Book launch: Plaster Casts in the Life and Art of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painters

Thu, Jul 3 - Wed, Dec 31  2025

Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Isabella Lores-Chavez, Ph.D., Associate Curator of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, launches her new book: Plaster Casts in the Life and Art of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painters.

In the early modern Dutch Republic, plaster casts offered artists a way to overcome limitations of space and time, and to define themselves. This book presents the first comprehensive account of the impact of plaster casts on the artistic practice, intellectual endeavors, and social status of seventeenth-century Dutch painters.

These modest objects were, in fact, real works of sculpture, incorporated into a variety of compositions where they signaled an artist’s ambitions and technical virtuosity. Marginalized in the history of Dutch art, plaster casts lie at the center of this study’s novel interpretations of paintings and drawings, paired with period sources.

Isabella Lores-Chavez, Ph.D. (Columbia University, 2022), is the Associate Curator of European Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She specializes in early modern Netherlandish art, with a focus on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.