Volume 32, Number 10 · June 13, 1985
Scenes in a Golden Age
By Ernst Gombrich
Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting Pennsylvania Press)
catalog of an exhibition organized by Peter C. Sutton
Philadelphia Museum of Art (distributed by the University of, 397 pp., $45.00
In what is called the 'art world' of today exhibition catalogs have acquired an almost ritualistic function. Too heavy to carry around, too detailed to be read in their entirety, they serve to reassure the public of the care and thought that have gone into the arrangement of the show. The catalog of the circulating exhibition 'Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting,' which went from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and finally to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, has many of the drawbacks of the genre. Its 400 pages, its 127 full-page color plates, its countless black-and-white illustrations and extensive bibliography inevitably present a contrast with the paintings to which it is devoted, since many of them are lighthearted and unpretentious.
Review, 2448 words
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