Why Isn’t Slavery Depicted in Dutch Painting?
Netherlandish art is remarkably coy about the whole colonial endeavor. A new book seeks to uncover those connections.
by Natasha Seaman 
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Like all such generalizing accounts, though, the thesis of Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art gets complicated if you look too closely. Like Alpers’s, Fowler’s book neglects the variety of 17th-century Dutch art, which encompassed much more than still lifes and church interiors, such as the theatrical paintings of Jan Steen or the histories of Pieter Lastman. Purists will likely object to the use of modern poetry as a source to replace the lost voices of Africans victim to the slave trade. And the link between transubstantiation and the abstraction of value, while intriguing, does not acknowledge the much older history of the monetary imaginary, already in place by the 14th century in the bills of exchange that allowed travel without the peril of carrying coins. There is much to be learned, however, from Fowler’s provocative account, and much to build upon.
Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art(2025), written by Caroline Fowler and published by Duke University Press, is available for pre-order online.
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