Buying and Selling: Commerce in Early Modern Europe

<div class="col-lg-6 col-md-6 col-sm-12">European artists of the 17th and 18th centuries took great interest in depicting what was new and exciting in public life. This included exploring arenas of commercial exchange and the rapidly expanding market of material goods. War, colonial expansion, and global exploration opened new markets and diversified the commodities available in Europe. The rising middle-class culture of consumption fueled demand for services and demanded a growing array of goods from near and far. In response, printmakers and draftsmen observed the economic and social changes ushered in by industrialization, urbanization, and a burgeoning middle class with money to spend on labor and fine things.</div> <div class="col-lg-6 col-md-6 col-sm-12">The focused studies of individual craftsmen range from serious images emphasizing the dignity of the skilled artisan to satires addressing issues of class and social status. Other images address women’s roles in the early modern marketplace, as workers, consumers, or allegorical representatives of commerce. Images featuring animals depict traditional jobs and necessities, and address the ways in which industrialization complicated the interconnected economies of the city and country. <em>Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, PhD, Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator, and Director of the Curatorial Fellowship Program</em></div>

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