Carla van de Puttelaar (born 1 November 1967) is a Dutch fine art photographer and art historian based in Amsterdam.
Van de Puttelaar was born in Zaandam, the Netherlands. She studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1991 to 1996 and obtained a PhD in art history from Utrecht University in 2017. Between 2011 and 2014, she served as a faculty member at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.
Her photographic work specializes in portrait photography and nudes, while her academic research focuses on Dutch and Scottish seventeenth- and early-eighteenth century portraiture. She authored ‘Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714’, published by Brepols in December 2021.
In 2017, van de Puttelaar initiated the portrait project Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World, which comprises over 550 portraits of women engaged in various art disciplines as museum curators and directors, to art collectors and artists.
Van de Puttelaar's work has been widely exhibited, including a retrospective exhibition titled ‘Brushed by Light’ at the National Museum of History and Art in Luxembourg in 2020. The exhibition featured 78 works spanning 22 years and was accompanied by a catalog with an introduction by art historian Rudi Ekkart. In 2021, she collaborated with Iris van Herpen on the project and exhibition Synergia
Van de Puttelaar’s photography is often compared to that of Rineke Dijkstra and Hellen van Meene due to its resemblance to Dutch Golden Age paintings in terms of composition, light, and texture. While she initially worked with film, she has transitioned to digital photography. Many of her photographs are untitled, enhancing a sense of distance and mystery while subtly conveying intimacy and sensuality.
Van de Puttelaar has received several awards, including the Dutch Prix de Rome Basic Prize. Her work has been exhibited in major cities such as New York, Paris, and Brussels. Additionally, her photographs have been featured as book covers and in publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 2009, she was ranked 51st in the top 100 Dutch artists by Elsevier. She was also a semi-finalist in the Artist of the Year contest organized by Stichting Kunstweek in 2018, 2019, and 2023.
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Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting, though most now regard that claim as an oversimplification.
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Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
Tina Barney is an American photographer best known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England. She is a member of the Lehman family.
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Caterina or Catharina van Hemessen was a Flemish Renaissance painter. She is the earliest female Flemish painter for whom there is verifiable extant work. She is mainly known for a series of small-scale female portraits completed between the late 1540s and early 1550s and a few religious compositions.
Fashion in the period 1600–1650 in Western clothing is characterized by the disappearance of the ruff in favour of broad lace or linen collars. Waistlines rose through the period for both men and women. Other notable fashions included full, slashed sleeves and tall or broad hats with brims. For men, hose disappeared in favour of breeches.
Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history roughly spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence.
Cornelis or Cornelius Ketel was a Dutch Mannerist painter, active in Elizabethan London from 1573 to 1581, and in Amsterdam till his death. Ketel, known essentially as a portrait-painter, was also a poet and orator, and from 1595 a sculptor as well.
Johanna Vergouwen was a Flemish Baroque painter and copyist.
The Allegory of Faith, also known as Allegory of the Catholic Faith, is a Dutch Golden Age painting by Johannes Vermeer from about 1670–1672. It has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1931.
Portrait of a Lady is a small oil-on-oak panel painting executed around 1460 by the Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden. The composition is built from the geometric shapes that form the lines of the woman's veil, neckline, face, and arms, and by the fall of the light that illuminates her face and headdress. The vivid contrasts of darkness and light enhance the almost unnatural beauty and Gothic elegance of the model.
Lancelot Volders also erroneously known as Louis Volders, Lois Volders and Jan Volders was a Flemish painter who specialised mainly in individual and group portraits but also produced a few history paintings and genre scenes. After training and working in Brussels, he may have worked after about 1700 from time to time at the Stadhouderlijk Hof in Leeuwarden.
Iris van Herpen is a Dutch fashion designer known for fusing technology with traditional haute couture craftsmanship. Van Herpen opened her own label Iris van Herpen in 2007. In 2011, the Dutch designer became a guest-member of the Parisian Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, part of the Fédération française de la couture. Since then, Van Herpen has continuously exhibited her new collections at Paris Fashion Week. Van Herpen's work has been included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. Aguilar used visual art to bring forth marginalized identities, especially within the LA Queer scene and Latinx communities. Before the term Intersectionality was used commonly, Aguilar captured the largely invisible identities of large bodied, queer, working-class, brown people in the form of portraits. Often using her naked body as a subject, she used photography to empower herself and her inner struggles to reclaim her own identity as "Laura" – a lesbian, fat, disabled, and brown person. Although work on Chicana/os is limited, Aguilar has become an essential figure in Chicano art history and is often regarded as an early "pioneer of intersectional feminism" for her outright and uncensored work. Some of her most well-known works are Three Eagles Flying, The Plush Pony Series, and Nature Self Portraits. Aguilar has been noted for her collaboration with cultural scholars such as Yvonne Yarbo-Berjano and receiving inspiration from other artists like Judy Dater. She was well known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.
Portrait painting in Scotland includes all forms of painted portraiture in Scotland, from its beginnings in the early sixteenth century until the present day. The origins of the tradition of portrait painting in Scotland are in the Renaissance, particularly through contacts with the Netherlands. The first portrait of a named person that survives is that of Archbishop William Elphinstone, probably painted by a Scottish artist using Flemish techniques around 1505. Around the same period Scottish monarchs turned to the recording of royal likenesses in panel portraits, painted in oils on wood. The tradition of royal portrait painting in Scotland was probably disrupted by the minorities and regencies it underwent for much of the sixteenth century. It began to flourish after the Reformation, with paintings of royal figures and nobles by Netherlands artists Hans Eworth, Arnold Bronckorst and Adrian Vanson. A specific type of Scottish picture from this era was the "vendetta portrait", designed to keep alive the memory of an atrocity. The Union of Crowns in 1603 removed a major source of artistic patronage in Scotland as James VI and his court moved to London. The result has been seen as a shift "from crown to castle", as the nobility and local lairds became the major sources of patronage.
The Princesse de Broglie is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It was painted between 1851 and 1853, and shows Pauline de Broglie, who adopted the courtesy title 'Princesse'. Born Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, she married Albert de Broglie, the future 28th Prime Minister of France, in 1845. Pauline was 28 at the time of the painting's completion. She was highly intelligent and widely known for her beauty, but she suffered from profound shyness and the painting captures her melancholia. Pauline contracted tuberculosis in her early 30s and died in 1860 aged 35. Although Albert lived until 1901, he was heartbroken and did not remarry.
Rosalie Favell is a Métis (Cree/British) artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba currently based in Ottawa, Ontario, working with photography and digital collage techniques. Favell creates self-portraits, sometimes featuring her own image and other times featuring imagery that represents her, often making use of archival photos of family members and images from pop culture.
Rudolf 'Rudi' Ekkart is a Dutch art historian known for his expertise in Dutch portraiture and his work in art restitution. In 1997, he received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam, writing it on Dutch portraiture. He served as the director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) from 1990 to 2012. Ekkart has played a significant role in tracing the provenance of artworks that were looted during World War II, and has contributed to the identification and restitution of many pieces to their rightful owners. Ekkart has published extensively on Dutch Golden Age portraiture, and his work has been influential in the field of art history and museology. Since 2023, he has been an honorary member of the Association for Dutch Art Historians.
