The newly released English translation of Samuel van Hoogstraten's Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst; Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt [1678] (Introduction to the academy of painting; Or, the visible world), translated by Jaap Jacobs and edited by Celeste Brusati, represents a significant and long-awaited addition to the body of literature on seventeenth-century Dutch art history. Written in a style that is challenging even for experienced readers of seventeenth-century Dutch, Van Hoogstraten's Inleyding is one of the most frequently cited sources for Dutch art theory and practice of the period—but few have read it in its entirety. While previous translations have been published in French (Blanc, 2006) and English (Ford, 2013), recent scholarship on artistic terminology and Van Hoogstraten's life and work called for a fresh English translation of the Inleyding. The present English edition by Jacobs and Brusati provides modern readers with a much-needed gateway into Van Hoogstraten's world and enables a fuller understanding of the rich and diverse content of his ambitious literary project.

The book opens with the editor Celeste Brusati's introduction (1–43), which situates Van Hoogstraten's writing in the contemporary world and describes the main issues of the text. Building on her earlier monograph on Van Hoogstraten (1995), Brusati provides valuable insight into the life, career, and inner world of this well-traveled, learned, and multifaceted painter-poet. She explains that the digressive nature of Van Hoogstraten's writing, which makes it hard to read for modern readers, was the exact characteristic that appealed to the contemporary audience (11–14). Then Brusati guides the reader into Van Hoogstraten's theoretical thinking, treating the art of painting as “the practical sciences” (werkdadige wetenschappen) (2). For this reason, she places Van Hoogstraten in the social and cultural world of his time, justifying the discussions that deviate from pure art theory and foray into the business side of the painting industry such as training, trade, and patronage.

After the stimulating introduction follows the translation of Van Hoogstraten's treatise (without the original text), with the editor's annotations at the end of each of the nine books titled under nine muses. In the translator's note (viii–ix), Jaap Jacobs explains the many choices he made in the translation while striving to stay faithful to Van Hoogstraten's original text and layout – including the title pages, the marginal notes, and the anatomical tables – and retain his varied voice as much as possible (viii). His effort yields impressive results: the translation is outstanding for its precision and accessibility, rendering Van Hoogstraten's writing style and multiple voices close to the original. After each book, the succinct endnotes provide more context and comments from the editor. And brief explanations of terminologies are summarised as a glossary after the translation (390–96), which comes in quite handy as it also serves as an index for Dutch terms. Understandably, the editor and translator chose to reduce these explanatory notes and the glossary to the bare minimum and placed them at the end to avoid overshadowing the main text. But there is a missed opportunity here for much-needed reflections on the uses of key terminology by Van Hoogstraten and his contemporaries that could facilitate the reading of the translation.

This otherwise superb translation is also slightly marred by the inconsistent treatment of sophisticated Dutch terms with no handy equivalent in English such as houding (attunement, harmonious disposition of colors, chromatic harmony) and schilderachtig (painting-like, painterly). Jacobs chooses different translations of the same term, demonstrating the multi-facet nature of the complex terms. However, it also breaks the linkage of the same term across different contexts. Although the authors attempt to mark the original Dutch term in brackets, it is not done consistently, making it difficult to study Van Hoogstraten's various uses of specific terms while reading without using the glossaries for a guided search.

These minor critiques hardly detract from the overall quality of this book. Jacobs and Brusati successfully present a much-needed, accurate new English translation of Van Hoostraten's magnum opus and open up this critical but perplexing source to a broader, modern audience interested in Dutch seventeen-century art, culture, and society. This book will surely become an indispensable source for the study of early modern art theory, practice, and beyond.