on the Leiden fijnschilders in The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 4th edn, edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Elizabeth Nogrady with Caroline Van Cauwenberge (New York, 2023), available online at https://www.theleidencollection.com/essays/.

Nakamura, Jun P., ‘Seeing Outside the Box: Reexamining the Top of Samuel van Hoogstraten’s London Perspective Box’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 12.2 (2020), available online at https://jhna.org/articles/seeing-outside-the-box-reexamining-the-top-of-samuel-van-hoogstratens-london-perspective-box/.

Online introduction on the forthcoming Van Hoogstraten project at https://www.codart.nl/feature/curators-project/samuel-van-hoogstraten-a-collaborative-project/.

 

Booking

 

How it works

Our online courses are hosted live on Zoom, a free online education platform. If you don’t already have an account with Zoom, you will need to sign up at www.zoom.us. To join with video, you'll also need a device with a camera (such as a computer, phone or tablet with a webcam). Otherwise you can join with audio only.

An online ticket booking is required, made above. Each booking is for one computer screen use, not person. Our online booking system is powered by Stripe, with secure payment processing that accepts all major credit cards.

A confirmation of purchase will be sent to your email with a Zoom link to use for every session in this course, along with a reminder email sent 2 hours before each session.

When joining the Zoom meeting, you will enter a virtual ‘waiting room’. Please ensure that your Zoom screen name matches the name you booked under, so that the lecturer can admit you from the virtual ‘waiting room’ into each session. Your lecturer can help you troubleshoot any technical issues on the day.