The one connecting factor in the different chapters in this book is obviously Van Hoogstraten himself: there was a single personality – although our knowledge of it may be shifting with each new historiographical focus – that linked art, literature, and scholarship during a foundational era of Dutch cultural history. Even though getting to know the ‘real’ Samuel van Hoogstraten may be beyond our ken as historians, it is a legitimate ambition to try to sketch the conceptual and ideological framework which implicitly connected his varied efforts. Four major themes surface throughout the present book's chapters and determine the surplus value of the sum of the parts: 1) training in Rembrandt's studio; 2) the theory and practice of art as deceit; 3) Van Hoogstraten as a courtier; and 4) his ambitions in the context of the history of knowledge. These themes illuminate the paintings as well as the writings, and may also indicate avenues for future research.

Rembrandt's studio

Van Hoogstraten's training in Amsterdam demands interest if only because Rembrandt, of all painters of the European Baroque, has probably received the most substantial amount of scholarly attention. From the 1960s onwards, attempts have been made to ‘normalize’ Rembrandt by putting the spotlight on the wide range of works and minor masters in his background. Yet in the twenty-first century, he exerts again the centripetal force in the historiography of Dutch art. According to Mariët Westermann, the relative decline of European hegemony has renewed attention to ‘the extensive but no longer assured history of painting as a unique resource of European culture’, engendering a ‘return to the major contributions of Dutch seventeenth-century art’ and Rembrandt in particular. The master-pupil relationship will therefore continue to dominate research about Van Hoogstraten, even though he is undoubtedly coming into his own as a canonical figure and historians will increasingly understand the master through his pupil. Studying the Dordrecht painter seems, in fact, a promising approach in Dutch art history: his cosmopolitanism, intellectualism, and the ‘betrayal’ of his master's manner – which made him such a suspect figure for earlier scholars – provide an alternative model for the traditional image of the Rembrandt circle as centered on a dark, unlettered, provincial, and lonely genius, while at the same time it is evident that Rembrandt remained a worthy example for Van Hoogstraten throughout his career.