Familial Identity and Site Specificity: A Study of the Hybrid Genre of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Family-Landscape Portraiture

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, the proliferation of Dutch family portraits among the broad middle class was a distinctive facet of artistic production. Within this visual trend, the vast majority of such paintings present the sitters in outdoor environs rather than the domestic sphere. This dissertation focuses on such images and adopts the term “family-landscape portrait” to highlight the hybrid nature of the images that commemorate a particular family within a specific locale. I consider the particularities of seventeenth-century Dutch family-landscape portraiture as a separate pictorial genre and attend to the ways in which these images construct identity and generate meaning, including through the blending of portraiture and landscape conventions. In order to investigate the complex meanings of family-landscape portraits, this dissertation will consider the images from the perspective of the biographical circumstances of the sitters’ lives; contemporary cultural, socioeconomic and political issues that inflect the choice of symbols or locale; and the pictorial traditions from which the images stem. Chapters divided by commonalities in locale reveal that mercantile or professional identities and values resonated strongly with families pictured along a coast. Kin groups portrayed near urban landmarks tended to highlight communal memory and political or civic values as facets of familial ideals. Groups adjacent to ruins displayed a concern with history, familial memory and cultural sophistication. Families depicted on their country estates highlighted communal and professional identities, earned leisure and hospitality as integral to familial identity.