Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) was one of the most distinguished of European artists, according to the Swiss abbot Gabriel Buzlin (1599-1681). Buzlin included him in a list of 166 painters of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Pictorum Europae praecipuorum nomina (c.1664). This judgment may have been colored by the abbot's own collection: his Weingarten monastery contained Van Hoogstraten's only full-fledged altarpiece, The Vision of Saint Benedict. And later scholars did not share his praise of the self-styled ‘painter of His Holy Imperial Majesty [Ferdinand III]’. The literary historian Peter Schull, writing in 1833, asserted that Van Hoogstraten's poetic qualities greatly surpassed his talents in the visual arts. Even nowadays, the painter is probably better known for a set of cumulative factors rather than for the quality of his figurative works: as one of Rembrandt's pupils, as a key author in the seventeenth-century theory of art, and as a social climber who achieved success through a combination of prolific painting, poetry, optical experiments, and European travels.

As the discipline of art history has increasingly highlighted the socio-economic context of paintings and other interdisciplinary issues, scholarly interest in Van Hoogstraten's multifaceted career has caused his position to shift from that of a marginal figure in Rembrandt's studio to someone central to the art of the Dutch Golden Age. In the last two decades, not only museums and departments of art history but also historians of literature, science, and even the new media have increasingly paid attention to the Dordrecht master. The closing of the millennium produced six monographs about the artist and his work, most of which consist of more pages than his own treatise on painting.

The present book, resulting from a symposium in Amsterdam in 2009, is the first collective effort addressing Samuel van Hoogstraten. Nine scholars explore different facets of his life and work: his theoretical treatise, artistic terminology, still life and genre paintings, perspective boxes, as well as his travels, novels, and reputation. The different vantage points extend the analysis to Van Hoogstraten's teacher, Rembrandt, as well as his own best-known student, Arnold Houbraken, and other members of the Van Hoogstraten family.