Thijs Weststeijn
Research interests
Thijs Weststeijn studies seventeenth-century art from the integrated perspective of painting practice and artists' writings. His present research (NWO-Veni) envisages to study painting in the Low Countries in the framework of European humanistic scholarship. He is especially interested in how the humanists’ ideas were interpreted in a vernacular context: artworks and antiquities were seen as expressions of local identity.
His second research interest is the exchanges between the Low Countries and the non-Western world, especially China. He envisages to explore how Chinese objects were integrated in Dutch collections and discussed in the context of a utopian view of Chinese philosophy.
Earlier he studied in Amsterdam (Ruudt Wackers School of Art, UvA) and Rome (Roma III). He was a visiting scholar at the University of London and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. He worked with the Rembrandt Research Project, the Huizinga Institute for Cultural History and contributed to various museums.
Teaching
Courses he has developed include: The Image of the Artist in the Seventeenth Century; Word and Image in Rembrandt's Studio; Art and Humanism in the Italian Renaissance; Research Seminar on Art Theory; Art and Architecture in Rome (at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome). He was also a lecturer in courses such as: Sources, Technique, and Historiography of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Art; The Canon of European Cultural History; Visual Analysis.
Books
The Visible World. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, trans.B. Jackson & L. Richards, Amsterdam University Press, distributed by The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Margaret Cavendishin de Nederlanden.Filosofie enschilderkunstin de GoudenEeuw, AmsterdamUniversity Press, 2008.
with Rens Bod and Jaap Maat (eds.), The Making of the Humanities. Volume I: Early Modern Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
with M.J.E van den Doel a.o. (eds.), The Learned Eye. Regarding Art, Theory, and the Artist’s Reputation. Essays for Ernst van de Wetering, Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
Some online publications
The Indonesian Roots of Dutch Modernism(in Dutch)
Holland's Horizon. The Art of Painting as a Framework for a Dutch World View (in Dutch)
'Beyond the moaning ground' (on DerekWalcott,Vincent van Gogh, andBarack Obama) (in Dutch)
Review of Paul Taylor, Iconography without Texts (Journal of Art Historiography)
Publications on UvA-Dare
More on UvA-Dare
Full list of publications
Conferences
The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (January 2009)
The Making of the Humanities (October 2008)
Paintings/Problems/Possibilities. A Symposium with Svetlana Alpers (May 2010)
The Making of the Humanities II (October 2010)