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William Paterson University art history professor Claudia Goldstein has just published her second book, titled Beuckelaer and the Art of Dining: Northern Painting, Food, and Social Class in Early Modern Italy. Through it, Goldstein hopes to share an understanding and appreciation of a little-researched artist while also dismantling some of the “artificial barriers” in art history, she says.
Joachim Beuckelaer was a Flemish painter who specialized in large-scale paintings of food market and kitchen scenes, popularizing the still life genre. Though his work often focuses on peasants and working classes, Beuckelaer boasted a rather wealthy, exclusive clientele both in Belgium and Italy that included nobility.
“He forced upper-class audiences to look at and think about the working classes,” Goldstein explains. The artist not only connected high and low socio-economic classes, but also women and men, health and food, and Italy and the North, she argues in the book.
Nevertheless, Beuckelaer suffers from “scholarly neglect,” according to Goldstein, because his name and identity were misunderstood and ultimately forgotten over the centuries, and because his genre of painting was not always appreciated. She makes a case in her book, through explaining the tribulations of researching Beuckelaer, for new ways of studying and appreciating art.
“For example, art historians of the Northern European Renaissance and the Italian Renaissance have traditionally kept to their own geographic areas. This has been changing, but in my book, I am seeking to get scholars from different fields and even different disciplines to incorporate each other’s work into their research,” Goldstein explains.
“If we could forget the somewhat arbitrary categories our discipline created almost two centuries ago, we could gain a deeper and more impartial understanding of the cultural history of this period,” she adds.
The book took over a decade to complete, and it brought Goldstein to London, Amsterdam, and Vienna for research.
Her work was recognized with a fellowship in 2022 from the Historians of Netherlandish Art. The award provided funding that allowed the book to include color reproductions of Beuckelaer’s vibrant paintings. Without it, the interior of the book, which contains 46 illustrations, would be entirely in black and white.
A member of the WP faculty since 2002, Goldstein’s research has won numerous awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium for her dissertation work. Additionally, Goldstein’s first book, about artist Pieter Bruegel, won the University of Amsterdam’s Joop Witteveen Prize.
02/18/25
