The art of being ‘au courant’: Reading the news in Dutch genre painting (1640-1690)

Summary An enigmatic interior scene painted by Leiden artist Frans van Mieris I (1635-1681) in 1676 has been identified since the nineteenth century as a ‘woman reading a letter’, a subject in keeping with other highly popular depictions of women with love letters in Dutch genre painting. As this article demonstrates, however, the sheet of paper she holds in her hands is not a written letter but a printed newspaper, more specifically an edition of the Oprechte Haarlemse Courant – one of the most widely read and international news sources published in the Low Countries. Dutch seventeenth-century artists seldomly represented the subject of news reading with a focus on female readership. Yet the gathering of news had become increasingly popular among both women and men of this time, as well as across diverse social classes. News sharing, an act in which women were involved, was a way to stay informed about the world, while also contributing to a culture of leisure and sociability. Its depiction in the case of Van Mieris’ work poses a challenge to traditional interpretations of women’s prescriptive roles in Dutch genre painting. Women were regular consumers of the news and participated in a wider culture of learning and thought that has long gone unrecognized in art historical scholarship. This article also draws attention to a long-overlooked subject: the depiction of newspaper readers among a group of genre painters and draftsmen, including Adriaen van Ostade, Jan Steen, and Cornelis Dusart. Noteworthy is the fact that these artists typically depicted the lower classes, in what was an inversion of actual newspaper reading practices, which appeared to be largely an elite affair. This discrepancy may reflect a particular interest among well-to-do collectors in artworks that portray a lower class: in this case, workers and peasants smoking and drinking while reading fleeting news. Within this context, the originality of Van Mieris’ focus on a female newsreader from the upper class gains even more significance as it demonstrates his attempt to vary the tried-and-true motif of women reading letters. After all, the work reflects its times: the art of being ‘au courant’.