Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting

Angela K. Ho is Assistant Professor of Art History at George Mason University, USA.

This book offers a vigorous analysis of iteration as stratagem within the painter's arsenal. (...) Ho is to be commended for bringing fresh insights to what has often been a conventional interpretation of repetition and invention in relation to a slew of pictures with which we are now newly acquainted. - Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 2019, Alistair Watkins Citing the repetition of motifs and subjects in Dutch Golden Age art as evidence of a conservative, market-driven conventionality has long been a commonplace, yet the nature of convention and repetition is not in actuality self-evident. Angela K. Ho's *Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention* offers a fresh interrogation of repetition as an artistic strategy [...] The result is a book that often hovers attentively over the connoisseur's shoulder but lingers longest and most satisfyingly at the painter's side. - Elisabeth Berry Drago, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume LXXI I, No. 3 Ho's thesis is a compelling one that goes far in explaining the readily observable phenomena of repetition and invention in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. - Wayne Franits, Syracuse University, CAA Reviews April 2018. Read the full review here. Winner of the 2017 Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA) Grant on Northern Art!

• List of Illustrations, Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. Key Concepts, 2. A Niche of One’s Own: Gerrit Dou’s Brand-Building Project, 3. The Pleasure of Novelty: Gerard ter Borch’s Innovation, 4. Invention through Repetition: Imitation and Emulation in the Work of Frans van Mieris , Epilogue: On Signature Products, Knock-Offs, and Product Lines, Notes, Bibliography, Index