This special edition of JHNA is dedicated to Walter Liedtke (1945 – 2015), Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Walter was a founding member of HNA and an internationally recognized scholar of Dutch and Flemish art. The issue comprises seventeen essays by fellow curators and academic scholars, often focused on paintings from the Metropolitan’s collection, along with an introduction and complete bibliography of Walter’s publications. Developing the issue has been a singular pleasure for guest editors Stephanie Dickey, Professor at Queen’s University, and Nadine Orenstein, Walter’s colleague at the museum, along with Alison Kettering, Editor-in Chief of JHNA. In the essays, many of the authors express their gratitude for Walter’s willingness to provide access to documents, his enthusiastic support for their research, and his willingness to share his knowledge. We hope the issue will stimulate memories of Walter for our readers as it builds upon Walter’s own scholarship.
The next issue of the journal will look very different from this one. In the summer of 2017, the journal will launch a new design and layout. The home page will announce the fresh look immediately, and the individual essays will exhibit a new layout and design as well, all courtesy of Sarah Rainwater Design of Providence RI. On the back end, the migration from our original platform Joomla to WordPress will provide up-to-date functionality. Rainwater Design is responsible, too, for a complete redesign of the website of our host organization Historians of Netherlandish Art.
We are grateful for a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support this upgrade of the architecture of both websites, especially as it allows a more advanced digital framework. We hope that the new website will encourage scholars to submit proposals that adapt the technology developed for digital humanities to the specific needs of art history. It will allow more frequent integration of video and audio enhancements in addition to new ways of displaying image and text, which together will create a new experience reading both on line and on mobile devices. Up until now, JHNA has mostly adhered to a traditional format. Although we will continue to publish traditional articles (and their PDFs), we hope in future to attract more research that makes central use of digital technology as a mode of inquiry. Watch for the call for essays once the website is launched.
Here’s another heads up: Alison Kettering will be reflecting on her experiences as Editor-in-Chief of JHNA at the College Art Association meetings in New York on February 16 in a session titled “Editing Journals in a Digital Age” chaired by Sarah Victoria Turner and Martina Droth. This past October, Turner and Droth, co-editors of British Art Studies, joined Heidi Eyestone, Alison, and representatives from other digital journals in a stimulating round table at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, on the future of such journals.
For this 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, resourcefulness, and commitment have made her an indispensable colleague. Additional technical help by assistants Qimeng Yu and Sara McAuliffe is gratefully acknowledged. We want to offer a special thank you to our webmaster Russ Coon for his numerous efforts over the years on behalf of JHNA. 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.
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 next formal deadline for submission of articles is August 1, 2017 (for publication in 2018 or 2019), although we welcome submissions at any time.
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