| The important role of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings in France during the eighteenth century is a phenomenon that has been both widely discussed and difficult to define. It is an issue that straddles the entire century and cuts across all considerations of divergent artistic styles, movements, and doctrines. The so-called Netherlandish vogue affected French painters, art commerce, and public attitudes toward art.;This study, never before attempted, explores prints as an expression of this vital segment of artistic taste. It demonstrates that reproductive copperplate engravings, though often overlooked, were recognized in their own time as the principal means to disseminate knowledge of the paintings and were produced during a period when Parisian printmaking reached an apogee of artistic and commercial success. Due to the commercial basis of their activities, printmakers were remarkably effective as "tastemakers"; they were in the mainstream of artistic activities through participation in the Academie royale and their contacts with collectors and dealers. Because they engraved paintings from collections that were still being formed, printmakers popularized every esteemed Dutch and Flemish painter by 1770.;Primarily as a result of extensive research at the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliotheque nationale and in Parisian press announcements of the period, this study presents (1) a catalogue of approximately 2,000 print entries and (2) a historical reconstruction, decade by decade, of printmaking activity. The prints reveal fascinating and previously unacknowledged patterns in taste that (1) document the formative phase of the vogue, (2) define periods of popularity for individual painters, (3) lead to a reassessment of the influence of the paintings on contemporary French artists, and (4) force us to recognize their importance in the nascent state of concern for landscape and the role of nature before 1750. |
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