afbeelder

Afbeelder is a Dutch term used in visual culture, art history and museum contexts to refer to a depiction or representation created in visual media. The word can function as a general noun for a work that depicts a subject, and in some scholarly texts it is used to indicate the act or result of depicting. In standard Dutch the more common word for a person who makes such depictions is afbeeldingmaker or schilder; afbeelder can appear in older or technical writings as a synonym for “depictor” or, more rarely, to denote an individual artist.

In practice, afbeelder encompasses paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, photographs, and digital images produced to represent people, places, events, or scenes. It is a key term in cataloging visual material, where curators describe the afbeelder as the image that conveys subject matter, composition, and stylistic characteristics.

Historically, the term appears in 19th- and early 20th-century Dutch scholarship and has continued in some catalogs and metadata schemas, though it remains less common than more specific terms. With digitization and metadata standardization, afbeelder is sometimes used as a generic label alongside more precise categories such as afbeelding (image), schilderij (painting), tekeningen (drawings), and fotografie (photography).

See also: afbeelding, afbeeldingmaker, schilder, beeldende kunst, museum cataloging.