In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property. Fowler demonstrates how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion. Moreover, she considers how the development of one of the first art markets was inextricable from the trade in human lives as chattel property. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian, and therefore inescapable from slavery’s reach.

Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Institute. She is the author of The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas and Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History.

“Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art dives into unexploited visual and artistic material in the history of racial capitalism’s beginnings at the time of Rembrandt. It is also a completely new interpretation of the objectification of the enslaved’s body by a Reformed religion of imageless God. This major and refined perspective is made, for the first time, necessary and obvious by Caroline Fowler, who takes the cultural ramifications of racial slavery one step further, thanks to the means of a bold and expanded art history.”
-- Anne Lafont, Professor of Art History, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Transubstantiation across Atlantic Worlds  1
1. Art Markets and Futures Speculation
2.Seascapes and Landscapes
3. Monuments and Architectural Painting
4. Domestic Interiors and Natural History
Conclusion. Historiography and Race
Notes
Bibliography
Index