RKD Study Close Encounters

29 April 2024

The latest RKD Study is about the cross-cultural exchange between the Low Countries and Britain between 1600 and 1830. Close Encounters is a collection of 14 articles, written in response to a symposium organized the RKD in 2022. It is the 10th volume published in the series of digital publications of the Gerson Digital project at rkdstudies.nl.

Symposium

The authors of the study – specialists from Great Britain, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands – elaborate on research they presented at the international symposium Close Encounters: Cross-Cultural Exchange between the Low Countries and Britain 1600-1830, held at the RKD in September 2022. The occasion of the symposium was the launch of the richly annotated and illustrated digital English version of Horst Gerson’s chapter on Britain from his Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts of 1942. There was ample response to the request to transform the September 2022 talks into the scientific papers: 14 of them could be included in this RKD Study.

Gerard van Honthorst, Apollo en Diana, 1628, Royal Collection — Gerard van Honthorst, *Apollo en Diana,* 1628, Royal Collection

Artists travelling to Britain

The project Gerson Digital: Britain involved biographical research, done by Rieke van Leeuwen, on artists from the Northern and Southern Netherlands who crossed the North Sea. The RKDartists database contains 838 artists from the Low Countries who travelled to Britain before 1800. Some famous examples of Dutch artists who worked in Britain are Samuel van Hoogstraten, Gerard van Honthorst and Willem van de Velde. The RKD Study covers chapters about them and various art-historical themes: cross-cultural networks and collaboration, the relationships of Netherlandish artists to British patrons, collecting and the trade in artistic goods. The collecting history of Netherlandish art abroad is an important part of the Gerson Digital project.

Hendrick Danckerts, Gezicht op Greenwich en het huis van de koningin uit het zuidoosten, ca. 1670, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich — Hendrick Danckerts, View of Greenwich and the Queen's House from the south-east, c. 1670, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

The RKD Study Close Encounters was edited by the academic committee: Karen Hearn, Angela Jager, Sander Karst, Rieke van Leeuwen, David Taylor and Joanna Woodall. You can find the study on rkdstudies.nl.