In 1971 the art dealer Edward Speelman endowed a fellowship for post-doctoral research in Dutch art to Wolfson College at Cambridge (UK). In celebration of this fellowship, Meredith Hale has collected eight essays from as many fellows. Connecting the broad range of subjects is the object-based approach in many of the essays. Lorne Campbell identifies the sitter in Rogier van der Weydens Knight with an arrow (1428, Brussels). Joanna Woodall argues for a political interpretation of Breughel’s series of the Five Senses for Albrecht and Isabella (1617). Ivan Gaskell identifies different types of trompe l’oeil (without any illustrations unfortunately) and Lindsey Shaw-Millar explains why Michael Sweerts remains such an elusive artist. Maria-Isabel Pousão-Smith discusses Adriaen Brouwer’s technique between rough and neat painting as a way of both engaging and distancing the viewers of his work, while Cordula van Wyhe turns to the relation between the visual qualities of the bronze and the representation of the aging face of Mary of Hungary in Leone Leoni’s statue of her (c. 1556). Print studies are represented in an essay by Meredith Hale who uses Romeyn de Hooghe’s print Hollands hollende koe (1690) as a starting point to discuss the relation between the role of the satirist and the problem of moral conviction, and by Elenor Ling’s study of Fitzwilliam’s still rather unknown collection of Dutch prints kept in their early nineteenth century albums that have remained more or less intact. The volume opens with an introduction to the collecting and study of Dutch art in Cambridge, by Jean Michel Massing and Meredith Hale.

From the editors