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Syftet med detta paper är att presentera några förslag för hur man på bästa sätt kan främja nydisputerade och postdoktorala konstvetares vetenskapliga kompetens och på så sätt verka för vetenskaplig kvalitet och förnyelse inom ämnet nationellt.

During the seventeenth century, the artistic production of new images and objects in Northern Europe reached a hitherto unprecedented scale. Painting in Norway thrived as well, but under conditions that privileged copying as a ruling principle. Most Norwegian painters made their living from copying printed images for church interiors. Therefore, early modern visual culture in Norway consists of a hybrid mix of repeated image, together with a material culture and ornamentation adapted to the local context. Altarpieces, pulpits, and panels were decorated with images copied after designs by artists like Maerten de Vos, Antony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens and Peter Paul Rubens, through reproductions. The prints that were used as models were, as a rule, produced in Antwerp and Amsterdam, and probably imported from there through the well-developed commercial trade relations between the Low Countries and Norway. In recent years, art historians have given their attention to how a shared, global visual culture was constructed from the dissemination and circulation of Flemish and Dutch graphic prints in the early-modern period (Porras 2023; Hyman 2021; Schmidt/Wouk 2017). In this paper, I will address this phenomenon from a Norwegian perspective, focusing on works by the painters Gottfried Hendtzschel and Elias Fiigenschoug.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the possible use of Dutch and Flemish prints and drawings by some of the immigrant portrait painters active in Sweden in the first part of the seventeenth century, a period when the demand for portraits was booming. Painters such as Jacob Heinrich Elbfas, born in Livonia and trained in Strasbourg; and Cornelius Arendtz, son of the Dutch immigrant painter Arendt Lamprechtz, painted portraits in a style that they repeated and copied from portrait to portrait. Other painters, most of them nameless to us today, were also contributing to the production of similar-looking portraits. The linear character of these portraits, as well as their similarity in terms of setting and poses, suggests a dependence on drawings, templates, and prints. 

In his Kristinatidens måleri (1955), Karl Erik Steneberg labelled the portrait painters active in Sweden in the first half of the seventeenth Century as guild painters stuck in repeating a belated, derivative style, before Queen Christina came to power, and Horst Gerson (1942) wrote about Elbfas that ‘viel Abwechslung vermag er im allgemeinen nicht zu geben.‘ Steneberg’s and Gerson’s motivation was to point out a lack of originality and variation in early seventeenth-century painting in Sweden, allegedly caused by a lack of foreign impulses. However, the increased production of portraits in Sweden follows a similar market logic as the serial production that prospered in the workshops of the Low Countries at the same time (Jager 2020; van den Brink 2001), represented by the workshops of painters such as the portraitist Michiel van Mierewelt (Jansen, Ekkart & Verhave 2011). The style of the portraits painted in Sweden might have been belated, but the rationalised working methods for producing portraits were contemporary.