Rembrandt’s Material Worlds
International Northern Baroque Bader Colloquia
Bader College, Herstmonceux Castle, UK
3–6 June 2027
With generous support from Bader Philanthropies, the Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art at Queen’s University, in collaboration with the Alfred Bader Research Centre at the Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam, is seeking papers for the international colloquium Rembrandt’s Material Worlds, to be held at Bader College, Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex, UK, from 3 to 6 June 2027.
The material turn is transforming how art historians understand works of art and the worlds from which they emerged.
The colloquium welcomes papers that reassess existing scholarship or offer new discoveries in the light of new archival research, technical examination, and emerging approaches within material studies. Possible topics and research methods include, but are not limited to:
materials, making, and artistic process;
sources, materials, and production of pigments, binders, grounds, canvases, wooden panels, copper plates, paper, and ink;
scientific approaches to attribution and connoisseurship;
technical art history;
new imaging and analytical technologies;
workshop practice, collaboration, and the material conditions of authorship;
technologies of production and forms of skilled and unskilled labour;
Rembrandt’s printmaking practices, including plates, papers, inks, printing, and the production of different states and impressions;
Rembrandt as collector, entrepreneur, or dealer;
“Saskia’s Enterprise”: Saskia Uylenburgh, Hendrickje Stoffels, and the household as a material and commercial enterprise;
material evidence of empire, colonial commerce, and environmental extraction;
ecocritical approaches and the environmental humanities;
human–animal relations in artistic materials, processes, and representations;
material imitation, transformation, and artifice;
conservation, deterioration, and the changing physical lives of artworks;
dendrochronology and the histories of wooden supports;
the shifting landscape of attribution and the material parameters of authorship;
the relationship between depicted objects and the material culture of Rembrandt’s world.
Please send a 200-word abstract and CV to Stephanie Dickey (stephanie.dickey@queensu.ca), Tomasz Grusiecki (tomasz.grusiecki@queensu.ca), and David de Witt
(d.dewitt@rembrandthuis.nl) by 15 November 2026. Those selected for the colloquium will be notified by 15 December 2026.