Traditions informing the deceptions perpetrated by seventeenth-century trompe-l'oeil paintings shine considerable light on the behavior of seventeenth-century artists, patrons, and viewers in unexpected ways. This study considers illusionistic paintings and written accounts of those experiencing them in the seventeenth century in conjunction with non-art historical scientific, philosophical, and social discourses of the period concerned with the subject of deceit. Questions on naturalism that remain a central subject in Netherlandish art history are elaborated upon, for, when considered deceptive, artists and their paintings reveal a variety of intriguing concerns. From this perspective, this dissertation argues that artists and their patrons fostered viewing responses that are surprisingly ideological with wide-ranging political and intellectual ramifications dependent on the immediate contexts in which they were made. To lie well, particularly in such a way that revealed the clever machinations of the deceit and established the participants' mastery of the subtleties of a given set of values, was a highly-desirable social and political achievement. Beautifully painted lies facilitated this exploration of deception.

The complicity of original sites of trompe-l'oeil reception in the deceptive act -- in physical locations like artists' studios, churches, town halls, homes, and the marketplace -- was determined by attitudes to deceit specific to these contexts. A painting that lies will encourage very different responses determined by the expectations of the participants. The place of deception in the visual arts, and painting in particular, was a practice informed by professional concerns, art theory, and economic pursuits favored by seventeenth-century Netherlandish artists. The production of illusionistic painting by the artist Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts for the Danish kings in the 1660s and 70s in particular terms of the complimentary goals of an emerging absolutist court and of the knowledge-producing system of a kunstkammer. Alternatively, two illusionistically painted organ screens painted for prominent churches in Amsterdam, one by Cornelis Brise and the other by Gerard de Lairesse, provides an entirely different set of responses within a context dominated by Protestant concerns and contemporaneous controversies. In this environment, the delicate balance between morally proscribed lies and the activation of compelling visual deceptions underscores the visual appeal of trompe-l'oeil art of this period.

The trompe-l'oeil paintings of Samuel van Hoogstraten and several of his contemporaries produced deceptive imagery for middle-class and royal patrons in Restoration England. Analysis of the written experiences of the bureaucrat Samuel Pepys with their illusions, serves as a means of accessing the social pressures and intellectual pursuits that responded to, and in turn informed, artistic production. By expanding the cultural referents of deception to include those determined by the immediate contexts for which trompe-l'oeil paintings were made, our understanding of a seemingly homogenous sub-genre is made far more complicated and versatile.