Foreword – Maartje Stols-Witlox
This RKD Study introduces and presents a database that provides access to art technological data that is crucial for our understanding of seventeenth-century painting in the Netherlands. This database is one of the outcomes of the NWO-funded research project Down to the Ground: A Historical, Material and Technical Study of Coloured Grounds in Netherlandish Painting, 1550–1650 (2019–2024). Down to the Ground was hosted by the University of Amsterdam and TU Delft and was carried out in close collaboration with the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), the Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem), the Mauritshuis (The Hague), the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA, Antwerp), the National Gallery (London), the Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen), and the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (The Hague).
Grounds, the layers that sit between the support and the painted image itself, have a crucial impact on the look of a painting. Seventeenth-century artists often chose coloured grounds and used their tone to enhance pictorial unity in their paintings. Through a combination of art-historical, technical, and scientific research, Down to the Ground sought to reconstruct how and why coloured grounds were introduced, adopted, and adapted across the Northern and Southern Netherlands during a period of intense artistic exchange and innovation. The outcomes of the project include Moorea Hall-Aquitania’s dissertation, a (Winter 2025) special issue of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art dedicated fully to Down to the Ground, and this database and study.1
The Down to the Ground (DttG) database—developed by Hall-Aquitania within her doctoral research in collaboration with Paul J.C. van Laar— is presented here as both a research tool and a model for sustainable data management in technical art history. By making the database and its underlying code openly available, and by inviting further contributions of data, this RKD Study ensures that the knowledge and infrastructure developed through Down to the Ground will remain accessible to researchers and can continue to grow beyond the lifespan of the original project. We hope that its availability to others will inspire further research and thus help further strengthen our understanding and admiration for the mastery of seventeenth-century artists.
Notes
1 Many of the articles in the Down to the Ground JHNA special issue are cited in this study. The special issue is edited by Perry Chapman, with guest editors Maartje Stols-Witlox, and Elmer Kolfin. It addresses the influence of colored grounds on the production and visual qualities of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in papers by Stols-Witlox and Kolfin, Stéphanie Deprouw-Augustin, Anne Haack Christensen, Moorea Hall-Aquitania, Paul J.C. van Laar, Sabrina Meloni, Marya Albrecht, Petria Noble, and Lieve d’Hont. Perry Chapman, Maartje Stols-Witlox, and Elmer Kolfin, eds., Down to the Ground, special issue, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 17, no. 2 (forthcoming).