Alison Kettering, born in Utica, New York, USA, in 1943. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor of Art History at Carleton College, Northfield.
Fellow (1 February 1997 – 30 June 1997)
While at NIAS during spring 1997, I was able to write two articles and deliver a lecture for a studiedag at Leiden University. The latter focused on the gap between the more traditional, iconological approaches characteristic of art history in the Netherlands, and the newer approaches practised more frequently in the U.S. and England. The first of the articles, “Ter Borch’s Regent Portraits for Deventer”, examines the unusually conservative portraits that Gerard ter Borch produced for members of the Deventer elite during the late 1650s through the 1670s. The article asks how, in an environment of declining civic prosperity, decreased opportunities, and factional strife, these Deventer portraits reflected and reinforced the social and cultural attitudes of the town’s regent class.
The second of the articles, “Gerard ter Borch’s Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Munster: A seventeenth-century eye-witness account?”, was commissioned for the catalogue, 1648-War and Peace in Europe, Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, to be published at the time of the opening of the exhibition, October 1998. It interprets the painting not as an `eye-witness account’, but as a reconstruction of actuality designed to convey a notion of the event as international and ecumenical rather than local and partisan. Both articles will be incorporated into a book of essays on the paintings of Gerard ter Borch.