An Entrance for the Eyes

Book excerpt: "How refreshing, how absolutely refreshing, to find a book on Dutch painting that asks readers to begin by simply looking. Hollander is faithful to the possibility--so common in painting, so unusual in scholarship--that the paintings are elusive, evasive, unsystematically ambiguous. Doors ajar, windows onto the street, paintings within paintings, half-drawn curtains, blank mirrors, a man's coat hung on a nail: those are the engines of interpretation, and Hollander tells their history lucidly and entirely persuasively."—James Elkins, author of The Object Stares Back "Hollander offers fresh and compelling readings of key works by Karel van Mander, Gerard Dou, Nicolaes Maes, and Pieter de Hooch. Very few recent books on Dutch art are as rich as this; and few are written in such lucid, unpretentious prose. What shines forth from every page is a genuine love of the pictures. Here is art history well tempered to the objects it interprets."—Joseph L. Koerner, author of The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art "In recent years, scholars have explored how space signifies in seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture; Hollander's fascinating study is the most comprehensive to date. It examines space--as conceived in the writings of Dutch art theorists, constructed in contemporary architecture, and disposed and made meaningful in the work of Gerard Dou, Nicolaes Maes, Pieter de Hooch, and Karel van Mander. An Entrance for the Eyes lays a firm foundation for research on this intriguing and hitherto understudied aspect of Dutch art."—Wayne E. Franits, author of Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art