The Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the publication of this issue. Over the past decade, the design and functionality of the website have undergone a substantial transformation with the migration of the original website to the website designed last year by Sarah Rainwater Design. Our editorial staff has changed as well, with Mark Trowbridge and Dagmar Eichberger taking positions held previously by Molly Faries and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, and with the appointment of Jacquelyn N. Coutré as digital art history associate editor. Although we do not have statistics on our readership in the earliest years, we do know that it reached more than 2 million hits in 2015, encompassing audiences worldwide where this art has long held great appeal. Just since the launch of the new website in September 2017, our analytics show 20,310 sessions and 38,136 page views. And now the articles can be shared through such social media platforms as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Another change should happen next year with the publication of an article that takes advantage of the adaptation of the digital humanities to the specific needs of art history publishing. This project will involve high resolution imaging techniques to examine the development of a painting in the National Gallery, Washington. Historians of Netherlandish Art has designated funds for a first-ever summer fellow whose academic and digital humanities background will allow him/her to to help the art historian reveal the findings. The two will use existing technologies to display such aspects as zoomable overlays of the visible light, x-radiograph and IRR images, and an image of the painting with details revealing paint layers. We hope additional grants will enable JHNA to publish such articles more frequently as we continue to explore various digital humanities approaches.
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The current issue includes three articles on early Northern topics and a fourth on a seventeenth-century Dutch subject. Elliott Wise’s essay on a Passion diptych (High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Art Institute of Chicago) focuses on the interchange of compassion and meditation. Anne Margreet As-Vijvers discusses the missing six miniatures of the Hours of Louis Quarré, a manuscript situated in the oeuvre of the Master of the First Prayer Book of Maximilian. Anne L. Williams examines humor’s centrality in late medieval depictions of Saint Joseph, arguing for its importance to the saint’s veneration while challenging the theory of education as the sole explanation for humor’s presence in devotional works. The fourth article focuses on the earliest documented painting that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) commissioned. Viewed in the VOC’s contentious sociopolitical landscape, View of Ambon illustrates how seemingly objective modes of picturing were inflected to express conflicting corporate and individual self-imaginings.
For the current issue, we once again thank Cindy Edwards who has minded the work of copyediting with such impressive attention to detail. We also acknowledge our managing editor Heidi Eyestone, Visual Resources Librarian of Carleton College. Heidi’s generous aid with images, uploading, and much else connected with this issue, and her long-range planning, technical expertise, and commitment have made her an indispensable colleague. Additional technical help by student assistants Noah Scheer and Joe Druckman is gratefully acknowledged. For financial support, we thank Carleton College.
JHNA is archived by Portico, an electronic service initiated by JSTOR and supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and the Library of Congress. Preserving scholarship published in electronic form indefinitely, it ensures long-term access to our content. Our membership in CrossRef allows us to register our articles, each with a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that provides a persistent link to its location on the internet. It allows libraries and other organizations as well as readers of on-line journals to find and connect to these articles. All articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
We encourage you to consider JHNA as a venue for your own publications. With your help, JHNA has become one of the premier journals of the early modern art of the Netherlands and its region. The Journal welcomes submissions at any time. Please consult our Submission Guidelines.
Alison M. Kettering, Carleton College, Editor-in-Chief
Jacquelyn N. Coutré, Queen’s University, Associate Editor
Dagmar Eichberger, Universität Heidelberg, Associate Editor
Mark Trowbridge, Marymount University, Associate Editor