JHNA is pleased to publish three articles on fifteenth- and seventeenth-century art produced in a variety of different media. The first, by Sally Whitman Coleman, discusses an early panoramic landscape painting, “Hans Memling’s Scenes from the Advent and Triumph of Christ” in Munich, a Simultanbild that has perplexed art historians for many years. Coleman argues that the key to understanding Memling’s narrative structure lies in a consideration of major Church festivals over the year.
The second by Matthijs Ilsink and Monica Marchesi, “A needlework by Philips van den Bossche, (fl. 1604–1615),” focuses on an artist who worked as court embroiderer to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. Published here for the first time is the single needle work securely attributed to van den Bossche, a wooded landscape with a Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The discovery of this “needle painting” gives insight into the nature of Van den Bossche’s embroidered oeuvre.
In the third, “Possessing Brazil in Print, 1630–54,” Elizabeth Sutton analyzes the maps of Brazil published during the tenure of the Dutch Republic’s possession of the territory (1630–54), many of which share common features demonstrating how existing conventions in rhetoric and iconography were used by publishers to convey Dutch ownership.
From time to time, JHNA publishes translations of important articles that appeared originally in Dutch. In the second section of this issue, we include the first installments of a five-part article by D.C.Meijer, Jr. “De Amsterdamsche Schutters-stukken in en buiten het nieuwe Rijksmuseum,” published over a four year period in Oud Holland (1885-1889). The remaining three installments will be published in the Winter 2014 issue of JHNA. By correcting and annotating this article on the Amsterdam militia company portraits, the Amsterdam scholar Tom van der Molen has produced what amounts to a critical translation. He has also provided a translation of his new transcription of a seventeenth-century document important to Meijer’s research, Gerard Schaep’s 1653 account of the civic guard halls in Amsterdam. In toto, Meijer’s article provides both a source for the original location of the civic guard portraits and, importantly, a record of ideas about the paintings at the end of the nineteenth century, around the time of the opening of the Rijksmuseum building in 1885.
The Summer 2014 issue of JHNA will serve as a festschrift and birthday celebration for Egbert Haverkamp Begemann. During his tenure at the Institute of Fine Arts, Prof. Begemann has trained dozens of scholars in the art historical traditions of connoisseurship, contextual analysis, and iconography, furthered the study of Rembrandt, Rubens, and other Dutch and Flemish artists, and promoted interest in works on paper. A good number of his former students will be contributing articles to this e-volume, which will be edited by Stephanie Dickey, Nadine Orenstein, and Jacquelyn N. Coutré.
For the current issue, we want to acknowledge again the excellent work of Cindy Edwards, our copyeditor; and the ever-generous help of Heidi Eyestone, Visual Resources Librarian of Carleton College, for her aid with images. Additional assistance by Kate Wiener, Natalie Zeldin, and Maggie Smythe is also gratefully acknowledged. We wish to thank our webmaster Russ Coon for his numerous and important efforts on behalf of JHNA. We also thank Carleton College and the University of Texas, Austin, for their financial support.
JHNA is archived by Portico, an electronic service initiated by JSTOR and supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ithaca, and the Library of Congress. Our membership in CrossRef allows us to register our articles, each with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), so that libraries and other organizations can find these articles and create links to them.
We encourage you to consider JHNA as a venue for your own publications. With your help, JHNA is becoming 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, 2013 (for publication in 2014 or 2015), although we welcome submissions at any time.
Alison M. Kettering, Editor-in-Chief. William R. Kenan Professor of Art History, Carleton College, aketteri@jhna.org
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Associate Editor, Kay Fortson Chair in European Art, University of Texas, Austin, chipps@jhna.org
Mark Trowbridge, Associate Editor, Professor of Art History, Marymount University, trow@marymount.edu