Gerard de Lairesse (1641-1711) was the most successful Dutch painter of his time, admired by the patricians of Amsterdam and the court of William III of Orange. After a century of neglect his rehabilitation began in 1970 when the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum acquired a series of his monumental grisaille paintings. Interest in his writings also increased.
De Lairesse wrote a manual on painting, the Groot Schilderboek, in 1707, the subject of this fine new study by art historian Lyckle de Vries.
De Vries found that the treatise is not primarily a discourse on the theory of art. The author was highly critical of the training methods of his contemporaries and put pen to paper to explain how the mind and hand of a young painter should cooperate in order to turn a mental image into a beautiful picture. With a working translation by the author included on a CD-rom.
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