The Art of Laughter: Humour in Dutch Paintings of the Golden Age presents the first ever overview of humour in seventeenth-century painting.

Rarely have more humorous paintings been produced than in the Dutch Golden Age. Naughty children, stupid peasants, foolish dandies and befuddled drunks, quack doctors, pimps, procuresses, lazy maids and lusty ladies – they figure in large numbers in Golden Age masterpieces.

Frans Hals is often called ‘the master of the laugh’. More than any other painter in the Golden Age, he was able to bring a vitality to his portraits that made it appear as if his models could just step out of the past into the present. Hals was one of the few painters in the seventeenth century who dared portray his figures – often common folk – with a hearty laugh and bared teeth. Merriment and jokes are prominent features in his genre paintings; artists in the Golden Age frequently used it in their work. Now – centuries later – the visual jokes are harder to fathom. A great deal of new research into the field has been carried out, particularly in the last twenty years, and we are beginning to get an idea of the full extent of seventeenth-century humour.

The book contains 60 masterpieces from painters like Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Judith Leyster.

192 pages
24 x 27 cm
130 photo's in colour and 25 black-white
paperback
English
ISBN 9789462621701
€ 28,50
OUT OF PRINT