Forschungsstelle "Westfälischer Friede": Dokumentation

DOCUMENTATION | Exhibitions: 1648 - War and Peace in Europe
Essay Volumes > Tome II: Art and culture

GARY SCHWARTZ
The shape, size and destiny of the Dutch market for paintings at the end of the Eighty Years War

The beginning of the Eighty Years War and the origins of the Golden Age of Dutch painting have been related to each other by historians in many ways. The unrest that led to the outbreak of the revolt was attended by iconoclastic incidents that traumatized the art world; the alteration from Catholicism to Calvinism changed the meaning of no profession (the clergy excepted) more than that of the painter. Religious repression in the southern Netherlands drove hordes of artists, dealers and art-lovers to the north, where they transformed Amsterdam into a new Antwerp, the former mother of the arts in the Netherlands. The decline of public ecclesiastical patronage forced this large population of painters to search for new buyers, new formats and new subjects. The institution of a republican form of government and the strengthening of the burgher oligarchies in the cities created a matrix of patronage more diffuse and more commercial than those in other countries. The disruption of European civil society by the Eighty (and even more by the Thirty) Years War made the role of Amsterdam as emporium of the arts more exclusive and more profitable than it would otherwise have been. The degree to which these relationships are determinative is debatable, but the outcome of that debate is not likely to undermine the overall interconnectedness between the course and conduct of the Revolt and the rise and flourishing of the arts in the northern Netherlands.

If that is so, why should we not also ask the corresponding question concerning the cessation of the Eighty Years War? Is there a relation between the Treaty of Münster and the end of the Golden Age? There are several reasons why this may not seem like a promising line of enquiry. (Indeed, the question does not seem to have been posed until now.) One is that the end of the Golden Age is not thought to have occurred until much later than 1648. It is usually dated to the final quarter of the seventeenth century. The historical and military events associated with it are the wars with the French, starting in 1672. Historians of art tend to see in this event the birth of French cultural hegemony over northern Europe. This view of the decline of the Dutch Golden Age is qualitative. A typical statement of this thesis can be found in the Pelican History of Art volume on Dutch seventeenth-century art. [1]

The Treaty of Münster plays a very different role in this picture of things. In this linkage, Münster serves as a triumphant symptom of the continuing rise of Dutch culture as well as the economy. A closer look reveals a far more conflicted situation. Jonathan Israel makes no bones about the condition of the republic at the time of the signing of the treaty. He speaks of a "Dutch political crisis of 1649-50" which had important economic components as well. [2] Hardly had the country recovered from this brief but painful interval before an even greater and more general disaster hit: the First English War of 1652-54. The timing of these events, which followed so closely on the Treaty of Münster, finds a parallel in certain key indexes of artistic activity, as we shall see below. In the second half of the 1640s Dutch parents began displaying great restraint in apprenticing their children to painters; and in the 1650s collectors began to cut down sharply on their purchases of new work from living painters. Of course this did not have an immediate effect on the productivity of the generations of painters then at work. It may have actually stimulated them to renewed efforts in order to make up for reduced income. However, the figures certainly offer grounds for serious consideration of this new historical problem.

At the end of this paper we will return to that question. In order to be able to deal with it effectively, however, we will first evoke as completely as possible the Dutch market for art in the period concerned. We will begin with a typology of forms of trade and then deal with the quantitative aspects of production.



I. SHAPE: CHANNELS OF COMMERCE IN ART

The market in art, to a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century, was a more concrete institution than it is to us. The concept of the market is in our minds synonymous with ideas of openness and anonymity. It is also an abstract notion - an arena where values are determined by an impersonal play of supply and demand. These abstract concepts seem so self-evident that we forget their distance from the literal meaning of the word market in the seventeenth century. To a Dutch painter of that time, the market was defined by place, time and restrictions of all kinds. The locale was the marketplace, usually one of the main squares of town, where open-air trade was permitted on certain days of the week and the year. Other locations, such as the bridges where much illegal trade in paintings took place, were seen as competitors to the market. The market as an institution was linked to the calendar and dependent on permission from the licensing authorities. Even in the famously mercantile Holland of the seventeenth century, open trade in paintings as of most other goods was prohibited unless specifically permitted. Traditionally, one day every week and one week per year were set aside for relatively unrestricted trade. Sales conducted at other times or places required licenses from the guild or the township. These were off-market sales, as were those via illegal channels that were combatted constantly without ever being repressed. The atmosphere at a market was all the freer for being an outlet for suppressed commercial and consumer urges. This is not to say that the laws of supply and demand were inoperative in the seventeenth-century art market or that prices cannot be accounted for by the mechanisms it describes. Rather, the specific processes by which artists sold their work were anything but impersonal or open. [3] From the perspective of a painter, nearly all transactions in art will have resembled one of the following patterns, divided into eight main categories: 1. PATRONAGE

Court patronage: Frederik Hendrik maintained a court in The Hague that could vie with all but a few others in Europe. The possibilities of Dutch painters to benefit from princely patronage were however not exhausted by the stadholder's court. Appended to it were satellite courts which had their own, sometimes overlapping circles of client artists: Frederik Hendrik's nephew the Elector Palatine Friedrich V and Frederik's wife Elisabeth Stuart, his cousin Johan Maurits van Nassau and his son-in-law Willem Frederik van Nassau-Dietz. His son Willem II did not live long enough to develop a court culture of his own, but Frederik's widow Amalia van Solms brought the tradition to a climax with her large-scale commissions for Huis ten Bosch.

Nor should it be forgotten that Dutch masters were not limited to their own country in the acquisition of princely patronage. They were conspicuously successful in the courts of Charles I, Charles II and William III of England, the Danish and Swedish courts, those of the Holy Roman Emperors in Prague and Vienna, the German courts of Berlin, Düsseldorf, Kassel and Munich and various Italian courts. In all, received wisdom on the subject to the contrary notwithstanding, the courts of Europe were of considerably greater importance to Dutch painters in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth.

Acquiring and retaining such patronage required that a painter cultivate a protector at court, who would speak up for him at the right moment. This function is known as brokerage, the broker being the mediator between a patron and a client.

Government patronage: Similar patterns as for court patronage apply to the commissions from the various governments of the Republic, mainly the city governments. The volume of such orders was not consistently high, but when it came to decorating a new town hall or other civic structure, the local government could dispense patronage on a scale that would add substantially to the lifetime income of those artists who benefitted from it. In the absence of open competitions, painters who maintained good relations with intermediaries with access to public figures were at an advantage. Direct ties to the decision-makers, such as Govert Flinck's friendship with the powerful Amsterdam burgomaster Cornelis de Graeff, could enrich an artist.

Semi-government and ecclesiastical patronage: Corporate bodies of all kinds had the habit of adorning their meeting halls with paintings. Group portraits and allegories pertaining to the activity of the body concerned were the most common, but there were organizations, such as the Sint Job hospice for syphilitics in Utrecht, which displayed paintings of all kinds - unpaid, but valuable as free publicity - by local artists. [4] Opportunities on this level were available to virtually any artist in the Netherlands; normal family connections would invariably bring one to the threshold of some such institution. Religious affiliation could provide access to not insignificant sources of patronage. A Catholic artist like Abraham Bloemaert or Pieter Fransz. de Grebber could count on a steady stream of commissions from his co-religionists for the adornment of the numerous semi-clandestine churches and house chapels. Protestant churches too generated not insignificant demand for painted decorations of all kinds.

Private patronage: The most widespread form of private patronage was the ordering of portraits and copies of portraits. This specialty accounted for as much as twenty percent of the total production of paintings at various junctures in the seventeenth century. By its nature, portraiture demanded a personal relationship between patron and painter.

In sum: patronage of one kind or another was enjoyed by most if not all Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The payment for such work was normally higher, sometimes astronomically so, than what could be earned in the trade.



2. RETAIL SALES

Studio sales: This relationship lies at the heart of the traditional image of the Dutch painter as a craftsman-retailer who produced at his own risk and sold his work to the public from a shop. It is also the most elusive. Montias writes of the varieties of sales outlets in Delft: "Examples of all these types of transactions can [...] be documented with one important exception: I have not found a single reference in a contemporary document to an individual who visited a painter's atelier and bought a painting in cash." [5] It would seem as though few if any Dutch painters held shop exclusively in their own work. Any artist who sold paintings from stock over the counter was most likely dealing in the work of others as well as himself. Portraitists would have a strong incentive to keep shops of this kind, in order to interest sitters in the purchase of other work. In this way private patronage overlapped retail sales.



3. SALES TO MIDDLEMEN

High-class dealers: The boundary between court patronage and sales via high-class dealers was often vague or beside the point. The intermediary functions of Pieter Isaacsz. and Simon de Passe for the Danish court, Johannes de Renialme for that of Brandenburg, and Michel le Blon for the Swedish crown could encompass court employment and contract work as well as individual commissions and purchase of existing work. Each of the artistically active courts of Europe was served by one or more agents who scoured the Dutch market on their behalf, either as court employees or free agents.

Gentleman-dealers: The quintessential gentleman-dealer of the mid-seventeenth century is the Amsterdamer Maerten Kretzer (1598-1670). Between 1630 and 1650, Kretzer built up a collection consisting mainly of work by living Netherlandish masters which he sold at auction in 1650. In 1645 he hired the services of the still-life painter Pieter van den Bosch for a period of one year, for the handsome sum of 1200 guilders. In 1650 we find two paintings by van den Bosch on offer by Johannes de Renialme to the Great Elector of Brandenburg, who already owned two others. In view of the other connections between Kretzer and de Renialme, it is reasonable to assume that these works were the fruit of van den Bosch's contract period with his patron. [6]

Gentleman-dealers also needed the lower reaches of the market in order to be able to practice effective patronage. In 1642, during a heated debate in Haarlem concerning the attempt of the township and the guild to further regulate and curb public auctions, a group of artist-entrepreneurs protested vigorously. One of their arguments was that "this will force various art-lovers ["liefhebbers"] who (in order to encourage beginning artists in their art) now purchase most of their work, to keep their hands in their pockets. Otherwise they will have no way of disposing of the pieces they buy." [7] In other words, an indeterminate number of works that to the eye of the world emerged on the market as impersonal offerings on the sales block actually came into being through highly personal agreements, sometimes amounting to virtual indentured slavery, between a patron and a painter.

Trade dealers: In all the art centers of the Netherlands, we encounter entrepreneurs involved in buying and selling art. Unfortunately, no firm records have been preserved in the northern Netherlands, such as those of the van Immerseel and Goetkint dealerships of Antwerp. [8] Our information concerning dealers' activities have to be reconstructed from traces of individual transactions. One of the major Amsterdam dealers from the 1620s on, Hendrick Uylenburgh (1587-1661), is recorded as having been active in an extremely broad range of art-related activities, from selling his own paintings to publishing etchings by others to cleaning and varnishing paintings. [9] The most active trade was practiced in the work of artists with close ties to the dealer. Younger artists lived in with Uylenburgh at various time. Among them were high-fliers like Rembrandt and Govert Flinck. Uylenburgh maintained excellent contacts with the city authorities which he used to bring in commissions for his artist partners.

Many if not most dealers were themselves artists. The majority of artists worked in other capacities in the course of their careers, and few painters did not at one time or another deal in the work of colleagues.

Agentsabroad: The Dutch commercial empire sprawled over the seventeenth-century world. Wherever the Dutch traded, resident or visiting agents were active, working the local market for what it was worth. It occasionally happened that a trader or agent himself became a major figure on the local cultural scene. This was the case with the Flemish merchant Gaspar Roomer (d. 1674), who "was held to be the richest man in Naples...; his collection of paintings was certainly the largest in the city." [10] The Dutch painters represented in his collection could count on orders from the Neapolitans who followed Roomer's eagerly sought advice. In Venice, the Netherlandish merchants Daniel Nijs, Lucas van Uffelen and Jan Nicquet played similar roles. [11]

Licensed galleries: In the larger cities we occasionally encounter commercial showrooms, such as that which operated for a while in the Ridderzaal in The Hague. However, mentions of such venues are few and far between. No Dutch city ever maintained a central market for art like the Antwerp pand.

Non-branch sales points: Many inventories of shopkeepers in areas related to painting contain stocks of paintings, usually more than one per master. The trades in which this occurs frequently are framemakers, painters' supply stores and bookshops. There are also regular indications of commerce in art at taverns, breweries and bakeries.



4. SALES ON CONSIGNMENT

Guild exhibitions: As a corrective to its primary role as monitor, the guild also promoted an authorized sales channel of its own. In many cities, the painters' guild maintained on its premises a showcase for the work of its members: at least one painting by each member, on sale to the public, with the stipulation that the painter replace sold items. Far from storming the gates to take advantage of this opportunity, guild members had to be badgered into complying. In 1644 the Utrecht town council sentenced any painter who had not delivered an autograph work within three months to a fine of ten stuivers a week. [12] onsignment arrangements may well have been effectuated in many other of the described channels as well.



5. AUCTIONS

Licensed auctions: Every city had its own variation on auction practice. For Amsterdam, I.H. van Eeghen distinguished between executorial sales conducted by the town hall concierge and sales by the beadle of the orphans' court. [13] The latter functionary was licensed to hold all sales other than executorial ones. The auctions could take place on the street in front of the house of the owner (or testator) of the goods or the auctioneer's house, but for important sales a hall would be rented in a tavern or other public accommodation. Montias reports for Delft on the sales conducted by the town auctioneer or venduemeester once a week. [14] In The Hague the burgomasters allowed the Confrérie of painters to hold a yearly six-day art sale. [15] For the valuation of paintings in licensed sales, and sometimes for the organization of a sale, the guild of St. Luke would be called in. The guild was in any case vitally interested in the goings-on in the salesrooms. The hammer prices at public auctions had immediate effect on the value of all the art in the market at that moment, and the guild had a strong interest in shoring up those prices. The quality of work at auction sales was also a major determinant for the image of art in the market at any given moment. Inferior work sold at inflated prices was just as bad as excellent work going under its worth. [16]

The interest of the guild in regulating auctions did not always coincide with the desires of its members. When an individual painter was in need of money, one of the surest ways of raising it would be to sell existing stock at auction. However, this is exactly the possibility that was the greatest source of worry for the guild. Just as the guilds exerted all their influence to contain the open-air markets, so it battled for control over public sales of art. In every city of the Republic where art was traded on any scale, we encounter evidence of ongoing, bitter struggles between the township, the painters' guild and dissident individuals or groups over the conditions for public auctions. n Amsterdam, artists who held voluntary sales were never again allowed to practice as a master in the city.

Unlicensed auctions or falsely accredited goods in licensed auctions: A painter selling his work at auction cannot have expected it to fetch as high a price as he would get from a dealer. Most of the buyers in the hall were dealers, and they would certainly not pay more at a public sale, with all the risks and costs this involved, than they would by private treaty. Nonetheless, the high likelihood of finding a buyer at a public sale was a powerful magnet. Artists were constantly seeking ways of getting their works onto the block, by hook or by crook. Of all the bones of contention in the documents, this is the one most frequently encountered. The most common dodge was to insert one's paintings into a legitimate sale and share the proceeds with the corrupt auctioneer. This practice led to restrictions such as that adopted by The Hague, where in 1626 the auctioneer of the orphans' court was forbidden from holding sales outside his own house; he was also required to submit to the guild a list of all paintings that did not come from estates or bankruptcies.

Desperation could drive artists to practices that Floerke calls the "Gipfel der Raffiniertheit," the ultimate cleverness of faking a complete bankruptcy sale, in the name of a straw man, in order to sell one's art at auction. [17] Artists were known to bribe merchants into sending them fake invoices they could not pay, in order to claim hardship and obtain a license for a sale.

When access to legitimate vendues was blocked, there was always a circuit of unaccredited auctions. Typically, these would be held in taverns outside the jurisdiction of the municipality where the guild was established. This led to the establishment of not insignificant centers for trade in art in places like Heemstede, outside Haarlem, Valkenburg outside The Hague and Wijk bij Duurstede outside Utrecht. The rigor or lack of it exercised by the authorities in the big cities also was an element in the competition between the large centers. When Amsterdam stiffened its conditions for public sales in mid-century, this benefitted the volume of auctions in The Hague.



6. RAFFLES AND LOTTERIES

Some of the various systems used in the Netherlands for raffles and lotteries allowed the use of art works as prizes. [18] When the event was organized independently, such works might be purchased for the occasion by the organizers, usually a charity or a government body. However, the popularity of this medium, like the public auction, encouraged artists, often in a consortium, to hold lotteries in which all the prizes consisted of paintings. This too was a heavily disputed area, subject to constant repression by the guilds. In the analysis of Neil De Marchi, the authorities tended to see the demand for art as a constant, so that lotteries cut in on and undermined more conventional sales channels. Those in favor of lotteries would argue that since the main appeal of lotteries lay in the excitement of a gamble (or the free meal for buyers of lots), art distributed through this method augmented the existing market and did not displace it. [19] De Marchi's conclusion that the "dissenters successfully used lotteries to show that demand can be engendered" might be too sanguine. A suspicious feature in several lotteries is that prizes were won by the organizers themselves or their family members. Montias reports of an auction held in Delft in 1614 that "eleven out of the thirty prizes accrued to 'insiders'": the organizer, Willem Jansz. Decker, his father Jan Willemsz. and the responsible notary. [20] At an auction organized by Jan Miense Molenaer in Haarlem in 1636, the artist's mother won the grand prize. [21]



7. OPEN-AIR SALES

The yearly market, the kermis and street peddling: Stands in the marketplace were more likely to be financed and manned by professional middlemen than by individual painters. Peddling was the illegal equivalent of the market. See also above.

Dealers in second-hand goods: At the lowest end of the scale are the dealers, mainly women, in second-hand household goods. While no painter would gladly take direct recourse to this outlet, the prices asked for paintings by the uytdraegsters, as they were called, surely had influence on the health of the trade in general. Weaknesses were apt to show themselves here, in the form of excess supply and a falling away of the market, before they affected more affluent areas of the market.



8. BARTER

If the records concerning a given artist are extensive enough, they are bound to contain evidence of barter. Art was exchanged for any and all other goods, up to one recorded swap of six paintings for a garden. Concerning this tactic, Montias is justified in saying that it demonstrates that "paintings were relatively liquid valuables at the time, perhaps because standards of quality were fairly uniform among large groups of people...." [22] They also demonstrate the inadequacy of the other channels described here to work away the production of paintings.



9. (TEMPORARY) EXPATRIATION

Though not exactly a channel on its own, leaving the country was almost always an option to Dutch painters. Elsewhere in Europe many of the above sales opportunities were available to them, with less competition than at home. The Dutch presence on the Italian scene is a well-known feature of the seventeenth-century art world. In the field of landscape painting the Dutch and Flemings exercised a virtual stranglehold on supply. The few Italian painters of landscape tended to work in the style of Paul Bril or to take their training from a Netherlander. The same is true, to a somewhat lesser degree, of genre painting, or bambocciate, which was synonymous with the Haarlemer Pieter van Laer and his school. Nearly all the Dutch painters of recognized standing who worked in Italy eventually returned to the Netherlands.

If the Dutch were a conspicuous presence in Italy, in Northern Europe they were so omnipresent as to be nearly part of the scenery. Traveling to France was easier, and in the course of the century it became a more frequent destination than Italy. Of all the visits abroad by Dutch artists reported by Horst Gerson, the largest number, following Rome, were to London. [23] In Scotland, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, Dutch and Flemish painters had the market virtually to themselves until in the course of the eighteenth century their native pupils began to found local schools. This was only marginally less true of Germany. In all, career possibilities for Dutch painters outside the country seem to have been wide open, dependent only on the adventurousness of the artist and his access to an agent, patron or middleman to smoothe his way at the start.

Not all of these outlets were available to a given painter at each moment in his career. Normally speaking, a painter would be locked into a single selling arrangement or a limited array of them. The benefit of trusted relations, old habits or contrariwise an irrepressible urge to try out new possibilities will have determined the behavior of individual artists. The market as a whole could favor particular outlets at certain times and places. Nonetheless, it makes sense to compare them graphically, since a given master could maneuver himself into specific directions.

As criteria for the comparison, I have chosen four major variables: price, volume, flexibility and prestige. Under flexibility, I understand the ability of the painter to address the given channel at will. Prestige is more immaterial than the others, but it is certainly as significant. High status would form an incentive to a painter to continue working even when demand for his work declined. The prestige of his production would also affect continuity. As the norm for each of these criteria, I have taken sales to a trade dealer or a colleague: retail sales in relatively high volume, at a discount, to partners who need to buy in order to stay in business. For each of the other channels, I have indicated whether the given variable is higher or lower in value than an ongoing relation with a dealer would be. The value is based on general indications, not on objective measurements. (Table I.)

The multiplicity of sales channels, criss-crossing and interfering with each other, is an indication of a fully developed market, capable of distributing wares to large segments of the Dutch and European population. It is also a signal of saturation and of the chronic need to hustle in order to make a living. Montias's remark that "artists in Delft faced a competitive, diversified market for their output" is valid for all the art centers of the Republic. [24] Nonetheless, when all the variables - price, volume, flexibility and prestige - were in conjunction, the results could be spectacular. Between 1632 and 1635, Rembrandt enjoyed this rare state of affairs. Working in a booming Amsterdam market which greatly valued him, with the prestigious patronage of the house of Orange on his record, he was able to expand his production of high-paying portrait commissions at will. This turned him into a wealthy man. On the whole, however, painters were the victims rather than the masters of circumstance. This is certainly true of Rembrandt later in life, when demand for his work fell and he had to take recourse to a series of licensed auctions, with low revenues and disastrous effects on his subsequent freedom.

Our overview of sales outlets for paintings does not exhaust the sources of income for individual painters. Virtually all painters supplemented sales by training apprentices; a few gave art lessons to amateurs. It was very common for painters to have auxiliary professions on which they could fall back when sales were slack. One problem with this is that the first trade to which they were likely to resort - art dealing - also suffered at such times. Moreover, art dealing between artists was most likely to be conducted, as the Dutch phrase has it, with closed purses - trading one's own paintings for the work of a colleague in order to diversify one's wares.

Of the outlets that offered a painter greater flexibility than sales to a dealer, two were legal and held the promise of higher prices: expatriation and holding raffles. Both demanded exceptional personal commitment, investment and risk, and were therefore not for everyone. For most painters, excluding the high-fliers, the ability to earn a living wage from art depended on a combination of channels:





Verkaufsweg


Preis-

niveau


Umfang


Flexibilität


Prestige


Kommentar


Mäzenatentum


Hof


++


-


--


++


erstrebenswert, schwer zu erlangen, Fürsprecher nötig


Regierung


++


-


--


++


wie oben


Kirche / Korpo-rationen


+


-


-


+


erreichbar durch Kontakte


Privat


+


-


-


+


anspruchsvoll, unruhiger Markt, gut bezahlt, Vorschuß möglich


Einzelhandel


Atelier-

verkäufe


+


-


-


+


nebensächlich; innerhalb einer Galerie, in der auch Werke anderer Künstler verkauft werden


Groß- und Zwischen-

händler


gehobener Handel / "Gentleman"-Händler


+


-


-


+


wichtiger Weg für eine kleine Gruppe


gewerblicher Handel / Kollegen


0


0


0


0


'hält den Schornstein am rauchen'


Agenten im Ausland


-


-


0


+


zusätzliche Verkäufe, höhere Kosten und Risiken


genehmigte Galerien


+


-


-


+


prestigeträchtige Orte, jedoch selten und weit auseinander


verwandtes Gewerbe (z.B. Rahmenhandel)


+


-


-


0


zusätzliches Einkommen, oder eher für Gebrauchtwaren


nicht verwandt-es Gewerbe (z.B. Kneipen)


0


-


-


-


wie oben


Kommissions-

aufträge


Verkäufe durch die Gilden


0


-


-


0


zu wenig lukrativ


Auktionen


genehmigte Auktionen


-


-


-


-


sicherten niedriges Einkommen, schwer zu arrangieren


nicht geneh-migte Auktionen


--


-


+


-


eine Art letzter Ausweg, riskant und subversiv


Verlosung


Verlosung / Lotterie


+


-


+


0


attraktiver Handelsweg für Künster-Unternehmer


Verkäufe unter freuem Himmel


genehmigte Märkte


+


0


-


0


gute Tradition, verläßlich, aber zeitlich begrenzt


nicht geneh-migter Handel


0


-


+


--


wenig riskanter Weg, in kleinem Umfang schnelles Geld zu machen


Second-hand


--


-


+


--


ein letzter Ausweg


Tauschhandel


Tauschhandel


+


-


-


0


attraktiv, vom Zufall abhängig


in die Fremde gehen


(zeitweilige) Auslands-aufenthalte


+


0


++


0


die Kirschen sind süßer, aber das Risiko ist höher


II. SIZE

In 1987 Ad van der Woude shook up specialists in Dutch painting with an estimate of the number of paintings produced in the Golden Age. He based his calculation on figures from Thera Wijsenbeek-Olthuis's book on Delft households in the eighteenth century. [26] After correcting for this difference, van der Woude arrives at a total estimate of about 18 million paintings. That is for "the number of paintings present in households" in the province of Holland between 1580 and 1800.

This figure includes a certain amount of duplication. Some paintings occur in more than one inventory, having been passed on from generation to generation. Since the Wijsenbeek-Olthuis figures show a decline in the number of paintings in households of about fifty percent per generation ("i.e. after four changes of generations: 100> 50> 25> 12?> 6?") van der Woude concludes that the production of paintings necessary to achieve the estimated ownership figures amounts to about nine million paintings. At least two-thirds of these will have to have been produced before 1700, providing a low figure for the production of paintings between 1580 and 1700 of about six million works, or some 50,000 per year.

Since the number of foreign painters among the identified names in Dutch collections is negligible, we may assume that nearly all of these works were made in the Republic. Using Montias's figures for the number of painters working in Delft, in relation to the population as a whole, van der Woude arrives for the province of Holland at an average working population of about 480 painters. This implies a rate of production per painter of about two paintings per week, a figure that van der Woude is able to defend on the basis of incidental documents. The number of two paintings a week recurs in several of his sources: in 1615 the highly skilled seascape specialist Jan Porcellis contracted to deliver forty paintings in twenty weeks; and pupils skilled in making copies were also said to be able to turn out two paintings a week.

Support for van der Woude's calculations has been provided by Michael Montias, based on his estimate of the earnings of painters and the prices of paintings. Master painters, he argues, needed to earn some 25 to 30 guilders a week from their work. [27] With paintings fetching an average price of about 15 guilders, this calculation too boils down to a rate of two paintings a week.

It is not likely that these first attempts at quantification, which are based on extrapolation from a narrow statistical base, are exactly on target. They have evoked shocked and bitter responses from some. The art dealer Saam Nystad countered with information from current catalogue raisonnés of fifty painters, which average out at 4.26 paintings a year, nearly 25 times less than the van der Woude-Montias-tempo. Nystad refuses to credit the high rate of loss projected by van der Woude. He also objects to the compilation of figures concerning paintings in general, when the interest of posterity is in the small portion of those works which can be considered art. [28] In all, however, the evidence seems strongly to favor the estimates of van der Woude and Montias. The high rates of production and astronomical levels of production they posit make sense and help explain other phenomena. The explosion of specialties in the early decades of the seventeenth century can be seen as a function of the increased competitition among painters. The repeated efforts of the guild to build dams around the market and the auctions are also more readily explained.

The average figures do not tell the whole story, however. A far more dramatic situation is revealed by a chronological analysis of the numbers of painters active in the course of the seventeenth century. This shows a major rise until the generation born in the 1630s, followed by a precipitous decline thereafter. The large number of painters active from 1600 to 1660 were responsible for what Bok calls "structural overproduction." Given the long life of a painting, this created a growing reservoir of goods hanging over the market. The Dutch art market was an accident waiting to happen. A sure indication that the accident did occur is provided by Montias's figure concerning the relative proportion of works by dead and living artists in Amsterdam collections. The share of living masters began to shrink around 1640, collapsing by the end of the century from a highpoint of over 65 percent to a nadir of under twenty. [29] This curve recurs both in lists of painters represented in present-day museums and in purely archival lists, including many artists no works by whom are known. (Chart 1.) As Jan de Vries was the first to observe: "The ... distribution reveals a great concentration of activity in the period 1575-1639. The number of painters born after 1640 does not gradually decline; it falls abruptly to a much lower level." [30] The premise of Rosenberg and Slive that the numbers of painters active after the 1660s remained the same does not stand up to scrutiny. Henceforth, we must consider the end of the Golden Age primarily in terms of quantity, the loss of the critical mass of working talent needed to constitute a force in the art world. Until about our year of 1648, for over half a century Dutch parents had considered painting a promising profession for their children and had apprenticed them in ever-growing numbers to painters. They stopped doing this just as the peace was proclaimed, with its much-vaunted promise of a flourishing of the arts. The flourish was played on the drums of the Eighty Years War rather than blown on the trumpets of the heralds of peace.



III. ART AND THE END OF WAR

The fact that the world of Dutch painting rose and fell in step with the war presents us with a counter-example to the common cliché, current in 1648 as in so many other times, that art thrives in peace and languishes in war. The case deserves to be taken seriously for what it can teach us about that too-easy assumption.

Having started with a summary of the historical factors which are said to have affected the arts at the beginning of the Eighty Years War, let us now ask which of those may have been operative at its end. Iconoclasm did not recur, and Calvinist antagonism to art in the church does not seem to have had a structural influence on the art world. Immigration remained incidental after the 1580s. Brabant artists who were brought north after the Peace came as visitors, not as refugees. Nor was there a reverse movement of return to the south. The established Catholic church was no more hospitable to dissidents in 1650 than it was in 1580. Burgher and civic patronage in the northern Netherlands does not seem to have undergone marked changes in the course of the century. The level of portrait commissions, if that may be taken as an index for this phenomenon, remained fairly steady. Court patronage from The Hague collapsed after Huis ten Bosch, but new opportunities in Germany more than made up for it. At mid-century the German origins of the Nassaus and of Amalia von Solms came into play more obviously and significantly than before.

Our review of art-market channels does not allow us at this stage to follow the intensity of traffic in each route from decade to decade. However, it reveals a complex adaptive system in which mechanisms of various kinds can take over from others under changing circumstances. In themselves, the various channels for art sales will not have been responsible for large changes in volume. Every facility available, however effective in principle, was built into a system of checks and balances which prevented it from growing beyond certain limits. It seems reasonable to expect that the full panoply of market options was in play only during the period of maximum production, and that many of them lost their significance after around 1660. The order in which these mechanisms kicked in and died off will have been influenced by outside factors, but this is a fairly fortuitous development.

That leaves us without a ready explanation for the striking simultaneity of the end of the Eighty Years War and the peaking of the Golden Age. The immediate economic factors we identified for the decline in the art market around 1650 have little to do with the Trêves: the crunch on the artisan class in 1649-50 was the result of bad weather and that on traders in 1652-54 of long-term competition with England. They took place at a moment when a constantly growing population of painters had been producing at full speed for two generations. As Marten Jan Bok has argued, the sudden drop can be explained by this combination of causes: the mass of durable paintings that were in the market and the natural inclination of people with money to stop spending it on luxuries in times of crisis. [31]

Part of this development can be related to the Eighty Years War, though only indirectly. The structural overproduction of paintings from the 1620s on was made possible by the expansive Dutch commercial and political stance, backed up by force of arms on land and sea. The existence of a great volume of art made during the war was a key factor in the weakening of the market when it ended. Throughout, however, the market for paintings in the seventeenth century was a buyer's market. After 1650, supply so exceeded demand that no painter without special ties of protection was certain of his livelihood.

If the immediate effects of the Treaty of Münster on the arts in Holland remain vague, there is a linkage on a larger time scale which might prove more to the point. In his discussion of the long-term effects of the peace, Ad van der Woude observes that the Dutch reconciliation with Spain in 1648 betrayed the spirit - and even the letter - of its alliance with a major trade partner, France. This led to an estrangement that cost both partners dear. Especially the Netherlands. One of the trades which was strongly transformed - decimated, in fact - was the art trade.

The bad luck of the painters was the good fortune of collectors, who were able to acquire top-quality art for very affordable prices. Seldom in history have people of normal means been able to fill their houses with art of such high standing. The painters of Holland produced a vast proliferation of images, themes and specialties for all ranges of the European market and for all price classes. Especially after 1648, the mounting mutual competition of such a large group of well-trained artists inspired extraordinary efforts that led to the creation of new standards for art throughout Europe and conquered for Holland a permanent place in world culture long after Dutch maritime, military and economic ascendancy had sunk away to historical curiosities.




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FOOTNOTES

This paper benefitted considerably from the comments on advance drafts by Marten Jan Bok, Neil De Marchi and Filip Vermeylen, to whom I am very grateful.

1. Rosenberg/Slive/ter Kuile 1966.

2. Israel 1995.

3. For surveys that follow some of the same ground as the following section, see Montias 1982, pp. 183-219, and Bok/Schwartz 1991.

4. Bok 1984.

5. Montias 1982, p. 194.

6. On Kretzer, see Jong 1980, p. 10.

7. Miedema 1980, I, p. 251.

8. Marchi/Miegroet 1994, pp. 451-464; Footnote 12 promises a publication of material from the Antwerp archives on these issues.

9. Schwartz 1985, p. 142, sums up eleven distinct activities.

10. Haskell 1971, pp. 205-208.

11. Logan 1991, pp. 139-145.

12. Floerke 1972, pp. 65-66.

13. Eeghen 1969, pp. 74-88.

14. Montias 1982, pp. 202-206.

15. Hoogewerff 1947, p. 194.

16. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Marchi 1995.

17. Floerke 1972, p. 42.

18. All the available evidence is gathered by Kosse 1992. Although Kosse only found documentation concerning twelve lotteries, she nonetheless concludes: "From the fact that the total appraised value of seven described lotteries of paintings from the first half of the seventeenth century amounted to nearly seventeen thousand guilders, we may assume that we are dealing with a phenomenon whose significance for the art market was more than negligible. All the more so since we very probably know only the tip of the iceberg" (p. 66).

19. Marchi 1995, pp. 214-217.

20. Montias 1982, p. 200. Cited by Kosse 1992, p. 32.

21. Bredius 1915, p. 9.

22. Montias 1982, pp. 205-206.

23. Gerson 1942. Using the index for a quick indication of the frequency of visits, one finds 126 references to Rome, 57 to London, 27 to Antwerp, 18 to Paris, 17 to Hamburg, 15 to Frankfurt, 14 to Berlin, 13 to Copenhagen and so forth.

24. Montias 1982, p. 218.

25. For examples of this function in the Antwerp export trade, see a forthcoming article by Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet (Marchi/Miegroet 1998).

26. Woude 1991. The text is the revised version of a lecture given by van der Woude during a conference at the Getty Center on 30 April-2 May 1987. For the source of van der Woude's figures, see Wijsenbeek-Olthuis 1987.

27. Montias 1990, pp. 64-67.

28. Nystad 1992, Montias 1993. For a reflection on this question which sides more with van der Woude than with Nystad, see Schwartz 1996.

29. Bok 1994, pp. 120-127. The figures are from Montias's database of Amsterdam inventories.

30. Vries, 1991, p. 258. De Vries' statement is based on two compendia - Peter Sutton's Dutch art in America and Christopher Wright's Paintings in Dutch museums - and on Michael Montias's analysis of the ratio between paintings by old and contemporaneous masters in Amsterdam collections. The same picture is confirmed by Montias's lists of Amsterdam painters, Marten Jan Bok's of artists in Utrecht and an analysis by the present author of the painters in the Union List of Artist's Names, as represented in Chart 1. According to de Vries (p. 261), curves drawn on the basis of masters now represented in museums "exaggerate this decline, but it is certainly real."

31. Bok 1994, pp.120-127.

32. Woude 1997, p. 115.



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