Ann Jensen Adams begins her book by observing that seventeenth-century Dutch portraits were displayed in a wide variety of contexts; they were “everywhere.” While it would be hyperbolic to declare scholarly studies of early modern portraiture to be everywhere, the last few decades have indeed witnessed an expansion of interest, notably in the portraiture of Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Adams’s book follows the tendency of recent scholars to shift scrutiny away from considerations of style and mimesis, and toward socio-cultural context and viewer response. Yet there is no book on Dutch portraiture quite like Adams’s in the breadth of its approach. Recent books include, for example, studies of the tronie (Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2008), Rembrandt’s portrait prints (Stephanie Dickey, Rembrandt, Portraits in Print, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004 [click here for review]), and an important museum exhibition catalogue (Portraits in the Mauritshuis 1430–1790, The Hague: Mauritshuis, 2004). Adams, by contrast, ranges widely in terms of portrait type, medium, and artist to investigate the conceptions of “self and personal identity, communal structures, and social ideologies” articulated by Dutch portraits, as well as the psychological processes by which they produced these conceptions. Her main claim is that portraiture constructed viewer identity and thereby played a role in creating the Dutch economic miracle. These portraits helped viewers find reassurance at a time when traditional sources of identity were eroding.

This book draws deeply on Adams’s research on the Amsterdam portraitist Thomas de Keyser as well as on her more recent, general articles on portraiture. Its content will appeal to readers interested both in its individual studies of portrait genres and in the more theoretical first and last chapters that frame these studies. The first chapter, “The Cultural Power of Portraits,” stands on its own as an exemplary introduction to seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture, with insights into early modern portraiture as a whole.

Adams begins chapter 1 by commenting on the flexibility of seventeenth-century definitions of portraiture, and by presenting an account of market considerations, including the economic background of viewers. The heart of the chapter, however, is Adams’s discussion of evolving early modern conceptions of identity; of the ways contemporary thinkers understood it; and especially how portraiture actively participated in producing it. Adams invokes seventeenth-century sources asserting the act of viewing as transformative for self-perception. She concludes with a helpful account of different methodological approaches to portraiture, from the empirical to the iconographic, but argues for an alternative yet complementary approach that prioritizes their impact on viewers.

The final, general chapter, “Portraits and the Production of Identity,” buttresses the first by exploring in greater detail current (twentieth/twenty-first century) identity formation theories accounting for the transactions between works of art and viewers. Adapting the theories of depth-psychologist Heinz Kohut (among others) about the role of “selfobjects” in psychological change, Adams outlines a model for understanding the psychological processes by which viewing artistic objects, most particularly portraits, might have altered beholders’ perceptions of themselves and their world. She ends by showing, in summary form, how this model furthers an understanding of each of the portrait types featured in the intervening chapters.

In these chapters, Adams narrows her lens to focus on linked studies of four different genres: portraits of individuals (ch. 2), families (ch. 3), sitters in the guise of historical figures (ch. 4), and civic guards (ch. 5). Each develops her initial contention that portraits gave visual form to abstract ideas and social concerns; in the process they disseminated concepts through which viewers’ identities were constructed.

Chapter 2 is strongest in its discussion of a portrait type too often dismissed as conservative and unimaginative, namely the single-figure, three-quarter-length, life-sized regent portrait. Adams convincingly links its very impassivity to the neo-Stoic concept of tranquillitas and the rational self-control by which that state was thought to be achieved. Although its arguments were earlier incorporated into a separate article (frequently cited since its publication in 1997 (Ann Jensen Adams, “The Three-Quarter Length Life-Sized Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Cultural Functions of Tranquillitas,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, Realism Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 175–186) this study is appropriately reprised here because of the significance of Adams’s interpretation and the insights it gives into portraiture’s role in creating social cohesion for an elite group. In addition, this “tranquil,” static type makes a telling contrast to another important type, representing individuals presented in interrupted physical or mental activity—of which Rembrandt’s introspective Jan Six (1654) (used for the book’s cover) is the best known.

Chapter 3, “Family Portraits: The Private Sphere and the Social Order,” contains two separate studies. In the first, Adams places Willem de Passe’s portrait print (ca. 1624) of the family of Elizabeth and Frederick of Bohemia in the context of competing concepts of the family in relation to the state. The print juxtaposes Elizabeth’s father King James I of England as head of state with Elizabeth and Frederick as head of a nuclear family, emphasizing the equivalence of paternal love of children with a monarch’s love for his people. In a novel interpretation, she argues that Elizabeth commissioned the print to pressure her father for aid as she promoted her political ambitions. The second study, by contrast, examines the unexpectedly large painting (1662) of the rags-to-riches Admiral Michiel de Ruyter and his family. Here she argues that, like the portrait of Elizabeth of Bohemia, it, too, promoted the political and social positioning of the family, and thus placed its sitters at the intersection between individual and public identity.

Chapter 4, on the history portrait, again investigates two paintings, now featuring prominent, contemporary sitters enacting roles in historical dramas. Adams situates the first, Werner van den Valckert’s Christ Blessing the Children (1620), which includes the family of Michiel Poppen, within the context of seventeenth-century meditational practices. Adams wrestles with the contradiction between the Protestant Zuiderkerk tower conspicuous at the back of the painting and the Poppen family’s likely Catholicism, arguing that the picture invited Reformed church support for an ecumenical approach toward the sacrament of Baptism, a shift with important ramifications for Amsterdam’s many Catholic families. The second, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Continence of Scipio (1658), with members of the Oorthoorn family, is another painting encouraging viewers to contemplate both private ideals and communal religious or political behavior. Here Adams claims that the portrayal of real people intensifies the viewer’s meditation on marriage and good government. The chapter concludes with her own meditation on the flexibility and elasticity of genres.

The fifth chapter, which builds on a previously published article (Ann Jensen Adams, “Civic Guard Portraits: Private Interests and the Public Sphere,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1996): 168–197), is one of the very strongest in its examination of the complex cultural functions of the civic guard portrait for seventeenth-century viewers. Rather than offering a predictable discussion of Rembrandt’s Nightwatch (1642), Adams investigates a portrait from an alternative tradition, de Keyser’s Company of Captain Allaert Cloeck and Lieutenant Lucas Jacobsz Rotgan (1632). Here again she accounts for the stiffness of the sitters by linking the painting’s visual rhetoric with both tranquillitas and specific partisan ends. She shows how de Keyser developed the lively preparatory studies into a painted composition emphasizing the company’s order and discipline. Observing that many members of the company were Remonstrants (like de Keyser himself), she lays out the political and economic controversies that may have made the composition’s sober affirmation of authority and reliability desirable for the sitters. More generally, she argues that even while such portraits forged connections to a group, they were still understood as collections of private individuals—“friendship portraits” conveying personal loyalties and alliances—and thus the personal property of the individual sitters. Adams ends by questioning why this particular social unit sought portrayal, while groups at the center of real political and economic power did not. Further complicating the interplay of private and public interests, she offers the compelling suggestion that the groups commissioning portraits (civic guard companies commissioned scores of them) were the ones associated with the ideal of public service, whereas groups involved in economic and political ventures were more directly associated with private gain.

At the start of her book, Adams calls portraiture the product of an interaction between linked parties: artist, patron-sitter, and viewer. Yet she might have paid more attention to the artist in light of the agency granted artists in this period, including commentary on why patrons chose to employ particular painters. Her discussion implies iconographical and stylistic decisions to have been more or less determined by the patron, as if commissioning meant making. She might also have attended more fully to a given work’s pictorial rhetoric in relation to its appeal, that is, how the artist’s visual decisions might have affected viewer response. Important exceptions can be found, however, such as her fine discussion of de Keyser’s effective compositional choices and the implications of Van den Valckert’s introduction of a participant self portrait. For some readers, this reviewer included, the book’s extensive philosophical and religious excurses sometimes distract from its main themes. Overall, though, this is an extensively researched, highly learned book, filled with insights and original ideas, some of which challenge established views. It is especially rewarding in its constant return to the theme of portraiture’s dialogue with viewers and its role in identity construction.