Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
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P.O. Box 3904, Kingston, New York 12402 Phone: 845-331-8519 Email: mshamans@artbooks.com

Item Number: 46733
Title: The Young Gentry at Play: Northern Netherlandish Scenes of Merry Companies 1610-1645
Author: Kolfin, Elmer
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9059970136
Description: Translated from Dutch by Michael Hoyle. Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2005. 24cm., pbk., 296pp., 24 color, 194 b&w illus. Summary: In the first half of the seventeenth century, paintings of the rich and elgantly clad urban young amusing themselves with courtship, music-making, drinking wine and playing tric-trac became extremely popular. This richly illustrated book examines the background of that popularity by combining iconographical research with the study of pictorial traditions, painting techniques, socio-economics, literature and book illustrations. The first part traces the sixteenth-century pictorial traditions that featured moralistic, idealistic and humorous variants of the merry company, mainly in prints. The second part shows that the seventeenth-century painters made deliberate iconographical and compositional changes to those traditions and developed new painting techniques and marketing strategies to reach a larger audience than ever before. The way that audience dealt with paintings of merry companies is described in order to form an idea of how the paintings were viewed. The different associations and meanings the paintings may have had for a contemporary audience is explored further in the last part, which focuses on the various views of the amusements of rich young people as expressed in writings and illustrations in songbooks, emblem miscellanies and didactic literature in the period that coincided with the popularity of the painted merry company.

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Michael Shamansky, Bookseller Inc.
P.O. Box 3904, Kingston, New York 12402 US
Phone: 845-331-8519
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Email: michael@artbooks.com

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