Samuel van Hoogstraten's Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst is the most substantial account of painting left to us by a Dutch artist in the later seventeenth century. Yet Van Hoogstraten has only recently received due credit for his text's distinctive contributions to the historiography of art. This belated valuation owes in no small measure to shifts in the frameworks through which scholars have come to view the Inleyding. In his 1924 magnum opus on European art literature, Julius von Schlosser described the treatise dismissively as an unoriginal pastiche of earlier writings, a judgment that remained more or less unquestioned for decades. Nearly a half century later Jan Emmens characterized the text more generously as an amalgam of what he called ‘pre-classicist’ and ‘classicist’ ideas about art, a transitional step in his narrative of the assimilation of classicist art theory by Dutch writers. In the past three decades both of these influential views of the Inleyding have been revisited and updated in several sustained analyses of this book and its author. To a large extent, this scholarship has sought to reframe our understanding of Van Hoogstraten by viewing his writing on art through many overlapping frames of reference, and portraying him variously as an enterprising painter-writer, a learned artist in the humanist mold, a defender of painting in the rhetorical tradition, a mouthpiece for his master Rembrandt's ideas about art, a purveyor of academic art theory imported from abroad, and a proponent of the new experimental philosophy. This work has situated the Inleyding within a wide range of contexts, among them the vernacular art literature of the Netherlands, European art theory, classical rhetoric, theology, moral philosophy, history of pedagogy, image theory, experimental philosophy, the history of the book and, not least, in relation to Van Hoogstraten's art.

While all of these recent studies differ substantially in their interpretive approaches and conclusions, in the aggregate they reveal the Inleyding to be a far more original commentary on Dutch art than had been presumed. We can now acknowledge, in a way that Von Schlosser certainly could not, that Van Hoogstraten's treatise amounts to more than a derivative exercise.