Abstract

The surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art and the Dutch art market from the late 16th century to the mid-17th century have propelled scholars to quantify the volume of production and to determine the source of its growth. However, existing studies have not explored the use of known paintings to specify and visualize the fluctuations of painting production in the Dutch Republic. Employing data mining techniques to leverage the most comprehensive datasets of Netherlandish paintings (RKD), this paper visualizes and analyzes the trend of painting production in the Northern Netherlands throughout the 17th-century. The visualizations verify the existing observations on the market saturation and industry stagnation in 1630–1640. In spite of this market condition, the growth of painting production was sustained until the 1660s. This study argues that the irrational risk-taking behavior of painters and the over-enthusiasm for painting in the public created a “social bubble” and the subsequent contraction of the production was a market correction back to a stable state. However, these risk-taking attitudes during the bubble time spurred exuberant artistic innovations that highlight the Dutch contribution to the development of art.

Highlights

  • From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century the sudden, meteoric rise of Dutch economic power was accompanied by the surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art, paintings in particular.During the Dutch Golden Age, the volume and the variety of genres and styles of the painting production reached unprecedented levels (Van der Woude 1991; Montias 1990)

  • The interplay of social, cultural, and psychological underpinnings of the art market have not yet been fully explored to interpret the rise and fall of the painting production. To answer this question that emerged from the data analysis, in Sections 5 and 6, I will apply behavioral economic theories to show how painters, art dealers, and the public interacted in the art market and created loops of reinforcement, providing a new hypothesis accounting for the unprecedented painting production in the 17th-century

  • To explain the phenomenal growth in painting production and the abnormal behavior observed in various agents in the art market in the first half of the 17th century, I would like to introduce the concept of “social bubble,” a term coined by Didier Sornette and Monika Gisler (Gisler and Sornette 2008)

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Summary

Introduction

From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century the sudden, meteoric rise of Dutch economic power was accompanied by the surprising and rapid flowering of Dutch art, paintings in particular. Due to the lack of historical sources on the painting production, existing studies either extrapolate the available materials to fill the missing data (Van der Woude 1991; Montias 1990; De Marchi and Miegroet 2006, 2014), or use the number of painters in the Republic to indicate the size of the art market (Rasterhoff 2017; Nijboer 2010). Both approaches are subject to a wide margin of error and are yet to yield convincing results (Brosens and Stighelen 2002). I hope to bridge the digital and traditional art historical scholarships of the art markets of the 17th-century Dutch Republic

Data on Painting Production
A Probability Approach to Account for Uncertainties
Production Trend Visualized
Painting
Painting as a Promising Profession
Painting as a Risky Business
Decisions under Risk and Uncertainty
Adriaen
Collective
Pieter
Willem
Art Market as a “Social Bubble”
Exuberant Innovation
Findings
Conclusion
Full Text
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