Staande man met lange jas after 1635

Frederick Bloemaert made this print of a standing man in a long coat sometime in the 17th century. It’s part of a larger series of prints of people. These prints were made in the Netherlands, a place with a booming art market at this time. Bloemaert made prints after paintings by his father Abraham, who was part of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, a group of Dutch artists who travelled to Italy to study the work of Caravaggio. While in Italy, they would have visited academies, copied antique statues and made drawings of people in the street, which became figure studies. This print emulates that practice, which was part of an emerging European-wide academy culture. Artists were encouraged to study other artworks and draw from life, and this print may be part of this new understanding of what it meant to be an artist. To know more, we can investigate not only the life of the artist, but the prints and drawings market in the 17th century Netherlands, along with the movement of artists and artworks between Northern Europe and Italy.