My dissertation contributes to the material and sensorial interest in the humanities by focusing on the beholder’s phenomenological experience of multi-panel paintings by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), Rembrandt’s first and most financially successful pupil. Dou has long been hailed as the founder of the Leiden fijnschilders (fine painters), who brought mimesis to the height of artistic achievement around mid-century. Archival documents reveal that at least eight of Dou’s paintings were once fitted within cases that featured highly illusionistic still life paintings on the outer surfaces of their hinged doors or sliding lids. While only two of the recorded covers survive, they feature both common and luxury objects with varied surface textures and lighting effects that exhibit a level of artifice true to the goal of painting professed by Philips Angel: schijn zonder sijn (“semblance without being”). Projecting out of the darkness of false shallow niches, the objects addressed the viewer in a trompe l’oeil mode and with a startling mimetic force that invited closer scrutiny. Yet, Dou’s still life works are rarely the subject of critical analysis and remain on the periphery of seventeenth-century Dutch art historical scholarship, overshadowed by his novel achievements in genre painting. Scholars most often interpret Dou’s still lifes as protective mechanisms for and allegorical glosses on the paintings they concealed. Instead, I argue that these approaches have limited our understanding of their significance. The disassembly and loss of most of these painted covers has further obscured their functions and meanings. My phenomenological approach underscores the ways in which these painted still life covers fostered an embodied relationship with the beholder in the context of the art collections for which they were destined. In Chapter 1, I gather evidence of Dou’s extant and lost still life covers and quantify this practice and consider these paintings together as an understudied corpus in concert with the paintings they covered. In Chapter 2 and 3, I provide historical and theoretical contexts for Dou’s nested paintings to ground them in pictorial and material traditions of concealment and revelation that permeated early modern culture (Netherlandish, German, and Italian) from the fourteenth- to the late seventeenth century. I consider them modern adaptations of the illusionistic images on the exterior of devotional diptychs and triptychs, insisting on their presence in the liminal space that connects the painted and real world. In Chapter 4, I analyze Dou’s painted still life covers as “meta-paintings,” characterizing them as theoretical objects charged with their own agency and the ability to invite the beholder to “think” with both their mind and body. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which Dou’s still life covers and René Descartes’s natural philosophy exhibit a shared and contemporaneous distrust of the senses through an epistemology of doubt and deceit, a premise that expanded the horizons of their respective fields in the seventeenth century. / 2025-09-21T00:00:00Z