Join us at 4:30pm on Wednesday, January 22nd as we host Caroline Fowler, who will be reading from and discussing her most recent book, "Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art."
About the book:
In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Whereas the sixteenth-century image debates in Europe engaged with crises around the representation of divinity, Fowler argues that the rise of the transatlantic slave trade created a visual field of uncertainty around picturing the transformation of life into property. Fowler demonstrates how the emergence of landscape, maritime, and botanical painting were deeply intertwined with slavery’s economic expansion. Moreover, she considers how the development of one of the first art markets was inextricable from the trade in human lives as chattel property. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery’s grasp.
About the author:
Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. She is a scholar of early-modern art, focusing on histories of bodies, the formation of the self, race, and property. Her books include, Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern HistoryI (2019); The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas (2020), and most recently, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (Duke University Press, 2025). She co-edits the series Art/Work with Princeton University Press, and occasionally hosts the podcast In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing.
Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase during the event. We will also be offering complimentary wine for audience members!
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