Lucie Rochard

The Dutch and Flemish obsession for cleanliness in the seventeenth century is a well known stereotype in current research and for travelers who visited the Northern and Southern Netherlands at that time. This has often led researcher to leave cleanliness out of their studies or to brush it aside as trivial or anecdotal. Nevertheless, concerns for cleanliness at the time were deeply-rooted in the local culture, with cleanliness and dirtiness shaping much of the literary and visual culture in both regions. Cleanliness and dirtiness also appear as artistic terms to discuss the painter's practice in both contemporary criticism and art treatises.

My work focuses on daily-life scenes, which establish a connection between real life, pictorial depiction and artistic practices. I will try to show the importance of cleanliness and dirtiness as key concepts in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, at each step of the picture's making and in the way painters think of their own work.

I will try in this work to combine history of art, cultural, material, and social history, to see how these images, born from Dutch and Flemish culture, modify and question it in return. I will also confront Dutch and Flemish art theory with European theory during the same period.