Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677–1747), like many competent but minor Dutch artists working at the dawn of the Enlightenment, is little known as a painter. (A selection of his written works and links to his painting oeuvre [mostly still lifes] can be found at Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman, http://www.weyerman.nl.) Like other artist-theorists before him, his legacy is preserved instead via his abundant commentary on the nature of visual art, its practice, and his attempt to take stock of Netherlandish artists from the seventeenth-century Golden Age through his own era. Lyckle de Vries's Jacob Campo Weyerman and His Collection of Artists’ Biographies translates a portion of Weyerman's original four-volume Dutch text into English, with an extensive critical commentary on this later source for theory in Netherlandish art. De Vries opens a thoroughly researched, selective window into Weyerman's biographies from his Descriptions of the Lives of Netherlandish Artists (3 vols., 1729) accompanied by a discourse on art through a translation of Disquisition on the Art of the Ancients (4 vols., 1769).
De Vries's assessment of Weyerman is his second foray into a book-length deconstruction of the primary sources that make up the critical canon in Dutch art; his previous book, How to Create Beauty: De Lairesse on the Theory and Practice of Making Art (2011), is a discourse on Dutch painter-theorist Gerard de Lairesse's Great Book of Painting (1707). While a number of early modern Netherlandish biographies and treatises on art have yet to be fully translated (among them, those by Cornelis de Bie [1662], and Samuel van Hoogstraten [1678], to name only two), de Vries's choice to elevate Weyerman reflects the painter's unusual experience as a prolific playwright and journal contributor. While Weyerman adheres to the model of a moralizing approach that is a hallmark of the tradition of Dutch and Flemish artists’ biographies (adapting content from earlier sources), de Vries foregrounds his literary style in a way that that enlivens the formulaic nature of this genre.
Considering the breadth and scope of Weyerman's multivolume texts, de Vries takes on the task of packaging a substantial amount of complex information into a condensed, cohesive analysis. Rather than provide a complete translation of Weyerman's four volumes, de Vries presents a critically grounded reference text with detailed interpretive commentary and selected translations. The commentary (141 pages) consists of six chapters that cross-reference Weyerman's biographies, supplemented by two substantial appendices (143–355) of the English-language texts and their original Dutch-language versions. An extensive index supplements the book, along with forty-two color plates of excellent quality that aid in visualizing the work of more obscure artists from the biographies, along with that of well-known names. The commentary presents Weyerman's text arranged by subject (such as portraiture, genre) interspersed with topical issues (such as art criticism, public art). In the chapters, de Vries lays out the valuable range of contexts necessary to articulate the various social meanings that inform these examples of the visual arts. In doing so, he further illuminates complex facets that contribute to the identity of the artist in the eighteenth-century Netherlands. In these sections, de Vries situates Weyerman in his cultural milieu; examines the literary genealogy of Weyerman's texts from classical tradition through contemporary eighteenth-century influences; compares his narrative approach to artists and their subjects to that of other theoretical-biographical texts; and lays out for the reader the patronage or market conditions for the works described, among other cultural points.
In collating, summarizing, interpreting, and presenting the texts in this manner, de Vries foregrounds themes that might otherwise go overlooked in the over one thousand pages that make up the multi-volume set of Weyerman's biographies. In addition to contextualizing Weyerman's world, de Vries's organization of the commentary reveals culturally important points that can be mined with relative ease, as is the case, for example, in Weyerman's fascinating discussion of itinerant painters (62–64). Likewise, Weyerman makes observations on artistic techniques, such as houding (color placement as a method for modeling), which draw attention to the materiality of process and reflect the complexity of the early modern artistic lexicon (100–3).
Following the interpretive commentary, two appendices provide the translated content (appendix 2), a section mostly devoted to Disquisition on the Art of the Ancients (appendix 1 translates selected biography). Like works of criticism before it in the Netherlandish canon, Weyerman's Disquisition traces the history of the arts through the achievements of storied artists from antiquity. In reference to the commentary and translated matter, the mechanics of Jacob Campo Weyerman and His Collection of Artists’ Biographies as a research guide are comprehensive, and they do much to enhance the utility of the volume, whether the artist referenced is obscure (such as J. I. de Roore) or a well-known (Rembrandt). Noteworthy in this regard are the detailed footnotes throughout, the indices with useful subsections for topographical location, and the standard list of artists names (divided into ancient and early modern).
The comprehensive contexts, thoughtful assessment of language, selected original texts, and high level of organization makes Jacob Campo Weyerman and His Collection of Artists’ Biographies especially valuable for the scholar who does not specialize in Dutch visual culture. Indeed, it is a text that may best serve this particular audience as an accessible research tool. As a later theorist writing during a period often described as in decline following the Dutch Golden Age, Weyerman sheds useful light on Dutch and Flemish painting through the mid-eighteenth century as a lesser-examined facet of the Netherlandish chronology. Beyond another entry in the critical canon, Weyerman's writing draws attention to transnational networks between the Netherlands and other artists. Weyerman's own experience working in England as did other accomplished painters described in the text, such as Egbert van Heemskerck the Younger, illuminates these patterns of exchange. Jacob Campo Weyerman and His Collection of Artists’ Biographies is a welcome addition to a growing genre of analysis, interpretation, and translations devoted to primary sources in Netherlandish art theory, joining the critical commentary of Hessel Miedema, Walter Melion, Celeste Brusati, and Thijs Weststeijn, among others. De Vries's contribution constitutes a welcome opening of these texts to wider audiences, facilitating further explorations of the often-overlooked art of the eighteenth-century Netherlands, and its wider European spheres of contact and influence.
