Adam Eaker is Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His recent publications include Van Dyck and the Making of English Portraiture (2022).
Description
Preface; Authors Note; Introduction; 1 The Family Ter Borch; 2 Learning to Write; 3 Modern Pictures; 4 Art and Love; 5 The Triumph of Painting; 6 A Dance with Death; Epilogue
Reviews
In this eloquent study, Adam Eaker has built a nuanced and engaging portrait of Gesina ter Borch, one that gives her voice and shows her range of complexities and contradictions. Moreover, he has demonstrated the depth of Gesina’s ambitions as an artist, and convincingly argued that she was an instrumental figure in the development of her brother Gerard’s distinctive and influential genre imagery. – Ilona van Tuinen, Head of the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam
Adam Eaker’s book is long overdue. He places Gesina ter Borch in fascinating new contexts and he also uses her as a lens to illustrate how a woman of this period understood contemporary visual culture, and could sometimes read written materials against their moralistic grain. It is a fascinating study that does full justice to an important female voice. – Elizabeth Alice Honig, University of Maryland
Precluded by her gender, class, and times from becoming a professional painter, Gesina ter Borch crafted for herself an immeasurably rich intellectual and artistic life apart from the thriving 17th-century Dutch art market. Drawing on Gesina’s albums of visually stunning watercolors, Adam Eaker tells the story of a modern woman – a painter, poet, musician, family archivist, and chronicler of her times – driven to create by love of art. - H. Perry Chapman, Editor in chief, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art and Professor emerita, University of Delaware