Opacity: Blackness and the Art of the Dutch Republic

As Dutch merchants became drivers of the transatlantic slavery business in the seventeenth century, Dutch art increasingly used Blackness to signal slavery and servitude. In this brilliant and pathbreaking work, Angela Vanhaelen proposes new ways of looking at Dutch paintings that do not equate Blackness with enslavement.

Vanhaelen reframes the conversation on Netherlandish art by placing seventeenth-century domestic scenes and portraits in dialogue with images of trading forts, markets, an...