Painters' Playbooks in the Art Market of Early Modern Amsterdam

The art market in seventeenth-century Amsterdam emerged as a competitive, multi-layered arena where artists of all kinds vied for a diverse and expanding clientele. How did this complex market function? And how did individual painters navigate this intricate system, making artistic and business decisions that fuelled the remarkable flourishing of Dutch art? Painters' Playbooks explores these questions through a novel socio-spatial lens. Drawing on digital methods, it reveals new patterns in artistic practice and market development in early modern Amsterdam. The book synthesises diverse historical sources to uncover artists' collective behaviours - or 'playbooks' - reflected in their location choices, social networks, and domestic interiors. Moving beyond traditional economic and art-historical explanations, it shows how these playbooks shaped market structure and influenced artistic innovation in the seventeenth century.

Weixuan Li is an art historian and digital humanist who explores seventeenth-century Dutch art, the art market and its global reach through digital methods. She has published on domestic art display, workshop practices, and painting production in the Dutch Republic, and is now examining artistic exchange between the Netherlands and Asia.

Acknowledgements, List of Figures, Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Painters at Home Chapter 3: 1585-1610 Chapter 4: 1610-1630 Chapter 5: 1630-1650 Chapter 6: 1650-1670 Chapter 7: 1670-1700 Conclusion The early modern art market as a socio-spatial phenomenon, Appendix I: Data and sources Appendix II: Deep mapping methodology, Appendix III: Spatial arrangement of art dealers' homes, Cumulative Bibliography, Index.