Peasant Scenes and Landscapes

"In Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, Larry Silver examines the emergence of pictorial kinds - scenes of taverns and markets, landscapes and peasants - and charts their evolution as genres from initial hybrids to more conventionalized artistic formulas. The relationship of these new genres and their favorite themes is linked to cultural issues of ultimate significance and reflects a burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in Antwerp. Silver analyzes how pictorial genres and the Antwerp marketplace fostered the development of what has come to be known as "signature" artistic style.

By examining Bosch and Bruegel, together with their imitators, he focuses on pictorial innovation as well as the marketing of individual styles, attending particularly to the growing practice of artists signing their works. In addition, he argues that consumer interest in the style of individual artists reinforced another phenomenon of the later sixteenth century: art collecting. While today we take such typical artistic formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent use of identifying signatures (a Rothko, a Pollock), Peasant Scenes and Landscapes shows how these developed simultaneously in the commercial world of early modern Antwerp."--Jacket.