Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age

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$15 General / $10 Gardiner Friends

Part of the Gardiner Signature Lecture Series
The Ann Walker Bell Lecture

This lecture is FREE for Gardiner Friends. Email [email protected] to register.

It started with spices. In the early 17th century, Dutch merchants began importing pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, and other flavourings from Asia to enliven European dinner tables. Sailing from the Netherlands to ports in Indonesia, China, Japan, India and many other places, adventurous Dutch mariners developed a lucrative trade network and returned home with wondrous and unfamiliar forms of Asian art.

The ships of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) brought Asian porcelain, lacquer, textiles, and gems to Dutch homes in unprecedented quantities. Inspired by these novel imports and the wealth of information that accompanied them, Dutch artists, writers, publishers, scientists and collectors shaped new ways of looking at the world around them. Together, they transformed Amsterdam into the largest and most important city in the Netherlands.

In this lecture, Corrigan explores the transformative impact that Asian luxuries had on Dutch art and life in the 17th century, offering new perspectives on the Dutch Golden Age and its relationship to Asia.

About the Speaker

Karina H. Corrigan, The H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art, Peabody Essex Museum 

Karina H. Corrigan is the H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where she has worked for over twenty years. She received a B.A. in Art History from Wellesley College, an M.S. in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. Corrigan lectures and publishes on many aspects of Asian export art and has organized eight exhibitions drawn from PEM’s notable collections including Taj Mahal, the Building of a Legend and Fish, Silk, Tea, Bamboo: Cultivating an Image of China. She served as the coordinating curator for PEM’s nationally traveling exhibition Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. With colleagues from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, she most recently co-organized Asia in Amsterdam: the Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age.

Header Image: Artists in Jingdezhen, China, Sweetmeat set with coat of arms of Johannes Camphuys, 1671–90, Porcelain, Peabody Essex Museum, Museum purchase with funds donated by the Asian Export Art Visiting Committee, 1999, AE85686.A-I