Art Markets in the Early Modern Netherlands

Abstract

As a moniker, “The Golden Age”—which has now, thankfully, fallen into disfavor—was long used to suggest the richness of seventeenth-century Dutch society in general, and of its visual culture in particular. Its pictorial legacy was distilled, synecdochically, into the figures of a handful of celebrated painters, such as Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Johannes Vermeer, and Rembrandt van Rijn. Yet even contemporaries chronicled the staggering appetite for, and the sheer abundance of, paintings of every sort in Dutch homes. 1 Quantitative analyses of the volume of paintings produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries posit the execution of between 5–10 million paintings, fueled by an average output of roughly two paintings per week, per artist. 2 And despite these almost mind-numbing production statistics, the Dutch Republic was a net importer of paintings during much of the seventeenth century. 3 These figures, speculative though they are, nonetheless limn the contours of the art market in the Netherlands during the early modern period. They have incentivized inquiry into economic analyses of the production of art, and have deeply inflected the study of early modern visual culture in the Low Countries—not least by connecting the objects of early Netherlandish art to the disparate cultural geographies to which they were often marketed. Perhaps most importantly, the economics of art and culture have helped to compel attention away from the repeated interrogation of canonical artists, and instead have invited consideration of the vast swaths of visual culture comprised by the popular consumption of images in that era. Implicated in this reorientation are the reassessment of conventional art historical categories such as style, pictorial genres, and authenticity, from fifteenth-century Bruges to seventeenth-century Amsterdam.