Weixuan Li

Winner Dissertation Prize 2024

Report by the selection committee

‘Here is the stock exchange and the money, and the love of art’, poet Thomas Asselijn observed in his laudatory poem of Amsterdam in 1653. Indeed, the art market in Amsterdam was booming at that time. Over a thousand painters lived and worked in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, making this city one of the most thriving and competitive art scene in Europe.

In her dissertation Weixuan Li seeks to explain the rapid rise of the art market in Amsterdam by investigating the so called ‘playbooks’ of painters and artists. By ‘playbooks’ is meant the (unwritten) set of rules that people from their profession comply with.

The role of market forces and social and economic conditions of painters in the early modern Netherlands have been relatively well researched. Nevertheless, Weixuan succeeds in illuminating these developments from a completely new, spatial perspective. She introduces an integrated socio-spatial approach to examine the development of the art market in seventeenth-century Amsterdam by combining economic and socio-geographical theories and using ‘deep-mapping’. This method makes it possible to combine different types of datasets and show how the painters distributed themselves spatially across Amsterdam and clustered together within certain neighbourhoods.

The interdisciplinary method used is not only very innovative, but Weixuan also presents her findings in a very clear writing style. Her work excels in precision and contains many illuminating graphs.

‘Art is happy where wealth reigns’, the painter Karel van Mander noted at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Varying on this, one could say that science rejoices when theory and analysis are in perfect harmony. This is definitely the case in Weixuan’s outstanding dissertation, and for this reason the jury for the Dissertation Prizes 2024 of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation decided to award one of its five dissertation prizes to Painters’ playbooks: Deep mapping socio-spatial strategies in the art market of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.