Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art 9789048550647

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Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age Editorial Board: Frans Blom, University of Amsterdam Michiel van Groesen, Leiden University Geert H. Janssen, University of Amsterdam Elmer E.P. Kolfin, University of Amsterdam Nelleke Moser, VU University Amsterdam Henk van Nierop, University of Amsterdam Claartje Rasterhoff, University of Amsterdam Emile Schrijver, University of Amsterdam Thijs Weststeijn, University of Amsterdam Advisory Board: H. Perry Chapman, University of Delaware Harold J. Cook, Brown University Benjamin J. Kaplan, University College London Orsolya Réthelyi, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest Claudia Swan, Northwestern University

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

Michael Zell

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 51.5 × 45.5 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 642 9 e-isbn 978 90 4855 064 7 doi 10.5117/9789463726429 nur 694 © M. Zell / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

In loving memory of my mother, Carole Zell



Table of Contents

Illustrations

9

Acknowledgments

27

Introduction

29

1. The Gift and Art in Early Modernity

41

2. Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic

97

3. Rembrandt’s Art as Gift

221

4. Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and Landscape Representation

305

5. For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift

369

Conclusion

439

Bibliography

443

Index

487

Illustrations 1.

Salvator Rosa, Heroic Battle, 1652-1664. Oil on canvas, 241 × 351 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images. 50 2. Titian, Pardo Venus (Jupiter and Antiope), 1551. Oil on canvas. 196 × 385 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images. 52 3. Titian, Charles V with a Dog, 1533. Oil on canvas, 192 × 111 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images. 53 4. Giambologna, Samson Slaying a Philistine, ca. 1562. Marble, 209.9 cm high. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: V & A Images, London / Art Resource, ny.54 5. Woven by Jan Raes I after designs by Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumph of the Eucharist, ca. 1625-1633. Wool and silk, 490 × 750 cm. Monasterio de las Descalzas, Madrid. Photo: Monasterio de las Descalzas, 55 Madrid / Bridgeman Images. 6. Peter Paul Rubens, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), 1629-1630. Oil on canvas, 203.6 × 298 cm. National Gallery, London. 56 Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 7. Ludovico Cigoli, Ecce Homo, 1607. Oil on canvas, 175 × 135 cm. Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Photo: Palazzo Pitti, Florence / Bridgeman Images.58 8. Michiel van Mierevelt, Dudley Carleton, Viscount Dorchester, ca. 1620. Oil on panel. 63. 5 × 50.2 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London / Art Resource, ny.61 9. Peter Paul Rubens. Daniel in the Lions’ Den, ca. 1614-1616. Oil on canvas, 224.2 × 330.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 63 Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. 10. Rembrandt van Rijn (?), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (SelfPortrait), 1629-1631. Oil on canvas, 69.7 × 57 cm. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. Photo: Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool / Bridgeman Images. 65 11. Jan Lievens, An Old Woman Called ‘The Artist’s Mother’, ca. 1627-1629. Oil on panel, 61.3 × 47.4 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 66 12. Jan Lievens, Sir Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancrum, 1654. Oil on canvas, 62.2 × 51.4 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Accepted by HM Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax and Allocated to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2010. 67

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13. Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1650. Oil on canvas, 98 × 74 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images. 14. Daniël Seghers and Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Garland of Flowers Surrounding a Sculpture of the Virgin Mary, 1645. Oil on canvas, 151 × 122. 7 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. 15. Hans Coenraad van Brechtel (copies after). Painter’s Palette of Daniël Seghers, Five Brush-Holders, and Painter’s Maulstick. Gilded copper, 23.5 × 17.5 cm (palette); 22.5 cm length (brush-holders); 88 × 1.2 cm (maulstick). Antwerp City Collection, Rubenshuis. Photo: Michel Wuyts. 16. Orazio Gentileschi, The Annunciation, 1621-1623. Oil on canvas, 289 × 198 cm. Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Photo © Musei Reali di Torino / Paolo Robino / Bridgeman Images. 17. Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, 1633. Oil on canvas, 242 × 281 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images. 18. Paulus Pontius after Peter Paul Rubens, Allegorical Portrait of Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke Olivares, ca. 1625. Engraving, 61.3 × 44.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 19. Quentin Metsys, Desiderius Erasmus, 1517. Oil on panel, 50.5 × 45.2 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 20. Quentin Metsys, Pieter Gillis, 1517. Oil on panel, 76.6 × 52.2 cm. © Longford Castle, England. Photo: Longford Castle Collection. 21. Michelangelo, Archers Shooting at a Herm, ca. 1530. Red chalk (two shades) on paper, 21.9 × 32.3 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 22. Michelangelo, Cleopatra, 1530-1534. Black chalk on paper, 23.2 × 18. 2 cm. Casa Buonarotti, Florence. Photo © Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Bridgeman Images. 23. Michelangelo, Pietà, 1540. Black chalk on paper, 28.9 × 18. 9 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, ma / Bridgeman Images. 24. Titian and Workshop, Madonna and Child in a Landscape with Tobias and the Angel, ca. 1535-1540. Oil on panel, 85.2 × 120.3 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 25. Veronese and Workshop, The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1562-1569. Oil on canvas, 148.0 × 199.5 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

74 76

77 80 81 82 84 85 87 88 89

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105

Illustrations 

26. Giulio Romano, Portrait of Margherita Paleologo, ca. 1531. Oil on panel, 115.3 × 91 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 106 27. Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527. Oil on canvas, 104.3 × 116.8 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 107 28. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon, 1624. Oil on canvas, 112.4 × 154.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ma. Frances Welch Fund / Bridgeman Images. 108 29. Pieter Saenredam, Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, Haarlem (The ‘Groote Kerk’), 1648. Oil on panel, 174.8 × 143.6 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased by Private Treaty with the Aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund (William Leng Bequest) and the Pilgrim Trust, 1982. 109 30. Gerrit Dou, The Young Mother, 1658. Oil on panel, 73.7 × 55.5 cm. 110 Mauritshuis, The Hague. 31. Gerrit Dou, The Tooth Puller, ca. 1630-1635. Oil on panel, 32 × 26 cm. 111 Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images. 32. Adam Elsheimer, The Mocking of Ceres, ca. 1608. Oil on copper, coated with silver, 29. 1 × 24 cm. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Gift of Alfred and Isabel 112 Bader, 2008-(51-004.03). 33. Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Right Inside Wing of the Altarpiece of St. John, ca. 1484. Tempera on panel, 175 × 139 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / De Agostini Picture Library / G. Nimatallah / Bridgeman Images. 116 34. Jan Gossaert, Adam and Eve, ca. 1520. Oil on panel, 169.2 × 112 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 117 35. Govert Flinck, Manius Curius Dentatus Rejecting the Gifts of the Shunamites, 1656. Oil on canvas, 485 × 377 cm. Royal Palace, Amsterdam. © Royal Palace Amsterdam Foundation. Photo: Tom Haartsen. 122 36. Ferdinand Bol, Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp, 1656. Oil on canvas, 485 × 350 cm. Royal Palace, Amsterdam. © Royal Palace Amsterdam Foundation. Photo: Tom Haartsen. 123 37. Jan Baptist Weenix, The Dutch Ambassador Jan Cunaeus on his Way to Isfahan, 1653-1659. Oil on canvas, 101 × 179 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.128

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38. Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer, 1668. Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 45.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images. 129 39. Bichitr, Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings, folio from the St. Petersburg Album, ca. 1615-1618. Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 18 × 25.3 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase – Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1942.15a.132 40. Joost Gerritsz, VOC Lantern, presented in 1643. Bronze, Nikko, Japan, 135 Toshogu Shrine. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Photo: Zairon. 41. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective Box with Interior of a Dutch House, ca. 1655-1660. Oil on panels. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery London / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images.136 42. Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, Battle of Gibraltar, 1622. Oil on canvas, 140 180 × 490 cm. Collection Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam. 43. Ludolf Backhuysen, The Port of Amsterdam, View of the IJ, 1666. Oil on canvas, 128 × 221 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris 140 / Bridgeman Images. 44. Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Woman, 1641. Oil on canvas, 272 × 165 cm. 145 John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark. 45. Albert Eckhout, Tupi Man, 1643. Oil on canvas, 272 × 163 cm. John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark. 146 46. Albert Eckhout, African Man, 1641. Oil on canvas, 273 × 167 cm. John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark. 147 47. Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Dance, ca. 1640. Oil on canvas, 172 × 295 cm. 148 John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark. 48. Frans Post, The Old Portuguese Fort of the Three Wise Kings (or Fort Ceulen), near the Rio Grande in Brazil, 1638. Oil on canvas, 62 × 95 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.148 49. Paulus Moreelse, Shepherd Boy with Flowers, 1627. Oil on panel 31.6 × 24.9 cm. Staatliches Museum Schwerin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliches Museum Schwerin / Hans Maertens / Art Resource, ny.151 50. Cornelis van Poelenburch, Banquet of the Gods, ca. 1627. Oil on panel, 36 × 69 cm. Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau. 152 51. Roelandt Savery, Paradise, 1626. Oil on panel, 80.5 × 137.6 cm. Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.152

Illustrations 

52. Reinier Nooms, View of Algiers, 1662-1668. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 110 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 154 53. Titian, Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo, ca. 1510. Oil on canvas, 81.2 × 66.3 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 156 54. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill, 1639. Etching and drypoint, 20.6 × 16.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 157 55. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640. Oil on canvas, 102 × 80 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National 158 Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 56. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. 159 Oil on canvas, 169.5 × 216.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. 57. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch (The Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq), 1642. Oil on canvas, 379.5 × 453.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 159 58. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild (The Syndics), 1662. Oil on canvas, 191.5 × 279 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. 160 59. Frans Hals, The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse, 1664. Oil on canvas, 170.5 × 249.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: René Gerritsen.160 60. Thomas de Keyser, Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk, 1627. Oil on panel, 92.4 × 69.3 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 161 61. Maerten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, 1532. Oil on panel, 168 × 235 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson.164 62. Samuel van Hoogstraten, A Trompe l’Oeil of Objects Attached to a Letter Rack, 1664. Oil on canvas, 45.5 × 57.5 cm. Dordrechts Museum, 167 Dordrecht. Photo: Museum of Dordrecht / Bridgeman Images. 63. Hendrick Goltzius, The Artist’s Emblem: Eer boven Gold (‘Honor above Gold’), ca. 1607, drawing from the album amicorum of Ernst Brinck van Harderwijk, fol. 256r. Pen and brown ink, 15 × 10 cm. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 170 64. Jan Lievens, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1640. Oil on canvas. 144.5 × 217.5 cm. Staatsgalerie in Neue Residenz, Bamberg. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatsgalerie in Neue Residenz, Bamberg / Art Resource, ny.172 65. Govert Flinck, Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom, ca. 1655. Oil on canvas, 113.9 × 101.8 cm. Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina. 174

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66. Ferdinand Bol, The Persian King Cyrus Returns the Treasure Looted from the Temple, 1669. Oil on canvas, 157 × 171 cm. Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam / on loan from the Protestantse Kerk, Amsterdam. Photo: Amsterdam Museum, Amsterdam. 176 67. Bartholomeus van der Helst, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Jan Both, and Jacob Duck, Portrait of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst, 1644. Oil on panel, 46 × 35 cm. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / on loan from a private collection. Photo: LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches 177 Landesmuseum, Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif. 68. Cornelis van Poelenburch, Portrait of Jan Both, 1648. Oil on copper, 16.5 × 13.5 cm. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / on loan from a private collection. Photo: LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif. 178 69. Jacques de Gheyn, A Soldier Shaping the Match between his Thumb and Forefinger, from the Marksmen series, Plate 41 in Wapenhandelinghe van roers musquetten ende spiessen (The Exercise of Arms), 1607. Engraving, 25.5 × 18.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 184 70. Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange, ca. 185 1613-1620. Oil on panel, 220.3 × 143.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 71. Jan Harmensz Muller after Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange, 1608. Engraving, 41.1 × 29.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.186 72. Jacob Matham after Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange-Nassau, 1610. Engraving, 4.1 × 28.9 cm. 187 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 73. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, View of Delft from the Northwest, ca. 1615. Oil on canvas, 71 × 162 cm. Collection Prinsenhof Delft. Photo: Tom Haartsen.188 74. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, View of Delft from the Southwest, 1615. Oil on canvas, 71 × 160 cm. Collection Prinsenhof Delft. Photo: Tom Haartsen. 188 75. Gerrit Pietersz, Mercury, ca. 1591-1593. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 24.3 × 19.5 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Buitenhof. 190 76. Hendrick Goltzius, Letter with a Bust of a Man, 1605. Pen and brown ink, 7.4 × 6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 191 77. Jan de Bray, Self-Portrait Playing Chess, 1661, drawing from Jacob Heyblocq’s album amicorum, fol. 249. Pen and ink. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 194

Illustrations 

78. David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life, 1624, drawing from Cornelis de Montigny de Glarges’s album amicorum, fol. 161. Pen and ink. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 194 79. Emanuel de Witte, Medusa, ca. 1635-1641. Graphite on parchment, autograph framing line in graphite, 15.2 × 11 cm. Accession no. 1999. 123.42. The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 195 80. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of a Friend of the Artist, ca. 1580. Pen in brown ink on vellum, diam. 13.7 x cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly. 197 Photo: Musée Condé, Chantilly / Bridgeman Images. 81. Hendrick Goltzius, Self-Portrait, inscribed: “Henricus Goltzius, Johani Engel / brecht Amicie ergo D. Dicavit,” 1605. Silverpoint on yellow-prepared vellum, 8.8 × 6.4 cm. The British Museum, London. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum. 198 82. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Giambologna, 1590-1591. Black and colored chalk, 37 × 30 cm. Teylers Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Teylers Museum.200 83. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Hans Bol, 1593. Engraving, 26.4 × 18 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 201 84. Hendrick Goltzius after Palma Giovane, St. Jerome, 1596. Engraving, 42.3 × 28 cm. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, ma. Accession no. 2011.637. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gift of Barbara Ketcham Wheaton. 202 85. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Jan Govertsen van der Aer, 1603. Oil on canvas, 82.7 × 107.5. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 203 Loan: P. & N. de Boer Foundation. Photo: Studio Tromp. 86. Rembrandt van Rijn, Satire on Art Criticism, 1644. Pen and brown ink, corrected with white, 15.5 × 20.1 cm. Robert Lehman Collection, 1975. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org. 226 87. Frans van Mieris the Elder, The Doctor’s Visit, 1667. Oil on panel, 44.5 × 31.1 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 230 88. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Ascension of Christ, 1636. Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 68.3 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich / Art Resource, ny.232 89. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Descent from the Cross, 1632-1633. Oil on panel, 90 × 65 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: Alte Pinakothek, Munich / Bridgeman Images. 233

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90. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Resurrection of Christ, ca. 1640-1641. Oil on canvas, 91.9 × 67 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich / Art Resource, ny.234 91. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1646. Oil on canvas, 97 × 71.3 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: Alte Pinakothek, Munich / Bridgeman Images. 236 92. Lucas van Leyden, The Beggars (Eulenspiegel), 1520. Etching and engraving, 17.5 × 14.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New 238 York. Photo: metmuseum.org. 93. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Blinding of Samson, 1636. Oil on canvas, 206 × 276 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. © Fine Art Images / Bridgeman Images. 241 94. Rembrandt van Rijn, Danaë, 1636 (reworked 1640s). Oil on canvas, 185 × 203 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: 242 The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg / Bridgeman Images. 95. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636. Etching, 243 10.4 × 9.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 96. Rembrandt van Rijn. Jan Uytenbogaert (The Goldweigher), 1639. Etching and drypoint, 25.1 × 23 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 246 97. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Maurits Huygens, 1632. Oil on panel, 31.1 × 24.5 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Photo: © Leonard de Selva / Bridgeman Images. 248 98. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Jacques de Gheyn III, 1632. Oil on panel, 29.9 × 24.9 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Photo: 248 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 99. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of an Old Man, 1634, drawing from Burchard Grossmann’s album amicorum (II), fol. 233r-v. Pen and brush and brown ink, 8.9 × 71 cm. Inscribed on verso: “Een vroom gemoet acht eer voor goet / Rembrandt / Amsterdam 1634.” Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 251 100. Rembrandt van Rijn, Simeon’s Song of Praise, 1661, drawing from Jacob Heyblocq’s album amicorum, fol. 61r. Pen and brush and brown ink and white body-color, 12 × 8.9 cm. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 253 101. Rembrandt van Rijn, Homer Reciting Verses, 1652, drawing from Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album, fol. 40r. Pen and brown ink, 26.5 × 19 cm. Six Collection, Amsterdam. Photo: Six Collection. 254 102. Rembrandt van Rijn, Minerva in her Study, 1652, drawing from Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album, fol. 42r. Pen and brush and brown ink, 26.5 × 19 cm. Six Collection, Amsterdam. Photo: Six Collection. 255

Illustrations 

103. Rembrandt van Rijn, Medea, or The Wedding of Jason and Creusa, 1648. Etching, 24 × 17.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 256 104. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Six, 1647. Etching, drypoint, and engraving, printed on Japan paper, 24.5 × 19.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 258 105. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Six, 1654. Oil on canvas, 112 × 102 cm. Six Collection, Amsterdam. Photo: Six Collection. 259 106. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Hundred Guilder Print (Christ Healing the Sick), ca. 1648. Etching and drypoint, first state, 28.2 × 39.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 261 107. Arent de Gelder, Portrait of a Collector with Rembrandt’s 100 Guilder Print (Self-Portrait?), after 1685. Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 64.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State 263 Hermitage Museum / Photo: Pavel Demidov. 108. Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Presented to the People, 1655. Drypoint with plate tone, printed on Japan paper, seventh state, 35.9 × 45.1 cm. 264 Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. 109. Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside Her, 1658. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 15.8 × 12.7 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Courtesy National 266 Gallery of Art, Washington. 110. Rembrandt van Rijn, Arnout Tholinx, ca. 1656. Etching, engraving, 267 and drypoint, 19.7 × 14.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 111. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait Etching at a Window, 1648. Etching and drypoint, 16 × 13 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 268 112. Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe), ca. 1657. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 15.5 × 20.4 cm. Rijks269 museum, Amsterdam. 113. Rembrandt van Rijn, Clement de Jonghe, 1651. Etching printed on 270 Japan paper, 20.5 × 16.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 114. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of an Elderly Man (Pieter de la Tombe?), 1667. Oil on canvas, 81.9 × 67.7 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. 271 115. Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Crucified between Two Thieves: The Three Crosses, 1653. Drypoint printed on vellum, second state, 38.1 × 43.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.272 116. Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint Francis Beneath a Tree Praying, 1657. Drypoint, printed with light plate tone on Japan paper, first state, 18 × 24.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 273 117. Frans van Mieris, In the Artist’s Studio, ca. 1655-1657. Oil on panel, 63.9 × 46.8 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden / Bridgeman Images. 274

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118. Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Haaringh, ca. 1655. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 19.6 × 15 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 276 119. Rembrandt van Rijn, Pieter Haaringh, 1655. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 19.6 × 14.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 277 120. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man with a Magnifying Glass (Pieter Haaringh?), ca. 1655. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 74.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org. 278 121. Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman with a Pink (Elizabeth Delft?), ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 74.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New 279 York. Photo: metmuseum.org. 122. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Antonides van der Linden, 1665. Etching, 282 drypoint, and burin, 17.3 × 10.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 123. Rembrandt van Rijn, Abraham Francen, ca. 1657. Etching, drypoint, and engraving, printed with plate tone on Japan paper, 15.8 × 21 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 283 124. Anthony van Dyck and an unidentified engraver, Paulus Pontius, from the Iconography, ca. 1627-1630. Etching and engraving, second state, 23.3 × 18.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 286 125. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremias de Decker, 1656. Oil on panel, 71 × 56 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg / Tarker / Bridgeman Images. 290 126. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, 1663. Oil on canvas, 82.5 × 65 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Photo: WallrafRichartz-Museum, Cologne / Bridgeman Images. 292 127. Arent de Gelder, Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, 1685. Oil on canvas, 141.5 × 167.3 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main / Ursula Edelmann / Art Resource, ny.293 128. Jan de Bisschop, Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk, from the South, ca. 1648-1671. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 9.8 × 15.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 311 129. Jan de Bisschop, Lane of the Huis ter Noot at The Hague, 1658. Pen and brown ink, brown wash and black chalk, 9.7 × 154 cm. Teylers Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Teylers Museum. 312 130. Constantijn Huygens the Younger (attributed to), Two Draftsmen at Zorgvliet. Pen and brown ink, brown wash over traces of graphite, 24.3 × 37.3 cm. Haags Gemeentearchief. Photo: Collectie Haags Gemeentearchief.312 131. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, View of the Waal with the Castle Zuilichem, 1671. Pen and pencil and brown ink, 9.4 × 16 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 313

Illustrations 

132. Abraham Rutgers, The Castle of Nijenrode on the Vecht, 1665. Pen and brown ink, brown wash over a sketch, 20.3 × 32.4 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. 314 133. Jan de Bisschop, Pelikaansbolwerk at Leiden (?). 1649. Pencil in brown and grey, black chalk, 8.8 × 15.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 316 134. Jan de Bisschop, Ruins of the Zaandpoort at Mechelen, 1649. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, black chalk, 9.5 × 15.3 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. 316 135. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, Bergen (Mons) from the Vicinity of Glin, 1675. Brown ink, with a partial framing line in graphite, on light tan antique laid paper, 12.5 × 19.3 cm. Accession no. 1979.64. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Frances L. Hofer. 317 Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 136. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, Landscape on the Outskirts of Bonn, 1673. Pen and brown ink, brush in brown and blue, 318 17 × 33.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 137. Valentijn Klotz, View of Ghent, 1674. Pen and brown ink, light grey 319 pencil, 9.1 × 15.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 138. Valentijn Klotz, Encampment near Nivelles, 1674. Pen and brown ink, light grey pencil, 8.2 × 13.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 319 139. Jacob Esselens, A View of Rye from Point Hill. Pen and brown ink with grey wash, over black chalk, 25 × 37 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge / Bridgeman Images. 320 140. Nicolaes van Beresteyn, Rider in a Forest, 1650. Etching, 19.8 × 21.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 321 141. Jan van Brosterhuysen, Landscape with Two Dead Fir Trees, ca. 1645. Etching, touched with grey wash, 9.7 × 10.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.322 142. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, View of Lembeek, 1675. Pen and brown ink, 10.8 × 16.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 325 143. Jacob van der Ulft after Jan de Bisschop, Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk seen from the Southeast, ca. 1660-1670. Pen and brush in brown ink, brown wash, 17.5 × 27.2 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Dietmar Katz / Art Resource, ny.325 144. Rembrandt van Rijn, Stormy Landscape, ca. 1638. Oil on panel, 52 × 72 cm. Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig. Photo: Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig © De A Picture Library / Art Resource, ny.327

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145. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bend in the Amstel near Kostverloren House, ca. 1650. Pen and brown ink and wash, white highlights on cartridge paper, 13.6 × 24.7 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images. 146. Rembrandt van Rijn, A Man sculling a Boat on the Bullewijk, with a View toward Ouderkerk, ca. 1650. Pen and ink with brown wash and white body color, 13.3 × 20 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images. 147. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Diemen, ca. 1650. Pen and brown ink, color washes, 10.4 × 18.5 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp. 148. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Sloten, ca. 1650. Pen and brown ink with wash on paper, 9.6 × 18 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images. 149. Rembrandt van Rijn, Houses on the Schinkelweg, ca. 1652. Brown ink on cream antique laid paper, prepared with grey wash, partial framing line in brown ink, 10 × 22.8 cm. Accession no. 1.2018.100. Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston, ma, Long-Term Loan. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 150. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Diemerdijk at Houtewael, ca. 1648-1649. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, white highlights (some washes in a later hand), 13.2 × 18.2 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam / Photo: Studio Tromp. 151. Claes Jansz Visscher, View of Houtewael, ca. 1607-1608. Brown ink on cream antique laid paper, framing lines in brown ink, 14.3 × 18.6 cm. Accession no. 1.2018.304. Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston, ma, Long-Term Loan. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College. 152. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with a Stone Bridge, ca. 1638. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 13.3 × 21.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Franck Raux © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource. 153. Rembrandt van Rijn, Cottage with White Paling among Trees, 1645. Quill and reed pen and brown ink, with brown wash and opaque white; later additions in greyish-mauve wash; framing line in brown ink, 17.1 × 25.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 154. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Haarlem with the Saxenburg Estate in the Foreground, ca. 1650-1651. Pen and brown ink, brown wash,

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328 329

329

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331

332 332

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155. 156.

157.

158. 159. 160.

161.

162.

163.

heightened with wash, 8.9 × 15.2 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (former Collection Koenigs) / Photo: Studio Tromp. 333 Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Diemen, ca. 1650-1652. Pen and brown ink, and wash on paper, 8.8 × 15.5 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: The Courtauld Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 334 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Banks of the Amstel River, Amsteldijk, near the Hamlet of Meerhuizen, with View towards Het Molentje, ca. 16481650. Pen and brush in brown, brown wash, white highlights (washes by a later hand), 14.6 × 26.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Tony Querrec © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.335 Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape Sketch with Bend of the Amstel River at Kostverloren, verso of View of Banks of the Amstel River, Amsteldijk, near the Hamlet of Meerhuizen, with View towards Het Molentje, ca. 1649-1650. Black chalk, inscriptions, 14.6 × 26.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Tony Querrec © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.336 Peter Paul Rubens, An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen, ca. 1636. Oil on panel, 131.2 × 229.2 cm. National Gallery, London. 338 Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. Anthony van Dyck, Landscape, ca. 1640. Pen and brown ink and watercolor, 18.9 × 36.4 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 339 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Landscape. Brown ink on white antique laid paper, 28 × 42.3 cm. Accession no. 1969.104. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Austin A. Mitch340 ell. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Hendrick Goltzius, Dune Landscape near Haarlem, 1603. Pen and brown ink, framing lines in brown ink, 9.1 × 15.4 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (former Collection Koenigs) / Photo: Studio Buitenhof.341 Constantijn Daniël van Renesse (attributed to), Amstel Landscape with Bathers. Pen and brown ink, wash, heightened with white, 14.6 by 27.3 cm. bpk Bildagentur/ Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.344 Constantijn Daniël van Renesse (attributed to), Landscape with Two Cottages between Trees, ca. 1657-1658. Pen and brown ink, wash, 19.5 × 31 cm. bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.345

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164. Pieter de With (attributed to), Landscape with Farm Buildings, ca. 1652. Pen and brown ink with brown wash, 11.6 × 20.4 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images. 347 165. Pieter de With, Boathouse between Trees, 1652. Pen and brown ink, 9.2 × 17 cm. bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.347 166. Rembrandt van Rijn, Clump of Trees with a Vista, 1652. Drypoint, first state, 14.8 × 21.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 348 167. Johannes Leupenius, View of Weeresteyn Manor on the Vecht. Brown ink on Asian paper, 11.4 × 18.5 cm. Accession no. 1.2018.100. The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma, Promised Gift. Photo: © President and 348 Fellows of Harvard College. 168. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man Writing or Drawing Next to a Window with View over the River IJ, 1650-1653. Pen with brown ink, brown and grey wash, heightened with white, on paper, 13.5 × 19.7 cm. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.349 169. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Schellingwou from the Diemerdijk over the IJ, shortly after 1651. Pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, framing lines with pen and brown ink, 8.1 × 13.8 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: Stichting Museum Van Beuningen (former Collection Koenig) / Photo: Studio Tromp. 349 170. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with a Farm Building and the House with the Tower, ca. 1650. Etching and drypoint, 12.2 × 32 cm. Rijksmu350 seum, Amsterdam. 171. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with the House with the Little Tower, ca. 1651, pen and brown ink, brush and tan wash. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 350 172. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Bloemendaal with the Saxenburg Estate (The Goldweigher’s Field), 1651. Etching and drypoint, 12 × 31.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 350 173. Ferdinand Bol, View in the Dunes near Haarlem, ca. 1651. Black chalk, brown and grey wash, 14.7 × 29.2 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris. 352 174. Rembrandt van Rijn, Six’s Bridge, 1645. Etching, 12.9 × 22.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 353 175. Raphael, Two Studies of Male Nudes, 1515. Red chalk and metalpoint with pen and ink inscription by Albrecht Dürer, 40.3 × 28.3 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Photo: © Purix Verlag Volker Christen / Bridgeman Images. 357

Illustrations 

176. Gerard ter Borch, The Introduction (An Officer Making his Bow to a Lady), ca. 1662. Oil on canvas, 76 × 68 cm. Polesden Lacey, UK. Photo: National Trust Photo Library / Art Resource, ny.371 177. Gerard ter Borch, Lady at her Toilette, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 59.7 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Eleanor Clay Ford Fund, General / Bridgeman Images. 372 178. Gesina ter Borch, Gentleman Kneeling before a Lady, drawing from her poetry album, ca. 1655. Watercolor and pen and ink, 373 31.3 × 20.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 179. Frans van Mieris, The Duet (Lady at the Harpsichord), 1658. Oil on panel, 31.6 × 24.9 cm. Staatliches Museum Schwerin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliches Museum Schwerin / Elke Walford / Art Resource, ny.374 180. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 376 44.5 × 39 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. 181. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter by an Open Window, ca. 1657. Oil on canvas, 83 × 64.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden © Staatliche 378 Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Bridgeman Images. 182. Gerard ter Borch, Woman Writing a Letter, ca. 1655. Oil on canvas, 379 38.3 × 27.9 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. 183. Johannes Vermeer, A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 51.7 × 45.2 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 380 184. Gerard Houckgeest, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft, 1651. Oil on 381 panel, 49 × 51 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 185. Gerrit Dou, Man Smoking a Pipe, ca.1650. Oil on panel, 48 × 37 cm. 382 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 186. Johannes Vermeer, A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), early 1660s. Oil on canvas, 74.1 × 64.6 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 383 187. Johannes Vermeer, A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), early 1660s, detail. Oil on canvas, 74.1 × 64.6 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020. 385 188. Johannes Vermeer, The Procuress, 1656. Oil on canvas, 143 × 130 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Bridgeman Images. 386

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189. Titian, Violante (La Bella Gatta), 1515-1518. Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 50.8 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Remo Bardazzi / Bridgeman Images. 390 190. Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting, ca. 1665-1666. Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / Bridgeman Images. 393 191. Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep, ca. 1656-1657. Oil on canvas, 87.6 × 76.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.398 192. Johannes Vermeer, The Guitar Player, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 53 × 46.3 cm. The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London. Photo: The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London © Historic England / 399 Bridgeman Images. 193. Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 51.5 × 45.5 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: 402 National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 194. Dirck van Baburen, The Procuress, 1622. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 107.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ma. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Theresa B. Hopkins Fund / Bridgeman Images. 403 195. Otto van Veen, “A Lover Ought to Love Only One” (Perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum), from Otto van Veen, Amorum emblemata (Antwerp, 1608), p. 55. Engraving. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 405 196. Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, ca. 1658-1660. Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 64.7 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, ma (stolen). Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston / Bridgeman Images. 407 197. Hendrick Goltzius, Danäe (The Sleeping Danäe Being Prepared to Receive Jupiter), 1603. Oil on canvas, 173.36 × 200.03 cm. Gift of the Ahmanson Foundation. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: lacma.org.409 198. Gerrit Dou, Woman Playing a Clavichord, ca. 1665. Oil on panel, 37.7 × 29.8 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Photo: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images. 413 199. Frans van Mieris, Cavalier in a Draper Shop (The Cloth Shop), 1660. Oil on panel, 54.5 × 42.7 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, ny.415

Illustrations 

200. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, ca. 1664. Oil on canvas, 39.7 × 35.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington. 417 201. Johannes Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 114.3 × 88.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org. 420 202. Jacob de Backer, The Last Judgment, ca. 1583. Oil on canvas, 119 × 53 cm. Photo: Hampel Auctions. 421 203. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid, ca. 1670. Oil on canvas, 71.1 × 60.5 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Photo: National Gallery of Ireland HIP / Art Resource, ny.424 204. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins, and Shells, 1606. Oil on copper, 64 × 45 cm. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Photo: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan © Paolo Manusardi / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images. 425 205. Pieter de Hooch, Woman Weighing Coins, ca. 1664. Oil on canvas, 61 × 53 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Artothek / Bridgeman Images. 427

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Acknowledgments While all books begin by acknowledging the generosity and assistance of others, it is especially fitting for the author of a book about gifts to acknowledge his debts of gratitude. I benefited immensely from the help, support, and forbearance of a great many people over the course of this book’s long gestation. Without this generosity from colleagues, students, friends, and family this book would not have been possible, and words alone can never repay the many debts I have incurred. I am especially grateful to H. Perry Chapman for her abundant, incisive, and invaluable suggestions, which I have tried to incorporate as far as possible, and to an anonymous reader for comments that improved the book’s readability. Natasha Seaman graciously and expertly edited the entire manuscript, and Carrie Anderson provided feedback at a critical moment. The support of Alan Chong and the positive reception of the audience of the Rethinking Rembrandt symposium he organized at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston in 2000, at which I first presented my ideas on Rembrandt and gift giving, helped launch the project. I am particularly appreciative of the encouragement of members of the audience who are no longer with us – Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, John Michael Montias, and Seymour Slive – whose scholarship has profoundly shaped the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art. For bibliographic references, critical feedback, engaging discussions, assistance in various forms, and advice, I am indebted to George Abrams, Clifford Ackley, Susan Anderson, Christopher Atkins, Ronni Baer, Marten Jan Bok, Celeste Brusati, Margaret Carroll, Paul Crenshaw, Stephanie Dickey, Charles Ford, Wayne Franits, Ivan Gaskell, Amy Golahny, Erik Hinterding, Julie Hochstrasser, Elizabeth Honig, Alison Kettering, Erna Kok, Susan Kuretsky, Friso Lammertse, John Loughman, Walter Melion, Rodney Nevitt Jr., Harm Nijboer, Judith Noorman, Nadine Orenstein, Shelley Perlove, Tom Rassieur, Bruce Redford, Joshua Rifkin, William (Bill) Robinson, Lisa Rosenthal, Suzanne Ryan, Catherine Scallen, Gary Schwartz, Larry Silver, Eric Jan Sluijter, Nicolette Sluijter-Seijffert, Mariët Westermann, Thijs Weststeijn, Arthur Wheelock Jr., Marjorie (Betsy) Wieseman, David de Witt, Lloyd de Witt, Christopher Wood, Joanna Woodall, and Anne Woollett, and the Director and Fellows of the Boston University Center for the Humanities. I am deeply grateful for the support and kindness of colleagues in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. Thank you especially Danny

Zell, M., Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/ 9789463726429_ack

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Abramson, Jodi Cranston, Emine Fetvaci, Deborah Kahn, Becky Martin, Ana María Reyes, Jonathan Ribner, Kim Sichel, and Greg Williams. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Fred Kleiner, and to Bruce Redford and Alice Tseng, who shouldered heavy administrative duties in part to allow me to focus on my research. I am also thankful for the insights and help of graduate students, in particular Christina An, Stephanie Glickman, Kate Harper, Rachel Hofer, Rachel Kase, Alexandra Libby, and Joseph (Joe) Saravo. For invaluable assistance with sourcing images, I thank Christopher Spedaliere, Visual Resource Manager, and Annemiek Overbeek for skillfully editing the images. I am also grateful to my editors at Amsterdam University Press, Chantal Nicolaes, for her support and guidance, and especially Erika Gaffney, for believing in the book, and for her unfailing patience, assistance, and graciousness. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Boston University Center for the Humanities, with a Jeffery Henderson Senior Research Fellowship, generously supported research leave. Subventions from the Boston University Center for the Humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University Humanities Research Fund also helped substantially to cover the book’s production costs. I thank especially Associate Dean Karl Kirchwey. My deepest thanks go to my wife Heidi and our children Myles and Arielle, who have spent their entire lives with this seemingly endless project. Their love, support, and patience sustained me throughout the research and writing. I am also grateful for the love and support of my sisters Janice and Allison and their families, and my mother, Carole Zell, who sadly passed away in 2013. Her enthusiasm for my work and for art left an indelible mark, and I regret that she did not live to see the publication of this book. I dedicate it to her in memory of her loving kindness.

Introduction In 1639 Rembrandt wrote to Constantijn Huygens, Secretary to the Dutch Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, that he was sending a monumental painting, likely The Blinding of Samson of 1636 (Fig. 93), as a token of appreciation for Huygens’s role in securing payment from the Prince for an important commission.1 Rembrandt was motivated by what he describes as Huygens’s “kind inclination and affection,” and sought to nurture a bond of mutuality with the statesman as his “obliging and affectionate servant.” With gracious and affective language Rembrandt thus recorded for posterity his participation in the culture of gift giving, one of the most important institutions of interpersonal exchange and social interaction of early modernity. Far from anomalous, Rembrandt’s gift exemplifies an important feature of the Dutch art world, which is so often presented in commercial terms. In the merchant republic’s vibrant and diversified market for art, networks of gift relations and the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift mingled with the growing dimension of commerce. Exploring the interaction between the gift’s symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland, this book offers a new perspective that reveals a unique and richly creative chapter in the interconnected history of gift giving and artistic creativity. The gift economy was indispensable to Dutch burghers for building and sustaining professional and personal bonds, and a vital means of demonstrating social values of goodwill, trustworthiness, virtue, and honor. As a consequence, a broad array of objects and services circulated in the form of gifts, including artworks. The Dutch state, too, regularly offered works of art as diplomatic gifts, the prime currency of international relations in seventeenth-century Europe – most ostentatiously with the “Dutch Gift” of paintings, antiquities, and other luxuries to King Charles II of England in 1660. Despite the significance and even fame of these Dutch bestowals of art, the role that gift giving played within the Dutch art system as an alternate economy of reciprocity and honor remains largely unexplored. By contrast, the gift economies of other early modern artistic cultures, particularly Italy, have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The Dutch Republic’s merchant society and

1

For the letter, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/2.

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buoyant art market have directed art historical study away from considerations of the gift and toward a relatively limited economic perspective. Given the unprecedented expansion and dynamism of the seventeenth-century Dutch art market, scholars have understandably highlighted features of Dutch artistic culture that suggest the market’s “invisible hand,” especially artists’ entrepreneurialism in adapting their practices to an intensely competitive marketplace. In the process, however, the gift’s social economy of mutuality and honor has been sidelined or depreciated as a vestige of socio-cultural norms presumed to be alien to Dutch mercantile values and Holland’s nascent capitalism. But gifts of art were traded among Dutch social and cultural elites as tokens of regard and materializations of shared cultural values. Like their counterparts in other European art centers, Dutch artists also embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, clients, and liefhebbers (art lovers), as well as familiars. The symbolic economy of the gift was an intrinsic part of the complex, overlapping modes of exchange that constituted the competitive Dutch art system, and from which emerged a vibrant and distinctive interaction between gift culture and art making. This book thus seeks to enrich the economic perspective on seventeenth-century Dutch art by considering the gift paradigm as an alternate yet complementary framework of investigation. Gifts of art were not separate from but woven into the functioning of the Dutch art system, just as gift giving was integrated into Dutch business relationships and burgher society in general. Donated artworks functioned in the Republic as agents of the mutual interests and interdependencies that underlay professional and personal webs of social relations, fostering bonds between artists, patrons, collectors, personal contacts, and intimates. Looking through the lens of the gift illuminates Dutch artists’ innovative adaptations of gift culture, particularly Rembrandt and Vermeer, who simultaneously define and defy our concept of the Golden Age. Rembrandt enlisted the gift economy to negotiate relations with patrons and collectors, and was inspired by this aestheticized form of exchange to create distinctive works of art designed to function as gifts (Figs. 104, 123). Both Rembrandt and Vermeer also activated the ethics and aesthetics of the gift to promote a privileged status for themselves and their work. Moreover, when used as a historical and critical framing, the gift paradigm helps us address apparently anomalous features of the Dutch art world, such as the exceptional number of amateur artists and the high profiles they enjoyed in cultural circles, as well as the unusually affective ties between Dutch artists and patrons that challenge expectations of typical artist–patron relationships. Crucially, the gift paradigm also provides insight into artists’ mixed responses to the growing impact of market forces on Dutch artistic culture. Rembrandt and Vermeer, I argue, engaged the gift economy’s alternate, aestheticized discourse to identify their creative labor as inspired by a devotion to art, not materialistic gain.

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Despite Rembrandt’s demands for high, even exorbitant, remuneration, he presented his art as gifts and designed works for distribution within gifting networks, which facilitated assemblies of art lovers of diverse social backgrounds. In 1667 the poet Jeremias de Decker, a recipient of Rembrandt’s portrait painting of himself (Fig. 125), wrote admiringly that Rembrandt was motivated “not for the sake of monetary gain, but purely as a favor […] and out of love for art.”2 Vermeer figured this “love of art” in modern paintings of beautiful women and elegant courtship that symbolically transform the (male) art lover’s desiring gaze by means of the gift’s anti-economic rhetoric of virtue and honor. In Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (Fig. 193), Vermeer announces the gift-like, non-commercial status of his art by emphatically juxtaposing an elegant woman’s invitation to the beholder to join a refined duet with an inset brothel painting of a procuress demanding payment for the services of a prostitute. Drawing on the antithesis between gifts and sales, Vermeer contrasts a crude monetary transaction with the woman’s enactment of an aestheticized exchange with the liefhebber, symbolically distancing his art and himself from ordinary economic relationships and calculations. For highly self-conscious artists and art theorists in early modernity, and especially the seventeenth century, the gift economy emerged as a critical tool for mitigating what they perceived as the market’s threat to perceptions of the value of art. The Italian painter Guido Reni insisted on transacting his works in the form of gifts, earning his biographer’s praise for refusing to compromise his aesthetic principles or undermine his social status by engaging in buying and selling paintings as if they were any other good. In today’s terminology, gift giving provided early modern artists with the means to de-commodify their practices, to promote the value of their works above the status of commodities. Of course, neither de-commodification nor commodification existed in the seventeenth century as terms to describe economic processes. But the gift’s alternate, social system of valuation offered early modern artists like Reni an established social mechanism for insulating their creative work from the taint of merchandizing and the leveling effect of the market. The allure of the gift economy as an alternate system of valuation in the arts remains to this day. Lewis Hyde has advocated passionately for the incommensurability between creative activity and the domain of the market, asserting that art is a gift not a commodity.3 A 2001 exhibition in Italy also explored contemporary art as gift, highlighting its gift-like capacity to generate new social encounters and relationships. 4 2 For De Decker’s poem on the portrait, published in the anthology Lof der geldsucht, vol. 2, pp. 34-36, see Strauss and van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1667/11. 3 Hyde, The Gift. 4 Il Dono.

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Dutch artists’ embrace of gift giving had distinctive characteristics that evolved from the Republic’s merchant culture and vibrant art market. Artists in other European art centers such as Italy or the Spanish Netherlands typically enlisted the gift economy to align themselves with aristocratic behavioral norms and values and detach themselves from association with activities of the merchant class. Dutch artists, by contrast, affirmed their burgerlijk virtue by mobilizing the gift economy. When Rembrandt offered his works as gifts to patrons, when he designed prints to function within a context of gift exchange or creatively adapted the ethics of the gift to distribute highly individuated impressions of his prints, he promoted artistic ideals shared by multiple strata within Dutch merchant society. And however pointed Vermeer’s assertion of his work’s exemption from ordinary or commercial transactions, his career and modern genre paintings epitomize the values of the Dutch burgher elite. At the same time, some Dutch artists found it challenging to reconcile their artistic ideals with the Republic’s nascent capitalist culture. In 1656 the Amsterdam artist Willem Schellinks, who moved within the circle of Rembrandt’s contacts, expressed deep ambivalence about the impact of market forces on perceptions of the value of art. In his poem “On the Painting of the Indians,” which is also interesting for situating the history of European painting in global perspective, Schellinks condemned what he perceived as the market’s debasing effects on the value of the arts by invoking a utopian Other in Mughal India.5 Schellinks imagines a stark contrast between the Mughals’ appreciation of art’s transcendent value and its diminished value in the commercialized society of Europe, where money and utilitarianism prevail over what he considers more significant forms of valuation. “[W]ere the West Indies to offer the Benjan [Mughal] for their art all the silver that Potosí (Peru’s silver mines) still has in store,” Schellinks writes, “he would say, ‘I’ll not trade art for treasure’”; in this way, he continues, India offers the Europeans the lesson that “art cannot be bought for any amount of money.”6 Schellinks’s opposition to the application of market valuation to his assertion of art’s transcendent worth, even if extreme or exceptional, opens a window into 5 Schellinks, “Op de schilder-konst der Benjanen.” Quoted in Schwartz (acknowledging Jan de Hond), “Terms of Reception,” p. 55; DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, “Introduction,” p. 19; and Gommans, Unseen World, pp. 218-219. On Schellinks’s unusual praise of Mughal painting, his four paintings of Mughal subjects, and Mughal artworks in seventeenth-century Europe, see Subrahmanyam, “A Roomful of Mirrors,” pp. 60-68; Gommans, Unseen World, pp. 215-223; and Schrader, ed., Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India, p. 14. 6 Schellinks, “Op de schilder-konst der Benjanen,” p. 353: “Al bood West-Indjen en den Benjaan / Voor deze konst, al ‘t zilver an, / Dat Potozi noch heeft in ‘t vat, / Hy zey, ik ruil geen konst voor schat, / Dees les leert ons al t’zaam Euroop, / de konst is met geen gelt te koop.” Translation from DaCosta Kaufmann and North, “Introduction,” p. 19.

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Dutch artists’ varied attitudes toward their changing circumstances in the burgher republic, and the role the gift economy served in negotiating this environment. Like Schellinks, Vermeer, whose rarified art and practice evade connotations of the market, likely harbored a similarly ambivalent view of the effects of this new economic situation on perceptions of his art’s value. Yet it would be a mistake to consider Vermeer’s or Schellincks’s attitudes as detached from the Dutch art system rather than intrinsic to its richly complex and at times seemingly contradictory characteristics. The anti-economic rhetoric of the gift offered Dutch artists and the cultural elites who sponsored them a means of mediating tensions between aesthetic and economic values that was fully consistent with the norms of burgher civility. As noted above, Rembrandt was praised by the poet De Decker, a recipient of one of his gifts, for his commitment to art as a noble pursuit based on aesthetic value alone; in De Decker’s words, Rembrandt was motivated “not for the sake of monetary gain, but purely as a favor […] and out of love for art.” De Decker here seamlessly intermingles the ethics of the gift with the phrase “the love art” to dispel money and economic calculation from the valuation of art. Based on the classical construct of the benefits of a happy life, the adage was pervasive in the discourse on art and commonly invoked by Dutch cultural and social elites, yet subtly adapted to suit the Republic’s artistic and commercial culture. In his 1678 art treatise Samuel van Hoogstraten, who studied with Rembrandt, cited Seneca’s triad of artistic motivations in which “the love of art,” or the artist’s satisfaction in his own labor, is privileged over the desire for profit and fame, remarking that the latter are “fruits of the first,” and painting is its own reward.7 But Van Hoogstraten inflected the ancient formula with a decidedly burgher gloss, based on arguments advanced earlier by Philips Angel and Jacob Cats, that stresses the ability of painters to earn a living from their profession. “Unlike her impoverished sister Poetry,” Van Hoogstraten writes, practitioners of painting are rewarded with generous payments.8 The gift economy therefore functioned for artists and liefhebbers as a resource to navigate the frictions between their aesthetic ideals and the rapidly changing economic conditions of Dutch burgher society. Institutionalized as a means of 7 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 355, 348. See further Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, pp. 213, 253-256, and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, pp. 63-65. Van Hoogstraten also depicted the Senecan motivations of money, fame, and love on the outside of his Perspective Box with Interior of a Dutch House (Fig. 41) and in the drawing Allegory of Painting and Its Benefits (Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris). 8 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 351. See Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, p. 256. Angel, Lof der schilder-konst, pp. 27-30, emphasizes the financial rewards of the painter’s profession, inverting the primacy traditionally accorded to painting over poetry because poets do not sell their work, which he borrowed from Cats’s Trou-ringh (Wedding Ring). On Angel’s adaptation of Cats in relation to the distinctive socio-economic conditions of Dutch culture, see Sluijter, “Didactic and Disguised Meanings?,” pp. 79-83, and idem, Seductress of Sight, pp. 213-217.

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signaling opposition to the growing pressure of the market on social and professional relationships, gift giving was also privileged in early modern art theoretical writings as a method of contesting the market’s perceived erosion of the value of art and the status of artists. By drawing upon the ethics of the gift, Dutch artists bridged their mercantile sensibilities with ideals of artistic honor and notions of art’s transcendent value. Entrepreneurial artists like Rembrandt could enlist gift giving to reconcile their embrace of the unprecedented economic opportunities offered by the booming Dutch art trade with claims to artistic and social prestige. But the discourse of the gift also accommodated more ambivalent, nuanced positions within the Republic’s competitive marketplace for art. Vermeer, whose paintings defy categorization as market productions, mobilized the gift economy to engage his rarefied audience of liefhebbers in a dialogue that symbolically transcended economic relationships and transactions. Exploring Dutch art from the vantage point of the gift captures these mixed responses to the evolving circumstances of the Dutch art market, while casting new light on behaviors and artworks that resist the dominant explanatory models of the field. The gift’s inclusiveness as an interpretive model not only brings into focus transfers of art as gifts in seventeenth-century Holland but reveals Dutch artists’ creative reactions to the changing economic and social conditions of nascent capitalism.

Chapter Descriptions The book comprises five chapters, beginning with a discussion of various theories of the gift, the gift model’s application to the study of early modern European society, and the status of art as a privileged form of gift in the seventeenth century. Having laid this foundation for investigating the interplay between art and gift giving in seventeenth-century Holland, I then focus on the distinctive character of gift culture and the gifting of art in the burgher republic. The three subsequent chapters explore Dutch artists’ involvement with gift exchange and the potential of the gift paradigm for reinterpreting the works and careers of Rembrandt and Vermeer, and the Republic’s many talented amateur artists. Chapter 1, “The Gift and Art in Early Modernity,” examines the centrality of gift giving to the developing commercial cultures of early modern Europe and the rise to prominence of works of art, especially paintings, in circuits of gift exchange. The chapter first addresses the evolution of the gift as a research paradigm in anthropology, tracing its emergence as a mythical alternative to Western capitalism to its modification into a dynamic model in which gifts and the market are viewed as interdependent rather than inherently antithetical exchange systems. Contrary to common assumption, gift giving in the early modern period acquired

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renewed importance as a mode of negotiating professional, social, and personal ties in a rapidly changing, increasingly commercialized environment. Art also emerged as an essential currency for negotiating relationships of patronage and clientage, and highly self-conscious artists increasingly turned to the gift’s symbolic economy to negotiate with patrons and set their transactions apart from ordinary forms of exchange. I probe the interconnections between gifts and art in various overlapping contexts of early modernity: Within the protocols of international diplomacy; structures of political patronage and clientage of court society; and artists’ professional and personal networks of affiliation, addressing as well the special circumstances and implications of artists’ embrace of gift giving to distribute their works. Chapter 2, “Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic,” explores the distinctive gift culture and the gifting of art in seventeenth-century Holland. Although they thrived in aristocratic societies, gift exchanges of various kinds, including art, were also widespread in Dutch mercantile culture. I first address gift giving’s marginalization in studies of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and then turn to the emphasis on gift exchange in recent historical research as being imbricated in Holland’s social, cultural, political, and commercial arrangements. For Dutch burghers giving gifts was obligatory in creating and nurturing professional, business, and personal relationships. Gifts of art also played a key role in the Republic’s diplomatic engagements, culminating with the “Dutch Gift” to England of 1660, arguably the most famous use of art in this way of all time. Like their colleagues elsewhere, Dutch artists mixed gifts with sales transactions by offering their works to potential and established patrons, contacts, and familiars. Discussion of the special cases of Rembrandt and Vermeer is reserved for later chapters, but here examples of various gifts by Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Lievens, Govert Flinck, and others are addressed. The three final chapters comprise case studies that explore how the gift paradigm allows new insights into the careers and works of Rembrandt and Vermeer, the most acclaimed artists of the Dutch Golden Age, and the many amateur artists active in seventeenth-century Holland. Chapter 3, “Rembrandt’s Art as Gift,” examines Rembrandt’s embrace of gift exchange over the arc of his career and analyzes the works he created to function as gifts among favored patrons, collectors, and intimates. Documents show that Rembrandt could be obstinate with patrons and that he insisted on extremely high remuneration, behaviors that may at first seem incompatible with the gift’s social economy of mutuality, service, and honor. But Rembrandt’s increasing engagement of the gift economy in later years, like his growing intransigence with patrons and conviction that his work was of transcendent value, reinforced the exceptional artistic persona and status he fashioned for himself. When Rembrandt began to present his art as gifts in the 1630s to important patrons and other figures, he

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largely followed the conventions and courtesies expected of such transactions. From the late 1640s through the 1660s, as Rembrandt’s primary supporters shifted to liefhebbers, gentlemen-dealers, and cultured members of the burgher class, however, he intensified his engagement and became more experimental with gift giving. In this period, which marks a highpoint in Rembrandt’s printmaking career, he focused on individuated impressions of etchings and drypoints and highly distinctive prints designed to circulate as gifts within networks of liefhebbers. With these works Rembrandt enlisted the gift economy to nurture ties with his inner sanctum, harnessing the ethics of gift giving to cultivate a unique position for himself and his work in the Dutch art world’s complex ecosystem. Chapter 4, “Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and Landscape Representation,” identifies a correspondence between the practice of Dutch amateur artists and the place of landscape in Rembrandt’s artistic production, and in doing so illuminates the link between gift culture and the withholding of certain types of artworks from the domain of the marketplace. Dutch amateurs favored landscapes drawn directly from nature as a pleasurable pastime, thus enacting interrelated ideals of art and leisure that also governed the status of landscape representation in contemporary art theory. This aestheticized social construct of sketching nature as a leisure activity also shaped the landscape art of prominent history painters, including Rembrandt, whose landscape drawings share close affinities with amateur landscapes. The vast majority of Rembrandt’s drawings of Amsterdam’s suburban countryside, which he drew exclusively while living in a fashionable neighborhood of the city, were not preparatory to more formal works, indicating that his sketching excursions, like those of Dutch amateurs, were not purely a commercial undertaking. Moreover, one of Rembrandt’s contemporaries reflexively linked landscape sketches by famous painters to gift exchange and its symbolic operations. In 1618 Edward Norgate wrote that artists’ “first and sleight drawings,” mentioning specifically landscapes, are “things never sold but given to frends [sic] that are Leefhebbers [art lovers].”9 Here the period’s construct of landscape drawing as a private recreation intersects with the anti-market ethos of the gift to describe the exceptional desirability of artworks that were unobtainable on the market. Chapter 5, “For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift,” explores Vermeer’s art in relation to the ethics and aesthetics of the gift. Unlike Rembrandt and many of his peers, Vermeer did not fully embrace the economic opportunities offered by seventeenth-century Holland’s thriving market economy. Vermeer’s output of paintings was extraordinarily limited, due in part to the support he apparently enjoyed from a benefactor or patron who protected him from the vicissitudes 9 Quoted in Muller and Murrell, Edward Norgate, p. 5. Parts of the passage are also cited in Howarth, Arundel and His Circle, p. 231, n. 3.

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of the market. While no records survive of Vermeer’s practice of gift giving, or of any other form of transacting his work, the gift culture of Dutch burgher society together with the conceptual framework of the gift paradigm cast a revealing light on his exceptionalism. Vermeer’s depictions of beautiful women and refined courtship encourage the art lover to experience his paintings as if in love with their seductive beauty, figuring the ideal relationship between beholder and artwork, and painter and painting, promoted in contemporary Dutch art theory, which was structured on the Petrarchan poetic trope of the male lover’s frustrated desire for an elusive female beloved. As objects of desire of the viewer and Vermeer himself, his paintings thematize art’s inspiration in love, not the desire for fame or profit. In this way, Vermeer laid claim to his work’s gift-like status, carving out a symbolic space for himself and his art in conformity with ideals of burgerlijk civility and yet incommensurate with the logic of economic measures of value. *** As will become apparent, my analysis is not limited to empirical evidence for recovering transactions of art in the form of gifts. While documentary and other textual sources are invaluable and provide crucial insight into the interplay between art and the culture of the gift in a range of social and institutional contexts of early modern Europe and the Dutch Republic specifically, they are not the only, or necessarily the most illuminating, form of evidence. The artworks themselves are essential sources of understanding as well as embodiments of the phenomenon. Art objects play active roles in the pages that follow, through their distribution as gifts and in the social identities they generated as they mediated affinities between Dutch artists and their audiences. My approach contrasts in some respects with theoretical formulations of the gift as involving relations between people, not objects.10 But objects were not necessarily inconsequential to the gift’s symbolic operations – its capacity to set in motion the personal and communal values that transcend depersonalized social relations and market valuations. When the gift is a work of art, especially when offered by the artist him- or herself, it tends to play a much more active role in the exchange as a performance both of its maker’s virtuosity and honor and the discernment and virtue of its cultured recipient. As the gifted artwork is viewed and appreciated by others, the aesthetic and social distinction it embodies is confirmed and renegotiated. 10 Elizabeth Honig follows this formulation in an important study of gifts of art, writing that the generosity an artist anticipates as a reward for presenting his work as gifts “will be entirely detached from the value of anything […]. The gift-reward is not about objects, but about persons.” See Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 95.

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My effort to highlight the agency of art in the discrete social circumstances of gift exchange is informed in part by the material turn in recent social theory and the humanities, and applications of this materialist framework to the study of seventeenth-century Dutch art.11 Sociologists have increasingly focused their attention on material things not as inert entities but as active participants or quasi-actors in creating, sustaining, and extending human ties. In reimagining the social realm as an integration of humans and things, this approach releases things from the passive roles to which they are typically assigned and transforms them into constitutive elements of social processes and relations. Art historians have always recognized the agency that artworks exercise in shaping, not merely reflecting or reinforcing social values or hierarchies.12 But underscoring the physical properties of and practical role artworks play in the establishment and performance of social relationships helps us capture how art and humans effectively co-construct each other. Exchanges of art as gifts and the circulation of artworks in the form of gifts epitomize the entanglement between humans and things that this recasting of the social realm considers the cornerstone of social activity. Focusing on gifts of art reveals the means by which certain personal ties between artists and members of their circles of admirers were created, sustained, and extended. The gifted artwork acquires an inalienable aura or agency through the circumstances of its trade, placing an especially intense spotlight on the active role that material things play as co-constructive agents rather than subordinate objects within the social networks that formed around them. The convergence between the Dutch Republic’s distinctive gift culture and vibrant art market, as we shall see, stimulated highly creative artistic engagements with gift giving that accorded works of art exceptional agency in nurturing affinities and webs of social interaction among Dutch artists, their patrons, collectors, and beyond. 11 On the material turn in social theory, see in particular Latour, Reassembling the Social. For an excellent summary of the material turn and its implications for art history, see Roberts, “Things.” On the “return to material” in the social sciences and humanities, and its application in archaeology, see Hodder, Entangled. For an application of this materialist framework to Rembrandt’s gift giving, see Zell, “Rembrandt’s Gifts.” For other investigations of the social agency of Netherlandish artworks in fostering new forms of association, see Vanhaelen and Wilson, “The Erotics of Looking,” esp. pp. 14-15. Ho, “Gerrit Dou’s Enchanting Trompe- l’Oeil,” applies anthropologist Alfred Gell’s theories to illuminate the social agency of Dou’s paintings. 12 In fact, art historical studies such as Michael Baxandall’s now-classic Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy have indirectly contributed to one of the most important materialist approaches to social theory, Actor-Network-Theory, through sociological studies of taste and music. Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” pp. 133-134, calls the history of art “a choice ally,” and Bruno Latour, leading spokesperson of Actor-Network-Theory, repeatedly cites Hennion’s work. See Latour, Reassembling the Social, pp. 11, n. 33, pp. 217, 237.

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Bibliography Angel, Philips. Lof der schilder-konst. Leiden, 1642. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Brusati, Celeste. Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Cats, Jacob. ‘t Werelts begin, midden, eynde, besloten in den trou-ringh met den proefsteen van den selven. Dordrecht, 1637. DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas, and Michael North. “Introduction: Mediating Cultures.” In Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, pp. 9-23. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Decker, Jeremias de. Lof der geldsucht, ofte vervolg der rijmoeffeningen van Jeremias de Decker – verdeelt in twee boecken. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1667. Il Dono: Offerta, Ospitalità, Insidia / The Gift: Generous Offerings, Threatening Hospitality. Exh. cat. Siena: Palazzo delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea; Mestre: Centro Culturale Candiani. Milan: Charta, 2001. Gaskell, Ivan. Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums. London: Reaktion, 2000. Gommans, Jos. The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2018. Hennion, Antoine. “Pragmatics of Taste.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, edited by Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan, pp. 131-144. Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2005. Ho, Angela. “Gerrit Dou’s Enchanting Trompe-l’Oeil: Virtuosity and Agency in Early Modern Collections.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7:1 (2015), doi: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.1.1. Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. “Art, Honor, and Excellence in Early Modern Europe.” In Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, edited by Michael Hutter and David Throsby, pp. 89-105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hoogstraten, Samuel van. Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: Anders, de zichtbaere wereld. Rotterdam, 1678. Howarth, David. Lord Arundel and His Circle. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. First published 1979. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Muller, Jeffrey M., and Jim Murrell, eds. Edward Norgate: Miniatura or the Art of Limning. New Haven and London: Yale Univerisy Press, 1997. Roberts, Jennifer L. “Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn.” American Art 31 (2017), pp. 64-69. Schellinks, Willem. “Op de schilder-konst der Benjanen.” In Clioos kraam, vol verscheiden gedichten, pp. 351-353. Leeuwarden, 1656. Schrader, Stephanie, ed. Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018. Schwartz, Gary. “Terms of Reception: Europeans and Persians in Each Other’s Art.” In Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, edited by Thomas daCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, pp. 25-63. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Sluijter, Eric Jan. “Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century Texts on Painting and the Iconographical Approach to Dutch Paintings of this Period.” In Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, edited by Wayne Franits, pp. 78-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. First published as “Belering en verhulling? Enkele 17de-eeuwse teksten over de schilderkunst en de ikonologisches benadering van Noordnederlandse schilderijen uit deze periode,” De zeventiende eeuw 4 (1988), pp. 3-28, and in Art in History / History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, edited by David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, pp. 175-207. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991. ———. Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. Strauss, Walter L., and Marjon van der Meulen. The Rembrandt Documents. New York: Abaris, 1979. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “A Roomful of Mirrors: The Artful Embrace of Mughals and Franks, 1550-1700.” Ars Orientalis 39 (2010), pp. 39-83. Vanhaelen, Angela, and Bronwen Wilson. “The Erotics of Looking: Materiality, Solicitation, and Netherlandish Visual Culture.” Art History 35 (2013), pp. 8-19. Zell, Michael. “Rembrandt’s Gifts: A Case Study of Actor Network Theory.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 3/2 (2011), doi: 10.5092/jhna.2011.3.2.2

1.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity Abstract This chapter examines the centrality of gift giving to the developing commercial cultures of early modern Europe and the rise to prominence of works of art, especially paintings, in circuits of gift exchange. Contrary to common assumption, gift giving in the early modern period acquired renewed importance as a mode of negotiating professional, social, and personal ties in a rapidly changing, increasingly commercialized environment. Art also emerged as an essential gift currency for negotiating relationships of patronage and clientage, and highly selfconscious artists increasingly turned to the gift’s symbolic economy to negotiate with patrons and set their transactions apart from ordinary forms of exchange. I probe the interconnections between gifts and art in various overlapping contexts of early modernity. Keywords: Gifts; Gift Giving; Art and Money; Diplomatic Gifts; Art Collecting; Caroline Court

Gifts of art proliferated in seventeenth-century Europe, becoming increasingly important to the conduct of international diplomacy and to fostering political, courtly, professional, and social alliances. Artists also embraced gift giving as never before to cultivate relationships of mutual interest and regard with patrons, collectors, contacts, and familiars. This intensified traffic in artworks as gifts reflects the centrality of gift giving in both aristocratic and middle-class behavioral codes, and the rising self-consciousness of artists about their social rank and the status of their work. It is also a revealing feature of the interplay between artistic culture and the developing economic cultures of early modernity. In this period of economic change, gift giving evolved in dynamic relation with Europe’s expanding market economy, assuming new meaning and greater potency as an instrument of economic and social negotiation. The anthropological paradigm of the gift defines gift giving as an alternate exchange system involving reciprocity and obligation in contrast to the depersonalized and short-lived social transactions of market or commercial relations. However, historians have made clear that early modern

Zell, M., Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/ 9789463726429_ch01

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gifts coexisted and interacted with the emerging cultures of market relations and other forms of interpersonal relationships. Whether lavish offerings by princes or aristocrats or more modest presentations by merchants or artists themselves, gifts of art rhetorically claimed exemption from ordinary social transactions and methods of valuation while remaining thoroughly entangled with them. In order to set the stage for investigating the distinctive character of Dutch gifts of art, this chapter first explores the evolution of theories of the gift and their importance for understanding gift giving’s role in the changing economic and social structures of early modern Europe. It then turns to the prevalence of gift transfers of art in the seventeenth century, probing the operations of the gift as they bear on artistic cultures of the period, including artists’ growing embrace of the gift’s symbolic economy of mutuality and honor.

The Symbolic Economy of the Gift in Early Modernity The study of the gift can be traced to Marcel Mauss’s magisterial and hugely influential The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies of 1925.1 Synthesizing anthropological studies of the Kwakiutl Potlatch, the Banaro people’s commerce in sexual favors, and the Kula Ring of the Trobriand islanders with other sources, Mauss showed that gift giving was a fundamental institution of social relations that bound together people and groups in webs of reciprocity. While subsequent anthropologists have critiqued and refined Mauss’s work, his original insight that gift giving is a social economy enclosing donors and receivers in relationships of mutuality remains profoundly compelling.2 Mauss’s ideas and later anthropologists’ elaborations of gift theory have also had a major impact on the study of early modern Europe. Natalie Zemon Davis and other historians have demonstrated that gift giving became an invaluable tool for negotiating relations in this period, when the increasing effects of commerce put pressure on traditional social norms.3 1 Mauss, The Gift. 2 Anthropological literature on the gift is vast. Among the most important and useful publications are: Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; idem, Logic of Practice; idem, Practical Reason; Appadurai, ed., Social Life of Things; Gregory, Gifts and Commodities; Strathern, Gender of the Gift; Weiner, Inalienable Possessions; Carrier, Gifts and Commodities; Schrift, ed., Logic of the Gift; Godelier, Enigma of the Gift; Osteen, ed., Question of the Gift; and Liebersohn, Return of the Gift. 3 See Davis, “Beyond the Market”; idem, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France; Vandevelde, Gifts and Interests; Algazi et al., eds., Negotiating the Gift; Sebek, “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising”; Howell, Commerce before Capitalism; and Heal, The Power of Gifts.

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How gifts operate in distinct social economies depends, of course, on a host of variables, and certainly no single definition applies to all transactions in which something, be it an object, service, or favor, is exchanged as a gift. A statement by Rubens illustrates the complexities of demarking the domain of the gift in early modernity. Writing in 1607 to the Mantuan Secretary of State, Annibale Chieppo, Rubens gratefully acknowledged receipt of a payment of 50 crowns for services rendered to his patron, Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Rubens expressed his gratitude by announcing that he would treat the money as if it were a personal gift from Chieppo: “It remains for me to tell you that I am as much obliged to you as if I received this money as a gift from yourself. And thanking you again with all my heart, I humbly kiss your hands.”4 Even a financial remuneration therefore could be rhetorically transmuted into a gift transaction by means of opposition to the rationale of fixed payments.5 In volunteering to accept the money as a gift, Rubens sought to transform his association with the court bureaucrat Chieppo into a relationship based on honor, reciprocity, and personal obligation, and thus antithetical to the short-lived and impersonal interactions involved in outright payments. With courteous language, Rubens committed himself to an enduring bond of respect and service and hoped Chieppo would respond accordingly. The interchangeability in Rubens’s mind of a monetary transaction and a gift exchange may at first sight seem paradoxical. By the standard of our cultural discourse, fungibility, the economic term for the process of equally substituting one thing for another, should not apply to the fundamentally autonomous realms of payments and gifs. The contrasting values brought to the surface by Rubens’s gesture underscore a distinction between today’s constrained ideology of gifts and an earlier historical moment, when gift giving infused the mediation of social relationships and the regimes of money and gifts intermingled. Early modern Europeans could engage the ethics of gift giving to detach a monetary transaction from association with self-interested motivation, and the gift’s affective rhetoric could convert self-interest into a demonstration of honor, virtue, and mutuality. This seeming contradiction highlights the gift’s function in early modernity as a symbolic system of exchange and social intervention embedded within, not separate from, economic and monetary exchange. In her important study of the gift in sixteenth-century France, Davis describes gift exchange “as an essential relational mode, a repertoire of behavior, a register with its own rules, language, etiquette, gestures.”6 Barbara Sebek similarly underscores the relational dynamics of gift 4 Rubens to Chieppo, 28 April 1607, in Magurn, Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, no. 14. 5 On the transformation of money into a gift through circumstance, see Parry and Bloch eds., Money and the Morality of Exchange, pp. 8-10. 6 Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, p. 9.

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giving, writing that in early modern England the practice provided “a form in which individuals and groups of all social levels […] could give shape, intelligibility, and material form to abstractly-delineated social relations.”7 Gift exchange functioned in this period as a method of conducting interpersonal relations with its own set of conventions and logic, which early modern Europeans could mobilize to stake out a social space insulated from the rules and calculations governing market relations. The gift was not a fixed category, but a variable classification that operated in opposition to market exchange. Recent anthropological studies have reinforced this historically contingent understanding of the gift, with important consequences for its use as a tool in historical research. While Mauss proposed in his foundational text a binary relationship between gifts and commodities, or anti-economic and economic values, subsequent anthropological research demonstrates that an oppositional modeling between gifts and commodities distorts the realities of the exchange systems and practices of archaic as well as non-Western societies. Earlier anthropologists often prioritized the types of transactions that conformed to the stereotype of gift giving as the antithesis to transactions in money economies, idealizing indigenous exchange systems as communal or gift economies.8 Nicholas Thomas highlights instead what he terms the entanglement of gift and commodity transactions in these societies. The separation between gifting and other systems of exchange, as he puts it, generates “a romantic counter-modernism in which selected features of their [‘primitive societies’] world serve to relativize and destabilize cherished features of our own.”9 Such views are products of the ethnocentric and historically determined idea of gifts as radically opposed to market exchange and values. If earlier literature mythologized the gift as antithetical to other modes of exchange, other studies emphasize the blurred boundary between gifts and commodities. In The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai and his colleagues demonstrate the fluidity with which things move into and out of the status of gifts or commodities by tracing the long-term trajectories or “social lives” of objects as they circulate in historical and non-Western environments.10 All things thus have commodity “potential” depending on their “commodity situation,” just as they have the capacity to be withdrawn or “enclaved” from commercial circulation as privileged gifts. Rubens’s rhetorical transformation of a money payment into a gift from a court official exemplifies the ease with which exchanges could move between these registers in early modernity. But abandoning altogether the distinction between 7 Sebek, “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising.” 8 Thomas, Entangled Objects, pp. 3-5. 9 Ibid, p. 13. 10 Appadurai, ed., Social Life of Things.

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gifts and commodities inhibits seeing economic systems as integrated spheres of exchange, wherein gift giving is a constituent part rather than a separate domain.11 Nonetheless, Appadurai’s stress on the mediation of social and cultural contexts in determining an object’s status as a gift or commodity underscores the usefulness of the gift paradigm for exploring the workings of historical gift practices. Despite the ethnocentric origins of the dichotomy between gifts and commodities, then, the interpretive category of the gift retains heuristic value if conceptualized relationally. With its claim to exemption from the logic of normal economic relations, gift giving functioned as a social mechanism with which to resist or put into abeyance relations generated by market or commercial exchanges. The anthropologist Christopher Gregory provides a helpful point of entry for investigating the rhetorical opposition between the social economy of gift exchange and market transactions, which also underwrote early modern gift giving.12 Gregory characterizes the two exchange systems as fundamentally different: In gift transactions donors and receivers are “reciprocally dependent,” whereas in market or commodity exchanges they are “reciprocally independent.” Gift exchange creates indebtedness and compels the return of a counter-gift, engendering relationships of reciprocity in which the gifted object tends to remain inalienable from the transaction itself. Commodity or market transactions, by contrast, are exchanges between objects, or rather between an object and its price equivalent; the payment of a purchase price alienates the object from the seller, and normally ends the relationship between those engaged in the exchange. Gift transactions enclose the parties in a system of giving, receiving, and reciprocation, whereas market transactions are oriented to depersonalizing or alienating the partners in an exchange. By appealing to and embracing this fundamental distinction, participants in gift exchanges become partners in relationships of solidarity, goodwill, trust, and mutuality, while simultaneously articulating, shaping, and giving form to their social identities.13

Gifts as and in History The historical roots of the interdependence between gift and commodity in Western thought lie in the rapidly changing economic and social circumstances of early modernity. As Mauss himself recognized, the very idea of the gift economy as the antithesis to economic exchange emerged in this period. His source for the 11 Thomas, Entangled Objects, p. 30. 12 Gregory, Gifts and Commodities, and Sebek, “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising.” See also Carrier, Gifts and Commodities. 13 Sebek, “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising.”

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moment when Europeans turned away from the social economy of gift giving in favor of self-interested economic conduct was Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, published with this title in 1714, though first published in 1705 as The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest.14 For Mauss, Mandeville’s controversial text, which for the first time valorized the inclination to self-interested behavior as the foundation of prosperity and civilization, marked the beginning of the triumph of the idea of self-interest.15 The Fable of the Bees is especially relevant in the context of this study because Mandeville first described market valuations of art.16 An English physician originally from Rotterdam, and perhaps an amateur collector himself, Mandeville identified four key factors that regulated the prices of paintings: the “Name of the Master”; the “Time of his Age”; the scarcity of the artist’s works; and the “Quality,” or social rank, of the owners of the paintings and the amount of time the paintings had been in the possession of “great Families.” The insights that Mandeville’s reflections on the market value of art provide about the consumption of art in his time have been expertly analyzed. For my purposes, as for Mauss, Mandeville’s significance lies in his vision of a society governed entirely by rational calculations of self-interest, leaving no room for the gift economy’s nurturing of social solidarities. Mandeville was a non-conformist, anti-clerical, radical thinker whose work represented, Harry Liebersohn writes, “a vote of confidence in modern commercial society, without a need for any religious morality or classical ideals to keep it prosperous.”17 Despite the gift’s status in his own day as a fundamental institution of social relations, Mandeville mentions gift giving only once, derisively caricaturing it as an antiquated vestige of a corrupt practice for the indolent. Other, more nuanced social theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, acknowledged the value of the reciprocities of gift exchange in fostering social bonds. But Mandeville’s dismissal of the gift economy as irrelevant would become the norm in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the most influential social theorists deemed the gift’s system of mutual obligations as incompatible with the demands for transparency and equality in modern economies and governments. While the gift never disappeared entirely from the discourse of social and economic theory, Liebersohn demonstrates that the West effectively only rediscovered the power of the gift through its encounter with the Other, or archaic, extra-European cultures. Globalization challenged Europeans to come to terms with notions of exchange 14 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees. 15 Mauss, The Gift, pp. 75-76, quoted in Liebersohn, Return of the Gift, p. 27. 16 See De Marchi and Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices,” pp. 451, 454-458. 17 Liebersohn, Return of the Gift, p. 33.

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that seemed remote and bewildering, and which had been written out of modern theories of economic life.18 After being consigned to near oblivion in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury social and economic theory, the gift reappeared in anthropology as a strictly alternate system of trade, with the potential to offer the West an antidote to the alienation engendered by commercial transactions and capitalism. Mauss made this connection explicit. Writing in the aftermath of World War I, he sought not only to remind his audience about an institution of exchange that tied individuals together by setting into play values of mutuality and solidarity, but to introduce an economic model that could balance the extremes between prioritizing selfishness in capitalism and communism’s utopia of selflessness.19 The gift paradigm as an ideal of social exchange incompatible with economic transactions is therefore inextricably linked to the rise of capitalism. This has significant implications for understanding the evolving role of gift giving and the culture of the gift in the nascent capitalism of early modern Europe. Gift exchange was a vital institution of social interaction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, operating alongside and interacting with market transactions while helping to build social cohesion. Gifting practices were in turn shaped by the steadily increasing influence of commerce on social relations, which sharpened the definition and function of the gift’s reciprocities as an alternative to market relations. Gift giving and market exchange were thus deeply enmeshed, locked together in the evolving circumstances of early modern European economies. Hardly an obsolete or fixed mode of exchange in the West’s economic development, gift giving was a dynamic social and cultural instrument that responded to Europe’s emergent economic structures. The arenas of gift and market exchange are not mutually exclusive but mutually defining.20 Gift giving provided early modern Europeans a means of navigating the changes they experienced as a consequence of developing capitalism. Especially in the commercially vibrant trading and urban centers of the north, traditional social formations and identities were put under intense pressure by this reorientation. As market forces gained ascendance, gift exchange gained appeal for its capacity to function symbolically as an alternate exchange system, exempt from the norms of market relations. Because gift giving was embedded in this increasingly commercialized environment, it was strengthened by and helped to clarify the parameters of behavior governed by the logic of the marketplace versus that of 18 Ibid, p. 133. 19 Ibid, pp. 162-163. 20 Sebek, “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising,” writes that gift and commodity transactions “are made meaningful, deployed, and do cultural work in relation to one another – even when one or the other is seemingly absent.”

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gifting. The anti-market and anti-utilitarian ethics of the gift became a powerful mechanism to effect social intervention, potentially redefining social relations in circumstances increasingly shaped by the dictates of commercial and profit motives. In the Dutch Republic, as we shall see in the next chapter, gift giving was a prevalent means of navigating this new social landscape. The merchant republic’s vibrant economic and artistic cultures proved fertile ground for the development of intersecting spheres of exchange and valuation in the arts, including the antieconomic, cultural logic of gift exchange. If the symbolic economy of the gift became more meaningful for merchants in this period, its aestheticized system of exchange offered aristocratic societies a crucial method of signaling social rank and chivalrous values. As Rubens’s letter to Chieppo showed, the ethics of the gift especially in court settings served to demarcate a symbolic space from which ordinary financial and social exchanges were rhetorically banished. In aristocratic Europe the heightened emphasis on gift giving, among other forms of enacting social prestige and hierarchy, evolved partly as a reaction to the growing impact of economic forces, as elsewhere.21 Gifts of art were favored instruments for mediating this culture’s deeply hierarchical social and political structures. Artists, too, increasingly perceived gift giving as an alternate exchange system with the capacity to affirm their elevated social status and that of their creative work.

Art and Politics: Diplomatic Gifts of Art in the Seventeenth Century While gifts of art proliferated within varied institutional and social networks in seventeenth-century Europe, they were perhaps most visible as a currency for conducting foreign relations. Diplomatic gifts of art, preeminently but not exclusively paintings, were of rising importance in orchestrating international alliances. Offering lavish gifts to other leaders and governments was an ancient practice, but in the seventeenth century diplomatic exchanges of artworks became commonplace. The most famous presentation of works of art as gifts of all time may well be the so-called “Dutch Gift,” initiated by the Dutch state to mark Charles II’s restoration to the English throne in 1660, which we shall explore in the next chapter. It was also the culmination of a distinct cultural shift. The customary traffic in diplomatic artworks consisted primarily of portraits exchanged between princely courts. Martin Warnke calls the trade in portraits

21 See Warwick, Arts of Collecting, esp. p. 57. For the aristocracy’s increasing emphasis on rank and luxury in the seventeenth century, see Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, and Stanton, Aristocrat as Art.

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between courts “the most important medium of cultural policy.”22 Countless state portraits and their official copies circulated as gifts among courts, capitals, and great aristocratic houses as a means of establishing and strengthening political and kinship alliances. The element of inalienable presence that portraits possess – their capacity to act as substitutes for their subject – combined with the inalienable nature of gifts, reinforced the portraits’ agency as political instruments. But the Dutch authorities mobilized a cultural discourse in which Italian Renaissance paintings in particular, not portraits, were assigned a privileged status. Competitively collected and ostentatiously displayed as public assertions of taste, rank, and status, sixteenth-century Italian paintings fulfilled the prestige fetish of early modern aristocratic and court society.23 As such, they emerged as invaluable tools for currying political and personal favors, engendering, as Jonathan Brown writes, “a powerful symbiosis […] between the cultural prestige of painting and the social prestige of princes.”24 Within the subtle, extra-linguistic forms of communication that became formalized in the rituals of international diplomacy, gifts of prestigious paintings possessed unique agency.25 The enthusiasm of seventeenth-century princes, Charles I of England and Philip IV of Spain in particular, for Italian and especially Venetian Old Master paintings created intense competition over these ever-harder to source artworks. If a living artist did receive a commission to produce a gift for a powerful monarch, it was understood that the opportunity would greatly enhance his reputation. In 1652 Salvator Rosa wrote that he was delighted to accept a commission from the new papal ambassador to France, Monsignor Neri Corsini, to paint the monumental Heroic Battle (Fig. 1) as a gift for Louis XIV, acknowledging the “honor” he would accrue in addition to the generous payment of 600 scudi: “I happily seized the opportunity [despite having to work in the heat of August, he noted], whether for the excellent price or for the honor which could not be greater, seeing it leave Rome as a gift for a king of France.”26 The prestige of Italian Renaissance art and its privileged status in diplomatic gift exchange originated in the Renaissance itself. Both the Medici and the leaders of the Florentine Republic began early on to exploit art in negotiating relations 22 Warnke, Court Artist, p. 212. See also Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 196-210. 23 On the “the compulsion to display one’s rank unremittingly” in aristocratic society, see Elias, Court Society, p. 64 and passim. For the nobility’s efforts to assert social distinction through the collecting and appreciation of art, see in particular Gage, “Some Stirring or Changing Place of Vision,” esp. p. 125. 24 Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs, p. 244. 25 See Chapter 2, pp. 118-119 and Colantuono, “Mute Diplomat”; Cropper, “Introduction”; and Auwers, “The Gift of Rubens,” pp. 433-435. 26 Quoted in Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 74. For the letter, see Rosa, Lettere, no. 150 (1652). The painting was presented to Louis XIV by Cardinal Chigi in 1664.

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1. Salvator Rosa, Heroic Battle, 1652-1664. Oil on canvas, 241 × 351 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images.

with foreign powers.27 While neither the early Medici nor the Signora had court artists, they recognized the potential of sponsoring art as a form of cultural policy and diplomacy.28 Confronted with waning political power in the seventeenth century, the Grand Dukes of Tuscany relied heavily upon their Florentine advantage in the arena of cultural policy, turning the Granducal Workshops virtually into distribution centers for diplomatic gifts of art.29 The seventeenth-century popes, likewise facing diminishing political power and respect, banked on the prestige of Italian artworks for diplomatic initiatives. Pope Urban VIII’s nephew Francesco Barberini, as Cardinal-Protector of England, pursued the strategy of dispensing gifts of Renaissance and contemporary Italian art in order to advance Catholic interests in England, paving the way, he hoped, for restoring Catholicism in the British Isles.30 Writing bluntly about his plans for England to Mazarin in 1635, Barberini acknowledged that he would not “hesitate to rob Rome of her most valuable ornaments, if, in exchange, we might be so happy, as to have the King of England’s

27 See Elam, “Art and Diplomacy in Renaissance Florence,” and Cox-Rearick, “Sacred to Profane.” 28 Elam, “Art and Diplomacy in Renaissance Florence,” p. 814. 29 Goldberg, “State Gifts from the Medici,” pp. 115-119. For artworks gifted by the Medici Grand Dukes to Spain, see idem, “Artistic Relations between the Medici and the Spanish Courts.” 30 For Barberini gifts of art to the Stuart court, see Madocks Lister, “Trumperies Brought from Rome,” and Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 255-256, 364-365.

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name stand among those princes who submit themselves to the apostolic see.”31 Barberini decided to send paintings to the Stuart court only after learning that Charles and Henrietta Maria both let it be known that they desired and expected gifts of paintings.32 Barberini presented pictures by Leonardo, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, Veronese, Giulio Romano, Pietro da Cortona, and Albani to Henrietta Maria, though in reality they were intended for Charles. In 1636 Gregorio Panzani, unofficial papal agent in London, reported to Barberini that the King and the architect Inigo Jones, whom Panzani called a Puritanissimo fiero (“fierce Protestant”), were wildly enthusiastic about the paintings by Leonardo, Del Sarto, and Giulio Romano.33 Anticipating correctly that Henrietta Maria would show her gifts to Charles, Barberini used her to initiate and maintain communication with the King. He also secretly dispatched gifts of paintings to the pro-Roman Catholic Privy Councilors Francis Windebank, Secretary of State, and Francis Cottington, but warned Panzani “not to divulge him [Barberini] to be the author of these presents.”34 Barberini’s correspondence also documents the care and sensitivity with which he approached the task of selecting appropriate works of art to send as gifts. In a letter to Panzani, Barberini presses for more detailed information about the taste and preferences of Windebank and Cottington: “You have not said whether you want copies or originals, old paintings or modern ones or other such detail which you have let me know on other occasions – whom they are for, who has one taste, who another?”35

Princely Gifts of Art Seventeenth-century sovereigns such as Charles I and Philip IV surpassed the papacy and Italian princes in their exchanges of prized Italian works of art as diplomatic gifts. One of the most high-profile transfers of paintings and other artworks from one royal collection to another occurred in 1623, when Charles I, as Prince of Wales, made an unexpected trip to Madrid to court the Infanta Maria Anna, sister of Philip IV. While neither the marriage nor an alliance between England and Spain materialized, Charles acquired from Philip major gifts from the Habsburg’s collection of Italian Renaissance art, which would help lay the groundwork for the successful 31 Barberini to Mazarin, 20 October 1635, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 364-365. For the letter, see Panzani, Memoirs, p. 193. 32 Madocks Lister, “Trumperies Brought from Rome,” esp. pp. 157-158. 33 See Wittkower, “Inigo Jones,” and Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 255-256. For the report, see Panzani, Memoirs, pp. 250-251. 34 Panzani, Memoirs, p. 251, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 256. 35 Barberini to Panzani, 11 April 1635, quoted in Madocks, “Trop de beautez découvertes,” p. 546.

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2. Titian, Pardo Venus (Jupiter and Antiope), 1551. Oil on canvas. 196 × 385 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images.

conclusion of a later peace treaty between the two realms in 1630. Celebrated works of art – including Titian’s Pardo Venus (Fig. 2) and Charles V with a Dog (Fig. 3), Veronese’s Mars and Venus, and Giambologna’s marble sculptural group Samson Slaying a Philistine (Fig. 4) – were presented to Charles in Madrid and on his return journey.36 The Giambologna had originally been gifted by Grand Duke Ferdinand I of Tuscany in 1601 to the Duke of Lerma, Philip III’s valido or chief minister, and Charles in turn gave it to his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. Charles even had the audacity to request the entire set of Titian’s poesie, painted for Philip II, which were reportedly crated for shipment to London, though returned to the Alcazar after the marriage negotiations collapsed. The King still coveted the Titians and in 1629 his ambassador to Madrid, Francis Cottington, who had accompanied him to Spain in 1623, pledged to “indevor to get allso thos of Titian, wch I left ye Palace ye last time”;37 he never succeeded. The Spanish court fully understood art’s utility as a political instrument, leading to a remarkable episode in the history of diplomatic gifts of art. In 1628 the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of the Spanish Netherlands donated a series of sumptuous 36 For Philip IV’s gifts to Charles I, see Brown, “Artistic Relations,” pp. 45, 50. Titian’s Charles V with a Dog (Fig. 3) would later serve Anthony van Dyck as a model for a majestic full-length portrait of Thomas Wentworth, later 1st Earl of Strafford. Wentworth was himself a recipient of portraits gifted by the King. In 1633 Charles gave him replicas of full-length portraits of himself by Mytens and of Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck in honor of his appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland. See Wheelock Jr., “The Queen, the Dwarf, and the Court.” 37 Francis Cottington to Endymion Porter, 2 November 1629, quoted in Brown, “Artistic Relations,” p. 45. For the letter, see Sainsbury, Original Unpublished Papers, p. 293.

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3. Titian, Charles V with a Dog, 1533. Oil on canvas, 192 × 111 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images.

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4. Giambologna, Samson Slaying a Philistine, ca. 1562. Marble, 209.9 cm high. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: V & A Images, London / Art Resource, ny.

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5. Woven by Jan Raes I after designs by Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumph of the Eucharist, ca. 1625-1633. Wool and silk, 490 × 750 cm. Monasterio de las Descalzas, Madrid. Photo: Monasterio de las Descalzas, Madrid / Bridgeman Images.

tapestries, designed by Rubens (Fig. 5), to the Convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, a retreat for female members of the Spanish royal family, site of important Catholic rituals as well as political negotiations, and showplace of royal gifts of art.38 The cycle’s theme of the Triumph of the Eucharist was conceived to impress Philip IV, Isabella’s nephew, with a demonstration of her support for Habsburg political and religious authority in the rebellious, war-torn Netherlands. A few weeks after the tapestries reached Madrid, Rubens arrived as Isabella’s envoy. His goal was to broker a peace between Spain and England, which, as both Isabella and Rubens hoped, would isolate the Dutch from English support and compel them to agree to terms more favorable to the Spanish Netherlands. A treaty between Spain and England would be signed and ratified in 1630, but the anticipated peace with the Dutch had to wait until 1648, eight years after Rubens’s death and fifteen years after Isabella’s. The successful conclusion of the peace treaty nevertheless was due in part to Isabella’s promotion of Rubens as her diplomatic agent, and despite Philip’s initial objection that her use of a mere painter to perform such important service was “a

38 On the tapestry series, see Vergara and Woollett, eds., Spectacular Rubens, and Libby, “Solomonic Ambitions.”

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6. Peter Paul Rubens, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), 1629-1630. Oil on canvas, 203.6 × 298 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

cause of great discredit […] to this monarchy.”39 During Rubens’s extended stay in Madrid he won over Philip and members of the royal council, emerging in their estimation, as Michael Auwers argues, as a unique asset that could be exploited as a species of diplomatic gift. 40 Intimately familiar with Charles’s devotion to art, the Spanish court recognized Rubens’s negotiating potential. In April 1629 Philip, his chief minister the Count-Duke of Olivares, and members on the Junta de Estado unanimously agreed that Rubens was singularly placed to further their interests. In the words of the royal council, “because of [Rubens’s] personal qualities, his civilized behavior and his intelligence, and his profession as a painter, the English king being a great lover of paintings, could secure himself a degree of access that could serve his Majesty well.”41 Rubens, Philip, and the royal council had calculated correctly. When Rubens arrived in London a month later he was warmly received by Charles. Toward the end of his mission, Rubens presented the King with a personal gift of Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Fig. 6), a grand 39 Philip IV to Isabella, 15 June 1627, quoted in Auwers, “The Gift of Rubens,” p. 423. For the letter, see Rooses and Ruelens, eds., Correspondance de Rubens, vol. 4, pp. 83-84. On Rubens’s service as a diplomat, see also Auwers, “The Infanta and her Painter-Diplomat.” 40 Auwers, “The Gift of Rubens.” 41 Quoted in ibid, p. 427, and idem, “The Infanta and her Painter-Diplomat,” p. 409. For the report, see Loomie, “Olivares, the English Catholics, and the Peace of 1630,” p. 1157, n 3.

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allegory of peace designed to appeal to Charles’s political ideals and help bring an end to the war with Spain.42 Shortly afterwards the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty was signed. Rubens thus was both a gift giver and himself a gift. As a practiced courtier and artist-celebrity, Rubens made the most of his unique position by enlisting the power of gifts to effect political change. As a diplomatic gift, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars embodied Rubens’s personal allegiance to the sovereign political goals he glorified in art while simultaneously playing an active, co-constructive part in the political negotiations he was entrusted by his king to conduct. As the subject and efficacy of Rubens’s painting show, the content and stature of gifted artworks were crucial. There was tremendous pressure in the competitive and shifting landscape of international diplomacy to vet with appropriate care works of art intended as gifts. The importance of making the right selection, and the embarrassing consequences of misjudgments, are revealed in one well-documented incident from 1650-1652. Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, contrary to the advice of his ambassador in Madrid, was intent on offering Ludovico Cigoli’s Ecce Homo (Fig. 7) to Don Luis de Haro, Philip IV’s new valido or favorite. Ferdinand’s ambassador, Ludovico Incontri, warned that “even if this picture happened to be among Cigoli’s finest, it could scarcely win a place in [Don Luigi’s] gallery, where there are so many excellent ones by artists of the first class, including Titian, Correggio, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and others.” He added pointedly that “I am given to understand […] that modern pictures count for nothing in this place.”43 The planned gift of Cigoli’s painting was eventually replaced by a gold statuette of Philip IV, which, as Incontri reported, delighted Haro and “All the lords […] could not praise the gift enough, admiring first one thing and then another. There is no Prince in all the world, they concluded, like our Grand Duke; he surpasses even the greatest kings in magnificence and in precious objects.”44 Such was the gift’s success that Philip himself requested to see it, which prompted Haro to regift it to his king. “His Majesty,” wrote Incontri, “was gratified in the extreme and he personally showed it to all the courtiers,” thereby magnifying the symbolic power of the Grand Duke’s gift.45 The traffic in state gifts of art therefore was potentially guided as much by the need to cultivate relations with influential courtiers and members of state as with a king or ruler, whose aesthetic preferences were generally better known. Gifts of art were finely calibrated to the hierarchical, thickly networked conditions of early 42 Auwers, “The Gift of Rubens,” pp. 430-435. On the painting’s allusion to Charles I’s political philosophy, see Vergara, Gender, Politics, and Allegory, pp. 1-62. 43 For the Cigoli gift and related correspondence between the Tuscan ambassador Ludovico Incontri and the State Secretary Giovanni Battista Gondi in Florence, see Goldberg, “Lost Chapter.” Cigoli’s canvas is now regarded as a highpoint of Florentine Baroque painting. 44 Goldberg, “Lost Chapter,” p. 107. 45 Ibid, p. 108.

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7. Ludovico Cigoli, Ecce Homo, 1607. Oil on canvas, 175 × 135 cm. Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Photo: Palazzo Pitti, Florence / Bridgeman Images.

modern administrative and courtly society. The more prestigious the work of art, the more agency the gift possessed as a means of negotiating the hierarchies that formed the bedrock of this political and social system.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

Gifts of Art at the Caroline Court Nowhere was the gifting of art as pervasive an instrument of politics as at the Caroline court.46 In the 1630s paintings by Rembrandt and other Dutch artists first arrived in England in the form of diplomatic and courtly gifts. Charles I’s devotion to what one contemporary called his “most beloved Pictura” essentially transformed paintings, particularly sixteenth-century Italian pictures, into indispensable assets for courtiers to distribute as gifts in order to preserve or enhance their rank. 47 The King’s equally art-loving grandees – the favorite George Villiers, 1st Duke Buckingham, and, after his assassination in 1628, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – also made the acquisition of artworks imperative for negotiating the court’s hierarchically ordered webs of social reciprocity. By the 1630s not only the possession of paintings but also the skills of a connoisseur were essential for aspiring courtiers.48 The anxieties this new situation created for some English courtiers are vividly illustrated by a letter sent in 1625 by Edward Conway, Secretary of State, to Isaac Wake, the English resident at Venice: Doe mee the favour to provide for mee, in those parts, three or fower principall choice Pictures, originall Pieces, and made by the best Workmen. I will not stand upon anie price, nor anie other thinge but that they may bee such as may w th creditt bee presented to a noble freind and there find acceptačon. I can give you no more particular direcčon, but that I would bestowe £200 or £300 or more upon one or more very curious Pieces accordinge to yor Judgment, and choice, and will make present payment of the money to anie you shall direct mee to here. I pray you excuse this troble I put you to, and comaund mee in all things as Your loveing father Frend and servant E. Conway. 49 46 For the interplay between gifts of art and politics at the Caroline court, see in particular Heal, The Power of Gifts, pp. 136-148. 47 The agent and art dealer Michel le Blon referred to painting as Charles’s liefste pictura in a 1638 letter, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 136-137. In the same letter he remarks that “diverse gentlemen have gone into ruin through the mentioned passion for collecting paintings and rarities.” On art collecting by Charles and members of his court, see Haskell, The King’s Pictures. 48 In his Panegyrick to King Charles of 1649, Henry Wotton described the ability to appreciate art as one of the King’s accomplishments: “what more learned than to behold the mute eloquence of lights and shadowes and silver poesy of lineaments, and as it were living marbles.” See Wotton, Panegyrick, pp. 102-106, quoted in Shakeshaft, “Letters of James, Third Marquis of Hamilton and Basil, Viscount Feilding,” p. 118. 49 Conway to Wake, 27 May 1625, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 43. For the letter, see Sainsbury, Original Unpublished Papers, p. 352. See also Levy, “Henry Peacham and the Art of Drawing,” p. 175.

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With no connoisseurial knowledge of his own with which to guide the selection of suitable paintings to offer at court, Conway was forced to rely on the resident’s judgment and favor. All he could do was make clear that the gifts of pictures must be accepted as “very curious Pieces” and that money was virtually no object. Wake responded: “It shall be my care to serve your Lp herein with all faithfulness & diligence,” though he added that not knowing the identity of “that noble frend unto whom you do intend to present these pieces” would impede his efforts. Nonetheless he committed to acquiring originals by “a good Master, whose name I will declare, & have them maintained to be of such a hand as I shall specifiye.”50 The “noble frend” to whom Conway intended to offer the paintings was the Duke of Buckingham, favorite of both Charles and his father, James I. Buckingham assembled in just five or six years a stupendous collection of 400 paintings, displayed at his London residence, York House, and is credited with transforming the entire patronage system in England. In the process he became the epicenter of an intensive traffic in gifts.51 Foreign powers as well as English courtiers inundated Buckingham with presents of pictures and other artworks, hoping to draw the royal favorite into a relationship dictated by the ethics of honor and mutual service. Buckingham’s seemingly limitless passion and avarice for art were not always gratified, however. His request for the Mona Lisa during his visit to Paris in 1625 to arrange Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria was refused.52 In the previous year Alvise Valaresso, Venetian ambassador in London, having informed his Doge that Buckingham wanted paintings by Paolo Veronese in the Library of San Marco, also tactfully refused the request, conveying that the Doge was “accustomed to guard such things jealously, and rarely if ever to part with them, as is the manner of republics.”53 Sir Dudley Carleton (Fig. 8), the English diplomat known today for his dealings with Rubens, succeeded in ingratiating himself with Buckingham, whom he called “the principal verbe,” through frequent correspondence, solicitations, and supplementary gifts of art, including Dutch paintings.54 While on assignment in The Hague from 1616 to 1625, Carleton took advantage of opportunities to acquire artworks to send as presents that would keep him forefront in Buckingham’s mind and ultimately serve his goal of attaining high office at court. In 1619 he presented Buckingham with a New Year’s gift of a portrait, perhaps of Buckingham, which he 50 Wake to Conway, 18 July 1625, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 44. 51 Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” pp. 220-221. 52 Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs, p. 31. 53 Alvise Valaresso to Doge Francesco Contarini, 29 March 1624, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 244, n. 31. See also McEvansoneya, “Some Documents,” p. 34. 54 Barcroft, “Carleton and Buckingham”; Hill and Lockyer, “Carleton and Buckingham,” p. 21; Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting”; and Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 266-271.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

8. Michiel van Mierevelt, Dudley Carleton, Viscount Dorchester, ca. 1620. Oil on panel. 63. 5 × 50.2 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London / Art Resource, ny.

later learned was so well received that the Duke had to hide it from King James, who wanted it for himself.55 Two years later Carleton engaged Buckingham to present 55 Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” p. 220, and Hill and Lockyer, “Carleton and Buckingham,” p. 21, citing a letter from Sir William Balfour to Carleton, dated 12 January 1619.

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James with a life-size portrait of his grandson Henry Frederick, the eldest son of his daughter Elizabeth Stuart, by the Dutch portraitist Michiel van Mierevelt.56 Based in nearby Delft, Van Mierevelt regularly received commissions from Carleton for both originals and copies of portraits of prominent English aristocrats and the ambassador to give as gifts to influential figures in the Netherlands and England.57 In 1617 Carleton himself received gifts of paintings by the Utrecht artist Abraham Bloemaert depicting the four evangelists from Sir John Ogle, the English governor of Utrecht.58 Carleton’s efforts to curry favor with the Jacobean court with gifts of art culminated in 1624 with his presentation of valuable marble statuary to Buckingham, for which he was eventually rewarded with the position of ViceChamberlain.59 In 1628 Carleton was appointed Secretary of State, and given the title Viscount Dorchester. Carleton’s connoisseurship skills were limited, but he cultivated the support of leading English aristocrats by catering to their aesthetic preferences, even earning Arundel’s personal gratitude for trying to satisfy what he called “my foolish curiosity in enquiringe for the peeces of Holbein.”60 In 1621 Carleton presented Arundel with a now lost Aeneas Fleeing Troy he commissioned from Gerrit van Honthorst, who had recently returned to the Netherlands from Rome and whose work was then unknown in England. In the accompanying letter to Arundel, Carleton writes: “I will beseech you to accept as it is: yt is w thout exception to ye good will of ye presenter what defect soever yor Lp shall observe in ye skill of ye painter,” and that he had selected the subject as a test of Van Honthorst’s talent.61 Deferring to Arundel to judge “how well he [Van Honthorst] hath acquitted himself,” Carleton also invites the Earl to share his opinion of a Van Mierevelt portrait he was planning to give the King: “I shal gladly know Yor Lps opinion ye work, for ye life & likenes wee all here thincke yt Michel of Delph hath not bene so happy in any other picture this many a day.” Enthusiastically accepting both the Van Honthorst painting and the opportunity to demonstrate his connoisseurial acumen, Arundel describes the gift in his response as “a fayre picture of Aeneeas flyinge out of Troy, in wch I 56 Hill, “Carleton and his Relations with Dutch Artists,” pp. 256-257, and idem, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” citing a letter from Carleton to Buckingham, dated 12 June 1621. 57 Van Mierevelt’s 1624 bill to Carleton is printed in Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” Appendix III, pp. 223-224. On Carleton’s patronage of Van Mierevelt for gifting purposes, see Jansen, “Klanten van het atelier Van Mierevelt,” pp. 78-79. 58 Hill, “Carleton and his Relations with Dutch Artists,” p. 261. 59 See in particular Hill and Lockyer, “Carleton and Buckingham,” pp. 27-31, and Heal, The Power of Gifts, pp. 134-136. Carleton had received the marbles as a present from the Elector of Cologne. 60 Arundel to Carleton, 17 September 1619, quoted in Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs, p. 19. For the letter, see Hervey, Life, Correspondence, and Collections of Thomas Howard, pp. 161-162. 61 Carleton to Arundel, 22 June 1621, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 108, and Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” p. 262. For the letter, see Sainsbury, Original Unpublished Papers, pp. 290-291.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

9. Peter Paul Rubens. Daniel in the Lions’ Den, ca. 1614-1616. Oil on canvas, 224.2 × 330.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

assure y r Lop I thinke the painter hath expressed ye story w th much arte & both for the postures & ye colouringe, I have seene fewe Duch men arrive unto it, for it hath more of ye Itallian then the Flemish & much of ye manor of Caravagioes colouringe, wch is nowe soe much esteemed in Rome.”62 In extolling Van Honthorst’s up-to-date treatment of the mythological subject, Arundel was willing to engage with Carleton in a sophisticated discussion of modern painting. At the close of the letter, Arundel acknowledges the agency of Carleton’s gift in nurturing an affective bond of mutual interest and service between the two men: “it [the painting] hath noe fault but only that it is too good a present for me, but since y r Lop thinkes it not soe, I doe receive it w th many thankes, & will esteeme it amongst ye many argumentse of y r love & kindnes wch I have formerly received from y r Lop. Yr Lops ~ most assured frend to comand, T. Arundell.” Carleton also drew on painting’s prestige at court and the symbolic economy of the gift to cultivate a personal bond with James I and his successor Charles I. Besides the Van Mierevelt portraits discussed above, his gifts included major works of art, the most significant of which was Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (Fig. 9), presented to Charles between ca. 1625 and 1632. The canvas, which, as Abraham 62 Arundel to Carleton, 20 July 1621, quoted in Hill, “Ambassadors and Art Collecting,” p. 262. For the letter, see Sainsbury, Original Unpublished Papers, pp. 291-292. See also Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 109.

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van der Doort noted in his catalogue of the King’s collection of around 1639, was “soe bigg as the life” and given “by the deceased Lorde dorchesterr,” was one of the eight pictures Carleton had exchanged with Rubens in 1618 for antique sculptures.63 In the letter Rubens sent to Carleton offering a choice from a number paintings in his studio, he identifies Daniel in the Lions’ Den as done “entirely by my own hand,” which justified its high price tag of 600 florins.64 Van der Doort’s catalogue of Charles’s collection itemizes at least 80 paintings and sculptures the King received as gifts from named individuals, confirming the inalienability of the presents from donors as tokens of appreciation and of personal service to the crown.65 Among these gifts are three paintings attributed to Rembrandt from Sir Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancrum, Lord of the Bedchamber, and Master of the Privy Purse. Ancrum possibly acquired or ordered the paintings in 1629, when he was sent to The Hague to attend the funeral of Henry Frederick, Charles’s nephew by his sister Elizabeth Stuart, who had died accidentally by drowning. The three paintings listed as Rembrandts include a self-portrait, described as “being his owne picture & done by himself in a Black capp and furrd habbitt with a lit[t]le goulden chaine uppon both his Shouldrs”; “an old woeman with a greate Scarfe uppon her heade”; and a “a young Scholler Sitting upon a Stoole […] by a Seacole [turf] fire.”66 The self-portrait is identifiable with a painting traditionally assigned to Rembrandt of ca. 1629-1631 (Fig. 10).67 Old Woman in a Scarf of ca. 1627-1629 (Fig. 11) is now attributed to Jan Lievens, Rembrandt’s Leiden colleague, who also likely painted the untraceable picture of a seated young scholar that Van der Doort identified as a Rembrandt.68 In Jan Orlers’s 1641 biography of Lievens, a similar painting of “a person wearing a round cap, studying near a turf fire” is described as hanging at Westminster.69 Orlers relates that the work was “painted with such spirit” that “His Highness the Prince of Orange caused it to be purchased 63 See Millar, Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures, p. 16. For the entry in Van der Doort’s inventory of ca. 1639, see Millar, ed., “Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue,” p. 4. On the exchange with Rubens, see in particular Muller, “Rubens’s Museum of Antique Sculpture.” 64 Rubens to Carleton, 28 April 1618. See Magurn, Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, no. 28. 65 Heal, The Power of Gifts, p. 137. For the inventory, see Millar, ed., “Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue.” 66 Millar, “Abraham Van der Doort’s Catalogue,” pp. 57, 60. 67 The painting’s authorship is contested. Although initially accepted as autograph by the Rembrandt Research Project, it was later rejected and attributed tentatively to Rembrandt’s pupil Isaac Jouderville. See Bruyn et al., Corpus 1, no. A 33; idem, Corpus 2, Corriegenda et Addenda, no. A 32; and Van de Wetering et al., Corpus, pp. 179-182 and Corriegenda et Addenda, no. I A 33. Christopher Brown has recently supported the traditional attribution to Rembrandt. See Brown et al., Young Rembrandt, p. 93. 68 Old Woman in a Scarf was also initially accepted but subsequently rejected by the Rembrandt Research Project and attributed to Lievens. See Bruyn et al., Corpus 1, no. A 32, and idem, Corpus 2, Corrigenda et Addenda, A 32. 69 Orlers, Beschryvinge der stadt Leyden, p. 377, quoted in Wheelock Jr., “Jan Lievens,” p. 5.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

10. Rembrandt van Rijn (?), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Self-Portrait), 1629-1631. Oil on canvas, 69.7 × 57 cm. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. Photo: Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool / Bridgeman Images.

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11. Jan Lievens, An Old Woman Called ‘The Artist’s Mother’, ca. 1627-1629. Oil on panel, 61.3 × 47.4 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

12. Jan Lievens, Sir Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancrum, 1654. Oil on canvas, 62.2 × 51.4 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Accepted by HM Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax and Allocated to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 2010.

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and presented to the ambassador of the king of England who in turn gave it to his master the king.” Constantijn Huygens, the secretary to Stadholder Frederik Hendrik who wrote enthusiastically about both the young Rembrandt and Lievens in about 1630, probably presented Lievens’s lost painting to Kerr on his return to England.70 It is possible, then, that all three “Rembrandt” paintings were intended as gifts from Frederik Hendrik to Charles. If so, Van der Doort’s catalogue suggests that the stadholder’s role in presenting the gifts registered less strongly than Kerr’s mediation in delivering them. Whatever the case may be, the first pictures believed to be by Rembrandt entered the English royal collection as diplomatic gifts. In 1654 Lievens would portray the now 76-year-old Earl in one of his most incisive portraits (Fig. 12), sensitively depicting the aging face of this staunch Scots royalist who took refuge in Amsterdam after Charles’s execution in 1649.71

Artists’ Gifts in the Seventeenth Century Although artists have bestowed their work throughout history, the practice became truly widespread in the early modern period. Many artists intermingled gift and sales transactions, presenting their works as personal gifts to patrons, clients, contacts, and familiars. In the seventeenth century, however, some acclaimed painters adopted gift giving as a preferred if not exclusive means of conducting relations with patrons. Guido Reni, Nicolas Poussin, and Daniël Seghers embraced the gift’s economy of honor and reciprocity as a means of distinguishing transactions of their paintings from sales and evading the stigma of a commercial exchange. These privileged circumstances of trade also strengthened their work’s inalienability by intensifying the paintings’ aura of personal or even bodily presence. Ultimately, artists’ engagement of gift exchange endowed their works with a forceful agency to mediate relations within webs of professional and personal alliance. Tales of artists gifting their works trace back to antiquity, and beginning in the Renaissance one in particular became a trope in the early modern discourse on art. Pliny the Elder reported that the Greek painter Zeuxis gave away his works because he considered them priceless.72 Alberti repeated the anecdote, asserting that Zeuxis’s gifts made him a god among mortals.73 The topos served Alberti’s project of elevating the social status of artists and art by reinforcing painting’s 70 Wheelock Jr., “Jan Lievens,” p. 9. See also Van Straten, Leiden Years, pp. 130-131. Kerr also returned to England with Lievens’s Capuchin Monk Praying (1629, private collection). 71 Wheelock Jr. et al., Jan Lievens, cat. no. 51. 72 On Pliny’s anecdote and its importance to early modern artists’ efforts to elevate the status of their profession, see in particular Warnke, Court Artist, pp. 152-153. 73 Alberti, On Painting, p. 61. Alberti was the first theoretician to refer to the anecdote.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

claim to be a liberal art, not subject to the calculations of economic exchange. In his history of ancient artists published in a Dutch translation in 1641, Franciscus Junius elaborated on Zeuxis’s practice of giving away his paintings by quoting Quintilian’s statement that “many things lose their worth for nothing so much as they may be prised at a certaine rate.”74 As Elizabeth Honig has emphasized, gift giving was promoted in sixteenthand seventeenth-century art treatises as a mode of ritually transforming market transactions into dignified exchanges appropriate to the honor and distinction of the profession.75 Vasari highlights several instances of prominent artists’ use of gift exchange to assert their privileged positions and the transcendent value of their creative labor, explaining that “gifts have great potency for those who labor for the love of art.”76 Vasari records that in 1537 Titian presented his now lost Annunciation, originally commissioned for Santa Maria degli Angeli at Murano but refused for the asking price of 500 scudi, as a gift to Emperor Charles V, “who was so tremendously pleased with it that he made him a gift of two thousand crowns.”77 According to Vasari, Giuliano da Sangallo also once refused a lavish gift of horses, clothing, and a silver goblet filled with hundreds of ducats from Alfonso II, King of Naples, asking for and receiving instead a selection from the King’s collection of antique statues, which Alfonso “granted to him most liberally […] on account of Giuliano’s worth.” Giuliano then regifted the statues to his patron Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, in Vasari’s words, “expressed vast delight at the gift, and never tired of praising the action of this most liberal of craftsmen, who had refused gold and silver for the sake of art, a thing which few would have done.”78 For Vasari, like Alberti before him, the work of true masters was irreducible to quantifiable measurements of value, a conviction reportedly shared by Sebastiano del Piombo, whom Vasari asserts “was of the opinion that no price was large enough to pay for his works.”79 Similarly, in 1604 Karel van Mander wrote that Joos van Cleve felt “no money could ever fully pay for his work,” though Van Mander considered this a symptom of madness.80 Later writings on art, particularly Italian treatises, intensify the disdain for monetary transactions, emphasizing instead the Senecan ideal of the artist who prioritizes the “love of art,” or devotion to art, over the rewards of money and fame. In 1670 Giovan Pietro Bellori lamented that painting “has come to be practiced by many who do not use their minds but only their hands, and for sordid gain,” though 74 Junius, Painting of the Ancients, vol. 1, p. 163. 75 Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence.” 76 Vasari, Lives, vol. 9, p. 164. 77 Ibid, pp. 167-168, quoted in Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 94. 78 Vasari, Lives, vol. 4, p. 194, quoted in Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 97. 79 Vasari, Lives, vol. 6, p. 183, cited in Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 100, n. 35. 80 Van Mander, Lives, fol. 226v, cited in Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 101.

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he praised Rubens for resisting the lure of money and remaining throughout his life “enthralled by the love of imitation.”81 Bellori aimed to insulate the arts from what he perceived as the threat of the market, which he despaired was causing the profession to become “a mechanical and lowly art in the opinion of the public, to the detriment of the noble talents that strive to perpetuate their names in painting.”82 Artists were keenly aware, of course, of the highly competitive conditions in which they operated, and developed marketing and other strategies to maximize remuneration for their work.83 Gift giving was one of the available options. Guido Reni, according to Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s 1678 biography, detested “the mention of price in a profession in which, he said, it should be obligatory to negotiate on the basis of an honorarium or a gift.”84 Similarly, Salvator Rosa, according to his eighteenth-century biographer Pascoli, regularly gifted his paintings to patrons with the expectation of generous returns.85 But artists’ responses to the increasingly entangled realms of art and money were complex and multifaceted. Ambitious artists with a strong sense of their own self-worth enlisted the gift economy as a method of transacting art not simply to maximize profits but to assert their agency by detaching themselves from both the dependency of conventional patronage relationships and the alienation of the market. The mutuality and honor of the gift economy allowed these artists to forge personal bonds with patrons and other customers, setting in motion reciprocities that acknowledged their membership in privileged social circuits. Although gift giving was one of the most vital forms of negotiating social relationships in the developing economic cultures of early modern Europe, the gift’s significance for seventeenth-century artists is not always recognized. In an insightful recent analysis of gifts of art, Elizabeth Honig casts gift exchange, which she aptly calls the honor system, as an artifact of largely outdated codes of behavior to which art theorists clung in the face of the market’s inexorable impact on the valuation of art.86 Philip Sohm recently asserted that for many Venetian painters of the Renaissance and Seicento “gifting was a commercial transaction masquerading as a social exchange.”87 The economic historian Richard Goldthwaite also characterized early modern Italian artists’ investment in what he calls “the game of gift exchange” as “culturally pretentious” and ultimately a futile attempt to identify with a class for which they would always lack the requisite social credentials.88 In Goldthwaite’s view, artists 81 Bellori, Lives, p. 193. 82 Ibid. 83 See in particular Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit. 84 Malvasia, Life of Guido Reni, p. 114, quoted in Spear, Divine Guido, p. 212. 85 Pascoli, Vite, vol. 1, pp. 71-72. Cited in Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 77. 86 Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” esp. p. 90. 87 Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 228. 88 Goldthwaite, “Painting Industry in Early Modern Italy,” pp. 299-301.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

who practiced gift giving were imprisoned within the period’s rigidly conservative and hierarchical social structure, unable to transcend its class boundaries or embrace the liberating, leveling effects of the market. In these studies, gift transactions are reduced to marketing devices or tactics that “disguise” commercial motivations, and thus an exploitative marketing strategy aimed at compelling patrons to reciprocate with payments inflated by the gift’s anti-market calculus. While these perspectives on artists’ participation in the gift economy are understandable correctives to the ideological bias of early modern art treatises and idealizations of the economics of artistic production, they are also anachronistic and teleological. If art theorists downplayed or tried to deny the inescapable role of money and market exchange in the production and distribution of art, their promotion of gift exchange as an alternative mode of negotiating relations with patrons illuminates an important feature of early modern artistic culture. The preoccupation with gift exchange in art literature offers insight into period concepts of artistic worth and their impact on interactions between artists, their patrons, clients, and collectors. Dismissing artists’ gifts as a strategic evasion of economic realities oversimplifies the cultural and social forces that informed pre-modern artistic practices as well as the complex processes involved in determining artistic and cultural value, which are never purely economic or financial. Goldthwaite himself acknowledges that the domains of cultural and economic valuation are not mutually exclusive, pointing to work by Michael Hutter and David Throsby, economists who propose “abandoning the usual assumption that such dualities are oppositional or incommensurate” and who draw attention instead to the interpenetration of economic and cultural modes of valuation in the arts and culture.89

The Art of the Gift: Reni, Poussin, Seghers The gift economy’s expanded importance in early modernity as an alternate exchange system led many seventeenth-century artists to offer their works in the form of gift transactions, and some leading painters privileged gift giving as the primary mode of negotiating with patrons. Not all ambitious artists attempted to engage their patrons and customers in relationships of mutuality by offering gifts, however. Despite his renown, Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), as Richard Spear has stressed, adopted a traditional fixed pricing structure, in which he calculated his fees by the number and size of the figures depicted.90 But gift giving was pervasive in the period and practically 89 Hutter and Throsby, “Value and Valuation,” p. 17. 90 Spear, “Guercino’s ‘prix-fixe’”; idem, Divine Guido, pp. 210-224; and Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 52.

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a requirement in contemporary etiquette, especially among cultivated social elites. So entrenched was gift giving by this time that painters in seventeenth-century Florence have been described as practicing “a kind of institutionalized gifting.”91 Artists who regularly made presents of their work enlisted the anti-economic discourse of the gift to signal their professional and social aspirations, laying claim rhetorically to the exemption of their creative labor from association with craft and sales. In 1591 the Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Paggi, who was a member of the nobility, expressed deep antipathy toward adopting the norms of market exchange for transacting art: “If one sets a price for a painting from a painter as if [one were ordering] a coffer from a carpenter, it makes it plebeian because that is what common shopkeepers do who wear smocks.”92 Outright sales of artworks at predetermined prices could be such a taboo for artists that, as Antonio Lupis wrote to the painter Andrea Valle in 1675, “It is better to give them away than to sell them thus humiliating the profession and prejudicing the work.”93 Bellori is even more voluble in his biography of Guido Reni. “There is no worse type than certain avaricious and ignorant men,” Bellori writes: who have no appreciation for anything in this world but money, considering every virtue and every precious quality of talent, however noble and estimable, to be useless and vile in comparison. Such men never offer any sustenance to the fine arts on their own initiative and it galls them that anyone else should reward and honor them, so they thwart the generosity of the popes and of those who love and prize the arts. […] if those men are in a position to give remuneration for some work of painting, even if it is excellent and bears a famous name, they do not measure its merits otherwise than by the time spent, and they want to reckon the money by counting the days, as in the case of common laborers; if they knew how much it takes and how one has to rack one’s brains to apply a brushstroke well to the canvas, they would not talk this way.94

For artists like Reni and their champion Bellori, the gift’s aestheticized economy provided a dignified method of circumventing the stigma attached to merchandising and manual labor. In a letter of 1628 Reni articulated the basis upon which only artists of his rank might and ought to foster gifting relationships with patrons and clients. According 91 Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 16. 92 Paggi to his brother Girolamo, 1591, quoted in Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 13. For the letter, see Bottari and Ticozzi, eds., Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, no. 17. See further Lukehart, “Contending Ideals,” pp. 209-214. 93 Quoted in Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 228. For the letter, see Lupis, Il plico, pp. 15-16. 94 Bellori, Lives, p. 356. See also Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 52.

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to Reni, there were three distinct classes of painters, and this hierarchy determined the prices of their works. The lowest (pittori più bassi) produced life-size figures each worth a meager 2 to 3 scudi; the figures of the “ordinary painter” (pittore ordinario) he valued at 15 scudi; but the “extraordinary” (straordinario) painter, like Reni himself, produced works whose quality exceeded any quantifiable measure of compensation. Gift giving, he asserted, was the most appropriate mode of transferring extraordinary paintings to signori grandi, who constituted the most suitable clients.95 The criterion for qualification in this select group of straordinari artists was a reputation for excellence among the grandi signori of the social and cultural elite. Reni and artists of his rank who were esteemed in the highest echelons of the collecting world operated in accordance with a distinctive system of valuation known as valore di stima, an estimation of an artist’s stature and his work’s value based on reputation and quality, not expenditure of labor. As Giulio Mancini acknowledged in his guide to collectors, the price of a painting “is linked with the quality of the patron who owns it and the artist who makes it,” and that by engaging in gift exchange “one sees extravagant prices and compensation in the great generosity of some gracious person or prince.”96 Reni and other artists thus sought to negotiate with cultivated and magnanimous patrons according to the logic of gift exchange in part to achieve above-market remuneration. But not all artists who embraced gift giving and the evaluative system of valore di stima shared Reni’s price manipulations or his social pretension. Nicolas Poussin preferred to think of transactions of his paintings as exchanges between friends, not sales, and cultivated lasting relationships with patrons based on shared intellectual interests and a mutual love of art.97 For Poussin, the ethics of the gift nurtured a humanistic community of learned and virtuous men rather than the hierarchical relationships of patronage and clientage. Poussin became indignant when Paul Fréart de Chantelou sent an unsolicited payment for a painting he intended as a gift, protesting in a 1650 letter: I promised myself that you would receive the little present with a favorable eye, but I expected nothing more, and did not claim that it placed you under any obligation to me. I was content enough to have a place in paint in your cabinet without filling my purse with money. It is a kind of Tyranny for you to render me so much your debtor that I can never pay off my debt.98 95 Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 53. For the letter in which Guido laid out his hierarchy of painters, see Ciammitti, “Una lettera di Guido Reni.” 96 Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, p. 140, quoted in Spear, Divine Guido, p. 212. 97 See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, pp. 177-215. 98 Quoted in ibid, p. 187. For the letter, see Jouanny, ed., Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, p. 418.

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13. Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait, 1650. Oil on canvas, 98 × 74 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images.

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The picture was the striking Louvre Self-Portrait (Fig. 13), which memorializes the two men’s bonds of ideal friendship, founded not on obligation and servitude but on honor and a shared devotion to painting. In his later years, when suffering from a hand tremor, Poussin would also present the unfinished Apollo and Daphne in the Louvre as a gift to Cardinal Massimo, one of his most important Italian patrons.99 Other artists’ motivations for engaging the gift economy in negotiating relations with patrons and collectors were equally principled. Daniël Seghers, the Flemish flower painter and coadjutor, or lay brother, of the Jesuit order, never sold his paintings but made them available to the Society of Jesus to present to rulers and dignitaries throughout Europe, including the Protestant stadholders of the Dutch Republic.100 The stadholder and members of his family received at least four of Seghers’s works between 1645 and 1652, beginning with Garland of Flowers Surrounding a Sculpture of the Virgin Mary (Fig. 14), painted for Frederik Hendrik in collaboration with Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert in 1645.101 Seghers and his order were richly rewarded not with cash payments but with counter-gifts whose value far exceeded what was expected of a painter’s fee. In 1649, Willem II, who had succeeded his father Frederik Hendrik as stadholder in 1647, presented Seghers with a spectacular gift of a solid gold palette engraved with the Prince’s arms by Hans Coenraad van Brechtel and six gold brush-holders. Three years later Amalia van Solms, widow of Frederik Hendrik and mother of Willem II, completed the gift of her by then deceased son with a gold maulstick that bore a skull. Although the original gold palette and maulstick were melted in the early eighteenth century, copies made of gilded brass are now in the collection of the Rubenshuis, Antwerp (Fig. 15). Seghers bequeathed all his gifts to the Jesuit House in Antwerp, where they were housed as celebrated treasures until the beginning of the eighteenth century.102 Seghers’s motives were not primarily self-interested, as the generous rewards he received were used to support the spiritual and pious activities of his order. A counterpart to Seghers’s practice of donating paintings for charitable ends was the gifting campaign of the Italian collector Padre Sebastiano Resta, a member of the Oratorian order, who distributed drawings from his famous collection in anticipation of generous donations for his philanthropy. Resta presented albums of prized drawings to prelates, princes, and kings with the expectation of receiving magnanimous counter-gifts of cash that would be dispensed as church charity. 99 Bellori, Lives, p. 325. 100 For Seghers and gift giving, see Couvreur, “Daniël Seghers’ inventaris”; Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons, cat. nos. 27, 35; and Merriam, Flemish Garland Paintings, pp. 118-119. 101 See Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons, no. 27. The painting was an integral feature of the decorative scheme of Amalia van Solms’s “large cabinet” in the Huis ten Bosch. 102 Ibid, no. 35. The gifts are mentioned in De Bie, Het gulden cabinet, p. 214, and Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 1, p. 141.

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14. Daniël Seghers and Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Garland of Flowers Surrounding a Sculpture of the Virgin Mary, 1645. Oil on canvas, 151 × 122. 7 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

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15. Hans Coenraad van Brechtel (copies after). Painter’s Palette of Daniël Seghers, Five Brush-Holders, and Painter’s Maulstick. Gilded copper, 23.5 × 17.5 cm (palette); 22.5 cm length (brush-holders); 88 × 1.2 cm (maulstick). Antwerp City Collection, Rubenshuis. Photo: Michel Wuyts.

Calling this his opera pia (pious work), Resta appealed to his patrons by invoking the values and rhetoric of the gift, resolutely dissociating their transactions from the self-interest of the marketplace to maximize revenue for Christian philanthropy.103 While comparatively few artists were inspired by such lofty ideals, it does not necessarily follow that most artists’ gifts were motivated purely by the desire to inflate their prices or increase their social capital. By offering gifts of their work some sought to secure economic and social advantages unobtainable through normal market transactions. But focusing exclusively on their self-interest and financial calculations downplays the crucial social and cultural dimensions of gift giving. The ethics of the gift helped artists to nurture bonds with patrons and clients that transcended the norms of traditional patronage relationships as well as the insecure conditions of commerce. Through the symbolic operations of the gift economy, artists hoped to transform commercial transactions into durable personal ties of reciprocity, honor, 103 See Warwick, “Gift Exchange and Art Collecting,” and idem, Arts of Collecting, esp. pp. 55-75.

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and obligation. In these aestheticized conditions of trade artists assumed greater agency in relationships with patrons and clients, and their works gained agency as material reminders of personal bonds and shared aesthetic convictions.

The Range of Artists’ Gifts Although most of the artists discussed thus far were major figures in their day, less well-known artists also gave away their work. Paolo Guidotti – a seventeenthcentury Italian painter, sculptor, poet, musician, inventor, and politician knighted by Pope Paul V – frequently presented his artworks as gifts and received generous rewards in return.104 The majority of artists, however, would have combined gift and market exchanges in their business practices by making sporadic and strategic gifts to patrons and customers. The testimony of four Italian printers from a trial of 1635 documents the routine intermingling of merchandising and gift giving in the period. As the printers testified, they customarily gave away impressions of dedicated prints “on paper, or on satin or taffeta or other material as we are used to doing, and which is commonly done by everyone.”105 Printmakers also regularly included dedicatory inscriptions in the hopes of receiving rewards from patrons or to nurture networks of affiliation with personal contacts. A few notable examples of artists’ gifts to important patrons shed light on the characteristics and range of such exchanges. In 1608 the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel sent gifts to Cardinal Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, not of his own art but other precious objects of art and nature he was confident would appeal: twelve shells of “the most beautiful and rarest type that are brought from India on Dutch ships” as well as a copy of a “beautiful” head by Raphael.106 In general, though, artists offered their own works, which were readily available and, more importantly, because bestowing products of their own hands heightened immensely the inalienability and symbolic resonance of their gifts. Rubens’s presentation of an allegory of peace as a parting gift to Charles I (Fig. 6) is a well-known though unusual example of an artist presenting his work to a patron. As we saw, Rubens conceived of the painting as an instrument of diplomacy, enlisting it to appeal both to the King’s political principles and his sensibilities as an art connoisseur. Rubens must have hoped the 104 Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 77, citing Baglione, Le vite, pp. 303-304. See also Haskell, Patrons and Painters, p. 14, and Faldi, “Paolo Guidotti,” pp. 286-287. 105 Quoted in Lincoln, Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker, p. 128. For the document, see Bertolotti, Artisti belgi ed olandesi a Roma, p. 226. 106 Quoted in Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values,” p. 150. For the letter, see Crivelli, Giovanni Brueghel, p. 75. On Brueghel’s work for Borromeo, see Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana, pp. 64-91, and for his Italian patrons more generally, see Honig, Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale, esp. pp. 12-18.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

gift would function as a lasting reminder of the peace he helped broker between England and Spain. Charles reciprocated with conspicuous tokens of his esteem and gratitude, conferring on Rubens a knighthood and material gifts, though explicitly in recognition of his services as a diplomat, not his work as an artist. While Rubens’s position as a Habsburg envoy and the terms of his reward were exceptional, his effort to enhance and perpetuate a personal bond with a powerful sovereign through the gift of his own work conformed to established artistic practice. As documents record, Orazio Gentileschi sent his paintings as gifts to eminent rulers in order to cultivate patronage and initiate relationships defined by ideals of mutual service and honor. In 1623 Orazio’s son Francesco delivered The Annunciation (Fig. 16) to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, together with a letter in which Orazio referred to his gift from the previous year of a painting of Lot and his Daughters, which he learned was positively received.107 “And so, animated by such exalted favor,” Orazio writes, “I have been encouraged to send you another [picture], larger and better than the first, which is [of] the most holy Annunciation, so that your Highness may better judge the point at which my art has arrived.” A gift by Orazio to Philip IV shows that even the most illustrious patrons were receptive to such gambits by artists. Orazio offered the monumental Finding of Moses now in the Prado (Fig. 17), a second, slightly altered autograph version of a painting in an English private collection commissioned by Charles I in the early 1630s.108 Charles had endorsed Gentileschi’s plan to give The Finding of Moses to Philip IV, as Sir John Coke, Secretary of State, wrote in 1633 to Sir Arthur Hopton, English ambassador in Madrid. “Wth his Maties: good liking and permission,” Coke wrote, Gentileschi had “dedicated and now sent unto that kinge” the canvas. Hopton reported that “his Matie [Philip] seemed to be very well pleased, and I am told that really hee is so. I have seene the peece since in a Roome [Salon Nuevo] of ye Pallace where most of the selected peeces are.”109 Philip responded to Gentileschi’s gesture with a princely counter-gift of 900 ducats, which was likely meant to impress Charles as much as reward the artist.110 In 1633 Gentileschi also dispatched another painting as a gift to Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, acknowledging in the accompanying letter his simultaneous gift of The Finding of Moses to the Spanish monarch.111 Gentileschi’s distribution of paintings to different rulers suggests that 107 Quoted in Christiansen and Mann et al., Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, no. 43. 108 See Weston-Lewis, “Gentileschi’s Two Versions,” and Christiansen and Mann et al., Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, no. 48. 109 Quoted in Weston-Lewis, “Gentileschi’s Two Versions,” p. 39. For the letter, see Harris, “Gentileschi’s ‘Finding of Moses’,” p. 89; and Trapier, “Interchange of Paintings,” p. 242. 110 Brown, “Artistic Relations,” p. 56. 111 Quoted in Weston-Lewis, “Gentileschi’s Two Versions,” p. 39. For the letter, see Crinò, “Due lettere,” p. 204. The painting has not been identified.

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16. Orazio Gentileschi, The Annunciation, 1621-1623. Oil on canvas, 289 × 198 cm. Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Photo © Musei Reali di Torino / Paolo Robino / Bridgeman Images.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

17. Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, 1633. Oil on canvas, 242 × 281 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images.

he was enlisting gift giving to secure a court position, inspired perhaps by Van Dyck’s appointment as Charles’s court painter in the previous year. In the end, though, Gentileschi was disappointed, as Hopton predicted: “if hee [Gentileschi] had asked my counsaile before he had come, I should have wished him to stay at home, for the manner of proceeding in this court [Madrid] is soe different from all others as few returne with satisfaction equal to ye expectation they bring.”112 Offering samples of one’s work was accepted as a decorous method for artists to initiate not only profitable exchanges but also personal relations with powerful patrons and even great princes. A 1626 letter to Rubens from the Count-Duke of Olivares, Philip IV’s favorite, offers a glimpse of the remarkably affectionate language that eminent statesmen used when accepting gifts from an artist. Thanking Rubens for the gift of an allegorical portrait print that the artist designed at his own expense 112 Quoted in Brown, “Artistic Relations,” p. 56. For the letter, see Harris, “Gentileschi’s ‘Finding of Moses’,” p. 89.

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18. Paulus Pontius after Peter Paul Rubens, Allegorical Portrait of Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke Olivares, ca. 1625. Engraving, 61.3 × 44.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

and had engraved by Paulus Pontius (Fig. 18), Olivares wrote: “I appreciate the love you have for me. A good sign of it is the portrait that you have ordered printed.”113

Artistic Gifts of Friendship Olivares’s acknowledgment of Rubens’s gift as a demonstration of the artist’s “love” seems like hyperbole to us. But his response is fully consistent with the rhetoric that accompanied early modern gift exchanges, and which the etiquette of gift giving required. Yet however routine such language was in the protocols of gifting, bonds of genuine affection could also be at play. Gifts carried emotional weight especially within horizontal social alliances, such as those between friends, usually elite men, who modeled their behavior on humanist values and ancient writings. Erasmus acknowledged gift giving’s role in maintaining friendships, but emphasized that only certain types of gifts were suitable for friendships nurtured by humanist intellectual and ethical principles. In the dedication of his Parabolae of 1514 to the Antwerp town clerk Pieter Gillis, Erasmus lays out the criteria that qualified his book as a “special gift for a special friend”: Friends of the commonplace and homespun sort, my open-hearted Pieter, have their idea of relationship, like their whole lives, attached to material things; and if ever they have to face a separation, they favor a frequent exchange of rings, knives, caps, and other tokens of the kind, for fear that their affection may cool when intercourse is interrupted […] But you and I, whose idea of friendship rests wholly in a meeting of minds and the enjoyment of studies in common, might well greet one another from time to time with presents for the mind and keepsakes of a literary description […] Our aim would be that any loss due to separation in the actual enjoyment of our friendship should be made good, not without interest, by tokens of this literary kind. And so I send a present – no common present, for you are no common friend, but many jewels in one small book.114

Although Erasmus here stipulates literary offerings, he also endorsed artworks as appropriate presentations to sustain the bonds of such “uncommon,” ideal friendships. Famously, Erasmus and his friend Gillis in 1517 commissioned Quentin Metsys to portray them in pendant portraits (Figs. 19-20) for presentation as a 113 Quoted in Vergara, Rubens and His Spanish Patrons, pp. 34-38, and Auwers, “The Infanta and her Painter-Diplomat,” p. 402. 114 Quoted in Davis, “Beyond the Market,” p. 77, and idem, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, p. 36. Book dedications to literary friends and university colleagues, as Davis writes, “rival in importance” those designed to attract patronage and monetary rewards.

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19. Quentin Metsys, Desiderius Erasmus, 1517. Oil on panel, 50.5 × 45.2 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

“joint gift” to their mutual friend Thomas More, in England.115 Hinged together as a diptych, the panels were intended as keepsakes of the three scholars’ affection for one another beyond the grave, for, as Erasmus wrote to More: “if fate should carry both of us off [Erasmus and Gillis], we can in some form at least be with you.”116 115 See Campbell et al., “Quentin Matsys.” On friendship portraits in Northern art, see Koerner, “Friendship Portraits.” 116 Quoted in Campbell et al., “Quentin Matsys,” p. 716, n. 8. For the letter, see Allen, ed., Opus epistolarum, no. 654.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

20. Quentin Metsys, Pieter Gillis, 1517. Oil on panel, 76.6 × 52.2 cm. © Longford Castle, England. Photo: Longford Castle Collection.

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Portraits were compelling tokens of personal connection and regard because of their evocation of the sitter’s absent presence and their capacity to reify bonds of affection. When artists presented self-portraits to members of their personal networks, as in the case discussed earlier of Poussin’s exchange with Chantelou in 1650 (Fig. 13), they enhanced considerably their gifts’ ability to act as pictorial surrogates. Poussin heightened the inalienability of his gift when he explained to Chantelou that he chose the Louvre painting as the finer, or le meilleur et le plus ressemblant, to another self-portrait, now in Berlin, which he sent to Jean Pointel, his other great French patron and Chantelou’s rival.117 Rubens acceded to the request of his humanist friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc to send a self-portrait as part of an exchange of antiquarian and artistic gifts. “For my devotion to him [Peiresc],” Rubens wrote to a mutual friend in 1629, “I deserve to live in his memory, and the more so because he has almost forced me to overcome my modesty and give him my portrait as a pledge of friendship.”118 Three years later Rubens received Peiresc’s portrait in reciprocation, along with, as he acknowledged to Peiresc, “very accurate drawings of your tripod and many other curiosities, for which I send you the customary payment of a thousand thanks.” He continued: “Your portrait has brought the greatest pleasure to me, and also to those who have seen it. They are entirely satisfied with the likeness, but I confess that I do not see reflected in this face a certain intellectual power and that emphasis in the glance, which seem to me to belong to your genius, but is not easy for anyone to render in a picture.”119 In the same letter, Rubens reports that he had heard “news of the arrival of my portrait, which I am afraid […] is unworthy of your museum, but only worthy of your humble servant.” Despite Rubens’s professed misgivings, his gift portrait helped deepen Peiresc’s bonds with members of his scholarly network, generating further gifts in turn. In 1630 César Nostradamus wrote to Peiresc: “I have learned that you have received the portrait of M. Rubens by his own hand, whereupon admiring this personage and his reputation, I have made the sonnet which I send you.”120 Moreover, artists’ bestowal of their art to nurture bonds of attachment catalyzed the development of a new category of artwork, the “presentation drawing,” which is associated principally with Michelangelo’s highly finished sheets presented to Tomasso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna.121 These refined, often iconographically complex 117 On Poussin’s address of the self-portraits to Chantelou and Pointel, see McTighe, Poussin’s Landscape Allegories, pp. 146-151. 118 Rubens to Pierre Dupuy, 22 April 1629, in Magurn, Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, no. 184. 119 Rubens to Pieresc, August 1632, in Magurn, Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, no. 216. 120 Magurn, Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, pp. 497-498, n. 2 (Letter 216). 121 On Michelangelo’s presentation drawings, see Wilde, Michelangelo, pp. 147-159; Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings, pp. 105-118; and Bambach et al., Michelangelo, pp. 130-155. For the circulation of his designs, see Bambach et al., Michelangelo, pp. 154-155.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

21. Michelangelo, Archers Shooting at a Herm, ca. 1530. Red chalk (two shades) on paper, 21.9 × 32.3 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

drawings, planned as independent works for presentation to intimate friends, were widely known within Michelangelo’s inner sanctum of familiars and admirers and publicized by Vasari. For the beautiful young Roman nobleman Cavalieri, Michelangelo drew allegorized mythologies (Fig. 21) and fantastic heads or teste divine (Fig. 22), while for Colonna, with whom he shared deep religious commitments, Michelangelo created intensely spiritualized images of the crucified Christ (Fig. 23). The drawings have been characterized as pictorial counterparts to Michelangelo’s poetry, and therefore as “works actuated by profound personal feeling.”122 As Alexander Nagel has argued compellingly, Michelangelo adapted the gift drawing’s exemption from the normal economy of artistic production and reception and from the artistic and institutionalized conventions of Christian art to engage Colonna in an intimate exchange centering on their shared reformist ideal of faith as a divine gift surpassing any measure of recompense.123 The heightened and exceptionally refined creativity that Michelangelo put on display in these drawings reflects the intimate circumstances in which they were traded and admired. As we shall see in later chapters, the ethics of 122 Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings, p. 107. 123 Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” and idem, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, pp. 169-187.

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22. Michelangelo, Cleopatra, 1530-1534. Black chalk on paper, 23.2 × 18. 2 cm. Casa Buonarotti, Florence. Photo © Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Bridgeman Images.

The Gift and Art in Early Modernity 

23. Michelangelo, Pietà, 1540. Black chalk on paper, 28.9 × 18. 9 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, ma / Bridgeman Images.

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the gift also inspired the creation of distinctive, innovative artworks by Dutch artists which, like Michelangelo’s presentation sheets, emerged from and actively mediated relations within social networks of patrons, collectors, and intimates.

Chapter 1 Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Trans. Cecil Grayson. London: Penguin, 1991. Algazi, Gadi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Juseen, eds. Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003. Allen, P.S., ed. Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Auwers, Michael. “Peter Paul Rubens: The Infanta and her Painter-Diplomat.” In Isabel Clara Eugenia: Female Sovereignty in the Courts of Madrid and Brussels, edited by Cordula van Wyhe, pp. 382-413. Madrid and London: Holberton, 2011. ———. “The Gift of Rubens: Rethinking the Concept of Gift-Giving in Early Modern Diplomacy.” European History Quarterly 43 (2013), pp. 421-441. Baglione, Giovanni. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti: Dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII fino à tutto quello d’Urbano VIII. Rome, 1642. Bambach, Carmen C., et al. Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer. Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017. Barcroft, J. H. “Carleton and Buckingham: The Quest for Office.” In Early Stuart Studies: Essays in Honor of David Harris Willson, edited by H. S. Reinmuth, pp. 122-136. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Bellori, Giovan Pietro. The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Ed. Hellmut Wohl, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, intro. Tomaso Montanari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Bertolotti, A. Artisti belgi ed olandesi a Roma nei secoli XVI e XVII. Florence, 1880. Bie, Cornelis de. Het gulden cabinet vande edel vry schilder-const. Antwerp, 1661. Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, and Stefano Ticozzi, eds. Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura. Vol. 6. Milan, 1822. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. ———. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. ———. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Trans. Randall Johnson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Brantl, Mary Katherine. “Agency Studies: Art and Diplomacy in Northern European Protestant Courts of the Early Seventeenth Century.” PhD diss., New York University, 1998.

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Brown, Christopher, et al. Young Rembrandt. Exh. cat. Leiden: Museum Het Lakenhal; Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2019. Brown, Jonathan. Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. “Artistic Relations between Spain and England, 1604-1655.” In The Sale of the Century: Artistic Relations between Spain and Great Britain, 1604-1655, edited by Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott, pp. 41-68. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Brusati, Celeste. “Natural Artif ice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life.” In Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, edited by Wayne Franits, pp. 144-157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bruyn, Josua, et al. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. 3 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982-1989. Campbell, Lorne, et al. “Quentin Matsys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gillis, and Thomas More.” The Burlington Magazine 120 (1978), pp. 716-725. Carrier, James G. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Christiansen, Keith, and Judith Mann et al. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Exh. cat. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Ciammitti, Luisa. “‘Questo si costuma ora a Bologna’: Una lettera di Guido Reni, aprile 1628.” Prospettiva 98-99 (2000), pp. 194-203. Couvreur, Walter. “Daniël Seghers’ inventaris van door hem geschilderde stukken.” Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis en de oudheidkunde 20 (1967), pp. 87-158. Cox-Rearick, Janet. “Sacred to Profane: Diplomatic Gifts to Francis I.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994), pp. 239-258. Crinò, A. M. “Due lettere autografe inedite di Orazio e di Artemisia Gentileschi De Lomi.” Rivista d’Arte, 29 (1954), p. 203-206. Crivelli, Giovanni. Giovanni Brueghel, pittore fiammingo o sue lettere e quadretti esistenti presso l’Ambrosiana. Milan, 1868. Cropper, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” In The Diplomacy of Art: Artistic Creation and Politics in Seicento Italy, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, pp. 9-20. Milan: Nuova Alfa, 2000. Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey. Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France.” Royal Historical Society Transactions 33 (1983), pp. 69-88. ———. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Elam, Caroline. “Art and Diplomacy in Renaissance Florence.” Renaissance Society of America Journal 136 (1988), pp. 813-826. Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Faldi, Italo. “Paolo Guidotti e gli affreschi della ‘Sala del Cavaliere’ nel palazzo di Bassano di Sutri.” Bollettino d’arte 42 (1957), pp. 278-295.

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Gage, Frances. “‘Some Stirring or Changing Place of Vision’: Vision, Judgement, and Mobility in Pictures of Galleries.” Intellectual History Review 20 (2010), pp. 123-145. Godelier, Maurice. The Enigma of the Gift. Trans. Nora Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Goldberg, Edward. “Spanish Taste, Medici Politics, and a Lost Chapter in the History of Cigoli’s ‘Ecce Homo’.” The Burlington Magazine 134 (1992), pp. 102-110. ———. “Artistic Relations between the Medici and the Spanish Courts, 1587-1621.” The Burlington Magazine 138 (1996), pp. 105-114 and 138 (1996), pp. 529-540. ——— . “State Gifts from the Medici to the Court of Philip III: The Relazione segreta of Orazio della Rena.” In Arte y diplomacia de la monarquía hispánica en el siglo XVII, edited by José Luis Colomer, pp. 115-134. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2003. Goldthwaite, Richard A. “The Painting Industry in Early Modern Italy.” In Richard Spear and Philip Sohm et al., Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters, pp. 275-301. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Gregory, Christopher A. Gifts and Commodities. London and New York: Academic Press, 1982. Harris, Enriquetta. “Orazio Gentileschi’s ‘Finding of Moses’ in Madrid.” The Burlington Magazine 30 (1967), pp. 86-89. Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. Revised and enlarged ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. First published 1971. ———. The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and His Courtiers. Ed. Karen Serres, intro. Nicholas Penny. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013. Heal, Felicity. The Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hervey, Mary F. S. The Life, Correspondence, and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, ‘Father of Vertu in England’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921. Hill, Robert. “Ambassadors and Art Collecting in Early Stuart Britain: The Parallel Careers of William Trumbull and Sir Dudley Carleton, 1609-1625.” Journal of the History of Collections 15 (2003), pp. 211-228. ———. “Sir Dudley Carleton and His Relations with Dutch Artists 1616-1632.” Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 13 (2003), pp. 255-274. Hill, Robert, and Roger Lockyer. “‘Carleton and Buckingham: The Quest For Office’ Revisited.” History 88 (2003), pp. 17-31. Hirst, Michael. Michelangelo and His Drawings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. “Art, Honor, and Excellence in Early Modern Europe.” In Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, edited by Michael Hutter and David Throsby, pp. 89-105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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———. Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale. University Park: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 2016. Houbraken, Arnold. De groote schouburgh der Nederlandtsche konstschilers-en schilder-essen. 3 vols. Amsterdam, 1718-1721. Howell, Martha C. Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hutter, Michael, and David Throsby. “Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview.” In Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, edited by Michael Hutter and David Throsby, pp. 1-19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Jansen, Anita. “De klanten van het atelier Van Mierevelt.” In Anita Jansen et al., De portretfabriek van Michiel van Mierevelt (1566-1641), pp. 65-83. Exh. cat. Delft: Museum Het Prinsenhof. Zwolle: Waanders, 2011. Jones, Pamela. Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Jouanny, Ch., ed. Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin publiée d’après les originaux. Vol. 5. Archives de l’art français. Paris: Champion, 1911. Junius, Franciscus. The Painting of the Ancients: De Pictura Veterum, according to the English translation (1638). Ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Koerner, Joseph Leo. “Friendship Portraits.” In Hans von Aachen (1552-1615): Court Artist in Europe, edited by Thomas Fusenig, pp. 63-74. Exh. cat. Aachen: Suermondt-LudwigMuseum; Prague: Obrazárna Pražského hradu; Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum. Aachen and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon, 1969. Levy, F. J. “Henry Peacham and the Art of Drawing.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), p. 174-190. Libby, Alexandra. “The Solomonic Ambitions of Isabel Clara Eugenia in Rubens’s The Triumph of the Eucharist Tapestry Series.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7/2 (2015), doi: 10.5092/jhna.2015.7.2.4. Liebersohn, Harry. The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Lincoln, Evelyn. The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Loomie, A. J. “Olivares, the English Catholics, and the Peace of 1630.” Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire / Belgisch tijdschrift voor filologie en geschiedenis 47 (1969), pp. 1154-1166. Lukehart, Peter. “Contending Ideals: The Nobility of Giovanni Battista Paggi and the Nobility of Painting.” PhD diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1987. Lupis, Antonio. Il plico. Milan, 1675.

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Madocks, Susan. “‘Trop de beautez découvertes’: New Light on Guido Reni’s Late ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’.” The Burlington Magazine 126 (1984), pp. 542, 544-547. Madocks Lister, Susan. “‘Trumperies Brought from Rome’: Barberini Gifts to the Stuart Court in 1635.” In The Diplomacy of Art: Artistic Creation and Politics in Seicento Italy, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, pp. 151-176. Milan: Nuova Alfa, 2000. Magurn, Ruth Saunders, trans. and ed. The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1955. Reprint, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Malvasia, Carlo Cesare. The Life of Guido Reni. Trans. and intro. Catherine and Robert Enggass. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Mancini, Giulio. Considerazioni sulla pittura. Ed. Adriana Marucchi, Luigi Salerno, and Lionelle Venturi. Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956-1957. Mander, Karel van. The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters. Vol. 1, Text. Ed. Hessel Miedema. Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994. Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. London, 1714. Marchi, Neil De, and Hans J. van Miegroet. “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century.” The Art Bulletin 76 (1994), pp. 451-464. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W. D. Walls, intro. Mary Douglas. New York: Norton, 2000. First published as Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques, L’année sociologique, n.s. 1 (Paris, 1925). McEvansoneya, Philip. “Some Documents Concerning the Patronage and Collections of the Duke of Buckingham.” Rutgers Art Review 8 (1987), pp. 27-38. McTighe, Sheila. Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Merriam, Susan. Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Vision, Still Life, and the Devotional Image. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Millar, Oliver. The Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. London: Phaidon, 1963. ———, ed. “Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collections of Charles I.” Walpole Society 37 (1958-1960). Muller, Jeffrey. M. “Rubens’s Museum of Antique Sculpture: An Introduction.” The Art Bulletin 59 (1977), pp. 571-582. Nagel, Alexander. “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna.” The Art Bulletin 79 (1997), pp. 647-668. ———. Michelangelo and the Reform of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Orlers, Jan Jansz. Beschryvinge der stadt Leyden. Leiden, 1641. Osteen, Mark, ed. The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Panzani, Gregorio. The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, Giving an Account of his Agency in England. Trans. and ed. Rev. Joseph Berington. London, 1793.

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Parry, Jonathan, and Maurice Bloch, eds. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pascoli, Lione. Vite de’ pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni. 2 vols. 1730-1736. Reprint, Amsterdam 1965, and critical ed. Alessandro Marabottini. Perugia: Electa Editori Umbri, 1992. Ploeg, Peter van der, and Carola Vermeeren et al. Princely Patrons: The Collection of Frederick Henry of Orange and Amalia of Solms in The Hague. Exh. cat. The Hague: Mauritshuis. Zwolle: Waanders. 1997. Rooses, Max, and Ch. Ruelens, eds. Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres. Vol. 6. Codex Diplomaticus Rubenianus: Documents relatifs à la vie et aux oeuvres de P. P. Rubens. Antwerp, 1909. Rosa, Salvatore. Lettere. Ed. L. Festa and Gian Giotto Borrelli. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Rosenthal, Lisa. Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Peter Paul Rubens. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001. Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972. Sainsbury, William Noël. Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens. London, 1859. Schrift, Alan, ed. The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York: Routledge, 1997. Sebek, Barbara. “Good Turns and the Art of Merchandising: Conceptualizing Exchange in Early Modern England.” Early Modern Culture 2 (2001). www.earlymodernengland. com/2010/02/good-turns-and-the-art-of-merchandizing-conceptualizing-exchange-inearly-modern-england/ (accessed 3 June 2011). Shakeshaft, Paul. “‘To Much Bewiched with Thoes Intysing Things’: The Letters of James, Third Marquis of Hamilton and Basil, Viscount Feilding, concerning Collecting in Venice 1635-1639.” The Burlington Magazine 128 (1986), pp. 113-134. Spear, Richard. “Guercino’s ‘prix-fixe’: Observations on Studio Practices and Art Marketing in Emilia.” The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994), pp. 592-602. ———. The ‘Divine’ Guido: Religion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guido Reni. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Spear, Richard, and Philip Sohm, et al. Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of SeventeenthCentury Italian Painters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Stanton, Donna C. The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnête Homme and Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Straten, Roelof van. Young Rembrandt: The Leiden Years, 1606-1632. Trans. R. Quartero. Leiden: Foleor, 2005. Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

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Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991. Trapier, Elizabeth du Gué. “Sir Arthur Hopton and the Interchange of Paintings between England and Spain in the Seventeenth Century: Part I.” Connoisseur 164 (1967), pp. 239-243. Vandevelde, Antoon, ed. Gifts and Interests. Leuven: Peeters, 2000. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. 10 vols. London: Bell, 1912-1915. Vergara, Alejandro. Rubens and His Spanish Patrons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Vergara, Alejandro, and Anne T. Woollett, eds. Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum; Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2014. Warnke, Martin. The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist. Trans. David McLintock. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Warwick, Genevieve. “Gift Exchange and Art Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta’s Drawing Albums.” The Art Bulletin 79 (1997), pp. 630-646. ———. The Arts of Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta and the Market for Drawings in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Weston-Lewis, Aidan. “Orazio Gentileschi’s Two Versions of ‘The Finding of Moses’ Reassessed.” In Orazio Gentileschi at the Court of Charles I, edited by Gabriele Finaldi, pp. 39-52. Exh. cat. London: The National Gallery; Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes; Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1999. Wetering, Ernst van de, et al. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Vol. 4, The Self-Portraits. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Wheelock, Arthur K. Jr. “The Queen, the Dwarf, and the Court: Van Dyck and the Ideals of Monarchy.” In Van Dyck 1599-1999: Conjectures and Refutations, edited by Hans Vlieghe, pp. 151-165. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. ———. “Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master.” In Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, pp. 1-27. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Wilde, Johannes. Michelangelo: Six Lectures by Johannes Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Wittkower, Richard. “Inigo Jones: ‘Puritanissimo Fiero’.” The Burlington Magazine 90 (1948), pp. 50-51. Wotton, Henry. Panegyrick to King Charles. London, 1649.

2.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic Abstract This chapter explores the distinctive gift culture and the gifting of art in seventeenth-century Holland. Although gift giving has been marginalized in studies of seventeenth-century Dutch art, gift exchanges of various kinds, including art, were widespread in Dutch mercantile culture. Giving gifts was considered obligatory for nurturing burgher professional and personal relationships, and gifts of art played a key role in the Republic’s diplomatic engagements. Like their colleagues elsewhere, Dutch artists mixed gifts with sales transactions by offering their works as gifts to potential and established patrons, contacts, and familiars. Discussion of the special cases of Rembrandt and Vermeer is reserved for later chapters, but here examples of gifts by Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Lievens, Govert Flinck, and others are addressed. Keywords: Gifts; Gift Giving; Diplomatic Gifts; Dutch art; Economics of Art; the Dutch Republic and Early Capitalism

Gift giving was deeply embedded in the mercantile culture of the Dutch Republic. Gifts of art were also common, circulating along a spectrum of social registers to give expression to and materialize webs of public affiliation and personal affinity. Dutch political and institutional authorities presented gifts of paintings and other art objects to facilitate political alliances and forge trade agreements, while private citizens offered gifts of art to nurture professional and personal bonds and enact cultural distinction. Rembrandt famously gifted his art, as we shall see in the next chapter, but other Dutch artists also gave their works to patrons and intimates, mobilizing the gift economy to cultivate business and social relationships defined by honor, virtue, mutual regard, and mutual interest. Yet the Republic’s identity as a burgher society has deflected attention away from its gift culture and gift giving’s role in its thriving art market. This chapter clarifies the importance of the symbolic economy of the gift in Dutch social, political, and commercial life, and tracks gifts of art as a form of cultural currency among burgher elites, cultural figures, citizens, and artists. In this merchant polity’s unique political, social, and

Zell, M., Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/ 9789463726429_ch02

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economic circumstances, gift giving functioned not apart from but within a vibrant, market-oriented artistic culture.

The Problem of the Gift in Studies of Golden Age Art Although some of the most famous episodes in the gifting of art were initiated by the Dutch Republic and documents record that Dutch artists presented their works as gifts, such transactions are seldom emphasized in the literature on Dutch artistic culture. When scholars do address Dutch artists’ gifts, they have sometimes questioned their motivations. Walter Strauss, for instance, was surprised by a record of Rembrandt’s presentation of his art as a gift because he assumed the artist was “constantly out for monetary gain.”1 More recent scholarship has given even greater priority to Rembrandt’s and other Dutch artists’ activities as good businessmen and entrepreneurs, privileging the impact of market forces on art making and the pursuit of monetary rewards over other incentives for producing art or fostering professional and personal ties. Scholars have fixed on a relatively narrow view of what constitutes “rational” economic behavior to account for and probe the workings of the vibrant and complex market for art in the Dutch Republic. As a result, the role that gift giving and its symbolic economy of reciprocity played as one of the multiple, overlapping modes of exchange in the Dutch art system has been largely overlooked, or dismissed altogether. The suspicion of transactions that fail to conform to current expectations of economic logic is not surprising. While the importance of the gift economy in other early modern artistic cultures has been the subject of considerable attention, especially regarding Italy, 2 the exceptionalism of early modern Holland as a predominantly mercantile society has directed attention away from gift giving and toward investigating the economic forces that drove and shaped its thriving open, speculative art market. Aspects of Dutch art that in hindsight appear as economically “progressive,” especially artists’ entrepreneurial adaptations of their work to a competitive marketplace, have tended to be emphasized, whereas the economy of sociability and honor associated with the gift has often been marginalized as a regressive, largely aristocratic practice antithetical to Dutch mercantile values. Ever since the 1980s, when the economic historian John Michael Montias pioneered the socio-economic approach to analyzing Dutch painting, art historians and historians alike have increasingly adapted the quantitative methods and priorities of economic 1 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, no. 1667/11. 2 See in particular, Spear, Divine Guido, esp. pp. 210-224; Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna”; and Warwick, “Gift Exchange and Art Collecting.”

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analysis to identify the factors that contributed to the unprecedented growth and diversification of the Dutch market for art. Supply and demand, production and consumption, process innovation, product innovation, economic competition, and specialization or niche branding are all models borrowed from economics to measure objectively and thus explain the development and efflorescence of Dutch art in the seventeenth century.3 New paradigms recently developed by economists have also been applied to the study of the Dutch art market, such as explanatory models for the creative and cultural arts industries or sectors, and “spatial clustering,” essentially the advantages to economic and cultural production of proximity to other firms, important customers, and institutions. 4 This economic turn has yielded profoundly important insights into the art market and artistic culture of the Dutch Republic, particularly the extent to which characteristic practices developed by Dutch artists can be understood to register the impact of market forces on artistic production. Dutch artists, we now recognize, were adept at adapting to the exigencies of the market, resulting in unprecedented artistic productivity, efficiency, and creative innovation. Yet this focus on the impact of the “invisible hand” of the market on artistic production and consumption has tended to privilege and thus overdetermine dimensions of Dutch artistic culture that lend themselves readily to the analytical tools and quantifiable measurements of economics. In the effort to quantify the phenomenal commercial success of artists in responding to the highly competitive market for art in the Republic, features of the Dutch art world that challenge a narrow definition of economic behavior, like gift exchange, have consequently been pushed to the sidelines.

The Gift in the Early Modern Netherlands While the symbolic economy of the gift has been associated primarily with aristocratic social and behavioral norms, a distinctive gift culture flourished in Dutch 3 See Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft; idem, “Cost and Value”; idem, “Art Dealers”; idem, “Estimates of the Number of Dutch Master-Painters”; idem, “Influence of Economic Factors on Style”; idem, “SocioEconomic Aspects of Netherlandish Art”; idem, “Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam”; idem, “Sovereign Consumer”; idem “Quantitative Methods”; idem, Art at Auction; De Marchi and Van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices”; Bok, “Vraag en aanbod”; idem, “Painter and his World”; idem, “Pricing the Unpriced”; idem, “Rise of Amsterdam”; idem, “Paintings for Sale”; Sluijter, “Jan van Goyen als marktleider”; idem, “On Brabant Rubbish”; De Marchi and Goodwin, eds., Economic Engagements with Art; Falkenburg et al., Art for the Market; Prak, “Guilds and the Development of the Art Market”; Jager, “‘Everywhere Illustrious Histories’”; idem, The Mass Market for History Paintings; and Rasterhoff, Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries. For a survey of the economic turn, see Rasterhoff, “Economic Aspects of Dutch Art.” 4 See Rasterhoff, Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries, and idem, “Economic Aspects of Dutch Art,” p. 365.

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burgher society. In the early modern Netherlands, Europe’s most vibrant commercial and trading center, the gift’s economy of mutuality performed a critical role in accommodating commerce to traditional social practices and relations. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this densely urbanized region evolved a commercial culture recognized as proto-capitalist, a prelude to the rise of the modern Western economic system and the society to which it gave rise.5 This framework of understanding has had a deep impact on the study of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, which some historians identify as the first modern economy. Identifying the early modern Netherlands with emergent capitalism, however, has led to histories structured on an evolutionary or biological paradigm, which, as the historian Martha Howell puts it, “ineluctably gives us a naturalized model of the modern economy with ‘laws’ and a logic so immutable that its only history can be the story of its discovery.”6 The development of the Netherlands’ economic culture in the centuries before the advent of capitalism has often been treated as the story of the birth of capitalism, with the result that practices that do not conform to later expectations are often seen as stubborn resistance to this linear, validating trajectory. The limitations of this approach have begun to be recognized, including among historians who remain committed to the project of charting capitalism’s complicated emergence.7 Jan de Vries, whose work has enriched our understanding of the socio-economic history of the Dutch Republic, proposes adopting a model of simultaneity and layering, in which various types of economic activity that can be identified either as capitalist or non-capitalist coexist and interact.8 Howell goes further, rejecting altogether studies that approach the economic culture of the Netherlands in the late medieval and early modern periods as “predictive of one to come.”9 In the rapidly changing commercial environment of the early modern Netherlands, gift giving was a characteristic feature of a distinctive and multilayered economic culture. Contrary to received wisdom, the expansion of the commercial economy in early modern Europe in no way diminished the gift’s potency in structuring social relations and identities. In fact, the reverse was the case.10 Gift giving intensified and took on new meaning and significance as it became enmeshed with Europe’s transforming economies. In vibrant, urbanized regions like the Netherlands, the practice was not a remnant of an archaic social and cultural order that merely 5 See Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, and, inter alia, De Vries and Van der Woude, First Modern Economy. 6 Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, p. 299. 7 Prak, “Introduction,” p. 19. 8 De Vries, “Economic Growth before and after the Industrial Revolution.” 9 Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, p. 13. 10 Ibid, pp. 149-151.

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disguised purchases as gifts, but a non-market mode of exchange crucial to negotiating the complexities of life in a newly commercial society. The gift economy’s capacity to nurture bonds of reciprocity and counter the alienating conditions of market transactions became all the more important to contemporaries as they traversed a dramatically changing social and economic landscape. The strong association of gift giving with a culture of honor, moreover, made it an asset in navigating commercial relationships. One’s personal honor, called increasingly in this age a man’s “credit,” signified social status and even more crucially integrity, an essential element in the smooth operation of the market.11 In the insecure circumstances of conducting business in the early modern period – which lacked many of the institutions, legal frameworks, and protections that limited risk in later times – commerce relied heavily on trustworthiness, the product of establishing and perpetuating one’s status as a man of honor and integrity. In a groundbreaking study of familial and business relationships in the Dutch Republic, Luuc Kooijmans demonstrated that gift exchange was a crucial method of guaranteeing one’s integrity and dependability.12 Kooijmans’s investigation of the archive of letters, diaries, and travel journals belonging to two leading Amsterdam regent families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the Huydecopers and the Van der Meulens – showed that burgher family and social relationships were animated by values of mutual interest and solidarity. Functional ties that established and expanded one’s personal credit were prerequisites to maintaining the family’s and individual’s trustworthiness or credit, which in the precarious conditions of a highly competitive and ever-changing merchant society also extended to business partnerships and other arrangements.13 The Huydecoper and Van der Meulen family papers meticulously record a virtually continuous flow of services and goods in the form of favors and gifts within the families’ webs of relations, including their own family members as well as social and business contacts. The archives in essence amount to a carefully balanced register of services rendered and received. Irma Thoen has also shown that routine gift exchanges of a host of objects and services permeated Dutch social life.14 Books, poems, and drawings – as well as utilitarian objects and immaterial offerings, such as lodging and meals – circulated continuously among elites, less well-to-do burghers, and even those of modest means. The Hague schoolteacher David Beck, for example, recorded in his diary about 1000 gift transactions in one year (1624); these were items he offered or received, or were exchanged by others in his personal network, meaning that such 11 Ibid, pp. 25-29, and Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, esp. pp. 148-172. 12 Kooijmans, Vriendschap, esp. pp. 136-139. 13 See also Zijlstra, “To Build and Sustain Trust.” 14 Thoen, Strategic Affection?

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exchanges were a daily occurrence in Beck’s life.15 Anne Goldgar notes the regular exchange of gifts between cultivated Dutch scholars, gentlemen, and collectors of tulips, among other rarities of nature and art.16 Dutch friendship albums or alba amicorum, a considerable number of which survive, also attest to the important role gift exchange played in the cultivation of friendships and contacts in the Republic. These albums, to which I will return in later chapters, are full of entries, small gifts of poems, and drawings by individuals whom the owner met either at home or while traveling. Such albums, as Marijke Spies and Willem Frijhoff explain, “marked out the territory of one’s network of friends, the persons on whom one could rely and to whom one had to return favors and help. Gifts, whether in the form of useful objects, poems, drawings, or simply a form of hospitality were therefore an essential element of social life, also for the poor and less well-to-do.”17 The Dutch words gift, geschenk, schenkagie, and gave can all be translated as “gift,” and the term vereering, which has no direct English translation, signifies “honoring by giving.”18 The gift’s economy of gratitude and obligation was deployed primarily to establish and maintain social bonds, and sometimes the expectation of reciprocation could be surprisingly explicit. As the statesman and author Johan de Brune remarked, “the first gift is the womb of the second,” wittily acknowledging the reciprocities involved in gift exchange.19 Thoen emphasizes, however, that it would be wrong to conclude that Dutch gift practices and the social relations they nurtured were predominantly or exclusively instrumental. Since all such exchanges enclose their participants in relationships of mutuality, focusing exclusively on the functional role that gifts play in any historical or social situation depreciates their emotional content. The instrumental and affective were not mutually exclusive. Gifts also pervaded political and aristocratic networks of patronage and clientage in the Republic, as Geert Janssen demonstrated in his study of the life and career of Willem Frederik of Nassau, Stadholder of Friesland and Count of Nassau-Dietz.20 Willem Frederik methodically recorded in his diary all the gifts, favors, services, and courtesies he rendered and received, comprising, like the papers of Amsterdam regent families analyzed by Kooijmans, a virtual ledger of “social rather than financial capital.”21 As a stadholder and hereditary nobleman – and in his subordinate position to his more powerful cousin, the Prince of Orange in The Hague, whom he called “the Boss” or “the Chief” – Willem Frederik operated as both a patron and a 15 Ibid, p. 49. 16 Goldgar, Tulipmania, p. 57. 17 Spies and Frijhoff et al., Dutch Culture in European Perspective, p. 216. 18 Thoen, Strategic Affection?, p. 12. 19 De Brune, Banket-werk, p. 54, quoted in Thoen, Strategic Affection?, p. 227. 20 Janssen, Princely Power, esp. pp. 175-179. 21 Ibid, p. 11.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

client, dispensing and accepting gifts in distinct circuits regulated by varying social norms. In the republican context of his election campaigns to become Stadholder of Groningen, for instance, gifts of luxury items such as silverware were apparently deemed inappropriate, though such gifts were also regularly presented in court circles. Willem Frederik received diamond rings from Stadholder Willem II and King Charles II of England, and he himself offered jewelry and paintings to the Orange court in The Hague. As Janssen writes, “the regular exchange of costly presents was such an accepted social obligation and an unwritten condition of employment at court” that members of Willem Frederik’s court at Leeuwarden “openly claimed them as their due.”22 While he deftly adjusted his offerings according to differing expectations, all of his gifts served to secure and strengthen long-term political and familial relationships vital to his position and status. The importance of gift giving in lubricating early modern Holland’s social and political life meant that gifts could cross the line into corruption. Willem Frederik dispensed money as bribery during his election campaign in Groningen, instructing his agent to conceal the donations.23 Repeated scandals led to the prohibition of public officials from accepting gifts. In 1652, after The Hague publisher Michiel Stael was convicted for publishing the names of public figures guilty of corruption, the States of Zeeland banned public administrators from receiving gifts, and in 1669, after the revelations of yet another scandal, the States of Holland adopted the same policy.24 While Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, is well known for his refusal to accept gifts, he was probably not motivated by personal scruples. De Witt had to remain noncommittal as raadpensionaris, which required working with various factions, and accepting a gift would have made him beholden to one party or individual.25 Contemporaries were aware of the fine line dividing gifts and favors from bribes, however opaque that distinction may appear in hindsight. Kooijmans discusses one such incident in the life of the Amsterdam regent and burgomaster Joan Huydecoper van Maarsseveen II. Outraged by an acquaintance who promised him money in return for helping him secure an office, Huydecoper wrote in his diary: “I must acknowledge that a worse or more scandalous thing has never happened to me […] that against my honor and my oath I should be compelled to seek my advantage by selling considerable offices, and consequently tarnish my good name and fame by such foul and unlawful gain.”26 Huydecoper’s indignation reveals the intricate decorum of the gift economy. 22 Ibid, p. 179. 23 Ibid. 24 See Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” p. 251, n. 95. 25 Janssen, Princely Power, pp. 175-176. 26 See Kooijmans, Vriendschap, p. 144, quoted in Janssen, Princely Power, p. 176.

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The “Dutch Gift” and Diplomatic Gift Exchange The Dutch Republic’s mobilization of art as diplomatic gifts has long been acknowledged, even if gift giving’s significance in burgher society has only recently been recognized and art historians have generally downplayed the role of gift exchange in Dutch artistic culture. Embracing the custom of giving diplomatic presents of works of art was not merely an accommodation of aristocratic or foreign practices, however. From its beginning, the nascent Dutch state offered gifts of both contemporary and Old Master paintings and an array of other valuables to reflect its arrival on the stage of international diplomacy, culminating with the so-called “Dutch Gift” presented to Charles II in 1660, which included 28 mostly Italian paintings and twelve ancient statues, among other extremely costly items. The sheer splendor of the gift represented a milestone in the diplomatic practice of gifting artworks, particularly paintings, ensuring its enduring fame and providing an inescapable starting point for investigating the Republic’s enlistment of art to facilitate its global diplomacy and trade. The Dutch Gift also helps elucidate distinctive aspects of the gift culture of burgher Holland.27 The Dutch authorities took great pains to assemble a suitably magnificent gift for Charles II in 1660. Even before the King returned to England to reclaim his throne, an executive committee of the States of Holland and West Friesland allocated the staggering sum of 600,000 guilders to pay for his journey and for “appropriate gifts and presents” (sortable schenkagien ende presenten) for Charles and his court.28 A delegation of “ambassadors extraordinary” of the States General, the governing institution of the Dutch Republic, was to present the gifts ceremonially in the Banqueting House in London, with the entire court in attendance. Italian paintings dominated the artistic treasures, with 22 pictures from the sixteenth century (Figs. 24-27), Guercino’s Semiramis (Fig. 28), and an Allegory of Painting attributed to Guido Reni (now ascribed to Francesco Gezzi), in addition to twelve ancient Roman sculptures. By order of the committee, examples of contemporary Dutch painting were also presented: Pieter Saenredam’s Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, Haarlem (the “Grote Kerk”) (Fig. 29), his largest surviving painting, probably acquired from the burgomaster Andries de Graeff;29 Gerrit Dou’s The Young Mother (Fig. 30) 27 For the Dutch Gift, see in particular Mahon, “Notes on the ‘Dutch Gift’”; Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, pp. 75-86; Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” pp. 64-70; and Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation.” The fame of the Dutch Gift was quickly established: Joachim von Sandrart mentions it in his Teutsche Academie of 1675. See Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, p. 56, cited by Walton, “Diplomatic Gifts,” p. 90. 28 See Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” p. 65, and Broekman and Helmer, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 229, 236. About 400,000 guilders were spent on the gifts. 29 See Mahon, “Letter”; Van Gelder, “Notes on the Royal Collection,” pp. 541-542, n. 1; Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, pp. 75-79; Schwartz and Bok, Pieter Saenredam, pp. 128, 206-208;

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

24. Titian and Workshop, Madonna and Child in a Landscape with Tobias and the Angel, ca. 1535-1540. Oil on panel, 85.2 × 120.3 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

25. Veronese and Workshop, The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1562-1569. Oil on canvas, 148.0 × 199.5 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

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26. Giulio Romano, Portrait of Margherita Paleologo, ca. 1531. Oil on panel, 115.3 × 91 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

27. Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527. Oil on canvas, 104.3 × 116.8 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

and another of his paintings, likely The Tooth Puller (Fig. 31),30 as well as Adam Elsheimer’s Mocking of Ceres (Fig. 32), all of which were purchased directly from Dou.31 In addition, Charles was presented with a sumptuous French bed and suite of furnishings purchased for an astonishing 100,000 guilders from his sister Mary Stuart, widow of Stadholder Willem II and mother of the 10-year old Willem III of Orange and future William III of England; tapestries woven with gold and silver; and the magnificent yacht Mary, contributed by the city of Amsterdam.

and Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” p. 69. Saenredam had offered the painting in 1648 to Stadholder Willem II, who declined to buy it. 30 Griffey, “More on the ‘Dutch Gift’,” and idem, On Display, pp. 242-243. 31 Elsheimer’s damaged Mocking of Ceres in the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, long thought to be a copy, is now considered the autograph version of this influential painting. See Klessmann et al., Adam Elsheimer, cat. nos. 26-27.

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28. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon, 1624. Oil on canvas, 112.4 × 154.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ma. Frances Welch Fund / Bridgeman Images.

A celebratory poem composed by Joost van den Vondel, entitled “Kunstkroon voor de Konigk van Groot Britanje” (Crown of Art for the King of Great Britain), was commissioned by the Amsterdam burgomaster Simon van Hoorn and presented together with the gifts. In the poem, Vondel glorifies the gifts as a demonstration of the “love” and “loyalty” of the Dutch state for Charles II.32 The ambassadors reported that it “was one of the best presents ever bestowed on a prince,” and that Charles admired especially a picture then thought to be an original Titian, though now considered a workshop production (Fig. 24), and the paintings by Dou (Figs. 30-31) and Elsheimer (Fig. 32). “It was plain to see,” the ambassadors noted, “that the king thought highly of all of them.”33 With these lavish gifts the Dutch authorities – principally the powerful States Party of Holland and the burgomasters of Amsterdam – sought to ingratiate themselves with the restored Stuart monarch. This was despite having been reluctant 32 Van den Vondel, De werken van Vondel, vol. 9, pp. 260-262, quoted in Broekman and Helmer, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” p. 239. A broadside of the poem is printed in Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, p. 76. 33 Quoted in Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” p. 70, and Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, pp. 83-84, n. 96.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

29. Pieter Saenredam, Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, Haarlem (The ‘Groote Kerk’), 1648. Oil on panel, 174.8 × 143.6 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased by Private Treaty with the Aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund (William Leng Bequest) and the Pilgrim Trust, 1982.

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30. Gerrit Dou, The Young Mother, 1658. Oil on panel, 73.7 × 55.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

31. Gerrit Dou, The Tooth Puller, ca. 1630-1635. Oil on panel, 32 × 26 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Photo Josse / Bridgeman Images.

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32. Adam Elsheimer, The Mocking of Ceres, ca. 1608. Oil on copper, coated with silver, 29. 1 × 24 cm. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Gift of Alfred and Isabel Bader, 2008-(51-004.03).

to help Charles during the eleven-year Interregnum, even expelling him from Dutch territory during his banishment from England in 1653. As part of the effort to foster a personal connection with the new King, they selected gifts that would help restore his late father’s collection of principally Italian paintings, sold by Parliament after Charles I’s execution in 1649 to fund the navy and pay off the

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

crown’s debts.34 The Dutch officials would have been alerted to Charles II’s and his government’s desire to restore the royal collection – and thereby re-establish the magnificence of the Stuart court – by the decrees issued immediately after the proclamation of the Restoration that ordered the surrender of paintings and other valuables acquired at the “Commonwealth Sale.” Anxious to improve the strained relations with Charles II, the Dutch authorities also hoped, ultimately in vain, that the gift might induce him to repeal the despised Navigation Act of 1651, over which the first Anglo-Dutch War was fought from 1652 to 1654, and which had ended in defeat for the Dutch. Given their previous treatment of Charles, members of the States of Holland and Amsterdam’s municipal authorities took the lead in arranging the complicated procurement of suitable gifts, rather than the States General, as would have been customary. It was they who provided the cash and went to great lengths to make acquisitions that would appeal to Charles, who they had been informed was “not partial to paintings by modern artists, but preferred antique pieces and Italian masters.”35 Amsterdam’s burgomasters and the Holland regents enlisted the artworks as diplomatic agents and lasting reminders of their new-found respect and the mutuality they hoped to forge with the restored English monarch. Selecting the right artworks was of paramount importance. An executive committee charged Cornelis de Vlaming van Oudtshoorn, a former Amsterdam burgomaster, to prevail upon the widow of Gerard Reynst, who had died two years earlier, to part with some of the Italian paintings and classical sculptures collected by her husband, together with his brother Jan Reynst, for a reasonable price. Gerard and Jan had assembled in Venice over 200 Italian paintings and over 300 mostly ancient sculptures, founded in part on the purchase of the collection of the Venetian nobleman Andrea Vendramin in 1629. These riches were shipped back to Amsterdam, where they formed the largest and finest collection of Italian art and classical sculpture in the Republic.36 For the colossal sum of 80,000 guilders Gerard’s widow agreed to sell 24 paintings and twelve sculptures selected by De Vlaming and committee member Van Hoorn, who described the pictures as “all of them of the highest caliber and the most painstakingly executed, in the opinion of connoisseurs of the art of painting and all it entails.”37 Many of the sixteenth-century Italian paintings – including canvases by Titian (Fig. 24), Veronese (Fig. 25), Giulio Romano (Fig. 26), Tintoretto, Schiavone, and Lotto (Fig. 27), among others – remain in the royal collection, though few of the sculptures are known. The bed acquired at even greater expense from Mary Stuart, widow of Stadholder Willem II and Charles II’s sister, was a potent symbol of the renewed ties between the 34 Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” p. 66. See Gleissner, “Reassembling a Royal Art Collection.” 35 Quoted in Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” p. 66. See also Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, p. 77, n. 84. 36 For the Reynst collection, see in particular Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst. 37 Quoted in Lammertse, “Gerrit Uylenburgh,” p. 67.

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Republic and the House of Stuart. Bought by Willem II in France for his pregnant wife’s delivery of their heir Willem III, the bed signified the close familial bonds between the English sovereign and the Princes of Orange, which the States of Holland in particular now felt compelled to acknowledge and honor.38 The generosity and symbolism of the Dutch authorities’ gift therefore had international as well as domestic agendas: To repair both the alienation between Charles and the Holland regents who had been unsupportive during his banishment and the regents’ frayed relations with the House of Orange and its supporters in the Republic. Amsterdam’s contribution of a yacht named after Mary Stuart further reinforced the message of respect that the statesmen of the province of Holland and its metropolis were determined to convey. The Dutch Gift of 1660 was a much more extravagant repetition of two earlier diplomatic presentations of works of art and other valuables by the States General to Stuart princes. In 1610 a Dutch delegation in London presented the 15-year old Henry, Prince of Wales, with two marine paintings, one by Hendrick Vroom depicting the Battle of Gibraltar, the first Dutch naval victory against the Spanish of 1607, and another entitled Storm at Sea, apparently acquired from Vroom’s studio but perhaps by Jan Porcellis.39 The Dutch also regifted four tapestries worked with gold from Sultan Mulay Zaidan of Morocco.40 The expensive paintings (Vroom’s battle picture cost between 1600 and 2000 guilders) were chosen after the Dutch ambassador in London, Noël de Caron, communicated that Prince Henry would be pleased to receive “some fine paintings by the best masters in this country.”41 The Prince also received an “ivory fan, very subtly and richly wrought” that had originally been a gift from the King of Siam to the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie / Dutch East India Company (VOC) Captain Joris van Spilbergen, and four large Bezoar stones, reputed to have medicinal properties.42 The embassy bearing these gifts was one of the first dispatched by the young Republic, which had just gained formal recognition with the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain in 1609. 38 Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 229, 238. 39 See Van Gelder, “Notes on the Royal Collection,” esp. pp. 543-544; Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 225-226; Swan, “Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten,” pp. 193-194; and idem, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 152-153. Since only one Vroom painting is listed in the Royal Collection inventories, Van Gelder suggested that Storm at Sea was painted by Porcellis, a proposal rejected by Russell, Visions of the Sea, pp. 162-164, because Porcellis was “totally unknown” in 1610. For Prince Henry’s collection, see Strong, Henry Prince of Wales, p. 188, and Orgel, “Idols of the Gallery,” esp. pp. 253-255. 40 Van Gelder, “Notes on the Royal Collection,” p. 543, and Anderson, “Material Mediators,” p. 78. Swan, Rarities of These Lands, p. 153, remarks that “the repurposing of gifts seems to pertain to rare, foreign goods.” 41 Quoted in Van Gelder, “Notes on the Royal Collection,” p. 543: “eenige schoone stucken schilderyen, vande beste meesters, die in dese landen.” For the report, see Dodt van Flensburg, “Resolutien,” p. 19. 42 Van Gelder, “Notes on the Royal Collection,” p. 543.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

Dutch diplomatic missions were sent simultaneously in 1610 to the allied English and French courts, which had been instrumental in mediating the Truce. 43 The delegation’s express goal, in addition to thanking formally and conspicuously the Protestant English court for its support, was to secure the goodwill of the heir-apparent to the throne, whose investiture as Prince of Wales the gift also commemorated. As the Resolutiën of the States General assert, Henry’s “succession is certain” (successie [is] seecker) and his “friendship is needed” (vriendschap [is] dese landen noodich). 44 The officials selected Vroom’s Battle of Gibraltar to glorify the fledgling state’s recent triumph over Spain and therefore its importance as a burgeoning maritime and commercial power. The Storm at Sea may have been conceived as a pendant that alluded symbolically to the perils endured during the Dutch struggle against Spain. As a pair, the pictures signified the new Dutch state’s arrival as a political and maritime force, and thus to convey its status as England’s “worthy ally.”45 Twenty six years later, in 1636, the Dutch sent another gift to the English court that included more paintings, this time for Charles I, who had ascended to the throne in 1625 following Henry’s premature death in 1612. 46 The Dutch delegation delivered four paintings to the King and his queen, Henrietta Maria, to commemorate the birth of their second child, Elizabeth: Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s Lamentation (Fig. 33) and the Legend of the Relics of Saint John the Baptist (which originally formed the wings of the main altar of the Knights of Saint John in Haarlem); Jan Gossaert’s monumental Adam and Eve (Fig. 34); and a Saint Jerome by Lucas van Leyden, which is now attributed to Aertgen van Leyden. The gift also comprised six white horses; a state carriage; a watch; three delicate porcelain cups; a chest veneered with mother-of-pearl; linens and damask; and a large amount of valuable ambergris. The Dutch ambassador Cornelis van Beveren, in an official report to the States General, wrote that the gifts were presented to the King “with appropriate comments saying these [presents] were fruits of such a field as could bring forth nothing but signs of affection and willing obedience.”47 He also stated that it had been communicated to the King and Queen that the paintings and other gifts “were 43 Even before the signing of the Truce, valuable gifts of Haarlem damask and an enoromous collection of shells were disptached to London and Paris to help secure English and French support. See Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 151-152. 44 Quoted in Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 225. For the report, see Dodt van Flensburg, “Resolutien,” p. 19. 45 Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 225-226. 46 See Bruyn and Millar, “Notes on the Royal Collection”; Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 226-229; and Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 152-153. 47 Quoted in Bruyn and Miller, “Notes on the Royal Collection,” p. 292. See also Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” p. 227.

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33. Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Right Inside Wing of the Altarpiece of St. John, ca. 1484. Tempera on panel, 175 × 139 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / De Agostini Picture Library / G. Nimatallah / Bridgeman Images.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

34. Jan Gossaert, Adam and Eve, ca. 1520. Oil on panel, 169.2 × 112 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

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fruits and products of our country and the rest acquired through the diligence of our navigation and trade,” remarking, too, that they “have pleased very much and the money spent on them has been used well.” The various gifts were therefore chosen to honor the English monarch while simultaneously broadcasting Dutch cultural and economic achievements both at home and abroad.48 The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Netherlandish paintings represented the Dutch national heritage; the linens and some other items qualified as domestic manufactured products; and the porcelain, mother-of-pearl, and ambergis were “rariteyten van dese landen,” or rarities derived from rising Dutch dominance of the global trade in exotic luxury goods. As Claudia Swan has rightly emphasized, the entanglement of trade and politics and the interchangeability between gifts and commodities in these first gifts to the English court are characteristic of the formative years of the Republic’s diplomatic engagements.49 “Mobilizing rariteyten,” she writes, “was a crucial means by which the Dutch sought to identify themselves politically and commercially on the global stage.”50 Both presentations should be understood, as Ambassador Van Beveren specified, as self-representations of the Dutch maritime empire’s cultural and economic prestige, and its global reach. The ceremonial display of the works of art was also a crucial feature of diplomatic gift giving and essential to the gift’s non-verbal “sign value.”51 Rubens provides a glimpse of the importance of choreographed presentations in diplomatic gifts when he reported in 1603 to his patron Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, on the reception of the Duke’s gifts of paintings and other items by King Philip III of Spain: “after long admiration judiciously applied to the finest things, he [the King] expressed great satisfaction […] by the quality and quantity of the presents. I hope, therefore, that if the donor’s reward is the approval of his gifts, Your Most Serene Highness will have achieved his purpose. Everything contributed to the success of the event; time, place, and other circumstances all chanced to favor us.”52 The elaborate ceremony that accompanied the presentation of the Dutch Gift of 1660 to King Charles II in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, with his entire court in attendance, was part of this non-verbal sign system of courtly magnificence, heightening the aura and message of the gifts. In their reports to the States General, the Dutch delegates conveyed that the King was suitably impressed, confirming that the artworks, and the paintings in particular, had performed the subtly eloquent role to which they had been assigned in European diplomacy. Beyond signifying prestige, distinction, status, honor, and tribute, the paintings functioned as visual 48 49 50 51 52

Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” pp. 227-229. See in particular Swan, Rarities of These Lands. Swan, “Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten,” p. 197. See Cutler, “Gifts and Gift Exchange.” Rubens to Vincenzo Gonzaga, 17 July 1603, Magurn, Letters of Peter Paul Rubens, no. 9.

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complements to diplomatic discourse. They served, in effect, as “mute diplomats,” as Anthony Colantuono describes such gifts of art.53 Due to the strong preference for Italian paintings among great princes, as discussed in the previous chapter, the Dutch regents modified their earlier, more parochial practice of giving contemporary and older Netherlandish paintings to the English court. But they supplemented their more prestigious gift of Italian pictures with paintings by Saenredam and Dou, presumably to showcase the work of contemporary Dutch artists as the “fruits and products of our country.” Dou’s meticulously painted and expensive genre scenes, whose fijnschilder (“fine painter”) technique epitomized the Netherlandish pictorial tradition, reportedly delighted Charles, who despite his partiality for Italian paintings acquired Pieter Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents in Breda in 1660, before his return to England.54 Saenredam’s Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, Haarlem (Fig. 29) may have been intended as a memento of the festivities staged in the church in July 1660 for Charles’s sister Mary Stuart and her son Willem III during their triumphal tour of Holland before departing for England.55 On a more prosaic level, all the works of art presented to the King qualified as either Dutch domestic products or luxury goods acquired through Dutch trade. Since the Italian paintings and antiquities were originally acquired in Venice by Jan Reynst, a prosperous trader in grain and salt, perhaps they were considered the kind of rare luxury good that the Dutch ambassador had earlier characterized as “acquired through the diligence of our navigation and trade.”56 The authorities’ decision to present primarily Italian Renaissance paintings was not one favored by the Dutch artistic community, however. In 1678 Samuel van Hoogstraten, painter, art theorist, and Rembrandt pupil, advised the Republic’s “Mighty governors” (Hoogmogende gezachebbers) that “when your highnesses wish to pay homage to neighboring or distant princes, to make that tribute consist largely of new and exceptionally good pictures.”57 Contemporary painters in other states likely experienced similar frustrations. Despite the English court’s enthusiastic reception of each of the Dutch gifts, and Charles II’s expression of “his willingness to enter into a nearer alliance with them [the Dutch],”58 none of their efforts ultimately realized the intended purpose 53 Colantuono, “Mute Diplomat.” See further, Auwers, “The Gift of Rubens,” pp. 433-435, and Um and Clark, “Introduction.” 54 The Brueghel (Royal Collection) was one of the most expensive of the 72 paintings Charles purchased from the dealer William Frizell. See Charles II: Art and Power, cat. no. 129. 55 Schwartz and Bok, Pieter Saenredam, p. 128. 56 Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” p. 231. 57 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 330, quoted in Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, p. 256. 58 As reported in the Mercurius Publicus, 8-15 November 1660, and the Parliamentary Intelligencer, 12-19 November 1660, quoted in Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, p. 81.

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of securing peaceful relations between the two commercial rivals, which in the seventeenth century were embroiled in three wars over rights in maritime trade. But the Dutch Gift of 1660 was probably motivated as much by internal politics as by the desire to mollify Charles II or foster Anglo-Dutch relations. As we have seen, the Holland regents and Amsterdam magistrates of the States Party, who had assumed political authority after the unexpected death of Willem II of Orange in 1650, financed the acquisition of presents for the crown, even though the States General presented the gifts. The Orangists, emboldened by the restoration of Willem III’s uncle in England, advocated the return to the stewardship of the Princes of Orange through the appointment of Willem III as stadholder, undermining the regents’ political legitimacy. Ironically, the extravagance of the gift drew criticism from both camps. The Orangists condemned it as a hypocritical, opportunistic gesture by the regents who hoped that, as one popular Orangist pamphlet from 1660 asserted, “the past may be forgotten.”59 Some members of the States Party considered lavish gifts to princes simply misguided. In 1662 Pieter de la Court, theorist of the party, wrote: [I]t is strange that any Supreme Powers should imagine that they can oblige a formidable Sovereign Prince to gratitude for Benefits received without any preceding promises, impoverishing themselves by Liberalitys, in order to enrich and strengthen those they fear: For we ought always to presume, that Kings will ever esteem themselves obliged to any thing but their Own Grandeur and Pleasure, which they endeavor to obtain, without any regard to Love, Hatred, or Gratitude […]. To give to Kings is a Kingly, that is, a monstrous great Folly; for the holy Wood, the blunt Cross of Prayers and Remonstrances, is of small force among men of power; and the Mony sacrificed to the idol of Gratitude, is yet of less value.60

Giving expensive presents to a sovereign, De la Court argues, would always be futile, since the gratitude and obligation that gift exchange engenders can never be secured from a king, who by definition will always prioritize his self-interest in personal “grandeur” and “pleasure.” Princes, in contrast to honorable citizens and statesmen like himself, will never surrender to the gift’s ethos of mutuality, reciprocity, and obligation. De la Court, eloquent defender of the wealthy regent and merchant class, warned that kings perceive gifts as a form of tribute instead 59 Quoted in Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” p. 239. For the pamphlet, entitled Turned Coat of Holland (1660), see Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamfletten-verzameling, no. 8374. 60 Quoted in Broekman and Helmers, “Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation,” p. 242, from the earliest English translation of De la Court’s 1662 text, True Interest and Political Maxims, pp. 259-260.

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of an invitation to enter into a relationship of mutuality and honor. Implicit in De la Court’s position is the Dutch merchant elite’s understanding of the gift as expressing communal values symbolized and reified as obligations that tie people together rather than alienating them in self-centeredness. These political controversies in no way diminished the Dutch Gift’s legacy for unmatched splendor, though its fame is also paradoxical. For even as the Dutch state was engaging ostentatiously in presenting works of art and other valuables as diplomatic gifts, Dutch ambassadors were expressly prohibited from accepting gifts themselves. Unlike other early modern realms and polities, where ritualized exchanges of expensive gifts were the norm among rulers, grandees, and ambassadors, the Dutch sought to mitigate the potential for collusion or corruption that accepting gifts might encourage. On 10 August 1651 the States General adopted a law decreeing that, as the early eighteenth-century Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek put it, “no envoy of the States-General should in any manner accept any gift whatever, under penalty of disgrace and whatsoever added punishment might be deemed fitting. Furthermore, breach of the law should ipso facto entail forfeiture of his office and rights to all offices in the future.”61 Gifts between princes, he admitted, were customary and therefore acceptable as gestures of goodwill, but not for the representatives of the Dutch Republic. Foreign diplomats residing in the Netherlands were exempt from the prohibition. This ambivalence toward diplomatic gifts emerged from the Republic’s changing political culture in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch authorities sought to mediate their new, precarious position in Europe’s political landscape. The decision to forbid envoys accepting gifts was one of a series of sweeping reforms initiated at the inauguration of the first stadholderless period, which began with the sudden death of Willem II in 1650.62 The position would remain vacant until 1672, when Willem III, born after his father’s death, was installed as stadholder after Louis XIV’s invasion of the Netherlands. The prohibition against ambassadors accepting gifts was promulgated by the so-called “Great Assembly” of the States General, convened in January 1651 to determine the governmental structure and policies of the Dutch Republic under the leadership of the newly empowered regents. In an effort to validate their coming of age as republican leaders, the regents promoted and enforced an ideal of exemplary governance that they also showcased through the decoration of Amsterdam’s spectacular new Town Hall. A series of 61 Anderson, Rise of Modern Diplomacy, p. 51, cited in Cropper, “Introduction,” p. 14. For Van Bynkershoek’s commentary, see his Quaestionum juris publici libri duo (Questions of Public Law), vol. 2, chap. 8, pp. 235-245. Translation from https://lonang.com/library/reference/bynkershoek-questions-public-law/bynk-208/ (accessed 13 July 2016). 62 See Frijhoff and Spies, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, pp. 36, 77.

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35. Govert Flinck, Manius Curius Dentatus Rejecting the Gifts of the Shunamites, 1656. Oil on canvas, 485 × 377 cm. Royal Palace, Amsterdam. © Royal Palace Amsterdam Foundation. Photo: Tom Haartsen.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

36. Ferdinand Bol, Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp, 1656. Oil on canvas, 485 × 350 cm. Royal Palace, Amsterdam. © Royal Palace Amsterdam Foundation. Photo: Tom Haartsen.

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monumental canvases was ordered with novel iconographies depicting the virtuous leadership of the consuls of the ancient Roman Republic, whom the regents identified as forebears, even translating “consul” with the Dutch term burgemeester (burgomaster or mayor).63 Facing each other on opposite walls of the Burgomasters’ Chamber, Govert Flinck’s Manius Curius Dentatus Rejecting the Gifts of the Shunamites (Fig. 35) and Ferdinand Bol’s Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp (Fig. 36) portray Roman consuls who refused to be corrupted by foreign gifts or threats, thus exemplifying through validating prototypes the incorruptibility of the municipal authorities. Lest any visitor or occupant miss the parallel between the burgomasters who commissioned the paintings and the depicted paragons of ancient republicanism, poems by Vondel were inscribed beneath the pictures to make the message crystal clear. Of Bol’s portrayal of the consul Fabricius, Vondel wrote: “Thus surrenders no man of state, for gifts nor clamor.”64 Jan Vos also composed verses on the paintings, and distilled the political message of Flinck’s image of the consul Dentatus thus: “He who governs must despise base gifts and givers all.”65 As diplomacy became more professionalized towards the end of the century, gift giving would become more regularized and the costs of presents come under tighter control. The States General gradually instituted a system by 1670 in which departing foreign emissaries received a “regular gift” (ordinaris present) of a chain and medal bearing the coats of arms of the Dutch Republic, with varying values based on the rank of the beneficiary.66 In France during Louis XIV’s personal rule beginning in 1661, diplomatic gift giving was brought under strict bureaucratic supervision as a branch of the crown’s propaganda machine. Traditionally, French royal gifts were varied in materials and types, and intended to impress upon foreign courts the French king’s magnificence and largesse. But under Louis’s administration, diplomatic gift giving became increasingly regulated as a means of disseminating the King’s image, in the form of portrait paintings and medallions ornamenting different kinds of objects.67 By 1681, Pyotr Ivanovich Potemkin was the last Russian ambassador to present lavish gifts to the English King, and the last ambassador to be awarded a gift in the traditional way when he departed.68 Extravagant gestures like the Dutch Gift of 1660 were ultimately the culmination of a specific moment in

63 Blankert, Ferdinand Bol, pp. 50-52. For the Town Hall, see Fremantle, Town Hall of Amsterdam. 64 Quoted in Blankert, Ferdinand Bol, p. 51. The original reads: “Zoo zwicht geen man van Staet voor gaven noch gerucht.” 65 Jan Vos, “Op Markus Kurius, door Govert Flinck,” in Vos, Dichtkunst, p. 115, quoted in Blankert, “Art and Authority,” p. 54. The original reads: “Wie ‘t algemeen bestiert moet gift en gever wraken.” 66 Sanders, Present van staat. 67 Richefort, “Présents diplomatiques.” 68 Anderson, Rise of Modern Diplomacy, p. 51.

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diplomatic history, when works of art became a privileged currency in the exchange of gifts between courts and states.

Dutch Global Gifts of Art: The VOC The dispensation of gifts was critical to creating and maintaining Dutch global trade networks, especially those administered by the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company (VOC), which occasionally included art objects in its gifting campaigns throughout South and East Asia.69 As early as 1610, Jacques Specx, the first Opperhoofd (Chief Trader) of the Japan factory at Hirado (and later collector of Rembrandt paintings), warned the Heren XVII (Gentlemen 17 or VOC board of directors): “Every year we shall have to present many gifts, for, in my opinion, there is no country under the sun where one has to make as many presentations as one does here. It is hardly possible to visit anyone, even a commoner, without taking him something.”70 Similar counsel was sent in 1638 by Barent Pietersz, VOC manager in Surat, India: I have advised you that in this country one cannot show up empty handed when one wishes to achieve anything from the king and the grandees and that one should have some rarities or something else to offer or present to them when one wishes to promote our affairs and trade with them, for by such means […] we draw the hearts and feelings of the grandees more towards us when one needs them on occasion than one would by presenting them thousands of rupees.71

The VOC directors, in an effort to ingratiate themselves with Asian rulers, urged their representatives in 1637 “to keep thinking about gifts which might f ind approval there so that the Shogun of Japan and other sovereigns in the Indies would become more and more attached to the Company.”72 Lists of desired gifts, 69 See in particular Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC.” 70 Jacques Specx to the Heren XVII, 3 November 1610, quoted in Viallé, “On Gift Giving by the VOC,” p. 292. Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 3-5, evocatively describes the extraordinarily diverse collection of art and exotic rarities with which Specx surrounded himself in Amsterdam after he retired from the VOC in 1632. In addition to five paintings attributed to Rembrandt and paintings by many other famous Dutch artists, Specx owned five hundred pieces of porcelain, Japanese and Javanese weapons, Turkish carpets, Japanese robes, Japanese lacquerware, and three large “Chinese” paintings, among a dazzling array of other valuables. The collection was inventoried after his death in 1652. 71 Barent Pietersz to the VOC Governor-General and Council in Surat, 8 April 1637, quoted in Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” pp. 292-293. 72 Heren XVII to VOC Governor-General and Council, December 1637, quoted in Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” p. 300.

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known as eisen tot schenkage, were compiled and sent for fulfillment initially to the Heren XVII in the Netherlands but later to Batavia, after its establishment as the VOC’s Asian headquarters in 1619. Company officials and administrators understood well the vital importance of the gift economy in securing, confirming, and sustaining the webs of political and commercial alliance that underwrote their global enterprise. The highly developed gift cultures of Asia provided the Dutch and their trading partners with a common regime of exchange that transcended language and custom, functioning in essence as a mechanism for transcultural negotiation. Cultivation of trade relations with regional rulers was carried out through ritualized, carefully orchestrated, and lavish gift presentations. Beginning in 1609, VOC representatives in Japan were required to undertake an embassy or hofreis (court journey) bearing elaborate gifts to the shogunal court in Edo (modern Tokyo). While at first irregular, the embassies became compulsory every year after the VOC secured exclusive European trading privileges in Japan in 1633. The embassies, which included 100 to 150 participants and involved a roundtrip of about three months, were enormously expensive undertakings, costing the company nearly 3.7 percent of the annual profits of trade with Japan.73 The Dutch, having no hereditary king as head of state, struggled especially in Japan with the low diplomatic status accorded to the Republic. At first, company officials explained away the alien concept of a republic by designating the stadholder “King of Holland,” which the Princes of Orange were more than happy to assist by signing letters sent on behalf of the company.74 But VOC officials abandoned references to the “King of Holland” in the 1630s, and started to present themselves not as ambassadors of a great foreign power but as loyal vassals of the shogun. In a letter from that year, they declared that “the Netherlanders shall display such faithful service to his Majesty (the shogun) in all matters such as his Majesty expects from the Japanese that are his own vassals.”75 Thereafter the hofreis followed the pattern of the annual, highly ritualized, and closely regulated visits to Edo by the domainal or warlords (daimyo), bearing gifts for the shogun and high-ranking-officials.76 While the Republic’s relatively low standing helped the Dutch secure trade agreements by accommodation into a domestic political system, it also necessitated even more extravagant diplomatic gift giving.77

73 Forrer and Kobayashi-Sato, “Dutch Presence in Japan,” p. 240. 74 Viallé, “On Gift Giving by the VOC,” p. 292. 75 E. Willem Janssen to Shogun Iemitsu, 24 July 1630, quoted in Clulow, “Gifts for the Shogun,” p. 204. See further idem, The Company and the Shogun, pp. 26-58. 76 Clulow, “Gifts for the Shogun,” pp. 205-206. 77 Gommans, “Merchants Among Kings,” p. 36.

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In their dealings with less-powerful Asian rulers, however, company officials carefully adjusted the types and costs of the gifts they presented. In 1679 the Governor-General and Council of Indies at the VOC headquarters of Batavia laid out a clear strategy for calibrating gifts to the amount of profit derived from trade. After learning that the King of Tonkin (Vietnam) demanded finer gifts than those received in 1678, the officials told Johannes Besselman, the head of the Tonkin Factory, that if the King and Prince complained again they should be informed politely but firmly about the company’s gifting policy: A presentation of gifts cannot truly bear that name unless it is done voluntarily and without compulsion. What matters is not the magnitude or largesse, but the sincere affection it represents. The gifts we present to the king and prince are an acknowledgment of the trade which we conduct in their territory. The deciding factor is therefore the extent of the trade, whether large or small, and the profits we derive from it.78

VOC gifts usually comprised f ine textiles and carpets, weapons, instruments such as telescopes, globes, reading glasses, and other “curiosities,” exotic animals like elephants, camels, water buffalo, and cassowaries, porcelain, and sometimes work of art, as we shall see. The types of gifts the Dutch presented most frequently fall under the rubric of what they called rariteyten, the rarities to which they had access through their dominance of East Indian trade.79 Presenting the gifts was even more highly ritualized in Asia than dictated by the protocols of European state diplomacy. At the annual embassy to Edo, for instance, the VOC delegation presented gifts to the shogun and then received his counter-gifts of silk robes as the culmination of the event. These robes or schenkagieroken (gift gowns) were standard shogunal gifts given in return for presentations of tribute from the daimyo, and consistent with the robes of honor (sarapa or khil’at) presented as reciprocal gifts by Asian sovereigns – including the Mughals of India, Safavids of Persia, and Ottoman Turks – which symbolized the recipient’s incorporation into their realms.80 The VOC envoy, Jan Cunaeus, is portrayed wearing the khil’at he received from the Persian Shah Abbas II in Jan Baptist Weenix’s painting of ca. 1658-1659 (Fig. 37), which Cunaeus likely ordered to commemorate the embassy he led to 78 Governor-General and Council to Johannes Besselman, 19 June 1679, quoted in Viallé, “On Gift Giving by the VOC,” p. 295. 79 See especially Swan, Rarities of These Lands. On gifts of natural specimens and animals, see Egmond, “Rare Naturalia as Collectors’ Items and Gifts.” 80 Viallé, “On Gift Giving by the VOC,” p. 308, and Gommans, “Merchants Among Kings,” pp. 37-38. For the tradition of honorific robing, see Mathee, “Gifts and Gift Giving in Safavid Persia,” p. 611, and Gordon, ed., Robes of Honour.

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37. Jan Baptist Weenix, The Dutch Ambassador Jan Cunaeus on his Way to Isfahan, 1653-1659. Oil on canvas, 101 × 179 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Isfahan from Batavia in 1651-1652, the highpoint in an otherwise lackluster career.81 Customarily the shogun gave 30 thickly wadded keyserroken or imperial robes, while other Japanese dignitaries would present additional robes to VOC envoys at their Edo lodgings before the Dutch departed for the return trip, which meant that the number of robes received could be substantial.82 Called by the Dutch Japonse roken, or simply japon, the robes were officially the property of the VOC, not the company representatives who received them as personal gifts. The finest examples were shipped back to the Netherlands via Batavia to the Heren XVII, who auctioned or redistributed them as gifts to influential figures; Charles II received multiple robes upon his restoration in 1660, in addition to spices and other exotic valuables.83 Yet the VOC’s chief merchant often kept the most beautiful examples for use as personal gifts and to sell in order to supplement his income. Such was the popularity of these robes as luxury items and status symbols for the Dutch elite that supply could not keep up with demand; and so, after repeated petitions, the VOC was authorized to order gowns directly from the Japanese tailors’ guild. The Japonse rok was thus transformed from a rarely traded gift into an exotic consumer good that commanded high prices at East India House auctions. Prized for their colorfulness and comfort, these luxurious 81 De Groot, “The Dutch Embassy to Isfahan,” esp. pp. 317-319. 82 See Breukink-Peeze, “Japanese Robes,” and Hollander, “Vermeer’s Robe,” p. 181, citing the 1727 account of Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician working for the VOC. See Kaempfer’s Japan, p. 416. 83 Breukink-Peeze, “Japanese Robes,” p. 56.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

38. Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer, 1668. Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 45.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images.

silk robes were adopted by Dutch elites as signifiers of discriminating wealth, leisure, and erudition. Distinguished gentlemen such as Christiaan Huygens had themselves portrayed wearing Japonse roken, and artists including Vermeer, with The Astronomer (Fig. 38) and The Geographer, created genre scenes of scholars clad in these exotic and rare garments.84 84 Hollander, “Vermeer’s Robe,” and Corrigan et al., eds., Asia in Amsterdam, cat. nos. 53 a-b. For the unusual case of a seventeenth-century Dutch portrait of a woman wearing a Japanese robe (Gerard Hoet, Portrait

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The VOC, like other trading companies, only occasionally distributed European works of art as gifts to Asian sovereigns and rulers. Divergent expectations of art in other parts of the world and the expense of shipping oil paintings across the seas generally made them less desirable gifts.85 Mughal India, however, was a different story, where certain emperors were known to be keenly interested in Western paintings – particularly those executed in the fine, detailed technique comparable to the conventions of Mughal painting. Emperor Jahangir, and his father Akbar before him, welcomed gifts of paintings from European traders, primarily the English. An illuminating source for understanding these gifts is the memoir of Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador of James I and employee of the English East India Company, who undertook a mission to Jahangir’s court in Agra from 1615 to 1618. A Dutch translation of his memoir was published in Amsterdam in 1656.86 Roe wrote repeatedly to company directors asking for fine pictures to present to the Emperor, who prided himself on being a serious connoisseur of painting.87 In a letter of 1616, Roe requested “Pictures, lardge, on cloth, the frames in peeces; but they must be good, and for varyetye some story, with many faces.”88 And again in 1618, as he was about to depart for home, Roe advised his employers that for “fitt presents from the King” they should send only quality paintings: “Pictuers of all sortes, if good, in constant request; some large storie; Diana this yere gave great content.”89 Roe presented Jahangir with seven portraits of English royals, aristocrats, and dignitaries, including King James I and Queen Anne, the Countess of Somerset, and Sir Thomas Smythe, governor of the East India Company, which Jahangir had displayed around his throne during the elaborate New Year’s gift ceremony known as Naw-roz (Roe calls it “norose”). Roe also personally gave the emperor a miniature of a woman by Isaac Oliver, which one of the court painters copied so well that Roe had to admit it was “so like that I was by candle-light troubled to discerne which was which; I confessed beyond all expectation.”90 Jahangir gifted one of the of Anna Elisabeth van Reede, ca. 1678, Slot Zuylen) in relation to gift culture, gender, and the construction of identity, see Rife, “The Exotic Gift,” pp. 172-212. Rife also links Rembrandt’s etching of an Indian shell or Conus Marmoerus of 1650 and Nicolaes Berchem’s Harbor Scene of ca. 1665 to the exchange of exotic goods as gifts. 85 Bok, “In the Service of the Dutch East India Company,” pp. 178-179, 188. 86 Roe, Journal van den reysen, cited in Schrader, ed., Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India, p. 10. 87 Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 334-339. For Roe’s distribution of gifts of art at the Mughal court and his response to Indian painting, see further Screech, “Anglo-Japanese Painting Trade,” pp. 55-67; Loomba, “Of Gifts, Ambassadors, and Copy-Cats”; Das, “Apes of Imitation”; Swan, “Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten,” pp. 185-187; idem, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 142-143, 149-151; and Rice, “Global Aspirations,” p. 67. 88 Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. 1, p. 119, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 336. 89 Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. 2, p. 488, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 336. 90 Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. 1, pp. 225, 213-214. See further Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 336-338; Screech, “Anglo-Japanese Painting Trade,” pp. 55-56; Das, “Apes of Imitation”; and Rice, “Global Aspirations,” p. 66. Roe refused to sell the picture, despite Jahangir’s offer of 1000 rupees, which was about 60 times more than he paid for the painting in London.

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copies to Roe “to showe in England wee are not so vnskillfull as you esteeme vs.”91 Roe concurred with the emperor’s estimation, commenting that in the “arte of limninge his [Jahangir’s] Paynters woorke miracles.”92 The most striking outcome of this encounter between European and Indian artistic traditions initiated by gift giving is Bichitr’s Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings from about 1615-1618 (Fig. 39), which incorporates a direct copy of the portrait of King James from one of Roe’s diplomatic gifts, probably painted by John de Critz.93 The dissemination of European paintings as gifts thus led, in this case, to intercultural dialogue and catalyzed a novel, hybrid work of art. But, unlike their English counterparts, VOC directors did not prioritize giving gifts of art to Islamic rulers, mistakenly believing that figural paintings would offend the sensibilities of a Muslim sovereign. Despite the evidence that paintings with figural representations were admired and collected by the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman courts, company representatives held to the misguided conviction that depictions of the human figure would be rejected for violating Islam’s an-iconic prohibition.94 The obliviousness of the Heren XVII is revealed in a directive sent in 1624 from Amsterdam to Huybert Visnich, first representative of the VOC in Persia: “Several paintings are [among the goods] going to Surat [company headquarters in India], but we do not think it a good idea to send any of them to Persia, because there are human figures in all of them.”95 Figural representations are not, in fact, banned in Shi’ite Islam, the religion of the Safavid rulers. The directors’ misapprehension of the situation apparently was not shared by agents posted at various VOC stations. In 1641 Wollebrant Geleijnsz, head of the Gamron station (Bandar-e Abbas) on the Persian coast, wrote to company headquarters in Batavia: We are hereby returning the large painting of the sea battle at Gibraltar fought by Admiral Heemskerck as well as [the portrait of] the chief merchant Adriaen van Oostende and various Moors, as a [French] painter formerly in the king’s service told us that they would not please the king or be valued at anything close to their price. What he would like are [paintings of] beautiful women, banquets, parties, anything smacking of luxury.96 91 Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. 1, p. 226, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 338. 92 Ibid, pp. 255-256, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 338. Roe made the comment in the context of gifting another painting to Jahangir. 93 Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 339. For Bichitr’s painting, see Beach, The Imperial Image, cat. no. 17a. 94 Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” pp. 25, 40-41. 95 Heren XVII to Huybert Visnich, December 1624, quoted in Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” pp. 30-31. For the letter, see Dunlop, Bronnen, no. 63. 96 Wollebrant Geleijnsz to Governor-General and councilors in Batavia, 9 May 1641, quoted in Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” p. 40.

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39. Bichitr, Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings, folio from the St. Petersburg Album, ca. 1615-1618. Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 18 × 25.3 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase – Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1942.15a.

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Geleijnsz was clearly better informed than his superiors. Already in 1618, agents of the English East India Company included paintings with figural representations in a list of items “most acceptable to present unto the kinge [Shah ‘Abbas I].” In the words of two English merchants, “Pictures bearing the resemblance eyther of man woman or other creatures being drawne to the lyfe are much desired by this kinge.”97 The perspective of the VOC directorate is surprising given the prominent status accorded to a number of Dutch artists at the Safavid court and requests the company received to send painters.98 Literally nothing survives of the work carried out by these artists, among whom was Philips Angel, author of the Praise of Painting (“Lof der schilder-konst”) of 1642, who enlisted in the VOC in 1645 and by 1653 was appointed court painter by Shah ‘Abbas II.99 Within a year Angel would be recalled to Batavia on suspicion of conducting illegal private trade. He reportedly received from the shah a farewell gift of “several drawings, of which a few were by himself [‘Abbas], since the king had indeed learned to draw from two Dutch painters, one named Angel […] that the Dutch company had sent to him.”100 The high command in Batavia nonetheless was shrewd enough to realize the potential of sending artists to Isfahan as a means of enhancing its ties with the court. In 1638, Adam Westerwolt, new director for Persia, was notified that two artists were to be delivered as a gift for Shah Safi, along with various rarities: [W]e are also giving you a certain Barend van Sichem, who is an able draftsman and is reasonable with the brush as well, along with Claes Andriesz of Amsterdam who can make enamels and set jewels. In the past His majesty has displayed particular appreciation for the work of these artists. You shall offer their services and thanks to them you will garner as much good will as previously was the case with French and Italian [artists]. The supplies they require will be sent in batches.101 97 For the list, see Ferrier, “An English View of Persian Trade,” p. 214, quoted in Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” p. 41. In 1637 Charles I sent Shah Safi presents of paintings of the royal family, the four seasons, a “gentlewoman,” a “Spaniard,” and portraits of Henrietta Maria. See Ferrier, “An English View of Persian Trade,” p. 241, n. 171, quoted in Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” p. 50. 98 Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” pp. 34-37. For the peripatetic career of the Dutch artist Cornelis Claesz Heda, who eventually served as court painter to Ibrahim Adil Shah II in Bijapur, see Hutton and Tucker, “The Worldly Artist.” 99 Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” pp. 34-37. 100 According to a 1657 journal entry of the French traveler and art dealer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, quoted in Loos-Haaxman, De landsverzameling schilderijen in Batavia, p. 43, and Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” p. 36. See Tavernier, Les six voyages, vol. 1, p. 456. The other Dutch artist who taught the shah to draw, Tavernier reports, was Hendrick Boudewijn van Lockhorst, a VOC junior merchant and painter. 101 High command and council in Batavia to Adam Westerwolt, 28 September 1638, quoted in Leupe, “Nederlandsche schilders in Persïe en Hindostan,” p. 262; Floor, “Dutch Painters in Iran” pp. 148 ff.; and Schwartz, “Terms of Reception,” p. 37.

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Company officials therefore saw an opportunity to enlist the symbolic power of the gift in the person of the artist himself to deepen and personalize a political and trading relationship with a ruling prince, as the royal council in Madrid had with Rubens in 1629. VOC leaders did offer a number of art objects as gifts in conducting trade in Japan, where the company enjoyed a monopoly. By far the most costly artistic present given to the shogun was an immense and elaborately ornamented brass lantern containing an internal chandelier, commissioned from Joost Gerritsz in 1640 (Fig. 40) for the astounding sum of 16,053 guilders. The lantern is still in its intended location, the Toshogu Shrine at Nikko, dedicated to the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate and grandfather of Iemitsu, the ruling shogun at the time of the 1643 presentation. This “worthy gift,” as the company called it, was sent during a tense moment in Japanese–European trade relations, immediately following the expulsion of the Portuguese.102 Its success was measured by Shogun Iemitsu’s repeal of a 1628 embargo on Dutch trade in Japan, for which the VOC had been petitioning. The extravagance of the VOC’s gift was considered controversial by some back home in the Netherlands. In 1662 Jan Vos published a scathing critique of the gift, denouncing the lantern as a new form of idolatry that substituted the worship of idols with the worship of profit. J. G. [Joost Gerritsz] Would cast no copper crucifix, so he made a copper lamp, which shall Burn Before the idol of the Emperor of Japan. In olden times no copper crucifix would be made sanctimoniously Now he makes something that shall blaze before a devil’s image: But this promises more money than the crucifix in my reckoning Is that not the work of the devil, to light a candle for profit?103

A less costly but perhaps more intriguing gift of Western art was presented in 1647 by VOC delegates also to Iemitsu: A painted peep-box, together with other wondrous items including camels, a cassowary, cockatoos, a civet, and rare medicines. The artist of the peep-box is not recorded, but the apparatus likely would have resembled Samuel van Hoogstraten’s famous Perspective Box with Interior of a Dutch House in London (Fig. 41), or one of the other five preserved examples. Willem Versteegen, the VOC Opperhoofd, recorded that the painted perspective box’s amazing optical 102 See Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Koperen kronen”; Mochizuki, “Idolatry and Western-Inspired Painting in Japan,” pp. 239-242; and Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” pp. 303-304. 103 Vos, Alle de gedichten, vol. 1, p. 450, quoted in Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Koperen kronen,” pp. 92-93, and Mochizuki, “Idolatry and Western-Inspired Painting in Japan,” p. 241.

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40. Joost Gerritsz, VOC Lantern, presented in 1643. Bronze, Nikko, Japan, Toshogu Shrine. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Photo: Zairon.

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41. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective Box with Interior of a Dutch House, ca. 1655-1660. Oil on panels. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery London / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images.

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effects caused a sensation when it was presented at Edo Castle. The ordinarily decorous comportment of Japanese officials gave way to open excitement as they jostled each other to look through the viewing holes.104 The peep-box made such a great impression that the Japanese soon would produce their own viewing apparatuses, fabricated from imported mirrors and lenses. The gift also appears to have inspired two unprecedented visits to the VOC delegations at Edo by a Japanese artist, described by the Dutch as a “famous and privileged painter of the emperor [shogun],” possibly the celebrated Kano Tan’yu, in 1654 and 1655.105 Easel paintings were occasionally presented to Asian rulers and monarchs. The VOC gave the shogun a number of impressive pictures depicting naval victories over the Spanish, including three large oil paintings presented in 1640 to Iemitsu, each appraised exceptionally high at 700, 750, and 1000 guilders.106 The artists are unknown, though given the valuations they were probably recognized masters of marine painting. Abraham de Verwer may have executed one of the pictures, since the VOC paid him 1200 guilders for a Battle of Gibraltar in 1639, which may have been the one that company officials considered presenting to the Safavid shah, but decided against in 1641.107 The Dutch gifts to the shogun, while accepted, do not seem to have found much favor. François Caron, head of the Dutch factory at Deshima in 1640, advised his superiors in Batavia not to send any more such paintings to be presented as gifts.108 Although Caron does not explain the reason for his directive, presumably the paintings failed to please because they did not conform to the formats of Japanese painting or Japanese display practices, which Caron described for Europeans in a widely translated publication.109 In Japan, paintings were executed on folding screens (byōbu), paper sliding doors, or hanging scrolls, with a fixed repertoire of subjects, and were displayed in prescribed locations in dwellings and changed according to the seasons or special occasions. The different conventions of European and Japanese painting also caused the English East India Company to abandon its effort to export European oil paintings (and prints) to Japan; a testing of the market in 1616 failed, and the company closed its factory at Hirado in 1623.110 Dutch company officials also wisely chose not to pursue the 104 Quoted in Screech, Obtaining Images, p. 313. For the document, see Vermeulen et al., Deshima Dagregisters, vol. 6, p. 264. 105 Quoted in Screech, Obtaining Images, p. 313. For the document, see Vermeulen et al., Deshima Dagregisters, vol. 12, pp. 138, 198. 106 Kobayashi-Sato, “Japan’s Encounters with the West,” p. 268. 107 Ibid. See further Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, pp. 227, 295, n. 40. 108 Kobayashi-Sato, “Japan’s Encounters with the West,” p. 268. 109 Caron, Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam, pp. 72-73. See also De Hond and Fitski, A Narrow Bridge, p.127. 110 Screech, “Anglo-Japanese Painting Trade,” p. 66. Richard Cocks, the Chief Factor at Hirado, also gifted European paintings to several Japanese individuals, perhaps due to a lack of sales. See ibid, p. 68.

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creation of an export market for paintings in Japan. Already in 1595, just weeks after the first Dutch merchant fleet sailed for Asia and years before the formation of the VOC in 1602, a merchant familiar with Asian markets informed the directors of the Compagnie van Verre that attempting to trade in paintings or prints would be “useless because they [the Chinese] themselves paint.”111 Despite the apparent lack of appreciation for Western easel paintings in Japan, we do know one case in which paintings were specifically requested by the shogun. In 1658, the year after fire decimated Edo and its population, destroying the shogunal art collection, VOC company chiefs received a request from an official, Inoue Masashige, for paintings for Shogun Ietsuna, Iemitsu’s son.112 The official specifically requested “some paintings of battles by land and sea” as replacements for works lost in the fire; as the register reads, “the ones that have been brought in the past and the other rarities in the castle had been destroyed in the fire.”113 When Masashige died just months before the paintings he had requested arrived in Deshima in 1663, the VOC officials decided to present the gifts to the shogun themselves. Described as “two large paintings” in “heavy frames” (unfortunately without identifying the artists), and together costing over 600 guilders, the works depicted two important Dutch naval victories. One, identified as “The Battle of Flanders,” showed the Battle of Nieuwpoort between Dutch and Spanish fleets in 1600, while the other, referred to more vaguely as “the sea battle between the Dutch and the English,” must have depicted a battle in the first Anglo-Dutch War of 1652-1654. Before presenting the gifts in Edo, the opperhoofd, Wilhelm Volger, asked the local governor of Nagasaki whether he thought the shogun would be pleased with the paintings. The governor first responded positively, but then changed his mind, saying that they depicted “very sad scenes, such as dead people and sinking and burning ships. These were, he said, scenes which one could not present to someone with such a tranquil mind as the Shogun without upsetting him badly.”114 Volger was not pleased, since he had 111 See Roeper, “Waren uit het Koninkrijk van China,” and Bok, “European Artists in the Service of the Dutch East India Company,” p. 177. The merchant Dirck Gerritsz Pomp, also known as Dirck China, gained extensive knowledge of Asia while working for the Portuguese. 112 Cited in Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” pp. 317-318, n. 87. 113 Quoted in Screech, Obtaining Images, p. 313. For the document, see Vermeulen et al., Deshima Dagregisters, vol. 12, p. 343. Masashige was a collector of European books and is recorded in the VOC register as having borrowed a copy of Jacob Cats’s Spiegel van den ouden ende nieuwen tijdt (1632) for the purpose of having some of Adriaen van de Venne’s illustrations painted onto screens that he displayed in his Edo mansion. See Screech, Obtaining Images, p. 312, citing Vermeulen et al., Deshima Dagregisters, vol. 11, p. 41. 114 Quoted in Screech, Obtaining Images, p. 313, and Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” p. 306. For the documents, see Vermeulen et al., Deshima Dagregisters, vol. 13, pp. 93, 96-98. The price of the paintings is recorded in the VOC Nagaskai Trade Book, given in Screech, Obtaining Images, p. 370, n. 38. Screech, p. 314, notes that the decision may have been prompted by Masashige’s death.

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even gone to the trouble of adapting the paintings to Japanese display practices, ordering “four beautiful Japanese stands made on which to set them like Japanese screens, in which manner they would be presented to the Shogun.”115 Both paintings were shipped back to Batavia in 1668. All the paintings gifted to the shogun, or intended as gifts for him, depict Dutch naval victories over their Spanish or English adversaries, conforming to the type of painting favored by VOC officials, the Dutch Admiralty board, and Dutch government institutions for their gifting programs. Recall that the States General, one year after concluding the Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain in 1609, gave Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales, two marine paintings, including Vroom’s Battle of Gibraltar, which commemorated a major early victory over Spain dating from three years earlier. At the resumption of hostilities in 1621, the Amsterdam Admiralty commissioned the enormous Battle of Gibraltar (Fig. 42) from Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen and in 1622 presented it to Stadholder Maurits as a token of its esteem.116 And in 1666 Amsterdam’s magistrates gave the Marquis Hugues de Lionne, Louis XIV’s secretary for foreign affairs, Ludolf Backhuysen’s monumental Port of Amsterdam, View of the IJ (Fig. 43).117 Marine and battle paintings were evidently chosen to impress upon recipients the might of the Dutch naval and commercial fleets. VOC officials emphasized the same message by distributing paintings of naval triumphs over their European rivals for dominance of global trade or Amsterdam’s harbor as gifts to local leaders across their seaborne empire: In 1602 Joris van Spilbergen presented a painting of the Battle of Nieuwpoort (the same subject selected for the failed gift to the shogun) to the “emperor” or King Vimaladharmasuriya of Kandy in Ceylon; Jan Pieterszoon Coen gifted a picture of Amsterdam’s harbor in 1620 to the Sultan of Palembang (Sumatra); and in 1641 the VOC headquarters sent a Battle of Gibraltar as a gift to the Persian shah, though, as noted above, the local representative determined it would not be welcome.118 Whatever desires the Dutch and other Europeans harbored about securing trade privileges by nurturing bonds of mutuality and respect, their lavish gifts would not have been received in the same spirit by the shogun, or any Asian ruler. Throughout Asia, the bestowal of gifts, even if reciprocated, signified the submission of tributary states or peoples, not a path towards opening discussions between equals.119 Before they could be presented, gifts were inspected by government 115 Quoted in Viallé, “On Gift-Giving by the VOC,” p. 306. 116 For this well-documented gift, see Zandvliet et al., Maurits, pp. 150, 404-407, and further, below. 117 See Daalder, “Maritime History in Paintings,” p. 39; De Beer, Ludolf Backhuysen, pp. 61-63; and further, below. 118 Loos-Haaxmann, De landverzameling schilderijen in Batavia, p. 51, cited in North, “Production and Reception of Art,” pp. 96-97. 119 Wills, Embassies and Illusions, esp. p. 34.

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42. Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, Battle of Gibraltar, 1622. Oil on canvas, 180 × 490 cm. Collection Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam.

43. Ludolf Backhuysen, The Port of Amsterdam, View of the IJ, 1666. Oil on canvas, 128 × 221 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Louvre, Paris / Bridgeman Images.

officials tasked with assessing their suitability, and if they were deemed acceptable protocol required that the European envoys prostrate themselves during solemn ceremonial presentations. The first, unsuccessful Dutch trade embassy to China in 1655, for instance, which brought expensive gifts for the imperial family, was characterized by the emperor’s court officials as a tribute mission from “barbarians”: “[The emperor’s] gracious benevolence has spread to so remote a distance that the barbarians are willing to scale the mountains and navigate the seas in order to

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look upon the glorious Heaven and the brilliant Sun. It is indeed a glorious event, honoring our prosperous dynasty.”120 Even Sir Thomas Roe, whose positive account of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s appreciation for art was discussed above, voiced his dismay that the gifts he presented were not treated appropriately by a ruler “who acknoweldgeth no equal.” Writing to James I in 1618, Roe complained: To the monarch with whom I reside your Maiesties minister I deliuered your Royall letters and presents, which were receiued with as much honor as their barbarous pride and Custtoomes affoord to any the like from any Absolute Prince, though far inferior to that respect due vnto them […]. I dare not dissemble with Your Maiestie their pride and dull ignorance takes all things done of duty, and this yeare I was enforced to stande out for the honor of your free guifts, which were sceazed vncivilly. I have sought to meyntayne vpright your Maiesties greatenes and dignitie, and withall to effect the ends of the Merchant; but these two sometymes cross one another, seeing ther is no way to treate with so monstrous ouerweening that acknowledgeth no equall. He [Jahangir] hath written Your Maiestie a lettre full of good woords, but barren of all true effect.121

In the same year, Roe communicated to Smythe, the governor of the East India Company, that Jahangir “expectes great Presentes and Jewelles, and reguardes no trade but what feedes his vnsatiable appetite after stones, rich and rare Peices of any kind of arte.” Describing Jahangir as an “overgrowne Eliphant,” Roe complained bitterly in 1617 that the emperor obstinately refused to engage in the reciprocal relations that gifts were intended to nurture: “Neyther will this overgrowne Eliphant descend to Article or bynde himself reciprocally to any Prince vpon terms of Equalety, but only by way of fauour admitt our stay so long as it either likes him or those that Gouerne him.”122 The symbolic power of the gifts, including works of art, presented in Asia and other parts of the global trading world therefore fell short of European expectations that they serve as reifications of mutual regard and reciprocal obligations. The Dutch were also aware that differing understandings of gift giving undermined the symbolism of reciprocity that their offerings were supposed to generate. The Dutch Reformed minister Willem Baudartius included in his 1620 chronicle a partial list of a whole shipload of astonishingly diverse gifts (including full-length painted portraits of 120 Quoted in Rahusen-de-Bruyn Kops, “First Dutch Trade Embassy to China,” p. 551, n. 57. See also Fu, A Documentary Chronicle, p. 16. 121 Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. 2, pp. 496-497, quoted in Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History, p. 151. 122 Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, vol. 2, p. 498, and vol. 1, pp. xxiii-xxiv, quoted in Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History, p. 145.

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Maurits and his half-brother Frederik Hendrik) that Cornelis Haga presented to Sultan Ahmed I on the first Dutch embassy to Constantinople in 1612-1613 as part of the negotiation of a trade contract, called a capitulation (ahidname) by the Turks. Baudartius stressed that the gifts to the sultan had escaped the usual fate of valuable presents of gold and silver only by virtue of their exoticism, rarity, or usefulness: “These presents were very welcome and greatly appreciated and were considered much more valuable than if they had just been so many vessels and beakers of gold and silver. Because silver and gold beakers and cups that the Turks receive, they bring straight to the Mint and make money of them.”123 In the Ottoman world a gift largely lost its symbolic worth after it was received, turning into “real” or market value when it was put into the treasury, hazine, which was a part of almost every well-to-do household.124 On rare occasions the Europeans received gifts of art from Asian rulers. In 1613 the former Shogun Ieyasu gave reciprocal gifts of originally ten pairs of painted screens to James I of England, of which only six were presented at court the next year by John Saris, Chief Factor of the East India Company.125 Because the Dutch Republic was a state without a monarch, Asian rulers did not generally consider themselves obliged to offer reciprocal gifts beyond the robes given to VOC envoys. In the early seventeenth century, though, Stadholder Maurits, who was initially identified as the “King of Holland” by Dutch trading companies, engaged in direct diplomatic contact and reciprocal gift exchanges with Asian rulers, receiving a number of ceremonial daggers (krisses), among other presents.126 Shogun Hidetada also likely presented to Maurits an Iwai suit of armor, probably at the same time a comparable suit was sent to King James I in 1613.127 Maurits also received a pair of Japanese screens painted with battle scenes in 1616, but not from the shogun: The Zeeland chamber of the VOC presented the screens after Maurits expressed interest in them.128 A few other artworks from the Dutch global trading empire also made their way as gifts into Dutch collections. In 1616 Cornelis Haga, the first Dutch ambassador in Constantinople who, 123 Baudartius, Memorien, fol. 18v, quoted in Swan, “Birds of Paradise,” p. 56; idem, “Exotica on the Move,” p. 63; and idem, Rarities of These Lands, p. 161. Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 167-183, skillfully analyzes the crucial role the gifts played in Haga’s embassy to the Ottoman court. 124 Reindl-Kiel, “Diplomatic Gift Exchange in the Ottoman Empire,” p. 115, and Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 166-167. 125 Screech, “Anglo-Japanese Painting Trade,” pp. 60-61. The screens were probably lost in the 1698 fire at Whitehall Palace. 126 See Zanvliet et al., Maurits, pp. 337, and cat. nos.187-188; 204; and 211, and Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 123-125, 125-128, 151, 157, 159. In 1602 Sultan Alau’d-din Riayat of Aceh (Sumatra) sent an embassy to the Netherlands bearing exotic and valuable gifts for Maurits. 127 Zandvliet et al., Dutch Encounter with Asia, cat. no. 53, and Swan, Rarities of These Lands, p. 151. The armor appears in Jacob van Campen’s 1648 Triumphal Procession with Goods from East and West, which forms part of the decoration of the Oranjezaal of the Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. 128 Leupe, “Japansche schilderijen aan Prins Maurits,” and Zandvliet et al., Maurits, p. 57, and cat. no. 211.

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as we saw, presented a stupendous assortment of gifts to Sultan Ahmed I in 1612-1613, wrote to the States General that he was sending “a portrait of this city, very curiously done after life,” which he hoped the delegates “would deign to accept […] from their ever most faithful and most humble servant.”129 Haga’s view of Constantinople soon passed to Adriaen Pauw, Amsterdam pensionary and trustee of the VOC, who used it to decorate the Kamer Constantinopelen at his castle at Heemstede, beneath which was a Latin description commemorating the gift: “The illustrious man, Cornelius Haga, spokesperson at the Porte, giving this [panorama] as a gift, sent it to the States General” (Illustris vir Cornelius Haga, apud Portam orator, D.D. [=donum datum] ordinibus Generalibus transmisit).130 Adriaen Pauw had accompanied Haga to Constantinople as a youth, and his brother Cornelis was secretary of the States General. Joan Huydecoper van Maarsseveen II, an Amsterdam patrician, burgomaster, and since 1666 administrator of the VOC, also recorded in his diary in 1700 that he had received several Chinese scroll paintings as gifts. He writes that he gratefully and cordially thanked the donor, but also expresses surprise that the painting of the “excellent” Chinese nation lacked an understanding of perspective and shadows. The works were framed and hung at Goudestein, his country retreat, but with the perspective apparently “improved.”131

Dutch Paintings as Exotic Gifts: Johan Maurits The WIC (“Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie” or Dutch West India Company) does not appear to have included works of art in its gifting campaigns in the Americas and West Africa. Nonetheless the company was instrumental in an unprecedented episode in the history of art’s enlistment as a privileged form of gift. Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau-Siegen and member of the House of Orange-Nassau who served the WIC as Governor-General of Dutch Brazil from 1637 to 1644, after his return to the Netherlands made three spectacular presentations to foreign princes that drew from his collection of Brazilian cultural artifacts and works of art depicting Brazil’s inhabitants, landscape, flora, and fauna. The exotic gifts were given to Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, in 1652, to the Danish King Frederick III in 1654, and to Louis XIV of France in 1679.132 Each presentation 129 Haga to the States General, 1 October 1616, in Heeringa, Bronnen, no. 163, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 251. 130 De Boer and Bruch, Adriaan Pauw, pp. 24, 72, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 253. 131 Quoted in Kooijmans, Vriendschap, p. 362, n. 8. In 1666 Huydecoper became a VOC administrator, and his father had been an initial investor in the company. 132 For Johan Maurits’s gifts, see in particular Buvelot et al., Albert Eckhout; Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, pp. 204-207; Anderson, “Johan Maurits’s Brazilian Collection”; idem, “Material Mediators”;

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comprised mainly paintings, watercolors, oil studies, and sketches made in Brazil by the painters Albert Eckhout and Frans Post, the physician Willem Piso, and the naturalist and cartographer Georg Marcgraf, whom Johan Maurits had brought on his expedition. The ethnographic and other items that accompanied the paintings and drawings, such as feather capes and ivory furniture, had been displayed in the Mauritshuis, Johan Maurits’s residence in The Hague, sometimes known derisively as the “Sugar Palace” in reference to the sugar trade and exploitation of enslaved Africans that financed its construction. The collection was accessible to select visitors, such as Adolph Vorstius, who visited with Constantijn Huygens in December 1644 and recorded his “amazement at the riches of the West and all the magnificent and monstrous things that the skies and the land there produce.”133 The number of artworks Johan Maurits distributed to these rulers is staggering: The Elector of Brandenburg received over 700 colored drawings, oil studies, and watercolors by Eckhout, Marcgraf, and other artists, and a now lost series of sixteen paintings by Eckhout, along with other Brazilian articles;134 Johan Maurits gave the Danish King 26 paintings mostly by Eckhout, which he described in the accompanying letter as “showing all kinds of people and fruits, 26 in number, all of them life-sized.” There were eight individual “ethnographic” portraits of men and women of the various ethnicities and races populating the region – indigenous Tapuyas (or Tarariu) and Tupi (or Tupinamba), Africans, and Mulattos (Figs. 44-46); a multi-figure scene of dancing Amerindians or Tapuyas (Fig. 47); a full-length portrait of the Count and another of him surrounded by natives (now lost); twelve still life paintings featuring Brazilian fruit and vegetables, all by Eckhout; and three portraits of the Congolese envoy Dom Miguel de Castro and his servants, probably painted by Jasper Becx or his brother Jeronimus in Middelburg in 1643.135 Louis XIV received fifteen Eckhout paintings depicting Brazilian subjects, as well as 27 Brazilian landscape paintings by Post, some of which he had produced in Brazil (Fig. 48). On Johan Maurits’s suggestion, at least eight of the Eckhout paintings were put to use as models for a tapestry series known as The Old Indies (Tentures des Indes), woven by the Gobelins manufactory multiple times beginning in 1687.136 idem, “Johan Maurits’s Gift to Louis XIV”; and idem, Rhetoric of the Gift. On two of the Post paintings Johan Maurits gifted to Louis XIV, see Rife, “The Exotic Gift,” pp. 74-131. 133 Vorstius to Huygens, 20 December 1644, printed in Buvelot et al., Albert Eckhout, p. 141. 134 For the inventories of Johan Maurits’s gifts to the Elector and Louis XIV, see Larsen, Frans Post, pp. 252-253, 255-259, doc. nos. 50, 54, 55. 135 For Johan Maurits’s letter to Frederick III, dated 13 July 1654, see Buvelot et al., Albert Eckhout, p. 18, and Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, p. 12. On the portraits of Dom Miguel de Castro and his servants, see Heyning, Terug naar Zeeland, pp. 44-47. 136 On the Tenture des Indes and Johan Maurits’s gifts, see Anderson, “Material Mediators,” pp. 77-85, and idem, “Johan Maurits’s Gift to Louis XIV.” The Elector’s paintings also served as models for two lost sets of tapestries that Johan Maurits ordered in 1667.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

44. Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Woman, 1641. Oil on canvas, 272 × 165 cm. John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark.

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45. Albert Eckhout, Tupi Man, 1643. Oil on canvas, 272 × 163 cm. John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

46. Albert Eckhout, African Man, 1641. Oil on canvas, 273 × 167 cm. John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark.

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47. Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Dance, ca. 1640. Oil on canvas, 172 × 295 cm. John Lee, CC-BY-SA, The National Museum of Denmark.

48. Frans Post, The Old Portuguese Fort of the Three Wise Kings (or Fort Ceulen), near the Rio Grande in Brazil, 1638. Oil on canvas, 62 × 95 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

With this lavish series of gifts, Johan Maurits sought to capitalize on both his fame as Governor-General of Dutch Brazil and the fascination with the “New World” among European powers. The international focus and the timing of his gifting campaigns were intertwined, for he initiated the gifts during a period of declining Dutch control of Brazil and the territory’s ultimate recapture by the Portuguese in 1654. “At that moment,” Rebecca Parker Brienen writes, “the paintings lost their function as a cycle endorsing the stability and prosperity of the colony and its peoples.”137 Johan Maurits may also have been responding to the new, for him unfavorable, political conditions of the stadholderless period. As we have seen, the sudden death of Willem II in 1650 ushered in a radically reoriented political structure in which members of the House of Orange-Nassau, including Johan Maurits, and their supporters were displaced by the powerful regents of Dutch cities, preeminently Amsterdam. Johan Maurits was already trying to nurture his relationships with foreign princes before initiating his gifting program: Friedrich Wilhelm appointed him governor of Cleves, Mark, and Ravensberg in 1648, and later also Minden. By enlisting his collection of Brazilian art and ethnographica as gifts, Johan Maurits endeavored to strengthen his ties with rulers who had the means and ability to bestow the titles, honors, and material rewards of the aristocratic class. Parker Brienen and Carrie Anderson rightly reject the overemphasis in earlier scholarship on the monetary gains Johan Maurits achieved through his gifting, calling attention instead to the cultural and social capital he accrued by distributing his Brazilian collection.138 To be sure, Johan Maurits would have desired money as well as the other material rewards he received, which included the Freudenberg Estate near Cleves from the Elector in 1652 and a team of seven horses from Frederick III of Denmark in 1656. Heavily in debt by 1679, the Count made explicit his need for cash in a letter accompanying the gifts to Louis XIV. But it would be reductive and inappropriate to conceptualize Johan Maurits’s gifts solely as a maneuver to acquire material returns. The ethics of gift giving offered him a means of engaging three powerful princes in a relationship defined by obligations of mutual service and honor. He was already a client of the Elector, and a distant relative of Frederick III, who had made him a member of the “Order of the Elephant” in 1649. Offering the Brazilian gifts served to reinforce Johan Maurits’s ongoing personal and political ties with these figures, which were confirmed and enhanced in 1652 when, probably through Friedrich Wilhelm’s sponsorship, he was elevated to Imperial Prince. Even the gifts to Louis XIV, for which Johan Maurits requested money in exchange, involved social dynamics of interdependency that transcend a narrowly utilitarian understanding of the transaction. These gifts, Anderson argues, may have been motivated to support 137 Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, p. 199. 138 Ibid, pp. 204-207; Anderson, “Johan Maurits’s Brazilian Collection”; and idem, Rhetoric of the Gift.

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the Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, Johan Maurits’s patron, who in 1678 strove (ultimately unsuccessfully) to persuade Louis XIV to allow him to retain territories won from Sweden in the alliance he had entered with the French against the Republic.139 Only the Count’s death in 1679 relieved the Sun King of the obligation of indebtedness that came with acceptance of Johan Maurits’s final gift of his Brazilian works.140

Gifts of Art within the Dutch Republic The Dutch Gift to Charles II in 1660, the States General’s earlier gifts to the English court, and the gifting campaigns of the VOC and Johan Maurits were unusually lavish, but they were not the only presentations of works of art by Dutch governmental bodies and civic institutions. The Republic’s municipal and state authorities commissioned paintings from local artists to distribute as off icial gifts in the hopes of nurturing relationships with influential f igures both at home and abroad. The primary recipients of gifted artworks from these governing bodies were, unsurprisingly, members of the House of Orange and off icials of the stadholder’s court in The Hague. As a contemporary testif ied, Amalia van Solms, consort of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, was showered with diplomatic gifts from foreign powers as well as Dutch institutions: “Nearly all foreign kings, princes, and potentates, the Indian companies, cities and wealthy institutions of Holland sent her presents, which she received openly and graciously without subjugation or secretly.”141 In 1627 the Utrecht provincial executive (Gedeputeerde Staten) presented Amalia with four paintings by the city’s artists to mark Frederik Hendrik’s installation as stadholder of the province of Utrecht: Paulus Moreelse’s Shepherd Boy with Flowers (Fig. 49) and Shepherdess, a Banquet of the Gods by Cornelis van Poelenburch (Fig. 50), and Paradise by Roelandt Savery (Fig. 51).142 No doubt the court’s preference for pastoral subjects and Utrecht painting in particular played a part in the selection of the presents. In 1638 Amalia also received from Amsterdam’s burgomasters an ancient statue of Cleopatra that had formed part of the Reynst collection, which had seeded the 1660 gift to Charles II. Amalia expressed enthusiasm for the statue when visiting the Reynst collection as she accompanied the French Queen Mother Marie de’ Medici on her visit to

139 Anderson, “Johan Maurits’s Gift to Louis XIV,” pp. 52-56. 140 Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, p. 207. 141 Borkowski, ed., Les mémoires, p. 27, quoted in Drossaers and Lunsingh Scheurleer, Inventarissen, p. 239; Swan, “Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten,” p. 192; and idem, Rarities of These Lands, p. 108. 142 For the gifts, see Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons, cat. nos. 18-19, 26. For Van Poelenburch’s painting, see Sluijter-Seijffert, Cornelis van Poelenburch, p. 33 and cat. no. 128.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

49. Paulus Moreelse, Shepherd Boy with Flowers, 1627. Oil on panel 31.6 × 24.9 cm. Staatliches Museum Schwerin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliches Museum Schwerin / Hans Maertens / Art Resource, ny.

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50. Cornelis van Poelenburch, Banquet of the Gods, ca. 1627. Oil on panel, 36 × 69 cm. Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau.

51. Roelandt Savery, Paradise, 1626. Oil on panel, 80.5 × 137.6 cm. Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

Amsterdam in 1638, after which the Amsterdam authorities convinced a reluctant Gerard Reynst to part with it.143 Gifts of marine paintings, one of the earliest pictorial specialties of the nascent Republic, were offered by various officials to showcase Dutch maritime might and promote the cooperation of their naval and merchant fleets. As noted above, in 1622 the Amsterdam Admiralty, largest of the Republic’s five admiralties, gave Stadholder Maurits the huge Battle of Gibraltar (Fig. 42) for his new quarters in the Binnenhof at The Hague, commissioned from Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen for a staggering 2400 guilders.144 The officials called attention to themselves by having Van Wieringen incongruously include an Amsterdam Admiralty yacht.145 The timing of this lavish gift celebrating the triumphant early Dutch victory over the Spanish armada was an integral part of its political meaning. By presenting the painting at the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce and resumption of hostilities with Spain, the Admiralty officials sought simultaneously to demonstrate their allegiance to the stadholder as commander-in-chief of the naval and armed forces of the Republic and to impress upon him Amsterdam’s maritime power, the profits it generated, and the need to protect them.146 A major marine painting, we also saw, was presented by the Magistracy of Amsterdam to Marquis Hugues de Lionne, Louis XIV’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1666. After learning that the Marquis lacked a picture of Amsterdam in his collection of views of the most famous European cities and that he would welcome such a painting, the civic authorities commissioned from Ludolf Backhuysen the large-scale Port of Amsterdam, View of the IJ (Fig. 43).147 The burgomaster, Gerard Hasselaer, was instrumental in helping Backhuysen secure the commission, for which he received 400 ducats in payment; one more gold ducat was also given as a gift to his wife. Backhuysen’s view of Amsterdam’s bustling harbor was calculated to impress upon the French Secretary for Foreign Affairs the city’s maritime and economic might in the lead-up to the War of Devolution (1667-1668), fought against Louis XIV’s claims to the Spanish Netherlands and Franche-Comté. 143 Logan, ‘Cabinet’ of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst, p. 58, citing Arnout van Buchell’s 1639 manuscript Notae Quotidianae (University of Utrecht). 144 See Russell, Visions of the Sea, pp. 174-176; Keyes, “Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen,” pp. 3-4; Brand, “De marineschilderkunst,” pp. 201-203; and Zandvliet et al., Maurits, pp. 150, 404-407. The Admiralty officials originally approached Vroom, but the 6000 guilders he demanded was so astronomical and his behavior so uncooperative that they turned instead to his pupil, Van Wieringen. 145 Daalder, “Maritime History in Paintings,” p. 39. 146 Zandvliet et al., Maurits, pp. 406-407. 147 Backhuysen enlarged the major buildings comprising Amsterdam’s prof ile, including the VOC’s new depot and the Town Hall, and incorporated the man-of-war Spiegel in the foreground to emphasize the city’s maritime prowess. See Daalder, “Maritime History in Paintings,” p. 39, and De Beer, Ludolf Backhuysen, pp. 61-63.

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52. Reinier Nooms, View of Algiers, 1662-1668. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 110 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The Hoog Mogende Heren (High and Mighty Lords) of the States General sometimes received gifts of art. In 1663 the sea captain Joris de Caulery (or Caullery) presented them with four paintings depicting the North African ports of Algiers (Fig. 52), Tunis, Tripoli, and Salee by Reinier Nooms, for which he was awarded a chain worth 100 silver ducats as a token of appreciation.148 Caulery may have been the same man painted by Rembrandt in 1632 when he was lieutenant of the civic guard in The Hague (Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco).149 Nooms, a prolific marine artist and probable sailor who signed his paintings “R.” or “Reinier Zeeman” (Sailor or Seaman), perhaps sketched the ports while accompanying Commander Michiel de Ruyter on a successful expedition against the Barbary pirates menacing Dutch commerce in the Mediterranean.150 De Ruyter’s vessel, De Liedfe, appears in Nooms’s painting of Algiers harbor. Amsterdam’s municipal authorities were also occasionally the beneficiaries of gifts of art. In one case their deep rivalry with the stadholder over leadership of the Dutch 148 Sanders, Present van staat, pp. 249-251. 149 A deed of June 1654 records the transfer of numerous portraits of “the Noble and Valiant Joris de Caullery, Captain at sea in the service of these lands” (de Edele Manhafte Cappiteijn te water ten dienster des landen) and of his late wife to their children, including the Rembrandt and other paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Jan Lievens, and Moses van Uyttenbroeck, among others. On the portrait, see Bruyn et al., Corpus 1, no. A 53. For the documents, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, docs. 1654/9 and 1661/7. 150 Lammertse, “Reinier Zeeman,” pp. 46-47. A drawing of Tripoli by Nooms records his voyage.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

polity necessitated delicate negotiations and the procurement of a substitute gift to satisfy both parties. Writing in about 1639, Alphonso Lopez, Cardinal Richelieu’s agent in the Netherlands, excused himself for delaying the presentation of the Cardinal’s portrait to the burgomasters of Amsterdam, who “desired it with passion” and wished to hang it in the town hall next to a portrait of Marie de’ Medici.151 The cause of the delay, Lopez explained, was that Frederik Hendrik, who had heard about the portrait, asked that it be offered to him instead. Lopez also conveyed that Amalia van Solms was requesting portraits of the Dauphin Louis XIV, then only about a year old, and his nurse. At Lopez’s suggestion another portrait of Richelieu was dispatched for presentation to the stadholder, who, according to a follow-up letter to the Cardinal, was delighted by the gift. To the satisfaction of the French, the portrait was hung in the Prince’s cabinet where, Lopez reported, “he gives audience,” and was praised by a famous painter in The Hague. In reciprocation, the Prince offered Lopez a large diamond ring that he removed from his finger, announcing that he hoped it would be appreciated as a token of his affection. Lopez, it is worth noting, was a discriminating art collector who owned Rembrandt’s early Balaam and the Ass of 1626 as well as Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo (Fig. 53), on which Rembrandt modeled his self-portraits from 1639 (Fig. 54) and 1640 (Fig. 55) – precisely the years of this presentation of official portraits by the French.152 Major gifts of art also flowed regularly to the Republic’s charitable institutions and professional, craft, and militia guilds in the form of group portraits donated by the administrators of these civic institutions. Rembrandt’s large-scale collective portraits The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (Fig. 56), The Night Watch of 1642 (Fig. 57), and The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild of 1662 (Fig. 58), and Frans Hals’s Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse of 1664 (Fig. 59) are only the most iconic examples of this widespread and distinctive phenomenon of Dutch corporate society. The paintings were commissioned with private funds and gifted to the institutions for display in official meeting chambers or boardrooms.153 The entire system of the production of group portraiture therefore depended upon gift culture and the gift’s capacity to structure social relations and identities. Usually the commissions were occasioned by the impending retirement of one or more members of the board, who then donated the paintings in order to fix and reinforce their social status within close-knit networks of merchant elites. The portraits also ensured the donors’ reputation for exemplary service in posterity; successive groups of board 151 Baraude [Tupinier], Lopez, pp. 152-153, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 71-73. The portrait has not been identified. 152 For the document connecting Lopez with Rembrandt, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1641/6. On Rembrandt and Lopez, see Bloch, “Rembrandt and the Lopez Collection”; Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 89-91, 99-101; and Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 38-41. 153 Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic, pp. 13-14, and Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities, pp. 249-258.

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53. Titian, Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo, ca. 1510. Oil on canvas, 81.2 × 66.3 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

members and officers would contemplate them as memorials to paragons of good stewardship and dedication to civic values. The gifts of art were not always portraits, however. In 1663 the surgeon Jan Zeeuw donated a painting of a skull by Hercules Segers to the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild, the same institution that had received Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, among other portraits. According

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

54. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill, 1639. Etching and drypoint, 20.6 × 16.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

to a contemporary record of the gift, the skull came from “a distant land” and was originally presented to the French king, who gave it to someone who traveled with it and “displayed it for money, and it was on that occasion that Hercules Segers saw and painted it from life.”154 154 Quoted in Van der Veen, “Hercules Segers,” p. 27. For the document, see Thijssen, Nicolaas Tulp, p. 22. Zeeuw likely received the painting from his stepfather Arent Rutgers, who was also a surgeon.

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55. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Age of 34, 1640. Oil on canvas, 102 × 80 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

Prominent members and off icials of the stadholder’s court in The Hague were frequent recipients of gifts, including artworks – probably none more than Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the stadholder, poet, musician, diplomat, and connoisseur (Fig. 60). Rembrandt famously offered Huygens a major painting, as did the Flemish painter Daniël Seghers, as we saw in the previous chapter. Huygens’s voluminous correspondence records his receipt of other gifts of art, including an untraceable painting from the Earl of Arundel in 1644. Arundel sent the painting along with a request for the Prince of Orange’s support in securing a position for

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

56. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas, 169.5 × 216.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

57. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Night Watch (The Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq), 1642. Oil on canvas, 379.5 × 453.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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58. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild (The Syndics), 1662. Oil on canvas, 191.5 × 279 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

59. Frans Hals, The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse, 1664. Oil on canvas, 170.5 × 249.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: René Gerritsen.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

60. Thomas de Keyser, Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk, 1627. Oil on panel, 92.4 × 69.3 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

the Earl of Oxford, Aubrey de Vere. Huygens’s courteous letter confirming that a suitable post had been found for the young earl is comprised mostly of his witty and eloquent gratitude for the gift, in fluent English: I hope not to have fayled in that kind of duty so farr as that I needed to be summoned of it by any mercenarie respects. And yet it has pleased your Lordship to deale with me something that way. But even in this incivilitie of receaving what I never deserved, I will obey and give humble thankes for so gracious a punishment […]. Surely, Mylord, the colours of this are most excellent and daintily applied, and I am to make a perpetual better cheare in these corners of a private kitchen

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then at any kings table. Though it must please the painter that I make much lesses of his never so cunning hand then of the givers.155

In 1647 Huygens was also given a gift of a “very praiseworthy and curious drawing by the widely-known illuminator and fine painter Hoefnagel” by J. Cranevelt, who asked that Huygens speak to Frederik Hendrik about intervening on the arrest of his son, along with 40 other Jesuit students.156 “If I still have ‘anything further of art,’ which pleases you,” Cranevelt writes, “you need only say.” The choice of a Hoefnagel drawing, which Cranevelt identifies as a flowerpiece, may have been purposeful, as the famed illuminator was Huygens’s uncle. Hoefnagel in fact taught Huygens to paint still life miniatures, which Huygens presented as gifts mostly to his friends. He boasted that his rendering of a hazelnut, a candle stump, a tobacco pipe, and “a rather hefty fly,” which he gave to his wife, was so true to life that not only Hoefnagel praised it but even “the De Gheyns, who are certainly not generous with compliments.”157 Huygens sometimes composed poems in reciprocation for artworks he received as gifts. In 1653 he thanked his cousin Beatrice de Cusance, Archduchess of Lotharingen in Antwerp, for portraits of his grandparents with a reciprocal gift of a painting of Adam and Eve as well as a poem entitled “On a painting of Adam and Eve, sent to Madame la Duchesse de Lorraine, who had made me a present of two excellent portraits of my ancestors, found in her study” (Sur un tableau d’Adam et Eve, envoye a madame la Duchesse de Lorraine, qui m’avoit faict present de deux excellens portracts de mes aijeuls, trouvez dans son cabinet).158 In 1660, after receiving a painting of an old man and other presents from Adriana le Thoré, Huygens composed a poem of thanks.159 The following year he again thanked her with a poem, this time for a miniature still life by De Gheyn.160 Cultural elites of the Republic also received gifts of art on occasion. Joost van den Vondel, for example, obtained a painting as a gift from a patron to whom he had dedicated his Altaargeheimnissen (Altar Secrets) in 1645. Vondel, who regularly received gifts of various kinds as rewards from dedicatees, was initially delighted by the painted altarpiece that Jacob Boonen, Bishop of Mechelen, sent him in 155 Huygens to Arundel, 2 September 1644. See Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 4, no. 3734, cited in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 257-258. 156 J. Cranevelet to Huygens, 26 November 1647, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” pp. 259-260. For the letter, see Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 4, no. 4713. 157 Huygens, Mijn jeugd, p. 73. 158 Worp, De gedichten, vol. 5, pp. 33-34, cited in Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, p. 32. For the portraits Huygens received from his cousin, see Broekman, pp. 31-33. 159 Worp, De gedichten, vol. 6, p. 278, cited in Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, p. 32. 160 Worp, De gedichten, vol. 6, p. 278, cited in Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, p. 32.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

gratitude, along with a letter of thanks. Vondel was planning to respond with a letter thanking the Bishop for his generosity, but after learning from connoisseurs that the painting was a weak copy, he gave it away to his sister Katharina to free himself from the burden of, in the words of a contemporary biographer, “a spiteful remembrance of this poor repayment.”161 As this episode demonstrates, not all gifts hit their mark. Vondel’s rejection of the Bishop’s painting dramatizes, moreover, that connoisseurial acumen had become necessary in successful gift exchanges involving artworks.

Dutch Artists’ Gifts Artists in the Dutch Republic conformed to the norms of burgher behavior and civility by presenting their works as gifts to cultivate relationships with patrons, collectors, and intimates, negotiate remuneration, and set into motion cultural values of honor and distinction. Like their colleagues in other European art centers, Dutch artists engaged the symbolic economy of the gift to distinguish their transactions with customers and familiars from impersonal market or commercial relations. Giving away artworks endowed them with an aura of inalienability that served as an enduring reminder of personal, affective ties. By distributing their works as presents Dutch artists drew recipients into relationships animated by cultured codes of conduct, including the knowledge of and dedication to art they shared with liefhebbers and professional and personal contacts. Rembrandt’s practice of gifting his art, which will be explored in the next chapter, is only the best-known example. Unlike Reni, Seghers, and Poussin, no artist in the merchant republic adopted gift giving as the favored means of transacting his work. These three painters worked in aristocratic societies marked by aversion to the erosion of the nobility’s social dominance, and where gift exchange was often a means of symbolically purifiying transactions from the taint of merchandizing. In general, Dutch artists mixed a market-oriented distribution of their works and production on demand from patrons with strategic or personal gifts of their work. Vasari’s recounting of Michelangelo’s and Titian’s use of the gift economy to manage relations with patrons and secure for themselves and their artworks elevated social status would have been familiar to them, as was the highly visible precedent of Maarten van Heemskerck’s St. Luke Painting the Virgin of 1532 (Fig. 61), which he donated to Haarlem’s Guild of St. Luke for its altar in St. Bavo’s. Although removed in 1581 after Haarlem’s embrace of the Calvinist prohibition on representational imagery 161 See Brandt, “Het leven van Joost van den Vondel,” p. 51, quoted in Thoen, Strategic Affection?, pp. 182-183.

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61. Maerten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, 1532. Oil on panel, 168 × 235 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson.

in places of worship, the altarpiece was on view in the Prinsenhof. A trompe l’oeil cartellino, on the podium on which Mary and Christ sit, prominently memorializes Van Heemskerck’s gift: This painting was given in memory Of Maarten van Heemskerck, who devised And executed it in honor of Saint Luke, Mindful of his fellow guild brothers. Let us thank him day and night For his generous gift here exhibited. Thus shall we pray with all our might That God’s grace go with him.162 162 The original inscription reads: “Tot een memorie es dese taeffelt gegeven. / Van Mertin Heemskerck diet heeft gewracht. / Ter eeren sinte Lucae heeft hy bedreven. / Ons gemeen gesellen heeft hy mede bedacht. / Wij mogen hem dancken by dage by nacht. / Van zyn milde gifte die hier staet present. / Dus willen wy bidden mit al ons macht. / Dat goids gratie / hem wil zyn omtrent.” For the painting, see Filedt Kok et al., Kunst voor de beeldenstorm, pp. 191-192.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

Of course, most artists in the Republic, where aniconic Calvinism was the state religion, no longer publicized their solidarity with the community by donating gifts of altarpieces to churches. A few Catholic artists who painted altarpieces for the clandestine churches with which they were affiliated seem not to have been motivated by financial gain alone.163 But Van Heemskerck’s gift finds a civic and professional parallel in the decorations of the headquarters of local guilds of St. Luke. In 1637, Hendrick Pot, Pieter de Molijn, Philips Wouwerman, Adriaen van Ostade, Allaert van Everdingen, and Salomon van Ruysdael, among others, donated paintings to decorate the Haarlem guild’s new assembly room. The still life painter Floris van Dijck also gifted a bust of Michelangelo, which he had brought from Italy.164 Leonaert Bramer and Cornelis de Man contributed to the new headquarters of the Delft Guild of St. Luke in 1661. According to a fragmentary document, the painters undertook the project not for payment, but “out of love and in honor of the guild.” Bramer provided a ceiling painting and De Man a canvas mural depicting a triumphal arch, both of which are lost.165 Insight into the sentiments that underwrote Dutch artists’ incorporation of gift giving into their dealings with clients and familiars is provided by the painter and theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten, who had been Rembrandt’s pupil in the 1640s. Van Hoogstraten was familiar with both Dutch and wider European systems of gift giving, and described the intricate calculations required for successful gifting in Den eerlyken jongeling (Of the Honest Youth) of 1657, his Dutch translation of Nicolas Faret’s L’honneste-homme, a hugely influential treatise on gentlemanly self-fashioning first published in Paris in 1630. The success of Faret’s text, which defines the behavioral ideal of the honnête homme (honest man) as the successor to Castiglione’s ideal Renaissance courtier, likely derived from the appeal of the concept of honnêteté to the Dutch burgher class.166 Van Hoogstraten’s Dutch version of the French original elaborates on this bourgeois orientation by modifying Faret’s full title from L’honneste-homme, ou l’art de plaire à la court (The honest man, or the art of pleasing at court) to Den eerlyken jongeling, of de edele konst, van zich by groote en kleyne te doen eeren en beminnen (Of the honest youth; or, the noble art of making oneself honored and esteemed by one and all). Thus, while Faret addressed himself primarily to aspiring courtiers, Van Hoogstraten wrote for an audience of 163 The devout Catholic painters Nicolaes Moyaert, Nicolaas Roosendael, and Johannes Vorhout contributed altarpieces to Amsterdam’s Begijnhof church of SS. Mary and Ursula. See Van Eck, Clandestine Splendor, pp. 119-123. 164 Van der Willigen, Les artistes de Harlem, pp. 6-7. 165 Soutendam, “Eenige aantekeningen,” p. 452, quoted in Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, pp. 96-97, 190. For Bramer’s and De Man’s paintings for the guildhall, see Goldsmith et al., Leonaert Bramer, pp. 25-26. 166 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, p. 53. On Van Hoogstraten’s translation of Faret’s treatise, see further Weststeijn, The Visible World, p. 34.

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Dutch burghers desiring to improve their social and cultural status. Giving gifts, the text makes clear, was a critical tool to achieve their social aspirations. As Van Hoogstraten explains in his expanded translation, the art of gift giving, which involves careful selection of decorous items, is essential “in order to gain favor” and leave “a lasting impression.” Gifts have the capacity to enchant the recipient, he emphasizes, providing one chooses them judiciously and not merely for their monetary value: The manner of giving must be so pleasing that the gift never seems trifling, and that the rarity is of greater importance than the cost. In order to gain favor, one must carefully consider the nature of the gift so that what is given by us leaves a lasting impression on the mind of the recipient and meets our objective. For thus even the ungrateful will be forced to remember the gift, so that neither the gift nor its occasion may be forgotten. One must take special care not to honor someone with something that is of no use to him or that does not suit him, such as a mirror for an ugly woman, but to duly take into account the status and age, standing and wealth, sex and worth of the person on whom we want to bestow our humble gifts.167

Van Hoogstraten’s advice arose from personal experience of wisely selecting and distributing gifts of his art. In Vienna in 1651, he presented three paintings he had brought with him from Dordrecht to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, who reciprocated by rewarding the painter with a gold medal bearing the imperial portrait.168 Arnold Houbraken, who had been Van Hoogstraten’s pupil in Dordrecht, provides a detailed report of the episode in the early eighteenth-century biography of his former master. Houbraken relates that Van Hoogstraten “earned the esteem of the Emperor and the whole court” with his gifts of a portrait, a Christ Crowned with Thorns, and a still life painting. Ferdinand was particularly taken with the still life’s trompe l’oeil effects, declaring that “as a punishment for that deception […] [Van Hoogstraten] should not get the picture back, for […] he [Ferdinand] wishes to keep and cherish it forever.”169 After his return to the Netherlands, Van Hoogstraten turned the imperial medal into a kind of signature of his exalted reputation, incorporating it into trompe l’oeil letter-rack paintings (Fig. 62) together with other marks of distinction – including letters addressed to 167 Van Hoogstraten, Den eerlyken jongeling, pp. 52-55, quoted in Roscam Abbing, “Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Personal Letter-Rack Paintings,” pp. 121-122. See also Kok, “Zonder vrienden,” p. 306, and idem, Culturele ondernemers, p. 33. 168 Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, pp. 54-55. 169 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 2, pp. 157-158. See also Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, p. 54.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

62. Samuel van Hoogstraten, A Trompe l’Oeil of Objects Attached to a Letter Rack, 1664. Oil on canvas, 45.5 × 57.5 cm. Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht. Photo: Museum of Dordrecht / Bridgeman Images.

him or to high-ranking officials, his own writings (the manuscript of Den eerlyken jongeIing, in one case), elegant tortoise-shell combs, and cameos. Van Hoogstraten may have gifted these unusual paintings to specific patrons or potential clients who would have recognized their highly personal imagery, as only those familiar with the artist would have understood and appreciated the pictures’ self-referential allusions.170 But since gift giving and market transactions were not separate but interdependent circuits of exchange, Van Hoogstraten’s selective distribution of letter-rack paintings to collectors with whom he maintained personal relations ultimately would have helped him consolidate and enhance his reputation in the marketplace.171 Recipients of the paintings presumably would have displayed them in cabinets of art and curiosities, active sites of learned, connoisseurial discourse and eloquent sociability that would have stimulated lively conversations about the pictorial qualities and self-referential claims of Van Hoogstraten’s art. 170 Roscam Abbing, “Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Personal Letter-Rack Paintings,” esp. pp. 123-127. Roscam Abbing questions Brusati’s argument that Van Hoogstraten used the paintings to promote his reputation and thereby broaden and strengthen his customer base on the open market. See Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, p. 139. 171 Brusati, “Rembrandt’s Art as Gift: Response.”

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Van Hoogstraten’s promotion of and participation in the culture of gift giving was in no way contradictory to his embrace of the open, speculative art market. Elizabeth Honig, however, has recently argued that Van Hoogstraten was suspicious of social systems like gift giving in the creation of value, placing his trust instead in the market’s objective means of assigning value to artworks.172 She bases her claim on a passage in Van Hoogstraten’s 1678 art theoretical tome Inleyding tot de hooghe schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere welt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, the Visible World) in which he reproaches artists who overestimate the quality of their work with “seductive guile” and “rascally intrigues” in order to take advantage of ignorant buyers as well as “honorable and noble spirits.”173 “It is natural,” Van Hoogstraten concedes, “that many artists consider their own works the best; but people always give the prize to those things, which each master puts into second place in his own work; intelligent people ought to esteem as worthy, that which is done with the greatest diligence.”174 According to Honig, Van Hoogstraten here acknowledges the importance of the free flow of information, a fundamental requirement of a market economy, in determining the fair value of artworks. But rather than rejecting the social and symbolic economy of gift giving, his criticisms are directed at artists who abuse otherwise honorable means of assigning value and collectors who lack the knowledge or intelligence to discriminate between first- and second-rate work.175 While Van Hoogstraten may have seen the benefit of and favored free-flowing information, he also advocated traditional methods of securing a high valuation of one’s work, advising young artists to attract a prominent patron or admirer to endorse and broadcast their talents. The artist must, Van Hoogstraten writes, “ensure, that through zealous Maecenases [patrons or supporters] he gains the favor of Princes or Kings or gets the respect of successful merchant folk. For without the help of favorable supporters and advocates, who noisily promote him, it will be hard for him to become known.”176 Selecting a suitable gift, as Van Hoogstraten advises in Den eerlyken jongeling, was an effective means of nurturing the mutuality, honor, and obligation that would bind together an artist and his personal Maecenas. 172 Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 101. 173 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 312-313.Translation by Charles Ford, www.ucl.ac.uk/grondt/visibleworld/calliope (accessed 13 October 2016). 174 Ibid, p. 313. 175 Taylor, “Birth of the Amateur,” pp. 506-509, emphasizes that Van Hoogstraten criticized dishonest intermediaries – kunstkenners or kenners (art knowers) and dealers – for deceiving innocent liefhebbers and ignorant “name buyers” into purchasing inferior paintings. Painters, he asserts, are genuine experts whose judgments should be trusted. See Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, esp. pp. 197-198. 176 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 310.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

As has been amply demonstrated by studies of the impact of the Republic’s vibrant art market on artistic production and consumption, Dutch artists were generally skilled at accommodating market strategies to their practices. More than in other art centers of seventeenth-century Europe, the Dutch broadly understood and embraced the interpenetration of the realms of art and commerce. In his Lof der schilder-konst of 1642, the painter and writer Philips Angel even praised the profession of the artist as similar to that of a prosperous merchant, and therefore more economically viable than poetry, traditionally a more esteemed pursuit.177 Nonetheless some Dutch artists saw the increasing penetration of market forces on the art world as a threat. In 1656 the painter and poet Willem Schellinks, mentioned in the Introduction, sharply criticized what he perceived to be the market’s debasing effects on the value of art, asserting that “Art cannot be bought for any amount of money.”178 Schellinks’s view may have been extreme in the Dutch context, but he was obviously not alone in his conviction that art possessed transcendent value. The celebrated Haarlem printmaker and painter Hendrick Goltzius, according to Karel van Mander’s Het schilder-boeck of 1604, expressed a similar sentiment when discussing payment for two commissioned portrait prints in 1583. In response to the protestations of an Amsterdam merchant “who had more money than sense,” Goltzius proclaimed: “Your trade is not to be compared with our art. I can become a merchant with money, but you cannot, with all your money, become an artist.”179 And Goltzius’s personal motto, “Honor above Gold” (Fig. 63), Van Mander reports, was borne out by his striving “not so much for money as for honor.”180 Honig is surely right to point out the struggles of Van Hoogstraten and other early modern writers on art to reconcile the growing importance of market valuations on aesthetic worth and the social status of the artist’s profession. Equally justifiable is Honig’s claim that the “honor system,” as she calls gift giving, “remained in artistic discourse as an ideal site where the value of the artist, rather than the value

177 Angel, Lof der schilder-konst, pp. 28-30. On Angel’s adaptation (and inversion) of Jacob Cats’s conventional argument in ‘t Werelts begin, midden, eynde (1637), that poets are superior to painters because they do not sell their works, see Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 213-216. 178 Schellinks, “Op de schilder-konst,” p. 353, quoted in Schwartz (acknowledging Jan de Hond), “Terms of Reception,” p. 55; DaCosta Kaufmann and North, “Introduction,” p. 19; and Gommans, Unseen World, pp. 218-219. On Mughal paintings in seventeenth-century Europe and Schellinks’s paintings of Mughal subjects, see Subrahmanyam, “A Roomful of Mirrors,” pp. 60-68; Gommans, Unseen World, pp. 215-223; and Schrader, ed., Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India, p. 14. 179 Van Mander, Lives, fol. 286v: “V Coopmanschap heeft doch geen gelijcknis met onse Const. Ick can met gelt wel een Coopman worden: maer ghy moeght met al u ghelt geen Constenaer worden.” 180 Ibid, fol. 268r: “seggende voor avijs, Eer boven Golt, en bewijst oock daedlijck genoech, niet soo gheltsuchtigh als eerliefdigh te wesen.”

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63. Hendrick Goltzius, The Artist’s Emblem: Eer boven Gold (‘Honor above Gold’), ca. 1607, drawing from the album amicorum of Ernst Brinck van Harderwijk, fol. 256r. Pen and brown ink, 15 × 10 cm. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

of the commodity, could be preserved.”181 Despite the Republic’s reputation as a proto-capitalist culture, though, the gift economy functioned as a vital, non-market, and dynamic mode of interpersonal exchange in Dutch burgher society, including among artists, as the following cases demonstrate. While documentary or compelling circumstantial evidence of artists gifting their works is not extensive, some examples are highly revealing. Each provides insight into the operations of gift giving in the complex, differentiated, and competitive market for art in the Dutch Republic. The most illuminating record of a Dutch artist’s gift of his work to enhance a relationship with a patron, apart from Rembrandt’s better-known gifts, is Jan Lievens’s presentation of a painting to the regent Joan Huydecoper van Maarsseveen II in about 1660.182 The transaction is recorded in Huydecoper’s diary, a rich archive tantamount to a ledger of the continuous flow of gifts of all sorts that patricians like Huydecoper both received and dispensed. In late 1658 or early 1659 Huydecoper commissioned Lievens to paint a large group portrait, which unfortunately has disappeared without trace. The portrait represented Huydecoper’s in-laws, the wealthy Coymans and Trip families, with the matriarch Sophia Trip, his motherin-law, as the focal point. About three years later Lievens gave Huydecoper a gift of a painting of The Entombment (“an image of Christ in the grave”), which was intended to commemorate and deepen the unusually close personal relationship that had evolved between the two men since the portrait had been commissioned. The picture is untraceable, though perhaps it bore a resemblance to Lievens’s Lamentation in Bamberg (Fig. 64). The social bond between artist and patron had been forged during regular visits by the Huydecopers and other family members to Lievens’s studio for sittings and viewings, where the painter and his patrons enjoyed a glass of wine. They also gathered for drinks or meals either at Huydecoper’s home or at the Keizerskroon Inn on the Kalverstraet (where shortly before Rembrandt’s art collection had been auctioned to pay off his debts). On one occasion, Lievens was accompanied by his wife for a meal at Huydecoper’s residence.183 This regular socializing struck the art historian Jaap van der Veen as “curious,” given that they were in the process of negotiating Lievens’s initial, startlingly high asking price of 2500 guilders for the portrait. Huydecoper enlisted a Haarlem dealer to prevail upon Lievens to lower his fee, ultimately paying the substantially reduced but nonetheless still very impressive price of 1600 guilders. 181 Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” p. 104. 182 Huydecoper mentions the gift in a letter to “de heer Sandra,” dated 16 September 1660, quoted in Van der Veen, “Patronage for Lievens’ Portraits and History Pieces,” p. 31. 183 Van der Veen, “Patronage for Lievens’ Portraits and History Pieces,” pp. 30-31, citing entries in Huydecoper’s diary. The painter Jacob van Loo was also a guest at Huydecoper’s house on at least two occasions in early 1660. See Noorman, Art, Honor, and Success in the Dutch Republic, p. 94.

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64. Jan Lievens, Lamentation of Christ, ca. 1640. Oil on canvas. 144.5 × 217.5 cm. Staatsgalerie in Neue Residenz, Bamberg. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatsgalerie in Neue Residenz, Bamberg / Art Resource, ny.

Personalized exchanges like these, capped by Lievens’s gift of a painting, however, def ined a certain type of artist–patron relationship among cultural elites of the period and confound expectations based on a purely transactional or instrumental perspective. In offering the gift, Lievens was trying to cultivate a social tie with Huydecoper that obviated the hierarchy and dependency of conventional patronage relations and the alienation typical of business transactions. His goal instead was to build a relationship animated by obligations of mutuality and honor. Based on the gift’s economy of reciprocity, Lievens could expect to receive a payment reflective of Huydecoper’s high status as a munificent patrician, not one calculated on economic factors alone, as well as the prospect of future commissions. Lievens, in turn, would be expected to honor Huydecoper and his extended family, bolstering their reputations as distinguished members of the Republic’s urban and political elite. Nonetheless, Lievens’s effort to enhance their bonds of mutuality and service was not successful. Huydecoper accepted the gift, but he refused to surrender to the obligations it engendered, quickly disposing of the painting because, as he wrote in his diary, he did not want to “have any obligation.”184 Huydecoper transferred the painting to the art dealer

184 Van der Veen, “Patronage for Lievens’ Portraits and History Pieces,” p. 31.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

Gerrit Uylenburgh, whose 1675 bankruptcy inventory of his stock includes a Lievens Entombment.185 Huydecoper was willing to invest his time, hospitality, and courtesy to foster both a professional and social bond with Lievens, even if he was ultimately unwilling to accept the burden of being unduly obliged to the artist. Lievens socialized regularly with Huydecoper and his family, and presented a gift demonstrating his talents as a history painter in a bid to forge an enduring personal bond of clientage and mutual service. However surprising by our standards, their association was typical at the upper echelon of the Dutch art world. Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, both pupils of Rembrandt in the 1630s who went on to enjoy highly successful careers as portraitists and history painters, established their professional and social positions in the network of Amsterdam’s elite patrons through the exchange of gifts, among other favors and services.186 By participating in this economy of reciprocity, as Erna Kok demonstrated, Flinck and Bol cultivated the ties that ensured important patronage and social advancement, effectively pursuing an alternative approach within the market system. This would explain why relatively few Flinck and Bol paintings are recorded in the stock of art dealers.187 So successful were Flinck and Bol in building profitable and socially advantageous careers among Amsterdam’s maagschappen (networks of powerful families who were closely related to each other) that eventually they themselves became members of the city’s social and commercial elite. Flinck, who came from an affluent family in Cleves, was able to exploit his connections with wealthy relatives when he arrived in Amsterdam in 1633, giving him an advantage in cultivating personal relationships with Huydecoper and other regents, including the brothers Cornelis and Andries de Graeff, Pieter and Jan Six, and the treasurer Johannes (Jan) Uytenbogaert. According to Houbraken, Flinck and these distinguished members of the citizen elite regularly received each other in their homes, where the subject of art was the focus of gentlemanly conversation.188 Flinck’s esteem within the highest echelons of Amsterdam society led the magistrates to award him the city’s most prestigious and lucrative commissions, culminating in the assignment to produce a series of twelve colossal paintings depicting the Batavian Revolt for the new town hall in 1659, though Flinck died in 1660 before completing it. Flinck would have been keenly aware that the bestowal of gifts was expected to nurture his bonds with these social, cultural, and political elites, though only one of his gifts is recorded. In his biography of the artist, Houbraken includes a 1659 letter from the magistrates of Cleves, Flinck’s birthplace, 185 Ibid, p. 38, n. 9. 186 Kok, “Zonder vrienden”; idem, Culturele ondernemers, pp. 43-78, 143-145; and idem, “Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and their Networks.” 187 Sluijter, “On Diverging Styles,” pp. 26-27. 188 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 2, pp. 22-23.

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65. Govert Flinck, Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom, ca. 1655. Oil on canvas, 113.9 × 101.8 cm. Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina.

where he continued to maintain close ties with the local elites. The letter was thanking Flinck for his gift of Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom (Fig. 65), probably the replica of his massive Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom, commissioned for the council chamber of Amsterdam’s town hall, now in the Bob Jones University Collection.189 Houbraken 189 Ibid, p. 24. See also Kok, “Zonder vrienden,” p. 332; idem, Culturele ondernemers, pp. 76-77; and idem, “Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and their Networks,” p. 68. For the painting, see Blankert et al., Gods, Saints, and Heroes, cat. no. 37.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

also reports that Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Cleves, was so delighted by Flinck’s likeness of him that he honored the painter with a miniature portrait of himself encircled by diamonds.190 Bol did not have Flinck’s advantage of birth, but through his marriage in 1653 to Elizabeth Dell, whose influential family held offices in the Amsterdam Admiralty and magistracy, he consolidated his position as leading painter for a network of patrons affiliated with the Dell-Spiegel regent clan. Through these connections, Bol secured lucrative commissions for history paintings for the Admiralty buildings, a series of portraits of the naval hero Michiel de Ruyter for all council chambers, and ultimately two monumental canvases depicting Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp (Fig. 36) and Moses and the Tablets of the Law for Amsterdam’s town hall.191 While no surviving documents confirm Bol’s use of his art as gifts, he likely gifted portraits of family members of this prestigious network of clients, and probably presented a painting to the authorities of Amsterdam’s Zuiderkerk in 1669 in recognition of his deepening ties with the clan. The canvas, recently identif ied convincingly as the unusual subject Persian King Cyrus Returns the Treasures Looted from the Temple (Fig. 66), is one of the last paintings Bol made after his second marriage in 1669 to Anna van Erckel, wealthy widow of the treasurer of the Admiralty and thus of the Dell-Spiegel clan.192 After this marriage he retired from professional activity to pursue an upper-class lifestyle in a grand residence on the Keizersgracht. The painting, which hung in the churchwardens’ meeting room, was likely Bol’s gift in honor of his father-in-law Elbert Dell, who had been master of the Zuiderkerk and served as guardian of the surviving children of Bol’s first marriage (Dell’s son also acted as witness to Bol’s second marriage in the same year).193 The rarely depicted subject of the Persian king’s generosity in returning the looted treasures served as an example for the churchwardens, 190 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 2, p. 22. See also Kok, Culturele ondernemers, p. 73. 191 Blankert, Ferdinand Bol, p. 50; Ekkart, “Ferdinand Bol and the Patronage of the Spiegel Family”; Kok, “Zonder vrienden,” pp. 320-326; idem, Culturele ondernemers, pp. 62-64; and idem, “Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol and their Networks,” pp. 70-79. 192 Albert Blankert (Ferdinand Bol, cat. no. 12) identif ied the subject as Solomon Bringing Gifts to the Temple, but Van Eikema Hommes (Art and Allegiance in the Dutch Golden Age, pp. 121-129) convincingly links it with the story of the Persian king Cyrus, who returned the treasures looted from the Temple. As she notes, Bol shows the treasures being taken away by the Israelites to rebuild the Temple, not being brought to it. The composition is a mirror image in smaller format of Bol’s somewhat earlier canvas of the same subject (Rijksmuseum, on loan to the Peace Palace, The Hague). The subject was also depicted by Pieter Lastman in a stained-glass window in the Zuiderkerk, which had been donated by the gold- and silversmiths’ guild in 1611. 193 Blankert, Ferdinand Bol, p. 50, and idem, “Art and Authority,” pp. 83-84. Although Blankert thought Elbert Dell was still churchwarden in 1669, he had in fact died two years earlier. See Van Eikema Hommes, Art and Allegiance in the Dutch Golden Age, p. 247, n. 74.

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66. Ferdinand Bol, The Persian King Cyrus Returns the Treasure Looted from the Temple, 1669. Oil on canvas, 157 × 171 cm. Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam / on loan from the Protestantse Kerk, Amsterdam. Photo: Amsterdam Museum, Amsterdam.

who were tasked with overseeing and raising funds for the maintenance and contents of their own temple, the Zuiderkerk.194 With the gift of the painting, Bol also may have alluded to his own act of conformity to this biblical model of giving generously for the embellishment of the house of God. Serious art lovers or liefhebbers also received gifts directly from the artists with whom they were on close personal terms. One such collector was Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst of Utrecht (Fig. 67), whose detailed 1651 inventory of his collection of almost 200 paintings (in addition to works on paper), which he

194 Van Eikema Hommes, Art and Allegiance in the Dutch Golden Age, p. 129.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

67. Bartholomeus van der Helst, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Jan Both, and Jacob Duck, Portrait of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst, 1644. Oil on panel, 46 × 35 cm. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / on loan from a private collection. Photo: LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif.

continued to update until 1659, records several works of art gifted to him by artists.195 In 1649 Cornelis van Poelenburch presented Van Wyttenhorst with a portrait of his 195 For Van Wyttenhorst’s collection and inventor y, see in particular Boers-Gossens, “De schilderijenverzameling.”

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68. Cornelis van Poelenburch, Portrait of Jan Both, 1648. Oil on copper, 16.5 × 13.5 cm. LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / on loan from a private collection. Photo: LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif.

deceased cousin, Jan van Assendelft.196 Van Wyttenhorst owned 57 paintings by Van Poelenburch, including a portrait of fellow Utrecht Italianate painter Jan Both (Fig. 68), which he received from Both as a gift in 1648, though Van Wyttenhorst 196 Boers-Gossens, “De schilderijenverzameling,” p. 194, no. 115, and Sluijter-Seijffert, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Appendix III, p. 228, fol. 10, no. 115.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

recorded that he gave 42 guilders to Both’s descendants.197 The artist Herman Saftleven also gave Van Wyttenhorst a landscape painting by Hercules Segers, and in 1639 the painter Herman van Swanevelt presented him with a print of Judith with Holofernes by Simon Severin.198 The pains that Van Wyttenhorst took to record these gifts from artists demonstrate the impact and importance of their efforts to cultivate a bond with him.

Dutch Artists’ Gifts to Court and Government Officials at Home and Abroad While Dutch artists presumably gave gifts primarily to members of the Dutch social and cultural elite in order to promote their careers, some presented their work to foreign princes and dignitaries, as we have seen was the case with Van Hoogstraten and Flinck. Among these artists was the Utrecht painter Gerrit van Honthorst, who enjoyed the patronage of the stadholder’s court as well as Dutch and foreign aristocrats residing in The Hague. As we saw in the previous chapter, his paintings were traded as gifts between leading aristocrats and off icials of the Caroline court to secure and sustain political patronage. Van Honthorst’s portraits of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms, and Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart (the “Winter King and Queen” of Bohemia) and their children also regularly circulated as gifts within these interrelated families.199 Van Honthorst himself propelled his career with strategic donations of his work. In a 1630 letter to Edward Nicholas, secretary of council to the English crown whom he had met in London in 1628, Van Honthorst offered “a night peece” (doubtless one of his candlelight paintings) in exchange for Nicholas’s willingness to put in a good word for him with Charles I. Van Honthorst hoped that Nicholas would convey to the King the “extraordinairie charges I have had in the making off this peece,” the massive allegorical portrait Charles I and Henrietta Maria as Apollo and Diana, which he entrusted his brother to deliver to the court:

197 Boers-Gossens, “De schilderijenverzameling,” p. 216, no. 35, and Sluijter-Seijffert, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Appendix III, p. 228, fol. 10, no. 35. 198 Boers-Gossens, “De schilderijenverzameling,” p. 221, no. 88, and p. 225, no. 83. Segers’s painting originally came from the collection of the art dealer Herman Saftleven, father of the artist of the same name. For the painting and whether it corresponds to a picture in the Westfälisches Landesmuseum Münster, see Van der Veen, “Hercules Segers,” p. 3. 199 See Judson and Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, pp. 28-32.

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Honble Sir, I doe yet remember the courtesie and honnor I receaved att your hands att my being in England, I should be verry ingratefull iff I should not always be ready to acknowledge the same, yet presuming further upon your courtesie than I ever have given you occasion to expect from me I make bould to adresse my self unto you upon the confidence I have of your good inclination towards a frend and stranger, my humble shute is that you would be pleased to aide and assist the bearer hereof my brother (whom I have sent with the great picter to his Matie) that he may have a short expedition for that wch his Matie shall be pleased to gratifie me withall, and by the way you may please to take into y r consideration the long tyme and extraordinarie charges I have had in the making off this peece, for I have attended manny voyages att the Haghe for to take the pictures off the king, queen and princes and now againe at the charge of sending my brother there, which is likewise noe small charge to me which I beseech you in occasion that may present to take into consideration, and recommend it when you see it fitting, for my part I will not shew my self ingratefull for y r courtesie but acknowledge y r kindnesse with a night peece off picture as you shall see in dew tyme. Wherewith ending, intreat you to remember my most humble dutye to his Mtie if occasion doth serve, and to you my service. I remayne always your most humble servant.200

Van Honthorst was nimble at deploying the courtly rhetoric of courtesy and honorable service, and cognizant that gifts of his work could help him navigate the intricacies of court society. Later that year Van Honthorst shared with Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador at The Hague who we have already encountered, that he had informed Nicholas “that if he should pay my demand he would not find me ungrateful in gratifying him by my art, hoping that it would have a beneficial result.”201 It is not known whether Nicholas acceded to Van Honthorst’s request and received a gift of one of the artist’s paintings, but according to Joachim von Sandrart, a pupil who had accompanied Van Honthorst to London, Charles rewarded the painter extravagantly with 3000 guilders, silver service for twelve, a horse, and other gifts.202 Artists also presented their works directly to members of the stadholder’s court. Constantijn Huygens was secretary to three successive stadholders and, 200 Van Honthorst to Edward Nicholas, 22 May 1630, in Carpenter, Mémoires, pp. 233-234, quoted in Brantl “Agency Studies,” pp. 256-257. 201 Van Honthorst to Dudley Carleton, 6 September 1630, in Carpenter, Mémoires, pp. 235-236, translated in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 257. 202 Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, II Book 3, pp. 303-304, and Millar, “Charles I, Honthorst, and Van Dyck,” p. 36.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

as head of the secretariat, the intermediary through which access to the Prince of Orange could be attained. In this capacity he received letters from artists, authors, and others in addition to gifts in various forms seeking his help in securing commissions or favors from the stadholder.203 The humanists P. C. Hooft and Caspar Barlaeus requested gifts of money or honors in return for dedicating their publications to the stadholder. Huygens was also responsible for sending counter-gifts from the Prince and other members of the House of Orange to the Antwerp Jesuit painter Daniël Seghers in exchange for his flower paintings (such as Fig. 14), which, as noted in the previous chapter, were presented in the form of gifts by Seghers’s monastic order. Huygens composed artful poems praising Seghers’s artistry as accompaniments to the gifted painting. In 1652 he shipped Amalia van Solm’s gold maulstick (Fig. 15), which originally bore a skull, with the following verses: What has politeness come to! For trouble masterfully taken, For art that knows no equal A stick appears a present […] Look, death sits upon the stick; And she glitters with a golden dress, […] Tis Seghers’ death’s head indeed, So it will be, soon or late; […] The flowers to which he gave life […] They will give him life, And make him survive his dying day, And the sunshine of his works Will be midday in the evening.204

In gratitude for his service and the poem, Huygens personally received from Seghers an untraceable canvas, which the painter described as “a cartelle for my Lord of 203 For Huygens’s position as secretary and his instrumental role in expanding Frederik Hendrik’s art collection, see Groenveld, “Frederick Henry and his Entourage,” pp. 31-32, and Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren, “The Stadholder’s Art Collection,” pp. 59-60. On Huygens’s interactions with artists and his role as patron and collector, see Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst. 204 Worp, De gedichten, vol. 5, p. 25, quoted in Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons, cat. no. 35. For Huygens’s relationship with Seghers, see Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, pp. 44-51.

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Zuilichem Secretary to the Prince of Orange whose portrait appeared in white and black.”205 As is well known, Rembrandt would send Huygens gifts of art while fulfilling the Passion cycle commission for Frederik Hendrik, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Other Dutch artists also sought to rally Huygens’s support by giving him presents of their work. In 1638 the Haarlem painter and printmaker Pieter Soutman sent Huygens impressions of his portrait prints, requesting in an accompanying letter “please be kind enough to accept them as a humble present.”206 Intermingling gifts with sales, Soutman was asking Huygens for advice on how to price prints that he planned to sell to the stadholder, and for portraits of the Princes and Princess so that he could “publish them in an artfully engraved way, because – as long as God gives me health – I still intend to bring out things of beauty.”207 Abraham de Verwer also wrote to Huygens in 1640 to thank him for his role in securing the stadholder’s patronage, promising to make him a gift of “various pretty things” (verscheyden fraije dingen) in return for commissions of paintings and teaching the young Prince Willem II how to draw and paint.208 Luminaries of the Dutch Republic also appealed to Huygens to recompense artists who sought to enter into a gifting relationship with the stadholder. In 1634 Caspar Barlaeus wrote to Huygens on behalf of the Leiden printmaker Jan van Vliet, asking that the artist receive “some little reward or honorarium” for publishing a large engraved equestrian portrait of the Prince, adding that “You know what rewards are due to such merits.”209 Barlaeus, who had provided the print with a poetic inscription “in order to make the goods more saleable,” also explains his personal motivation for approaching Huygens about the matter: “I should like to add something beyond what is usual and the custom of your court. In my youth I lived at Leiden with his parents for two years, which has imposed on me the need both to embellish this work with a poem, and to commend to you in the strongest terms both the author and the work.” In one instance, an artist with 205 Quoted in Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons, cat. no. 27, n. 7. For the document, see Couvreur, “Daniël Seghers’ inventaris,” no. 91: “Een cartelle voor mijn heer van Zuijlicsem Secretaris van den Prins van Orangie daer sijn conterfeytsel in was van wit en swart.” 206 Soutman to Huygens, 30 January 1638, printed and translated in Barrett, “Letters from Pieter Soutman to Constantijn Huygens,” p. 160: “sult die ghelieven voor een oodtmoedich present te aenveerden.” 207 Ibid: “die na die const int licht te brengen, want godt ghesontheyt geeft, verhoope noch wat vrayes int licht te brengen.” 208 See Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 3, no. 2296, cited in Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, p. 36. 209 Barlaeus to Huygens, 18 April 1634, in Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 1, no. 899. My thanks to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for translating the Latin, and to Joshua Rifkin for his assistance. The letter is mentioned in De Heer, “Jan Gillisz van Vliet,” p. 6.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

whom Huygens was well acquainted facilitated a gift exchange not in gratitude for assistance in securing a commission or in recognition of a dedication, but to help another artist secure a privilege from the court. Jan van Brosterhuysen – who was an amateur artist as well as botanist, poet, musician, and aristocrat – had known Huygens since their student days in Leiden and in 1632 wrote that Jacob van Campen, architect and painter, would be offering a present, “praying affectionately that you will receive it favorably.”210 Van Campen had requested that Huygens mediate with the stadholder to grant him hunting privileges at his rural estate of Randenbroek. Van Brosterhuysen noted that although Van Campen was not from the aristocracy, he nonetheless “was a good architect and good painter.” In a later letter to Hygens from 1645, Van Brosterhuysen enclosed gifts of own landscape etchings.211 It was not only officials of the stadholder’s court who received presents from artists. Artists also presented their works to members of the States General, and these gifts together with the official counter-gifts are recorded in the Resolutien of the States General. In 1607, Jacques de Gheyn – engraver, painter, and draftsman in The Hague – for instance, dedicated and presented to the heren of the States General his illustrated manual of arms, Wapenhandelinghe van roers musquetten ende spiessen (The Exercise of Arms) (Fig. 69), for which he was awarded 200 guilders in thanks.212 In 1608 the heren received from the Delft portraitist Michiel van Mierevelt a painting of Prince Maurits (Fig. 70), awarding him in return a “tribute” (verering) of 200 guilders that was subsequently raised to 300 guilders.213 The same year the Amsterdam engraver Jan Muller was given 100 guilders for “honoring” (vereerd) the heren with the printing plate of a portrait of Maurits, purportedly made from a life drawing by Van Mierevelt (Fig. 71).214 Van Mierevelt also received 135 guilders, 10 stuivers in 1611 for his presentation of impressions on satin and paper of portrait 210 Van Campen to Huygens, 9 December 1632, in Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 1 no. 739, quoted in Bok, “Familie, vrienden, en opdrachtgevers,” p. 41. For Brosterhuysen, see Chapter 4, pp. 307, 320-321. 211 Van Brosterhuysen to Huygens, 1 November 1645, in Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 4, no. 4186, cited in Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, p. 191, n. 2. 212 See Dodt van Flensburg, “Resolutien,” vol. 5, p. 6. 213 Dodt van Flensburg, “Resolutien,” vol. 5, p. 7, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 252, n. 44. Van Mierevelt’s gift portrait of Maurits, which until recently was identified as the portrait in the Rijksmuseum, is in the collection of the Eerste Kamer or Senate of the Netherlands. It is an early version of Van Mierevelt’s more than 20 surviving portraits of the stadholder, which helped him secure his reputation as Maurits’s portraitist. See Jansen, “Portretten van Prins Maurits,” esp. pp. 111-112. 214 Dodt van Flensburg, “Resolutien,” vol. 5, p. 8, quoted in Brantl, “Agency Studies,” p. 252, n. 44, and Jansen, “Portretten van Prins Maurits,” p. 111. Earlier in 1607 the States General awarded Van Mierevelt a six-year patent on reproductions of a print of the Prince, which Muller engraved. See Jansen, “Portretten van Prins Maurits,” p. 111.

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69. Jacques de Gheyn, A Soldier Shaping the Match between his Thumb and Forefinger, from the Marksmen series, Plate 41 in Wapenhandelinghe van roers musquetten ende spiessen (The Exercise of Arms), 1607. Engraving, 25.5 × 18.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

70. Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange, ca. 1613-1620. Oil on panel, 220.3 × 143.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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71. Jan Harmensz Muller after Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange, 1608. Engraving, 41.1 × 29.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

72. Jacob Matham after Michiel van Mierevelt, Portrait of Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange-Nassau, 1610. Engraving, 4.1 × 28.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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73. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, View of Delft from the Northwest, ca. 1615. Oil on canvas, 71 × 162 cm. Collection Prinsenhof Delft. Photo: Tom Haartsen.

74. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, View of Delft from the Southwest, 1615. Oil on canvas, 71 × 160 cm. Collection Prinsenhof Delft. Photo: Tom Haartsen.

prints of the Princes Maurits and Frederik Hendrik (Fig. 72) engraved by Jacob Matham after Van Mierevelt’s designs.215 Some artists gifted their work to municipal authorities. In 1634 Hendrick Vroom, pioneer of marine and cityscape painting, “honored” the burgomasters with a large portrait of Delft, which they “accepted with thanks and presented Mr.

215 Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, p. 374, no. 505, quoted in Jansen, “Atelier en atelierpraktijken,” p. 57.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

Vroom, as an expression of their gratitude, 150 guilders.”216 The Delft magistrates stipulated that this was not merely a cash payment but a token of their appreciation, “in consideration of the facts that his mother was buried in the Oude Kerk and that Mr. Vroom in his youth learned his art here, and that he has always borne great affection for this city.” The painting was probably Vroom’s View of Delft from the Northwest (Fig. 73), which shares a long provenance in Delft’s municipal collection together with its pendant, View of Delft from the Southwest, dated 1615 (Fig. 74). Since View from the Northwest, which bears no date, is comparable stylistically to View from the Southwest, it seems the burgomasters purchased the latter painting around 1615 and were presented with its unsold pendant by Vroom years later. 217 The Delft authorities carefully recorded the affective and personal motivations underlying their decision to reward Vroom for his gift. Yet, writing from the economic perspective that he innovated, John Michael Montias interpreted their statement as a rhetorical masking of a payment price: “This was surely as elegant and courteous a formula for a sales transaction as anyone could devise.”218 The underlying motivations of virtually any gift exchange can be laid bare by adopting a reductively instrumental economic approach. But doing so depreciates the complex social dynamics triggered by the offer and acceptance of a gift.

Dutch Artists’ Friendship Gifts Dutch artists also used gifts of their work to foster and deepen personal, horizontal social bonds, and the most common type of artistic gift exchanged within personal networks of affiliation probably would have been relatively informal works, especially drawings. In offering these to familiars, Dutch artists behaved similarly to poets and authors of the period who frequently penned epigrams and short verses as gifts. A relatively large number of gift drawings are preserved in the alba amicorum, or friendship albums, assembled by the educated and cultural elite. Only a few other

216 Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, vol. 2, pp. 670-671, quoted in Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, p. 188. Michiel C. Plomp in Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, cat. no. 90, questions whether this was an outright gift or “some kind of package deal” related to Vroom’s involvement in a sordid family affair during the early 1630s. Gifts and interests, however, are always closely intertwined. 217 See Luijten et al., Dawn of the Golden Age, cat. nos. 200, 201; Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, cat. no. 90; and Van Suchtelen and Wheelock Jr. et al., Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age, no. 49. While View of Delft from the Northwest has sometimes been dated to the 1630s to align with Vroom’s gift of 1634, the painting’s style suggests a date closer to 1615. 218 Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, p. 188.

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75. Gerrit Pietersz, Mercury, ca. 1591-1593. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 24.3 × 19.5 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Buitenhof.

drawings are known to have originated as tokens of appreciation or regard, identifiable by inscriptions referring to the circumstances of their production and exchange. Gerrit Pietersz sent the elegant Mercury from ca. 1591-1593 (Fig. 75), his earliest known sketch, from Amsterdam as a gift to the Utrecht silversmith Adam van Vianen. Pietersz folded the sheet horizontally, wrote Van Vianan’s address on the back, and inscribed at the upper right (the inscription at the lower right is by a later hand) his hope that Mercury,

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

76. Hendrick Goltzius, Letter with a Bust of a Man, 1605. Pen and brown ink, 7.4 × 6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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eloquent messenger of the gods and patron of artists, will bring his friend good fortune by steering him in de engelen banck, or where the angels dwell.219 The spontaneous sketch may have been a congratulatory gift to the younger Van Vianen on the occasion of his establishment as an independent master in 1591. Whatever the circumstances, the liveliness of Pietersz’s pen and brushstrokes and artfully dynamic pose of Mercury, based on the Mannerist figural style of his master Cornelis van Haarlem, suggest Pietersz’s hope that the divine messenger’s vigor would help propel his friend’s career. Other rare survivors of the type of sketch artists would have produced spontaneously as tokens of familiarity for social and business contacts as well as intimates are two letters with pen and ink drawings of a man’s head Goltzius sent in 1605 to the Amsterdam goldsmith and dealer in art and exotic goods Jan (Hans) van Wely (Fig. 76). Goltzius must have considered his drawings signif icant, as he signed and placed his monogram prominently next to the busts of a young man and an older man with a flowing beard. Demonstrations of Goltzius’s virtuoso penmanship, they accompany his declarations to Van Wely that he is working “with passion” on a penwork, most likely the monumental canvas Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus (Without Ceres and Bacchus and Venus Would Freeze) in the Hermitage, and consciously ignoring his detractors. As Goltzius writes, “None of these gossips understands what I am doing anyway, nor are they worthy to understand it.”220 The preservation of Pietersz’s and Goltzius’s gift drawings is a fortunate exception; extant drawings that artists contributed to alba amicorum are more numerous and testify to the ubiquity of spontaneous gifts of both professional and amateur drawing within cultured circles of Dutch society.221 Alba amicorum, which originated in German academic circles and became widely popular in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are generally small, portable volumes of signatures, mottos, poems, coats of arms, and images the owner collected from friends, acquaintances, contacts, and famous individuals. In Anthony Grafton’s words, they functioned for their owners as “deposits in a bank of social and cultural capital,” which constituted, according to Bronwen Wilson, “forms of social media that connected individuals to a network, sometimes of 219 See in particular Luijten et al., Dawn of the Golden Age, cat. no. 37, and Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style,” p. 490. 220 See Nichols, “Hendrick Goltzius” (22 May 1605); Schapelhouman, “De mensen begrijpen mij niet”; and Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, cat. no. 91. For Van Wely’s sales of porcelain, shells, and bird of paradise specimens, see Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 85-86, 204, 206-207. Van Wely was also known for his shocking murder in the stadholder’s quarters in 1616. 221 On alba amicorum, see Thomassen, ed., Alba amicorum; Wilson, “Social Networking”; De Schepper et al., In vriendschap verbonden; Georgievska-Shine, “Album Amicorum and the Kaleidoscope of the Self”; Woodall, “For Love and Money”; and Bass, Insect Artifice, pp. 82-108.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

strangers, and that network consisted not only of those already inscribed, but also future friends and readers.”222 Material embodiments of Dutch burgher investment in cultivating friendship and mutuality, friendship albums are also repositories of the personalized offerings, including works of art, that regularly mediated interpersonal relations. Rembrandt made drawings for three alba amicorum over the course of his career, which will be discussed in the following chapter. The last friendship album to which Rembrandt contributed a sketch – the famous album of Jacob Heyblocq, rector of Amsterdam’s Latin School – contains 40 drawings by other artists, such as Flinck, Jan de Bray, and Aert van der Neer, in addition to inscriptions by notable scholars, men of letters, and poets.223 Jan de Bray’s 1661 pen sketch of himself seated before a chessboard (Fig. 77), looking out to the beholder as if interacting with an absent partner, is accompanied by the lines: “What use a single man, he can’t play chess alone, so I find no friend alas, my game, begone.”224 In 1624 David Bailly drew a vanitas still life in pen and ink (Fig. 78) for the album of the diplomat Cornelis de Glarges; his inclusion of the adage quis evadet (Who escapes?) on a rolled-up sheet of paper among the assembled objects alludes to transience, and thus to the album’s purpose of preserving for posterity the owner and his network of contacts and familiars.225 A unique album in the Abrams collection at the Harvard Art Museums, dateable to about 1635-1641, consists exclusively of 41 full-page drawings on vellum by 27 Dutch painters, all but five of which are signed. The artists, eighteen of whom resided in The Hague or Delft, include Jan van Goyen, Simon de Vlieger, Adriaen van Ostade, Anthonie Palamhdesz, Cornelis Saftleven, Christiaen van Couwenbergh, Willem van Aelst, and Emanuel de Witte, whose chalk drawing of a snake-haired Medusa (Fig. 79) is the only known drawing by this painter of church interiors. The album probably belonged to Pieter Spiering van Silvercroon, Dutch representative of the Swedish crown, art collector, and patron of Gerrit Dou.226 A glimpse of the steady circulation of drawings among other artistic and cultural items as gifts within certain social groupings in seventeenth-century Holland is provided by the diary of The Hague schoolmaster David Beck, who was an amateur artist, poet, and devotee of the arts. Dating from 1624, the diary records frequent exchanges of poetry, books, and drawings within Beck’s social network, which included friends like Herman Breckerfelt, a glass engraver, with whom he spent evenings discussing Van Mander’s Het schilder-boeck and 222 Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, p. 18, quoted in Wilson, “Social Networking,” p. 206. 223 On the album, see Wybe de Kruyter, “Jacobus Heyblocq’s Album amicorum,” and Thomassen and Gruys, eds., The Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq. 224 For De Bray’s drawing, signed and dated 1661 in Haarlem, see Wilson, “Social Networking,” p. 213. 225 Ibid, pp. 213-214. On the album, see Bots et al., eds., L’album amicorum de Cornelis Glarges. 226 Robinson, “The Abrams Album,” and Veldman, “Portrait of an Art Collector,” p. 238.

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77. Jan de Bray, Self-Portrait Playing Chess, 1661, drawing from Jacob Heyblocq’s album amicorum, fol. 249. Pen and ink. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

78. David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life, 1624, drawing from Cornelis de Montigny de Glarges’s album amicorum, fol. 161. Pen and ink. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

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79. Emanuel de Witte, Medusa, ca. 1635-1641. Graphite on parchment, autograph framing line in graphite, 15.2 × 11 cm. Accession no. 1999. 123.42. The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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trading drawings. 227 Also part of Beck’s circle of contacts was David de Moor, a prosperous Amsterdam bookkeeper with an interest in the arts, who visited Beck’s office in The Hague to look at drawings. De Moor received regular gifts of Beck’s poetry and copies of other poems, which he reciprocated with books and small amounts of money.228 Beck’s interactions with De Moor typify the blurred boundaries between professional and social, or what we might call utilitarian and affective, relations that characterize seventeenth-century Dutch sociability, and the ubiquity of gift giving in establishing and maintaining both professional and personal bonds in the Republic. Portraits, as we have seen, were often distributed within circuits of gift exchange in early modernity, including among artists, their contacts, and familiars. The importance of this category of the gift to Rembrandt’s portrait production will be analyzed in the next chapter, but here I consider portraits that Hendrick Goltzius is recorded or presumed to have given to contacts and members of his inner circle as mementoes of personal ties and friendship. Among these are informal portrait drawings that must have been frequently transacted as personal gifts. Albrecht Dürer, for example, gave away a remarkable number of casually drawn portraits as gifts during his trip through the Netherlands in 1521, and carefully recorded each transaction in his diary. In one instance the sitter, a German Dürer met in Antwerp, offered a payment which the artist steadfastly refused: “Have taken the portrait of Hans Lieber of Ulm in charcoal; he wished to pay me 1 florin, but I would not take it.”229 Thanks to their inscriptions, two portrait drawings by Goltzius are known to have been executed as gifts. Goltzius inscribed FECIT HENRICUS GOLTZIUS UT SYMBOLUM AMICITIA (“Hendrick Goltzius made this as a token of friendship”) in the circular frame of his delicately detailed portrait of a 23-year old man, on vellum, dateable to about 1580 (Fig. 80). This refined sheet is a drawn counterpart to the meticulously engraved portrait medallions that Goltzius produced for patrons especially in the 1570s–1580s.230 Goltzius did not design these medallions to function primarily as print matrixes since he engraved the inscriptions in the correct direction rather than in mirror image for printing purposes. The few impressions taken from the plates, with reversed inscriptions, presumably would have been distributed within the owner’s inner circle of contacts and familiars. The owners or recipients of diminutive portrait medallions such as these, sometimes made of precious metals, 227 For Beck’s gifts of drawings, poems, and other items, see Thoen, Strategic Affection?, pp. 86-88, 176-180. 228 For the entries in Beck’s diary for 1624, see Beck, Spiegel van mijn leven: 27 May; 30 August; 8, 22, 23, and 24 September. 229 Fry, ed., Dürer’s Record of Journeys, p. 80. On Dürer’s expectation of returns for the gifts of art he gave away while on his journey and his frustrations when they were not adequately reciprocated, see Honig, “Art, Honor, and Excellence,” pp. 91-92. 230 See Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, p. 61.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

80. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of a Friend of the Artist, ca. 1580. Pen in brown ink on vellum, diam. 13.7 x cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo: Musée Condé, Chantilly / Bridgeman Images.

perhaps wore them as portrait miniatures and as tokens of affection. In 1605 Goltzius also inscribed a small silverpoint self-portrait (Fig. 81) with a dedication to a friend, the otherwise unknown Johannes Engelbrecht, who was 47 years old at the time.231 Goltzius largely abandoned the lucrative business of engraving portraits after returning from his transformative trip to Italy in 1591; but during his journey he made a series of drawings depicting artists he met in Florence, Venice, and Rome, and while en route in Munich. Produced on Goltzius’s own initiative and drawn in colored chalks from life, the sheets functioned as vivid mementoes 231 Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, p. 151, and Sell and Chapman et al., Drawing in Silver and Gold, cat. no. 59.

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81. Hendrick Goltzius, Self-Portrait, inscribed: “Henricus Goltzius, Johani Engel / brecht Amicie ergo D. Dicavit,” 1605. Silverpoint on yellow-prepared vellum, 8.8 × 6.4 cm. The British Museum, London. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

and personalized presentations to commemorate and nurture the amicable professional bonds Goltzius had established with an international network of illustrious contemporary artists.232 They are analogous, in this sense, to a late sixteenth-century group of paintings gifted by the German artist Hans von Aachen, which portray the painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths who belonged to his inner circle of colleagues, including likenesses of Giovanni Bologna or Giambologna, Joseph Heintz, Bartholomeus Spranger, and Adriaen de Vries.233 The most striking drawing of Goltzius’s series of artists is the portrait of the sculptor Giambologna (Fig. 82), but he also drew likenesses of Dirck de Vries, Johannes Stradanus, Jacopo Palma Il Giovane, and Pietro Francavilla; according to Van Mander, Goltzius also drew Girolamo Muziano in Venice and Johan Sadeler and Christoph Schwartz in Munich. The high finish and painterly character of the drawings indicate that they were not intended as models for a series of engravings of famous artists like that by Van Dyck. Moreover, a number of the drawings remained in Italy, where Giovanni Baglione praised them in 1642 as bellissimi portraits of Giolztius’s amici virtuosi.234 Apparently the drawings were presented to the sitters as gifts. The remarkably informal character of some of these portraits – which show the sitters in the midst of drawing, reading a book, or lost in thought – conveys the intimacy of Goltzius’s relationship with his fellow artists. Their directness and immediacy also suggest that Goltzius creatively adapted portraiture as a means of deepening personal networks of affiliation.235 Goltzius’s drawings of artists he met on his trip to Italy also parallel the friendship portraits that he, Jacob Matham, and Jan Muller engraved of fellow artists, including among others Abraham Bloemaert and Hans Bol (Fig. 83), the imperial court painters Spranger and Von Aachen, and the Antwerp printmaker Philips Galle. The prints are furnished with elaborate verses extolling the sitters’ fame and the friendships shared within this tight-knit international network of artists. In 1582 Goltzius sent the copperplate of his portrait of Galle to the artist with some impressions of the plate, which Galle gave to his friends.236 The unusually personal character of these works evolved from the custom of dedicating prints to friends, such as Goltzius’s large St. Jerome after Palma Giovane of 1596 (Fig. 84), which bears the dedication amicitia ergo (“Out of friendship”) to the Venetian sculptor

232 Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, cat. nos. 48-50, and Kettering, “Friendship Portraits of Hendrick Goltzius.” 233 Koerner, “Friendship Portraits,” esp. pp. 63-71. 234 See Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, p. 149. For Baglione’s comments, see Baglione, Le vite, p. 390. 235 Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, pp. 149-151. 236 Filedt Kok, “Artists Portrayed by their Friends,” p. 164.

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82. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Giambologna, 1590-1591. Black and colored chalk, 37 × 30 cm. Teylers Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Teylers Museum.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

83. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Hans Bol, 1593. Engraving, 26.4 × 18 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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84. Hendrick Goltzius after Palma Giovane, St. Jerome, 1596. Engraving, 42.3 × 28 cm. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, ma. Accession no. 2011.637. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gift of Barbara Ketcham Wheaton.

Art as Gift in the Dutch Republic 

85. Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Jan Govertsen van der Aer, 1603. Oil on canvas, 82.7 × 107.5. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: P. & N. de Boer Foundation. Photo: Studio Tromp.

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Alessandro Vittoria.237 The distribution of the prints as reifications of friendship sustained the affective ties between Dutch mannerist artists and an international community of colleagues, while also publicizing and immortalizing their fame for a wide audience of art lovers.238 Goltzius rarely produced portraits in his later years, though Van Mander emphasizes more than once that he made portraits for his own pleasure, mentioning specifically his 1603 portrait of Jan Govertsen van der Aer (Fig. 85), which shows the Haarlem collector holding a large, prized shell from his collection.239 Goltzius’s informal portrayal of Govertsen van der Aer as a man of refined repose conveys the familiar, intimate relationship between the painter and this liefhebber of the marvels of art and nature.240 *** Artists’ presentations of their own works as gifts thus generated distinct valences of meaning with conditions and outcomes that do not necessarily correspond either to a rigidly hierarchical notion of patronage or an understanding of the art market as a depersonalized arena of exchange. For Dutch artists, like their counterparts in aristocratic Europe, gift giving provided a means of navigating complex social interchanges, activating values of social distinction, honor, and virtue, and potentially endowing their art with compelling and inalienable agency. The ethical and aesthetic dimensions of gift exchange held even greater allure for some Dutch artists and liefhebbers. Rembrandt and Vermeer, as I argue in the following chapters, increasingly and imaginatively engaged the symbolic economy of the gift as a means of promoting and enacting the exceptional status of their work.

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———. “Material Mediators: Johan Maurits, Textiles, and the Art of Exchange.” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016), pp. 63-85.

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Broekman, Inge. De rol van de schilderkunst in het leven van Constantijn Huygens: 1596-1687. Hilversum: Verloren, 2006. Broekman, Inge, and Helmer Helmers. “‘Het hart des Offraers’: The Dutch Gift as an Act of Self-Representation.” Dutch Crossing 31 (2007), pp. 223-252. Brune, Johan de. Banket-werk. Amsterdam, 1658. Brusati, Celeste. Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten. Chicago and London, 1995: University of Chicago Press. ———. “Rembrandt’s Art as Gift: Response.” Lecture delivered at the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, 23 July 2013. Bruyn, Josua, and Oliver Millar. “Notes on the Royal Collection III: The Dutch Gift to Charles I.” The Burlington Magazine 104 (1962), pp. 291-294. Bruyn, Josua, et al. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Vol. 1. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982. Buvelot, Quentin, et al. Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil. Exh. cat. The Hague: Mauritshuis. Zwolle: Waanders, 2004. Bynkershoek, Cornelis van. Quaestionum juris publici libri duo (Questions of Public Law). 2 vols. Leiden, 1737. Translation from https://lonang.com/library/reference/bynkershoekquestions-public-law/bynk-208/ (accessed 13 July 2016). Caron, François. A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam. London, 1671. First published as Beschrijvinghe van het machtigh coninckrijcke Japan (Amsterdam, 1645). Carpenter, William Hookham. Mémoires et documents inédits sur Antoine van Dyck, P. P. Rubens, et autres artistes contemporains. Trans. Louis Hymans. Antwerp, 1845. Cats, Jacob. ‘t Werelts begin, midden, eynde, besloten in den trou-ringh met den proefsteen van den selven. Dordrecht, 1637. Charles II: Art and Power, edited by Rufus Bird and Martin Clayton. Exh. cat. London: The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace; Edinburgh: The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse. London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017. Clulow, Adam. The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ———. “Gifts for the Shogun: The Dutch East India Company, Global Networks, and Tokugawa Japan.” In Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, edited by Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello, pp. 198-216. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Colantuono, Anthony. “The Mute Diplomat: Theorizing the Role of Images in SeventeenthCentury Political Negotiations.” In The Diplomacy of Art: Artistic Creation and Politics in Seicento Italy, edited by Elizabeth Cropper, pp. 51-76. Milan: Nuova Alfa, 2000. Corrigan, Karina, Jan van Campen, and Femke Diercks, eds. Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age. Exh. cat. Salem, ma: Peabody Essex Museum; Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.

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van de markt voor schilderijen in de eerste decennia van de zeventiende eeuw,” in Art for the Market: 1500-1700, edited by Reindert Falkenburg et al., pp. 112-143. Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 50 (1999). ———. Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. ———. Rembrandt’s Rivals: History Painting in Amsterdam, 1630-1650. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2015. ———. “On Diverging Styles, Different Functions, and Fame: Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Rembrandt as History Painters.” In Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck: New Research, edited by Stephanie S. Dickey, pp. 21-43. Zwolle: Waanders, 2017. Sluijter-Seijffert, Nicolette. Cornelis van Poelenburch 1594/5-1667: The Paintings. Trans. Jennifer Killian and Katy Kist. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2016. Soutendam, J. “Eenige aantekeningen betreffende Delfsche kunstenaars.” De Nederlandsche Spectator (Arnhem and The Hague, 1870), pp. 452-453. Spear, Richard. The ‘Divine’ Guido: Religion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guido Reni. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Spies, Marijke, and Willem Frijhoff et al. Dutch Culture in a European Perspective I: 1650: Hard-Won Unity. Trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Strauss, Walter L., and Marjon van der Meulen. The Rembrandt Documents. New York: Abaris, 1979. Strong, Roy. Henry Prince of Wales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks. Oxford: Oxford Universtity Press, 2005. ———. “A Roomful of Mirrors: The Artful Embrace of Mughals and Franks, 1550-1700.” Ars Orientalis 39 (2010), pp. 39-83. Suchtelen, Ariane van, and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. et al. Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age. Exh. cat. The Hague: Mauritshuis; Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Zwolle: Waanders, 2008. Swan, Claudia. “Birds of Paradise for the Sultan: Early Seventeenth-Century Dutch-Turkish Encounters and the Uses of Wonder.” De zeventiende eeuw 29 (2013), pp. 49-63. ———. “Exotica on the Move: Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland.” Art History 38 (2015), pp. 620-635. ———. “Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten: Episodes in the History of Material Culture of the Dutch Republic.” In Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, edited by Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello, pp. 171-197. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ———. Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Tavernier, J.B. Les six voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier; qui’il a fait en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes. 2 vols. Paris, 1680-1682.

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Taylor, Paul. “The Birth of the Amateur.” Nuncius 31 (2016), pp. 499-522. Thijssen, E.M.H. Nicolaas Tulp al geneeskundige geschetst: Eene bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der geneeskunde in de XVIIde eeuw. Amsterdam, 1881. Thoen, Irma. Strategic Affection? Gift Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Holland. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Thomassen, Kees, ed. Alba amicorum: Vijf eeuwen vriendschap op papier gezet: Het album amicorum en het poëziealbum in de Nederlanden. Maarssen and The Hague: Schwartz/ SDU Uitgeverij, 1990. Thomassen, Kees, and J. A. Gruys, eds. The Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq: Introduction, Transcriptions, Paraphrases, and Notes to the Facsimile. Zwolle: Waanders, 1998. Thomsen, Thomas. Albert Eckhout: Ein niederländischer Maler und sein Gönner Moritz der Brasilianer: Ein Kulturbild aus dem 17. Jahrhundert. Trans. Lina Johnsson. Copenhagen: Levin og Munksgaard,1938. Um, Nancy, and Leah Clark. “Introduction: The Art of Embassy: Situating Objects and Images in the Early Modern Diplomatic Encounter.” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016), pp. 3-18. Veen, Jaap van der. “Patronage for Lievens’ Portraits and History Pieces, 1644-1674.” In Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Reconsidered, pp. 28-39. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. ———. “‘Hercules Segers, Disregarded and Yet a Great Artist’: A Sketch of His Life.” In Huigen Leeflang and Pieter Roelofs et al., Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, vol. 1, pp. 17-36. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2017. Veldman, Ilja. “Portrait of an Art Collector: Pieter Spiering van Silvercroon.” Simiolus 38 (2015-2016), pp. 228-249. Vermeulen, Ton, et al. The Deshima Dagregisters: Their Original Tables of Contents. 13 vols. Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1986-2010. Viallé, Cynthia. “‘To Capture their Favor’: On Gift-Giving by the VOC.” In Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, pp. 291-319. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Vondel, Joost van den. De werken van Vondel. Vol. 9. Ed. J. F. M. Sterck et al. Amsterdam: Binger, 1936. Vos, Jan. Dichtkunst. Amsterdam, 1658. ———. Alle de gedichten. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1662. Vries, Jan de. “Economic Growth before and after the Industrial Revolution: A Modest Proposal.” In Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400-1800, edited by Maarten Prak, pp. 177-194. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

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Vries, Jan de, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Walton, Guy. “Diplomatic Gifts and Ambassadorial Gifts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Gifts of the Tsars, 1500-1700: Treasures from the Kremlin, edited by Barry Shifman and Guy Walton, pp. 75-95. Exh. cat. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art. New York: Abrams, 2001. Warwick, Genevieve. “Gift Exchange and Art Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta’s Drawing Albums.” The Art Bulletin 79 (1997), pp. 630-646. Weststeijn, Thijs. The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Trans. Beverly Jackson and Lynne Richards. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Willigen, Adriaan van der. Les artistes de Harlem. Notices historiques avec un précis sur la Gilde de St. Luc. Haarlem and The Hague, 1870. Wills, John E. Jr. Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666-1687. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Asia Center, 1984. Wilson, Bronwen. “Social Networking. The ‘Album amicorum’ and Early Modern Public Making.” In Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe, edited by Massimo Rospocher, pp. 205-225. Bologna and Berlin: Il Mulino / Duncker & Humblot, 2012. Woodall, Joanna. “For Love and Money: The Circulation of Value and Desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album amicorum.” In ‘Ut pictura amor’: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700, edited by Walter S. Melion, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell, pp. 649-703. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017 Worp, J. A. De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens. 7 vols. Groningen, 1892-1899. ———. Briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens, 1608-1687. 6 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1911-1917. Wybe de Kruyter, Claas. “Jacobus Heyblocq’s Album amicorum in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek at The Hague.” Quaerendo 6 (1976), pp. 110-153. Zandvliet, Kees. Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Oversees Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Amsterdam, 1998. Zandvliet, Kees, et al. Maurits Prins van Oranje. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. ———. The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. Zwolle: Waanders, 2003. Zijlstra, Suze. “To Build and Sustain Trust: Long-Distance Correspondence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Merchants.” Dutch Crossing, 36 (2012), pp. 114-131.

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Rembrandt’s Art as Gift Abstract This chapter examines Rembrandt’s embrace of gift exchange over his career and analyzes the works he created to function as gifts among favored patrons, collectors, and intimates. Rembrandt’s gifts to important patrons and other figures in the 1630s largely conform to the conventions and courtesies expected of gift transactions. From the late 1640s through the 1660s, as Rembrandt’s primary supporters shifted to liefhebbers, gentlemen-dealers, and cultured members of the burgher class, however, he intensif ied his engagement and became more experimental with gift giving. Through highly distinctive prints designed to circulate as gifts, Rembrandt enlisted the gift economy to nurture ties with his inner sanctum, harnessing the ethics of gift giving to cultivate a unique position in the Dutch art world. Keywords: Rembrandt; Gifts; Gift Giving; Economics of Art; Art and Money

Throughout his career, Rembrandt presented gifts of his art to patrons, collectors, and familiars. Beginning in the 1630s, as he was actively courting prominent patrons in The Hague and Amsterdam, Rembrandt’s gifts adhered to the protocols of gift giving at the stadholder’s court and among Dutch urban elites. But in the later 1640s through the 1660s – when his audience was largely comprised of art lovers, gentlemen-dealers, and poets of the well-to-do burgher class with whom he maintained close relations – Rembrandt creatively engaged the symbolic economy of the gift in the design and distribution of his art, even creating distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange. This chapter charts the changing pattern of Rembrandt’s gifts of art and elucidates the interrelationships of his gifts, his documented obstinacy with patrons, and his demand for elevated compensation as demonstrations of the artistic persona he fashioned for himself. Rembrandt’s increasing focus on gift transactions in later years and his creative adaptation of the gift system for his artistic purposes reveal how this aestheticized form of exchange became an alternate means of promoting his work’s artistic and social value. While gift giving served as one of the multiple strategies available to Dutch

Zell, M., Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/ 9789463726429_ch03

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artists to market and distribute their work, for Rembrandt the symbolic power of the gift also functioned as a resource to cultivate a privileged status for both himself and his art. The unusual intimacy of address characteristic of Rembrandt’s later prints also evolved partly through his engagement of the gift economy to nurture an audience of liefhebbers, endowing his art in the process with compelling agency to mediate cultural and social identities. *** Rembrandt’s offer in 1639 of a monumental painting as a gift to Constantijn Huygens, secretary to Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, is one of the few documented interactions between the artist and his patrons, and in fact the only surviving example of its kind by his own hand (see Fig. 93). As Rembrandt explains in a letter dated 24 January 1639, he was sending the painting in gratitude for Huygens’s role in securing payment for an important commission, and intended his extravagant gift as reciprocation for Huygens’s “kind inclination and affection,” signing off by declaring himself Huygens’s “obliging and affectionate servant.”1 Despite his gift’s familiarity to scholars and its potential for providing insight into Rembrandt’s conduct of relations with patrons and collectors, his gesture has usually been treated as an anomaly or dismissed as self-serving. This depreciation stems in part from the legacy of eighteenth-century classicist critiques that portrayed Rembrandt as preoccupied with monetary gain, epitomized by Arnold Houbraken’s 1718 characterization of the artist as “moneyloving” (geltgierig and geltliefdig).2 Documents from Rembrandt’s lifetime do seem to corroborate the view that he prioritized money over fostering good relations with patrons.3 But Rembrandt’s attitudes toward pricing his work and his often contentious interactions with patrons were in fact interdependent phenomena. Rembrandt, his * This chapter expands and reworks my articles, Zell, “Gift among Friends” and “Rembrandt’s Gifts.” 1 Rembrandt to Huygens, 27 January 1639. See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/4. 2 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 1, p. 272. Houbraken elaborated with the colorful anecdote that Rembrandt’s pupils, aware of his cupidity, painted coins on the floor and elsewhere to deceive him, and that he reached out in vain to pick them up. See Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, p. 191, and Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, pp. 59-60. 3 A perception reinforced in the 1980s by Schwartz, Rembrandt, and Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise. Schwartz depicts Rembrandt as a failed painter for patrons whose nasty disposition undermined his efforts to cultivate prestigious patronage, while Alpers portrays him as a preternatural entrepreneur of Holland’s nascent capitalist economy, unbeholden to patrons’ desires and a shrewd manipulator of market demand. Both accounts tend to sustain Rembrandt’s mythic status as a supreme individualist in conflict with or exerting authority over his social milieu, a view rooted in enduring nineteenth-century notions of the artist. For the alternative argument that Rembrandt was the maker of his own myth, see Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits, pp. 132-137.

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patrons, and collectors were all stakeholders within a highly differentiated, vibrant and stratified art market, and gift giving was an intrinsic part rather than a separate sphere of exchange of this multilayered artistic economy.

Rembrandt’s Strained Relations with Patrons Before investigating the circumstances and social dynamics that motivated Rembrandt’s gifts of art and the implications of these interpersonal exchanges for understanding distinctive characteristics of his work, we need to address Rembrandt’s dealings with patrons and clients in general. In stark contrast to the courtesy and gracious language in Rembrandt’s 1639 letter offering his art as a gift to Huygens, documents show time and again his intransigence and arrogance with patrons, ultimately to his peril. It is hardly surprising, then, that Rembrandt’s reputation as a non-conformist who steadfastly refused to compromise his artistic principles has cast such a long shadow over his reception. 4 Yet the two clashing personas of Rembrandt that emerge from the historical record – as graciously dispensing gifts of art or as narcissistically dismissive of patrons’ desires – are not incompatible. While Rembrandt certainly could be obstinate with patrons, his disputes should be understood within the larger framework of social and aesthetic values that conditioned his attitudes as an ambitious and highly self-conscious artist. Rembrandt’s participation in the economy of gift giving, like his intransigence with patrons, was shaped by his identification with a historically specific construct of the artist and of art, that of valore di stima, as discussed in Chapter 1. Although not common among Dutch artists in the seventeenth century, this ideal was nonetheless a significant feature of Dutch artistic culture. The documentary record shows that Rembrandt, once established as Amsterdam’s leading painter and after having achieved an international reputation among art collectors, did not hesitate to assert his independence from patrons’ demands.5 Evidence of Rembrandt’s contentious attitudes toward even powerful patrons, who might have provided protection from the financial crises that eventually led to his filing for bankruptcy protection in 1656, began as early as 1642, when he was at the pinnacle of his career as Amsterdam’s preeminent portraitist and history painter.6 4 According to Schwartz, Rembrandt, pp. 362-363, Rembrandt’s tactlessness and untrustworthiness with patrons sabotaged his career, while Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, p. 4, characterizes his relations with patrons as “rebarbative.” 5 For an excellent analysis of the disputes between Rembrandt and his patrons, see Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 110-135. 6 According to the later testimony of Hendrick Uylenburgh, Rembrandt’s business partner during the 1630s, in 1642 he had helped resolve a dispute between Rembrandt and Andries de Graeff over payment for

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But the most detailed documents of disputes with patrons date from the 1650s, and underscore Rembrandt’s inflexibility when confronted by dissatisfied customers. Perhaps the most illuminating document, dated 23 February 1654, records legal action taken against Rembrandt by the Portuguese-Jewish merchant Diego d’Andrade over a portrait commission.7 According to the notary who delivered the complaint to Rembrandt, D’Andrade had paid the artist an advance of 75 guilders (fl.) for a portrait of a jonge dochter, or a young woman, which D’Andrade had presumably seen incomplete in Rembrandt’s studio and now alleged did not resemble the sitter, demanding that Rembrandt alter and retouch it before the woman’s imminent departure from Amsterdam. If Rembrandt failed to comply, D’Andrade would refuse to accept the painting because, the notary recorded, “it is of no use to him.”8 The document provides a full account of Rembrandt’s unequivocal and unyielding response: All this having been read to the respondent [i.e. Rembrandt] in its entirety, he stated that he would not touch the painting again nor finish it unless the claimant pays him the balance due or guarantees full payment by giving a security. And that after he has finished the painting, he will leave it to the judgment of the board of the St. Lucas’s Guild whether the painting is a likeness of the young woman or not. If they decide that there is no resemblance, he will then change it, and if the claimant should still be displeased, he will then finish the painting at some time, and whenever he has an auction of his paintings, he will include it in the sale.9

As this remarkable evidence demonstrates, Rembrandt was unwilling to compromise his artistic authority by acceding to the demands of a patron. Insisting on full payment to complete the painting, or at least a guarantee of payment, Rembrandt transferred the authority to which D’Andrade felt entitled to the Amsterdam Guild of St. Luke, avowing that he would only defer to the judgment of his professional peers as to whether or not he had achieved an adequate likeness of the sitter. a portrait. Uylenburgh reported that he and other “good men” (who remain anonymous in the deposition) had served as arbiters of the dispute, which they settled by assigning Rembrandt a payment of 500 guilders for the painting. The work in question may have been the majestic life-size, full-length portrait from 1639 now in Kassel, though the document does not provide any identification information. The cause of De Graeff’s dissatisfaction is unknown. See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1659/2, and Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 111-112. 7 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1654/4, and Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 120-125. 8 The painting in question has not been securely identified, but it has been suggested that the sitter was Beatriz Nunes Henriques, a relative of D’Andrade who married Manuel Teixeira de Sampayo in 1654 in Hamburg. See Van der Veen, “Faces from Life,” p. 77. 9 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1654/4.

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Rembrandt was supremely confident of his artistic abilities and of his reputation among serious art collectors and connoisseurs, or liefhebbers, whom he assumed would be eager to purchase the portrait at auction. Even as Rembrandt was enduring the financial pressures that precipitated his bankruptcy in 1656 and the personal hardships that ensued, then, he refused to acquiesce to the demands of a dissatisfied customer.10 That Rembrandt persisted through the end of his life to challenge the period’s expectations of conventional patronage relationships, despite the financial consequences, was confirmed recently by the discovery of documents in a private Italian family archive relating to a previously unknown commission from a Genoese patron.11 In 1666 Francesco Maria Sauli, a nobleman who would serve as Doge of the Republic of Genoa from 1697 to 1699, ordered from Rembrandt two modelli (models) for altarpieces destined for his family’s church of Nostra Signora Assunta in Carignano. From the correspondence between Sauli, his sea captain Viviano, and two agents in Amsterdam, we know the subject of one of the altarpieces, which surprisingly was the explicitly Catholic subject of the Assumption of the Virgin. Viviano’s first report to Sauli refers to Rembrandt’s justification of his extremely high remuneration as a reflection of the high quality and reputation of his work. As he wrote, Rembrandt “wants a lot of money, but he presents himself as someone who has knowledge of the art of painting and therefore he stands his ground.”12 Rembrandt’s delays in delivering the paintings make clear that he prioritized his creative process over his patron’s schedules and requirements. His excuse, according to Viviano, was that he had “thrown himself into the work with the utmost mental commitment” and “he says that he wants to gain fame and honor in our parts with this commission.”13 After a further postponement, Rembrandt audaciously raised his asking price by more than double, driving Viviano to the point of exasperation: “I am at a loss how to come to an agreement with Rembrandt: He is now asking me for 3000 guilders for both, whereas he initially asked for only 1200 guilders.”14 Sauli, 10 In the 1650s and 1660s Rembrandt also had complicated dealings with Don Antonio Ruffo, the Sicilian patron who acquired from the artist three paintings of uomini illustri. See the classic study by Held, Rembrandt Studies, pp. 17-58, and Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 125-133. For the Ruffo documents, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, docs. 1654/10, 1654/16, 1661/5, 1662/11, and 1662/12. 11 See Magnani, “Een onbekende opdracht.” 12 Ibid, pp. 5, 13: “Pretende molto denaro però si rimesso in persona intelligente di pittura per stare a suo giudizio.” 13 Ibid, pp. 6, 14: “vuol in questa occasione acquistare in cotteste parti lode et honore,” translation from Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 15. Magnani, p. 14, renders the phrase as: “he says he wants to garner praise and honor in our parts with this commission.” 14 Ibid, pp. 7, 14: “Col Rembrante non so come ne uscirò me ne domanda di tutte due fiorini 3000 quando ne chiedè da principio solamente fiorini 1200.”

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86. Rembrandt van Rijn, Satire on Art Criticism, 1644. Pen and brown ink, corrected with white, 15.5 × 20.1 cm. Robert Lehman Collection, 1975. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

while initially asserting that he was prepared to pay no more than 500 guilders, ultimately paid Rembrandt over double that amount (1023.15 guilders) for the modelli, which are now lost. But Rembrandt’s unreliability, both in his asking prices and delivery of the paintings, which were finally ready for shipment more than eight months late, may have cost him the commission for the altarpieces, which appear not to have been executed. In the unusual drawing Satire on Art Criticism, dated 1644 (Fig. 86), Rembrandt expressed visually his contempt for those he deemed unqualified to judge his work, such as patrons like D’Andrade. At the sheet’s left a man seated on a barrel wearing a hat with protruding ass’s ears pontificates on two paintings to which he points, while an audience listens attentively.15 The paintings are presented for inspection by 15 For the drawing, see in particular Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Satire on Art Criticism,” and Crenshaw, “Catalyst for Rembrandt’s Satire on Art Criticism.” Crenshaw proposes that Rembrandt created the drawing in response to the 1644 publication of Constantijn Huygens’s Momenta Desultoria, which includes several disparaging epigrams about Rembrandt’s portrait of Jacques de Gheyn III (Fig. 98).

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a man wearing a gold chain, perhaps a painter with this mark of honor traditionally bestowed by a prince, behind whom is a sketchily drawn figure holding what may be a shield, an attribute of Minerva, protector of the arts.16 At the right corner a crouching man wipes his behind and looks directly out at the viewer, graphically rendering Rembrandt’s disdain for the opinion of ignorant liefhebbers and perhaps collectors who were mere naemkoopers, or name-buyers, about whom Rembrandt’s former pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten complained in 1678.17

Honor, Money, Gifts: Rembrandt and Valore di Stima At f irst sight Rembrandt’s refusal to accommodate his patrons’ wishes and his contempt for their judgment of his work seems to correspond with a later, nineteenth-century construct of the artist in conflict with his social surroundings, determined to follow his own path at all costs, disdainful of prevailing tastes, and rejected by hidebound, bourgeois contemporaries. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries this perspective formed the dominant view of Rembrandt, until it was recognized that he continued to enjoy a high reputation among patrons and collectors despite his f inancial troubles and declining popularity among Amsterdam’s patricians.18 Hence the idea of Rembrandt as a non-conformist and social misfit is selective and largely a product of the nineteenth-century myth of the artist, an anachronism that occludes the complex of historical practices, values, and forms of knowledge that shaped his career. Rembrandt and other ambitious and self-conscious early modern artists who asserted their independence from the expectations and subservience of orthodox patronage relationships may have been instrumental in the development of this later construct of the artist, but their situation cannot be reduced to its terms. Rembrandt’s behavior and attitudes, as Eric Jan Sluijter has shown, are consistent with a discrete frame of values that informed certain artists’ self-definitions in early modernity, and which contemporaries in Italy understood to be encompassed by the phrase valore di stima, which signaled the estimation of an artist’s worth based on quality and reputation.19 As a category for determining artistic value, valore di stima was defined in opposition to valore di fatica or macchina, or the calculation 16 Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Satire on Art Criticism,” p. 10, identifies the motif as a half-drapery or rag as an allusion to the term vod (rag), commonly used in the seventeenth century to refer to bad paintings. 17 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, Preface, and pp. 196-197. See Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Satire on Art Criticism,” pp. 8-10, and Taylor, “Birth of the Amateur,” pp. 504-509. 18 For Rembrandt’s nineteenth-century reception, see McQueen, Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt. 19 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” pp. 13-16, and idem, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 25-59.

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of a painting’s price based on fixed, quantifiable measures of labor, such as the number and size of the figures or the number of hours of labor expended.20 Valore di stima and valore di fatica operated concurrently on the Italian art market, with artists deploying one or the other pricing system depending on their professional orientations. Valore di stima underwrote Guido Reni’s defiant attitude toward patrons and his insistence that compensation for his paintings be considered a form of reward for his artistic talent rather than payment of a purchase price. According Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice of 1678, Reni abhorred “the mention of price in a profession in which, he said, it should be obligatory to negotiate on the basis of an honorarium or a gift.”21 Reni refused to settle on a price in advance, insisting that payment be established on the basis of the quality of the completed work. The prices Reni achieved were higher than if his paintings had been sold in the usual way, since his remuneration was understood to be a reflection of the patron’s discernment in addition to the aesthetic value of the work itself. Prominent patrons were expected to provide generous, even excessive rewards, for, as Malvasia asserts, “the munificence of the great is not ruled by ordinary terms.”22 Malvasia echoes Giulio Mancini’s earlier promotion of gift giving as an honorable means of negotiating the transaction of works of art, and through which, Mancini writes, “one sees extravagant prices and compensation in the great generosity of some gracious person or some prince.”23 Reni’s approach contrasts starkly with Guercino’s transparent and fixed method of pricing his paintings, which he calculated according to the number and size of the figures.24 In providing patrons with a clear-cut pricing system, Guercino was operating within the framework of valore di fatica, a more traditional craftsman-like or artisanal standard of production in which expenditure of labor determined monetary value. As a consequence, Guercino never commanded the prices that Reni enjoyed, though he was able to charge substantial amounts for his work relative to painters in Italian cities with less progressive views of the arts, such as Naples.25 Guercino’s comparatively old-fashioned, quantifiable pricing system ran 20 Sluijter derived his conceptual models from Richard Spear’s investigation of the competitive marketing strategies adopted by the Italian painters Guido Reni and Guercino, who were close contemporaries of Rembrandt. See Spear, Divine Guido, pp. 210-224. 21 Malvasia, Life of Guido Reni, p. 114, quoted in Spear, Divine Guido, p. 212. 22 Malvasia, Life of Guido Reni, p. 83. 23 Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, p. 140, quoted in Spear, Divine Guido, p. 212, and Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, p. 51. 24 Spear, Divine Guido, p. 213, citing Bonfait, “Il pubblico del Guercino.” See also Spear, “Rome,” p. 52, and Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 10. 25 See Marshall, “Naples,” p. 118.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

directly counter to Reni’s strategy and thinking, and conflicted with the period’s art theoretical discourse that distinguished between practitioners of the fine arts and craftsmen involved in selling commodities like any other good.26 Most Dutch painters probably determined their prices according to the system the Italians called valore di fatica, calculating the amount of time and thus essentially the labor expended in the production of art. The most financially successful Dutch artists adopted this as their business model. Rembrandt’s first pupil, Gerrit Dou, Dou’s student Frans van Mieris, and Adriaen van der Werff all calculated their prices according to the measure of time, the functional logic of valore di fatica. Renowned for their painstakingly net or later known as fijnschilder (fine painter) workmanship and handsomely remunerated by rich patrons from across Europe, each of these painters was also transparent about his pricing system. Dou kept a record of how many hours he worked on a painting and charged an hourly rate of the equivalent of six guilders (ein Pfund Flemsch), while Van Mieris charged five guilders.27 Van der Werff, who kept meticulous count of the number of hours he worked on a painting, charged a flat rate of 25 guilders a day, to which he would add other costs as well as a premium determined by what the market would bear or the buyer would likely accept.28 The prices that Van Mieris achieved with this craftsman-like method were reportedly staggering. For The Doctor’s Visit of 1667 (Fig. 87), a relatively small panel on which he worked a total of 300 hours, Van Mieris supposedly received 1500 guilders, which was nearly the amount Rembrandt earned for his colossal group portrait The Nightwatch in 1642 (see Fig. 57).29 When Cosimo III de’ Medici visited Van Mieris in Leiden in 1669 he reportedly tried to acquire The Doctor’s Visit by doubling the asking price, but had to settle for The Family Concert of 1675 now in the Uffizi, for which he paid an astounding 2500 guilders.30 The tonalist landscape painter Jan van Goyen also likely calculated his prices according to this artisanal method of determining value. Unlike Van Mieris and the other fijnschilders, Van Goyen painted in a loose, abbreviated manner that also increased his profitability 26 In his 1672 biography of Guido Reni, Giovan Pietro Bellori addressed the special considerations of talent and virtue that he asserted should dictate how artists are to be remunerated. See Bellori, Lives, p. 356. See also Spear, “Rome,” p. 52. 27 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 10, citing Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, p. 196, and Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 2, p. 4. 28 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” pp. 10-11. See further Bok, “Pricing the Unpriced,” esp. p. 108, and Gaethgens, Adriaen van der Werff, pp. 46-47. 29 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 3, p. 4, and Naumann, Frans van Mieris, vol. 1, p. 196. For the picture, which was painted for the Leiden burgomaster Cornelis Paet, see Buvelot et al., Frans van Mieris, cat. no. 40. 30 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 3, p. 5, and Naumann, Frans van Mieris, vol. 1, pp. 177-185. For the painting, see Buvelot et al., Frans van Mieris, cat. no. 45.

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87. Frans van Mieris the Elder, The Doctor’s Visit, 1667. Oil on panel, 44.5 × 31.1 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

by decreasing the time to production – a “process innovation” identified by John Michael Montias.31 Extrapolating from Van Hoogstraten’s report that Van Goyen could complete a painting in a day, he received about 10 guilders for a small painting and 60 for a large one.32 If most Dutch artists’ measure of their work’s value derived either entirely or partly from this artisanal standard or valore di fatica, Rembrandt clearly did not feel these rules applied to him. On the contrary, Rembrandt espoused the set of values that Reni and other Italian artists and figures associated with the arts identified as valore di stima. Demanding elevated, even outrageous prices signaled, for Rembrandt, like Reni, that his work exceeded ordinary measures of compensation and valuation.33 Money was the instrument through which he laid claim to his privileged status and the above-market, transcendent value of his creative labor. Elevated payments and gift giving were intertwined within this aesthetic ideology because money, as we saw with Reni’s interactions with patrons, served simultaneously functional and symbolic roles in artists’ conduct on the art market. The earliest records of Rembrandt’s engagement of the gift economy confirm this interrelationship. Rembrandt offered his art as a gift to Constantijn Huygens as part of his negotiation in the 1630s of exceptionally high prices for his first major commission as a history painter, a cycle ultimately of seven Passion pictures for Stadholder Frederik Hendrik. In 1636 Rembrandt requested a staggering 1200 guilders for The Ascension of Christ (Fig. 88), which had been delivered as a companion picture for The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross (Fig. 89) already in the Prince’s collection, a price he undoubtedly considered reflective of his exceptional skill in and dedication to the art of painting.34 Writing to Frederik Hendrik’s secretary Huygens, to whom he would later send a gift of a monumental painting in gratitude, Rembrandt declared that although “I certainly deserve” the price requested, he would be “content with whatever His Excellency pays me.”35 In 1639, when The Entombment and Resurrection (Fig. 90) of the cycle were ready for delivery, Rembrandt adjusted his asking price to 1000 guilders, writing that these latest installments “I think will be considered fine enough to warrant His Highness paying me no less than a thousand 31 Montias, “Cost and Value.” 32 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 11, and idem, “Jan van Goyen als marktleider,” esp. pp. 39-48. 33 On symbolic pricing in the contemporary art market, see Velthuis, Talking Prices. 34 For Rembrandt’s exchanges with Huygens about payments for the Passion cycle pictures and the insights these provide into his views on compensation for artistic excellence, see Sluijter, “Determining Value,” pp. 13-14, and idem, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 52-54. For the seven letters to Huygens, see Gerson, Seven Letters by Rembrandt, and Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, docs. 1636/1, 1636/2, and 1639/2-6. In the second letter (doc. 1636/2), Rembrandt asks for 200 pounds, the equivalent of 1200 guilders. 35 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1636/2.

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88. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Ascension of Christ, 1636. Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 68.3 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich / Art Resource, ny.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

89. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Descent from the Cross, 1632-1633. Oil on panel, 90 × 65 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: Alte Pinakothek, Munich / Bridgeman Images.

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90. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Resurrection of Christ, ca. 1640-1641. Oil on canvas, 91.9 × 67 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich / Art Resource, ny.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

guilders for each of them. But should His Highness not deem them worth that, let him pay me less, according to his pleasure. I rely on His Highness’ knowledge and discretion.”36 Once again, however, Rembrandt received from the Prince only 600 guilders for each painting, which he accepted begrudgingly, telling Huygens, “if His Highness cannot be persuaded in the face of valid arguments to pay a higher price, even if they are obviously worth it, I shall be content with 600 k. guilders each.”37 In an aside to Huygens, Rembrandt added that “if things had gone according to your wishes and to propriety, no objection would have been raised to the asking price,” indicating that he was confident of Huygens’s support in the price negotiations, despite Frederik Hendrik’s decision. Rembrandt calculated his estimation of the paintings’ high value purely on the creative and intellectual talents he invested in their production; as he wrote to Huygens, he had undertaken their execution with “great pleasure and interest,” explaining that “as a result of my diligent zeal” he had successfully captured in these two paintings “the deepest and most lifelike emotion” (die meeste ende die naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt).38 Based on Rembrandt’s failures to secure the remuneration he expected from the stadholder, Sluijter concludes that Rembrandt “grossly overestimated the value of the paintings” and that he “had overreached; his reputation at the court and the willingness to pay up for this were not what he expected. However he ultimately understood that he had to swallow some of his pride and be satisfied with what he could get.”39 Yet, as Sluijter acknowledges, Rembrandt did receive 1200 guilders each for The Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 91) and The Circumcision, the final two paintings for the Passion cycle, which were delivered in 1646. Although the fee Rembrandt asked for these works is unknown, it is probably safe to assume, given that he was paid his asking price for the earlier paintings of exactly the same and relatively modest formats, that this time the stadholder agreed to Rembrandt’s terms, or perhaps decided to enhance the payment in recognition of Rembrandt’s reputation at this point in his career as preeminent Dutch painter. The 1200 guilders Frederik Hendrik awarded Rembrandt for the paintings, literally double the amount for the other Passion pictures, was immensely more than the 500 guilder payments allocated by the court in the 1640s to Pieter de Grebber, Salomon de Bray, Theodore van Thulden, and Jacob Jordaens for large-scale paintings for the Oranjezaal in the 36 Ibid, doc. 1639/3. 37 Ibid, doc. 1639/5. 38 Ibid, doc. 1639/2: “Dees selvij / twe stuckens sijn door stuijdiose vlijt nu meede afgedaen / soodat ick nu oock geneegen ben om die / selvijge te leeveren om sijn Hoocheijt daer meede / te vermaeken want deesen twe sijnt daer die meeste / ende die naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt in / geopserveert is dat oock de grootste oorsaeck is dat / die selvijge soo lang onder handen sij geweest.” See also Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 14. 39 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” pp. 13, 14, and idem, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 54-56.

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91. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1646. Oil on canvas, 97 × 71.3 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Photo: Alte Pinakothek, Munich / Bridgeman Images.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

Huis ten Bosch.40 The Prince of Orange in this case seems to have been receptive to Rembrandt’s gambit to engage him in a negotiation animated by the ideal of valore di stima, in which the patron’s largesse was expected to reflect the quality of the work and the artist’s reputation as well as the patron’s own discernment and benevolence as a supporter of the arts. Rembrandt expressed just this sentiment when he wrote to Huygens that he was relying on Frederik Hendrik’s “knowledge and discretion.”41 While the Prince of Orange might have been knowledgeable enough and willing in principle to respond according to the sophisticated, Italianate artistic values that informed Rembrandt’s expectation of the proper conduct of virtuous patrons and artists of his rank, comparatively few patrons from the Dutch citizen elite would have accepted such entitlement in what they likely considered a more straightforward business transaction.42 Rembrandt’s insistence on extremely high, even astronomical payments was sanctioned by aesthetic principles that applied also to works by esteemed predecessors, not only his own. Contemporaries noted Rembrandt’s willingness to part with huge amounts of money in order to acquire rare works by such masters. In 1642 the burgomaster of Harderwijk, Ernst Brinck, twice recorded that Rembrandt paid 179 guilders for an impression of Lucas van Leyden’s small engraving of a beggar playing pipes known as Eulenspiegel (Owlglass) (Fig. 92), a famously scarce work. Joachim von Sandrart also reported that Rembrandt had paid 1400 guilders at auction for 14 fine impressions of Lucas’s larger prints of Christian subjects. 43 In 1686 Filippo Baldinucci acknowledged that the extravagant prices Rembrandt was willing to pay for the work of illustrious colleagues was a means of conferring honor on the profession, and commended Rembrandt for his actions. Basing himself on reports from the Danish painter Bernhard Keil, who had trained with Rembrandt in the 1640s, Baldinucci wrote that Rembrandt “deserves great praise for a certain goodness of his, extravagant though it be, namely, that for the sake of the great esteem in which he held his art, whenever […] paintings and drawings by great men of those parts [were offered for sale at auction], he bid so high at the outset that no one else came forward to bid.” Rembrandt’s goal, Baldinucci concludes, was “to emphasize the prestige of his profession” (per mettere in credito la professione).44 40 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 14, and idem, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 54-55. 41 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/3. Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, p. 54, and p. 411, n. 178, translates discreesij as judiciousness rather than discretion. 42 Sluijter, “Determining Value,” p. 16, and idem, Rembrandt’s Rivals, p. 55. 43 On Rembrandt’s high payments for Lucas prints, see Cornelis and Filedt Kok, “Taste for Lucas van Leyden Prints,” pp. 43-44. For Brinck’s records of Rembrandt’s purchase of the Eulenspiegel, which Samuel van Hoogstraten confirmed in 1678, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1642/10. For Sandrart’s report, see Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, p. 240. 44 Baldinucci, Cominciamento, p. 80: “Merita egli però gran lode per una certa sua, benché stravagante bontà, cioè, che per la stima grande ch e’ faceva dell’arte sua, quando si subastavano cose appartenenti alla medesima e particolarmente pitture e disegni di grand’uomini di quelle parti, egli alla pri­m a

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92. Lucas van Leyden, The Beggars (Eulenspiegel), 1520. Etching and engraving, 17.5 × 14.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

offerta ne alzava tanto il prezzo, che non mai si trovavasi il secondo offerente, e diceva far questo, per mettere in credito la professione.” Translation from Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, p. 91. See further Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, p. 113, and Held, Rembrandt Studies, p. 8. My thanks to Erik Hinterding.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

However paradoxically, then, money functioned for Rembrandt as an instrument to express and enact the non-market, immeasurable value of works by artists of his elevated rank. Rembrandt’s attitudes and behavior, like those of Reni and other Italian artists who espoused valore di stima, were informed both by theoretical justifications for the high prices that distinguished artists could and should command and the promotion of gift giving as the means of demonstrating their work’s exemption from ordinary, quantifiable compensation. Beginning with Alberti, as we have seen, art theorists and writers on art consistently invoked the exorbitant prices paid for paintings in antiquity and Zeuxis’s conviction that his art was beyond calculable measures of value. 45 In Pliny’s recounting, Zeuxis was so convinced of the quality of his work that he deemed no remuneration sufficient, a statement Alberti drew upon to formulate his justification of painting’s status as a liberal art, which therefore could not be assessed like other commodities. In Alberti’s words, Zeuxis gave away his work because he “did not believe any price could be found to recompense the man who […] behaved like a god among mortals.”46 Malvasia rehearsed the topos in his discussion of the link between Reni’s pricing strategy and his practice of gifting his paintings: “Following the example of Zeuxis who, judging that his works could not be adequately rewarded […] it was Guido’s practice at times not to put a price on the works he painted for great personages and men of substantial means, but rather to give the paintings to them.”47 Franciscus Junius, in his history of ancient painting published in a Dutch edition in 1641, cited Zeuxis’s presentation of his works as gifts, “saying that no price could be answerable to their worth.” Junius added that Zeuxis thereby avoided diminishing his art’s prestige, quoting Quintilian’s statement that “many things lose their worth for nothing so much […] as that they may be prised at a certaine rate.”48 By the seventeenth century gifts and money therefore were enmeshed in both artistic theory and practice. The symbolic operations of the gift economy played a crucial role as a method of articulating the inestimable value of works of art while simultaneously freeing the artist’s monetary reward from the market’s quantifiable calculus. Rembrandt increasingly engaged this aestheticized system of exchange and its anti-market discourse to give expression to the exceptional worth of his art. By activating the ethics of the gift, he embraced patrons, collectors, and familiars in a dialogue founded on values of honor, virtue, curiosity, and, above all, devotion to, or in period terms, “the love of art.” 45 Warnke, Court Artist, esp. pp. 152-153. 46 Alberti, On Painting, p. 61. 47 Malvasia, Life of Guido Reni, p. 115. 48 Junius, Painting of the Ancients, vol. 1, p. 163: “Zeuxis f irst began to make presents of his workes, saying that no price could be answerable to their worth; so he bestowed Alcmena upon the inhabitants of Agrigentum, Pan upon Archelaus […] seeing ‘many things lose their worth for nothing so much,’ sayth Quintilian, ‘as that they may be prised at a certaine rate.’”

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Rembrandt’s Gifts in the 1630s Firsthand records of Rembrandt’s statements are extremely scarce, but in three of the seven surviving letters by his hand he repeatedly offers his work as gifts. Dating from the 1630s, when Rembrandt was cultivating aristocratic patronage in The Hague, the letters offer rare glimpses into the significance of gift giving to his conduct of relations with patrons. In the letter dated 27 January 1639, as we have seen, Rembrandt informed Constantijn Huygens, the deeply cultured secretary to Frederik Hendrik, that he was sending a painting ten feet long and eight feet high as a token of appreciation. 49 We know that Huygens had already declined the gift because Rembrandt wrote that he was dispatching the painting “in spite of your wish […] hoping that you will accept it.”50 The only known paintings by Rembrandt that correspond with the measurements described in the letter are The Blinding of Samson dated 1636 (Fig. 93) and Danäe when first completed in 1636 (Fig. 94), before being cut down and reworked substantially in the early 1640s. Most scholars believe The Blinding of Samson was the gift, though Danäe has also been suggested since it was still in Rembrandt’s possession in 1656 and therefore might have been returned if Huygens acted upon his original refusal to accept it.51 Yet Huygens’s professed reluctance was probably dictated by the etiquette that surrounded the exchange of gifts, especially in the rarefied setting of the stadholder’s court.52 In any case, neither painting was ever recorded in Huygens’s possession.53 In his role as the stadholder’s secretary, Huygens, as discussed in Chapter 2, routinely received letters from artists, authors, and others seeking his assistance as well as gifts of paintings, among other presents.54 Recall that Daniël Seghers, the Flemish painter and lay brother of the Jesuit order, presented him with a gift of one of his flower still life paintings.55 Rembrandt’s gift of his art to Huygens therefore 49 For the letter, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/2. 50 Rembrandt to Huygens, 27 January 1639. See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/4. 51 Schwartz, Rembrandt, pp. 130-131, 178, and idem, Rembrandt’s Universe, p. 343. In Sluijter’s view, Danäe, a life-size erotic nude, would have been an unsuitable gift, whereas The Blinding of Samson would have been both more appropriate and more in line with Huygens’s taste. 52 Bruyn et al., Corpus 3, p. 193. 53 Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, pp. 41-42, believes that Huygens likely refused the painting, since The Blinding of Samson is not recorded in the 1785 inventory of the estate of Huygens’s great-greatgranddaughter, Susanna Louise Huygens, and nor did Huygens mention the picture in any of his writings. 54 For Huygens’s position as Frederik Hendrik’s secretary and his role in building the Prince’s art collection, see Groenveld, “Frederick Henry and his Entourage,” pp. 31-32, and Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren, “The Stadholder’s Art Collection,” pp. 59-60. For Huygens’s interactions with artists and his role as patron and collector, see Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst. 55 See Chapter 2, pp. 158-162, 180-183; Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, esp. pp. 36-51, and Van der Ploeg and Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons, cat. no. 27.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

93. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Blinding of Samson, 1636. Oil on canvas, 206 × 276 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Photo: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. © Fine Art Images / Bridgeman Images.

was consistent with the culture of the Prince’s court, though the extravagance of his present was exceptional and purposefully designed to capture Huygens’s attention. Declaring himself Huygens’s “obliging and devoted servant,” Rembrandt offered the huge canvas in gratitude for Huygens’s role in brokering the prestigious commission for the Passion cycle. About two weeks later Rembrandt apparently shipped the painting to The Hague, acknowledging in the accompanying letter that he was doing so because “I feel deeply obliged to requite [you] with service and friendship [… and] in spite of your wish, [I] am sending [you] along [with this letter] a canvas, hoping that you will accept it, because it is the first memento which I offer you, Sir.”56 In fact, this was not the first gift of art Rembrandt had presented 56 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/4: “Bevinden daer ue goeden gunst ende geneegentheijt / soo dat ick van harten geneegen uwer obblijsier blijven / ue rekumpensijve dienst ende vriendschap te doen. / Soo ist door geneegentheijt tot sulx tegens mijns / heeren begeeren dees

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94. Rembrandt van Rijn, Danaë, 1636 (reworked 1640s). Oil on canvas, 185 × 203 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg / Bridgeman Images.

to Huygens; three years before he had sent the statesman some of his “latest work,” presumably impressions of recent etchings like Self-Portrait with Saskia (Fig. 95) or The Return of the Prodigal Son, both dated 1636, which he described as a “token of my readiness to serve you,” adding: “I trust that you will most graciously accept it in addition to my greetings.”57 Later in February 1639, after the painting had been sent and when he was about to receive final payment from the Prince, Rembrandt assured Huygens: “I shall forever seek to requite you, Sir, for this with reverence, service, and evidence of friendship.”58 bijgaenden douck toesenden / hoopende dat u mijner in deesen niet versmaeden / sult want het is die eersten gedachtenis / die ick aen mijn heer laet.” 57 Ibid, doc. 1636/1: “En ken oock niet naerlaeten volgens mijn dienstwillijgen / gunst mijn heer te vereeren van mijn jonsten / werck vertrouwenden dat mij ten bessten sal / afgenoomen werder neffens mijne groeteenissen.” 58 Ibid, doc. 1639/6: “ende ick sal sulx aen ue met reeverensij, dienst / ende blijck van/ vrienschap altijts souken te reekumpenseeren.”

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

95. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636. Etching, 10.4 × 9.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Huygens, an art connoisseur, amateur, and courtier on the lookout for local talent that could give Frederik Hendrik’s court the luster expected in international courtly culture, had visited the young Rembrandt and Lievens in their studio by 1630, praising in his diary Rembrandt’s exceptional skills as a history painter, especially of small-scale pictures. He was most likely instrumental in brokering the Passion cycle commission, and was in a position to continue to advance Rembrandt’s career. The gifts, especially the spectacular 10 × 8-foot canvas, were conspicuous demonstrations of Rembrandt’s gratitude and hopes to secure further orders from the stadholder, in which he was ultimately successful.

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Although Huygens had originally declined Rembrandt’s extravagant gift, either out of politeness or a reluctance to become indebted to the artist, Rembrandt refused to accept no for an answer. Rembrandt’s first payment on his expensive new house on the Sint-Anthoniesbreestraat was due, so the gift he insisted upon sending was intended to encourage Huygens to arrange swift reimbursement for the latest Passion pictures. Rembrandt’s fawning language in the letters has often been dismissed as empty rhetoric, and much has been made about his “ulterior,” self-interested motivation for offering the gift, which is undeniable.59 Focusing exclusively on ulterior motives, however, produces an inadequate account of the complex social dynamics involved in the negotiations. Doubtless Rembrandt’s offer was understood as a device for accruing financial and social capital; but a taboo on making this underlying motivation explicit was essential to the symbolic value of the exchange.60 Rembrandt’s professions of affection and devotion, moreover, were determined by the expectations of courtly decorum and clientage. Gifts, especially in court settings, were strongly associated with issues of honor, service, and loyalty, and thus drew the receiver into a special bond with the donor.61 Rembrandt’s spectacular gift, far from merely an overgenerous means of offering thanks, should therefore be understood as his attempt to transform an economic and professional bond with Huygens into a social alliance animated by a set of expectations based on honor, not profit. If the gift was The Blinding of Samson (Fig. 93), the intensely violent subject – a moment in the biblical narrative never depicted before or after – may have been calculated to appeal to Huygens’s personal taste and to his rank as a courtier.62 Extravagant gifts typically found favor in court circles, where they tended to be conspicuous, even spectacular objects designed to attract attention and sustain interest.63 The forceful and gruesome imagery of the Blinding, which also openly declares its rivalry with celebrated precedents in the depiction of pain and horror by Rubens and other renowned painters, undoubtedly fulfilled these criteria.64 Rembrandt’s rendering of physical violence in vivid pictorial form and on such a monumental scale still captivates, endowing the painting with a forceful agency that compels and entraps the beholder. As a gift, the picture’s ability to exert agency 59 See in particular Schwartz, Rembrandt, pp. 116-117. 60 On the taboo of explicitness, see Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. 96. 61 For patronage dynamics at the stadholder’s court, see Janssen, Princely Power in the Dutch Republic. My characterization of the patron–client relationship in the stadholder’s court also relies on the analysis of Medici court culture in Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier, esp. pp. 36-41, and on studies of the French court in Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Early Modern France, and idem, “Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France.” 62 Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, p. 43. 63 See Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier, esp. p. 48. 64 Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 43-48.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

would have been magnified immeasurably. Even if the proffered work were another painting, such as Danäe (Fig. 94), though, its sheer scale and vivid sensuality would have greatly enhanced its ability to act as a mediator of Rembrandt’s interests. To ensure that his painting would achieve the desired effect, Rembrandt instructed Huygens to “hang this picture in a bright light and in such a manner that it can be viewed from a distance. It will then sparkle at its best.”65 Hanging in Huygens’s palatial new residence on the Plein, its inescapable presence inextricable from Rembrandt’s presentation, the canvas would have served as a provocative and intransigent agent of Rembrandt’s effort to impose on the stadholder’s secretary an inalienable bond of reciprocal obligations or mutual service. In defying Huygens’s refusal of the gift, Rembrandt apparently was banking on his painting’s capacity to overcome resistance. While Huygens was initially reluctant to enter into the complex relationship symbolized and inaugurated by acceptance of Rembrandt’s extravagant gift, perhaps he relented, as two more very lucrative commissions were forthcoming from the stadholder: An Adoration of the Shepherds (Fig. 91) and a lost Circumcision from 1646. As noted, Rembrandt would receive 5400 guilders for the seven paintings that comprised the commission, a very large sum even relative to the generous remunerations generally awarded by the Prince. It is conceivable that Huygens’s initial resistance was nothing more than a demonstration of the courtesy demanded by the protocols of accepting lavish gifts from clients. Yet Huygens could have obviated the painting’s ability to act as a reminder of his obligations to Rembrandt even if he had accepted it. As discussed in Chapter 2, we know that the patrician Joan Huydecoper quickly disposed of a painting of the Entombment that Jan Lievens had given him as a gift after completing a portrait commission in 1659. By doing so, Huydecoper negated the intended efficacy of this conspicuous memento of his social bond with Lievens because, as he wrote in his diary, he did not want to “have any obligation” to the artist.66 If Huygens accepted Rembrandt’s gift, he would have been expected to reciprocate by continuing to promote Rembrandt’s career, to protect him, to embrace and support him as a personal client.67 Whether Huygens accepted Rembrandt’s painting, refused it, or disposed of it, his support after this period apparently dwindled. Reconstructing the circumstances of Rembrandt’s presentation of this gift, however, confers on the Blinding – or whichever canvas was sent – a remarkable ability to embody and affect the personal ties that flowed around and through it. As a result, the painting assumes an active role in describing the relationships between Rembrandt and his patrons. 65 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/4: “[P.S.] Mij heer hangt dit stuck op een starck licht en dat men daer wijt ken afstaen soo salt best voncken.” 66 See Chapter 2, pp. 171-173, and Van der Veen, “Patronage for Lievens’ Portraits and History Pieces, p. 31. 67 Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 51-52, maintains that Rembrandt’s strategy “completely misfired,” and concludes that Huygens must have refused to accept the painting when it arrived in The Hague.

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96. Rembrandt van Rijn. Jan Uytenbogaert (The Goldweigher), 1639. Etching and drypoint, 25.1 × 23 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

A second government official and liefhebber seems to have received another gift from Rembrandt for assisting him in collecting payment from the stadholder.68 In 68 Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, p. 15. Erik Hinterding in Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 35, suggests that the print was commissioned because the copper plate was still in the possession of Uytenbogaert’s descendants in 1760. However, this does not negate the possibility that it was initiated as a gift. See further Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 70-75.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

1639 Rembrandt etched the unusual portrait historié of Johannes (Jan) Uytenbogaert (Fig. 96) who, in his capacity as Receiver-General of Holland in Amsterdam, had provided him with information that resulted in the timely receipt of the Prince’s payment, and thus the funds to make the down payment on his new house.69 The portrait allegorizes the sitter as a beneficent receiver and dispenser of goods in the form of sixteenth-century Northern images of goldweighers or merchants, as its later title, The Goldweigher, acknowledges.70 Rembrandt’s commemoration of Uytenbogaert’s position in this unusual historicizing form, with Uytenbogaert wearing archaic sixteenth-century clothing, gestures pointedly to the sitter’s appreciation for Northern Renaissance art. Uytenboagert was a major collector, especially of works on paper, and owned a famous album of prints by Lucas van Leyden.71 The etching was probably a very special token of the artist’s gratitude, and, unlike the gift Rembrandt offered Huygens, it assumes the form of a personalized tribute. An unusually large number of impressions survive of the first, incomplete state of the plate, which was fully elaborated except for Uytenbogaert’s face. This indicates that Rembrandt printed extra proofs, which perhaps he and even Uytenbogaert himself distributed as rarities within the circles of connoisseurs to which the sitter also belonged.72 An anonymous member of this social network amplified Rembrandt’s pictorial tribute to Uytenbogaert by adding a caption at the bottom register of an impression of the print now in Vienna, which reads: “This is the countenance of your treasurer, whom Astraea has dedicated to her own for twenty years, O Amsterdam.”73 Through Rembrandt’s close contact with Huygens, Uytenbogaert, and connections at the court at The Hague he earlier received a commission for a pair of more conventional gift portraits. In 1632 Constantijn’s older brother, Maurits (Fig. 97), who held the position of secretary to the Council of States, and his artist-friend Jacques de Gheyn III (Fig. 98) – son of the painter, engraver, and draftsman Jacques de Gheyn II, and relative of Uytenbogaert – ordered from Rembrandt companion portraits of themselves. Presumably commissioned jointly, these small, delicately painted portraits memorialized the sitters’ mutual affection through the act of 69 As Rembrandt wrote in the same letter to Huygens on 27 January 1639, Uytenbogaert had volunteered to intercede on his behalf in order to secure the money owed to him for two paintings for the Passion commission. See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1639/4. For Uytenbogaert, who may have known Rembrandt from his Leiden days, see Dudok van Heel, “Mr Johannes Uytenbogaert.” On Rembrandt and Uytenbogaert, see Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 66-88. 70 See in particular Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 78-80. 71 Cornelis and Filedt Kok, “Taste for Lucas van Leyden Prints,” pp. 47-50. 72 Dickey, Portraits in Print, p. 66, and Fucci, Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions, pp. 51-53. Fucci argues convincingly that both Rembrandt and Uytenbogaert should be considered partners or collaborators in the promotion of proof states of the portrait. But it does not necessarily follow, as Fucci asserts, that the print was therefore more likely a commission than a gift. 73 See Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 71, 88 with ill. on p. 254, and Tuynman, “Manuscript Caption.”

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97. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Maurits Huygens, 98. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Jacques de Gheyn 1632. Oil on panel, 31.1 × 24.5 cm. Kunsthalle, Ham- III, 1632. Oil on panel, 29.9 × 24.9 cm. Dulwich Picture burg. Photo: © Leonard de Selva / Bridgeman Images. Gallery, London. Photo: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

gift giving by bequest. De Gheyn stipulated in his will that his portrait be given to Maurits, in whose collection the pendants were reunited at De Gheyn’s death in 1641.74 Friendship portraits of men are rare, and the most famous precedents, as we have seen, were Quentin Metsys’s diptych portraits of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis (Figs. 19, 20), town clerk (griffier) of Antwerp, which the sitters commissioned in 1517 to present to their mutual friend Sir Thomas More in London as a “joint gift.”75 The panels were intended as keepsakes of the three scholars’ affection for one another beyond the grave. Maurits Huygens may have been aware of Metsys’s gift portraits, since Constantijn requested in 1631 that Jan van Brosterhuysen, another artist-friend, find a copy of Erasmus’s letters, which included information about them.76 In any 74 See Bruyn et al., Corpus 2, nos. A 56 and A 57, with related documents. For the close connection between the Huygens and De Gheyn families, who were neighbors in The Hague, see Van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, vol. 1, p. 132, and Blankert et al., A Genius and His Impact, cat. no. 8. De Gheyn also owned Rembrandt’s Two Old Men Disputing (Probably St. Peter and St. Paul; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and Old Man Asleep, Seated by a Fire (Galleria Sabauda, Turin), which he left to Uytenbogaert together with other pictures from his collection. 75 See Campbell et al., “Quentin Matsys,” and Chapter 1, pp. 83-85. 76 Schwartz, Rembrandt, p. 96. For Constantijn’s criticism of Rembrandt’s portrait of De Gheyn as a poor likeness of the sitter (though he did not criticize his brother’s portrait), see ibid, pp. 96-97; Bruyn et al., Corpus 2, no. A 56; and Blankert et al., A Genius and His Impact, cat. no. 8.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

case, Rembrandt’s pendants continue the humanist tradition of exchanging portraits as gifts to sustain friendship bonds. Rembrandt’s unusually small and refined portrait paintings of Maurits and De Gheyn are almost miniature-like tokens to commemorate, reify, and preserve the men’s relationship as intimate friends. Their friendship, similar that of Erasmus, Gillis, and More, would have been shaped by the humanist ethos of amicitia. Renaissance writers like Erasmus had reestablished and revised the ancient ideal of perfect friendship defined by Cicero, among others, as a bond shared by men of exemplary ethical and moral behavior. And Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier of 1528, which praises the affectionate bonds of such friendships as representing “all the good that life holds for us,” helped establish these rarefied ideals of friendship in court settings like The Hague.77

Rembrandt’s Later Gifts Gift giving in Rembrandt’s later career differed from the predominantly courtly, hierarchical exchanges of the 1630s, while at the same time becoming more pronounced and more regular. The courtly circumstances of the stadholder’s commission are somewhat exceptional for Rembrandt, whose sights became more sharply focused on developing a base of patrons and customers among Amsterdam’s patricians and merchants, while also attracting commissions from foreign patrons. As is well known, however, Rembrandt did not achieve complete success in negotiating the networks of patrician collectors in Amsterdam. His troubles can be attributed, in part, to his reputation for delays and intransigence, and probably to his increasing alienation from the idealizing aesthetics being adopted by younger painters, including his former pupils Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol. After the 1640s, Rembrandt’s contacts with collectors at the highest level of society became less frequent, as a contemporary acknowledged in 1679 when he remarked that Rembrandt’s esteem and respect had “somewhat diminished recently.”78 From the 1650s he cultivated lasting relationships with art lovers, dealers, and poets who were predominantly members of the wellto-do middle class.79 The more intimate and regular exchanges characteristic of his more personal patronage relationships in this period are reflected and embodied in 77 Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, p. 125. For early modern friendship portraits, see Cranston, Poetics of Portraiture, pp. 62-72; Bomford, “Rubens and the Value of Friendship”; and Koerner, “Friendship Portraits.” 78 Matthias Scheits’s annotated copy of Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boeck, quoted in Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, pp. 101-102. For the document, see Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden, no. 348. The annotation reads: “hei hielt sein Wohnung t’Amsterdam, wass achtbaer ende groht van aensien door sein konst geworden, het welck doch in ‘t lest mit hem wat verminderde.” 79 For the importance of networks of friends, relatives, and acquaintances to Rembrandt’s career, see Runia and De Witt et al., Rembrandt’s Social Network.

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the innovative works of art, particularly his virtuoso prints, which he designed to circulate within gifting networks. In 1667, two years before Rembrandt’s death, the poet Jeremias de Decker also lavished praise on him for the gift of a painting. The growing importance of gift giving in Rembrandt’s practice and within circles of his collectors reveals that he imaginatively developed the capacity of his art to exercise agency in forming and consolidating assemblies of art lovers.

Rembrandt’s Gift Drawings and Jan Six The intimacy of address that became a hallmark of the works Rembrandt conceived to function as gifts within circles of liefhebbers shares important affinities with the gift drawing, a distinct category of art discussed in previous chapters. Rembrandt participated in the custom of gifting drawings by contributing sketches to three friendship books, or alba amicorum, volumes containing drawings, emblems, coats of arms, and dedicatory verses by the owner’s contacts, acquaintances, and intimates.80 Extremely popular in the seventeenth century, especially among educated young men from the Netherlands and Northern Europe, they functioned in some respects as the social media of their day.81 Rembrandt’s alba amicorum drawings, like the literary contributions to the volumes, can be considered analogous to the occasional verses that were commonly offered spontaneously by and for friends and associates. Rembrandt’s earliest gift drawing, dated 1634, appears in the album of Burchard Grossmann the Younger and depicts a bearded man with hands clasped (Fig. 99). On the facing page Rembrandt inscribed and signed on 18 June 1634: Een vroom gemoet / acht eer voor goet (“A pious mind places honor above wealth”), thus characterizing the dignified man he drew as an embodiment of piety and virtue.82 Grossmann, an educated man from Jena who visited the Netherlands twice, seems to have encountered Rembrandt at the house of the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh, Rembrandt’s business partner, landlord, and soon-to-be relative (after his 1634 marriage to Hendrick’s cousin Saskia Uylenburgh). Although usually identified as 80 For Rembrandt’s alba amicorum drawings, see in particular Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style,” pp. 487-494. For a succinct overview, see Noorman, “Rembrandt in Friendship Books.” 81 On alba amicorum, see Chapter 2, pp. 192-193; Thomassen, ed., Alba amicorum; Wilson, “Social Networking”; De Schepper et al., In vriendschap verbonden; Georgievska-Shine, “Album Amicorum and the Kaleidoscope of the Self”; Woodall, “For Love and Money”; and Bass, Insect Artifice, pp. 82-108. 82 For the drawing and the inscription, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. no. 1634/6; Broos, “Review of Rembrandt Documents,” pp. 252, 254; Schwartz, Rembrandt, pp. 186-188, 369; Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, pp. 105, 152, n. 40; Thomassen, ed., Alba amicorum, pp. 80-81; Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style,” p. 489; Van der Veen, “Hendrick Uylenburgh,” pp. 52-53; and especially Rifkin, “Rembrandt and Burchard Grossmann the Younger.” I am grateful to Joshua Rifkin for sharing his article in advance of its publication.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

99. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of an Old Man, 1634, drawing from Burchard Grossmann’s album amicorum (II), fol. 233r-v. Pen and brush and brown ink, 8.9 × 71 cm. Inscribed on verso: “Een vroom gemoet acht eer voor goet / Rembrandt / Amsterdam 1634.” Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

a merchant, Grossmann was a cultivated figure with real interest in the visual arts and music.83 Grossmann’s friendship book contains many drawings contributed by German artists, as well inscriptions from academics, including the Dutch philologer and poet Daniel Heinsius, whom he met in Leiden on his first stay in the Dutch Republic in 1629. Joshua Rifkin speculates that Grossmann may have also met Rembrandt in Leiden, where the young artist was recognized as something of a local celebrity. Upon his return to the Netherlands Grossmann sought Rembrandt out in Amsterdam, where he received a small gift of the drawing and the epigram honoring virtue and devotion. Whether or not he had met him earlier, Rembrandt Rifkin notes, must have considered Grossmann a worthy recipient of his gift. The connection between Rembrandt and Jacob Heyblocq, a teacher at Amsterdam’s Latin school for whose album amicorum Rembrandt boldly sketched Simeon’s Song of Praise in 1661 (Fig. 100), remains as obscure as his link with Grossmann.84 In contrast to Grossmann, however, Heyblocq was a well-connected member of Amsterdam’s cultural circles, and his album is embellished with literary and pictorial contributions from poets, scholars, and prominent artists. One member of this circle, identified variously as the actor-poet A. B. de Leeu or the poet A. Liezanus, penned 83 Rifkin, “Rembrandt and Burchard Grossmann the Younger,” pp. 29-30. 84 For the Heyblocq album, see Wybe de Kruyter, “Jacobus Heyblocq’s Album amicorum”; Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style,” pp. 488-489; and Thomassen and Gruys, eds., Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq. For the album’s drawings, see Noorman, “Drawings Collection in the Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq.”

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verses on the facing page of Rembrandt’s sketch, likening Heyblocq to the pious Simeon whose faith is rewarded with a sighting of the Christian Messiah: “Which teaches that true believers never need fear death […] / What, then, o Heijblock, can be of greater comfort?”85 Rembrandt’s depiction of Simeon’s reception of the divine gift of his promised savior may allude to his own gift of the drawing to Heyblocq.86 In any case, Rembrandt’s rough, sketchy technique is a virtuoso performance of his late, self-consciously “plain style” of draftsmanship.87 Unlike the sketches gifted to Grossmann and Heyblocq, which are Rembrandt’s first and last known contributions to friendship books, his two more elaborate drawings for Jan Six’s album Pandora of 1652 (Figs. 101, 102) are personal tokens of appreciation for an important patron and liefhebber with whom he maintained close ties from the later 1640s through the mid-1650s.88 The album, comprised of written and drawn gifts to Six from friends and notables, is aptly named for the mythical woman showered with gifts by the Olympian gods. Rembrandt sketched two classical scenes for the album – Homer Reciting Verses and Minerva in her Study – in reference to Six’s veneration of ancient literature in addition to art. Six was a deeply cultured man who took a Grand Tour of Italy from 1641 to 1643, and built up a magnificent library filled with books and manuscripts of ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary literature as well as publications on art – including Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck, at least three editions of Vasari’s Lives, and Lomazzo’s Idea del tempio della pittura.89 Born into a Huguenot émigré family that had established a successful cloth-dying and silk-weaving business, Six withdrew from his mercantile beginnings to devote himself to a life of leisure and the arts. He became a noted connoisseur who amassed an acclaimed collection of art and antiquities, which the amateur draftsman and classicist theorist Jan de Bisschop used to illustrate his Signorum veterum icones of 1668-1669 and Paradigmata graphices variorum artificum of 1671. Six was also an amateur poet and playwright for whose tragedy Medea of 1648 Rembrandt etched The Wedding of Jason and Creusa as a frontispiece (Fig. 103). His career in municipal politics began with his appointment as an Amsterdam commissioner in 1656, facilitated in part by his father-in-law the burgomaster and physician Nicolaes 85 See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1661/3. 86 I owe this suggestion to Walter Melion. 87 See Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style.” 88 For Rembrandt’s relationship with Six, see in particular Smith, “Privacy and the Gentlemanly Ideal”; Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 57-60; De Winkel, Fashion and Fancy, pp. 93-132; and Rembrandt en Jan Six. For the drawings, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1652/1; Bevers et al., The Master and His Workshop, cat. no. 31 a & b; and Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style.” For the Pandora album, see Möller, “Het album Pandora.” 89 Six, Catalogus, cited in Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style,” p. 493. Six was particularly devoted to Homer, whose works he owned in at least nine editions in various languages. On Six’s book collection, see Roodenburg, “Elegant Dutch?,” p. 270.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

100. Rembrandt van Rijn, Simeon’s Song of Praise, 1661, drawing from Jacob Heyblocq’s album amicorum, fol. 61r. Pen and brush and brown ink and white body-color, 12 × 8.9 cm. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

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101. Rembrandt van Rijn, Homer Reciting Verses, 1652, drawing from Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album, fol. 40r. Pen and brown ink, 26.5 × 19 cm. Six Collection, Amsterdam. Photo: Six Collection.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

102. Rembrandt van Rijn, Minerva in her Study, 1652, drawing from Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album, fol. 42r. Pen and brush and brown ink, 26.5 × 19 cm. Six Collection, Amsterdam. Photo: Six Collection.

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103. Rembrandt van Rijn, Medea, or The Wedding of Jason and Creusa, 1648. Etching, 24 × 17.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

Tulp, subject of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp of 1632 (see Fig. 56), whose daughter Margarita he married in 1655. In 1691 Six himself occupied the post of burgomaster of the city. Rembrandt was clearly familiar with the young patrician’s literary and artistic passions. The drawing Homer Reciting Verses (Fig. 101), which Rembrandt inscribed with a dedication to Six using the Latinized form of his name, “Joanus Six,” makes an appeal to Six’s connoisseurial expertise with a quotation of Marcantonio Raimondi’s famous engraving after Raphael’s fresco The Assembly of the Gods on Mount Parnassus, which Six would have seen in Rome.90 Rembrandt’s drawings in Six’s gift album are thus evidence of his relationship with Six not so much as a client but as an intimate, forming part of a dialogue between patron and artist out of which also emerged the celebrated portrait etching of Six of 1647 (Fig. 104) and the spectacular painting of 1654 (Fig. 105), Rembrandt’s only painted portrait to remain in the possession of a sitter’s descendants. Six’s etched portrait, as we will explore further below, was designed to circulate as a gift within his network of personal contacts and fellow art lovers. Rembrandt’s unusually fluid and virtuosic handling of the brush in the 1654 portrait must have dazzled Six. Presumably Six also would have been delighted by Rembrandt’s characterization of him in the portrait as a contemplative gentleman dressed in the stylish equestrian attire of a country squire, with his redcoat draped casually over his shoulder. Six was actively cultivating this persona in the years following his purchase of the country manor Elsbroek in 1651.91 The distinctive and highly personalized character of Rembrandt’s homage to Six in this large-scale portrait is a self-consciously bravura artistic performance reflective of the sophistication of both its maker and sitter. The extraordinary passages of broad, apparently spontaneous brushwork embody, as Eddy de Jongh argued, the effortlessness that Castiglione termed sprezzatura and was translated into Dutch as lossigheydt (“looseness”), a social and artistic ideal cultivated among early modern elites, including Six.92 The painting also seems not have originated as 90 Bevers et al., The Master and His Workshop, cat. no. 31 a & b. See also Courtright, “Rembrandt’s Late Drawing Style,” p. 485. 91 De Winkel, Fashion and Fancy, pp. 98-132. 92 De Jongh, “Spur of Wit”; idem, “Review of Bob Haak,” pp. 67-68; Smith, “Privacy and the Gentlemanly Ideal”; Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Manner,” p. 16; idem, The Painter at Work, pp. 160-163; and Weststeijn, Visible World, pp. 240-241. The first Dutch translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), published by Lambert van den Bos in 1662, was dedicated to Jan Six. De Jongh also notes that Six, who owned Rembrandt’s grisaille St. John the Baptist Preaching (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), was the first connoisseur in Amsterdam to collect oil sketches. De Winkel, Fashion and Fancy, pp. 124-150, however, links Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura with a broader and longer development of taste in the arts and fashion. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, p. 93, implausibly interprets the painting’s swift strokes as traces of “a sitter who got away” from Rembrandt’s authoritative control of his studio.

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104. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Six, 1647. Etching, drypoint, and engraving, printed on Japan paper, 24.5 × 19.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

105. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Six, 1654. Oil on canvas, 112 × 102 cm. Six Collection, Amsterdam. Photo: Six Collection.

a typical commission, as Paul Crenshaw proposed. Rembrandt had borrowed 1000 guilders from Six in 1653, but we know from later documents that the amount of the debt was never reduced. If Six had commissioned the portrait, the loan would likely have been halved, given Rembrandt’s customary fee of about 500 guilders for a painting of this size during these years.93 If this supposition is correct, Rembrandt 93 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, p. 57.

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initiated the portrait as a gift to convey his gratitude to and closeness with Six. Like Rembrandt’s gift of a monumental painting to Huygens 15 years earlier, Six’s portrait may have been intended to reinforce and materialize the personal ties that bound the artist and dilettante together in a relationship that transcended the norms of conventional patronage. But even if the gift secured Rembrandt temporary reprieve from his obligation to Six, it failed to sustain their relationship. By 1656 Six had transferred Rembrandt’s promissory note of 1000 guilders, presumably in anticipation of the artist’s application for protection from creditors by declaring cessio bonorum in July of that year.94 Six’s marriage in 1655 to the daughter of the orthodox Calvinist burgomaster Nicolaes Tulp and his appointment in the same year as Commissioner of Marital Affairs, a minor position that marked his entry into public life, probably compelled him eventually to dissociate himself from Rembrandt, whose extramarital relationship with the pregnant Hendrickje Stoffels, condemned by the Calvinist Church Council in 1654, had become a public embarrassment.95

Rembrandt’s Prints as Gifts During the 1650s and again in the early 1660s, the period identified as the highpoint of Rembrandt’s printmaking career, he created highly inventive and technically experimental prints that brought the intimate address of gift drawings to the more public arena of art. Rembrandt directed this intimacy of address primarily to comparatively small networks of art lovers, designating for these privileged circuits of exchange the most desirable and exclusive impressions, printed on rare and expensive supports. In contrast to the marketing techniques typically adopted by printmakers, who sought broad distribution for their works, Rembrandt increasingly focused on the production of luxuriously exclusive editions. Moreover, he reportedly negotiated the transfer of some prints to this discerning audience of liefhebbers not in the form of sales, but as gifts. A very old tradition, probably dating to the early eighteenth century, has it that the famous Hundred Guilder Print (Christ Healing the Sick, Fig. 106) was originally exchanged as a gift between Rembrandt and his intimates.96 On the verso of a first-state impression on Japan paper in the Rijksmuseum is an old Dutch inscription 94 Ibid, p. 60. Six sold the note to the merchant Gerbrand Ornia, who in 1657 forced Lodewijck van Ludick, Rembrandt’s guarantor, to assume the debt, which was passed on to Herman Becker. See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1657/3. 95 Dudok van Heel, “Rembrandt,” p. 28, and Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 58-61. 96 Barbara Welzel first drew attention to this tradition in Bevers et al., The Master and His Workshop, cat. no. 27.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

106. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Hundred Guilder Print (Christ Healing the Sick), ca. 1648. Etching and drypoint, first state, 28.2 × 39.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

referring to the print as being traded by “my special friend” Rembrandt for an impression of Marcantonio Raimondi’s The Plague (La Pesta).97 Another French inscription, dating from the eighteenth century, elaborates by attributing the rarity of The Hundred Guilder Print to Rembrandt’s distribution of only a limited number of impressions among his friends, noting that not one was sold on the market in Rembrandt’s time.98 Ironically the print’s popular title, which refers to 97 The inscription on the reverse of an impression in the Rijksmuseum reads: “Vereering van mijn speciaele/ vriend Rembrand, tegens de / Pest van M. Antony” (Traded from my special friend Rembrandt for the Plague by Marcantonio). See Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden, no. 266, where it is attributed to the art dealer and collector Jan Pietersz Zomer. Dudok van Heel, “Jan Pietersz. Zomer,” p. 98, rejects the identification. 98 The inscription is transcribed in Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 61: “Rembrand Amoureux d’une / Estampe de M.A. savoir la / Peste, que son ami J. Pz. Zoomer, avoir de fort belle / Impression, & ne pouvant / l’Engager à lui vendre, / Lui fit present, pour l’avoir / de Cette Estampe-ci, plus- / rares & plus Curieux Encore / que l’Estampe l’on Nome [?] / de Hondert Guldens Print, par / les Addition dans Clair obscur / qu’il y a dans Celle-ci, / don’t il n’y a eu, suivant le raport / qui m’en Ete fait, que tres peu d’Impressions, don’t / Aucune n’a jamais été vendûe / dutemps de Rembrand, mais / distribuées entre ses amis” (“Rembrandt, in love with a print by Marcantonio known as the Plague, of which his friend J. Pz Zomer had a very beautiful impression, and could not be convinced to sell it to him, made a present to have it of this print, rarer and more curious than the print one calls [?] the Hundred Guilder Print, by the

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its exceptionally high market value of 100 guilders (a fact already acknowledged in Rembrandt’s lifetime as extraordinary, if not excessive), deflects from its original, apparently very different circumstances of exchange.99 Arent de Gelder’s unusual Collector with Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print (Self-Portrait?, Fig. 107) also links the print to exclusive conditions of production and reception.100 While sometimes identified as a self-portrait, the painting is more likely a portrait of an unknown collector holding an impression of The Hundred Guilder Print and turning to the viewer as if engaged in an intimate discussion of Rembrandt’s artistry. De Gelder, who came from an affluent Dordrecht family and did not have to sell his paintings to make a living, also belonged to the exclusive group of collectors that Rembrandt cultivated in these years.101 The virtuoso Hundred Guilder Print assumes and addresses this devoted audience of liefhebbers; they would have appreciated Rembrandt’s unprecedented synthesis of the various verses of Chapter 19 of Matthew’s Gospel, among other sources, into a unified narrative scene and the display of the extraordinary range of his printmaking skills, from light sketch-like touches to elaborate detail and velvety chiaroscuro effects.102 Inscriptions by Rembrandt on a few other prints also seem to confirm that individuated impressions were presented to an inner sanctum of collectors. On the back of a superb seventh-state impression of Christ Presented to the People on Japan paper in the Lugt Collection (Fig. 108), for example, Rembrandt wrote in red chalk “Kattenburgh,” referring either to the Amsterdam collector and art dealer Dirck van Kattenburgh or his brother Otto.103 And a second-state impression on additions in the chiaroscuro that are in this one, of which, according to a report made to me, there were not but very few impressions made, of which not one was ever sold in Rembrandt’s time, but distributed among his friends”). 99 The print’s title appears to have originated in Rembrandt’s lifetime. Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 61, and Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, pp. 60-61, cite a 1654 letter from Jan Meyssens of Antwerp to Charles Vanden Bosch, Bishop of Bruges: “Also available here [in Antwerp] is the most remarkable print by Rembrandt, in which Christ is healing the sick, and I know that it has been sold several times in Holland for 100 guilders and more; and it is as large as this sheet of paper [on which the letter is written], very fine and lovely, but ought to cost 30 guilders. It is very beautiful and pure.” For the letter, see Van den Bussche, “Un évéque bibliophile,” pp. 358-359. 100 Noted by Welzel in Bevers et al., The Master and His Workshop, cat. no. 27. For De Gelder’s painting, see Arent de Gelder, cat. no. 42. 101 For De Gelder, see in particular John Loughman, “Arent de Gelder,” and Van der Veen, “Rembrandt’s Late Pupils,” pp. 37-39. 102 On The Hundred Guilder Print, see in particular Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 61. For a recent interpretation of the print’s religious imagery, see Crenshaw, “Beyond Matthew 19.” 103 Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 78 , and idem, Rembrandt Etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, vol. 2, cat. no. 62a. Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, p. 175, n. 102, suggests that Rembrandt may have presented the print as a gift to Dirck van Kattenburgh in thanks for facilitating a financial arrangement

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

107. Arent de Gelder, Portrait of a Collector with Rembrandt’s 100 Guilder Print (Self-Portrait?), after 1685. Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 64.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / Photo: Pavel Demidov.

with his brother Otto in 1655. According to the testimony of the landscape painter Allart van Everdingen and his son Cornelis, Rembrandt’s Simeon (National Museum, Stockholm), which was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1669, belonged to Dirck van Kattenburgh. Rembrandt also told Van Everdingen that he was working on etching plates for Van Kattenburgh that would depict the Passion of Christ. See Van de Wetering, Corpus 6, no. 324. For the document, see Bredius, “Uit Rembrandts laatste levenjaar.”

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108. Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Presented to the People, 1655. Drypoint with plate tone, printed on Japan paper, seventh state, 35.9 × 45.1 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

Japan paper of Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside Her (in Washington, Fig. 109) is inscribed Voor ‘t Chirurg (“For the surgeon”), indicating that perhaps this was intended for the surgeon Arnout Tholinx, whom Rembrandt had portrayed in both a portrait etching (Fig. 110) and a painting (Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris) in about 1656.104 It is also possible that Rembrandt inscribed an impression of his Self-Portrait, Etching at a Window (Fig. 111) in 1649 for Jan Six, who in 1655 became Tholinx’s brother-in-law.105 Perhaps some collectors were even presented with customized impressions elaborated with passages of drawing.106 On at least four 104 For the inscription, see White and Boon, Rembrandt’s Etchings, vol. 1, p. 97, where it is suggested, implausibly, that Rembrandt presented the print to the surgeons’ guild in thanks for allowing him access to their facilities to draw from the nude. See, further, Williams et al., Rembrandt’s Women, cat. no. 128. For Rembrandt and Tholinx, see Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 82; Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 141-142; and Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, p. 60. For Tholinx’s life, see Van Tol, “Een portret.” 105 Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, p. 243, n. 13, citing an impression of the 1648 etching inscribed “Six 1649” in the Edward Rydge sale (Christie’s, 16 December 1924). 106 Rassieur, “Looking over Rembrandt’s Shoulder,” p. 60, n. 67.

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impressions of the first state of Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill of 1639 (Fig. 54) Rembrandt added architectural features in black chalk that he never introduced to the plate itself. Traces of Rembrandt’s personalized exchanges of prints among collectors with whom he enjoyed close relations may also be found in titles that continue to be used for certain prints: Christ Preaching from about 1657 (Fig. 112) is still known as La Petite Tombe (La Tombe’s little plate), as it was called by Edmé-François Gersaint in the first published catalogue of Rembrandt’s prints of 1751.107 Gersaint followed an older tradition, dating back to the 1679 inventory of Rembrandt’s copperplates in the possession of Clement de Jonghe, the Amsterdam print and map dealer whom Rembrandt portrayed in a portrait etching in 1651 (Fig. 113), where it is listed as Latombisch plaatjen.108 The print’s traditional title most likely refers to the art lover, dealer, bookbinder, and graphic artist Pieter de la Tombe, who was one of the artist’s intimates and supporters in these years and is mentioned in several documents dating from the period 1650–1658.109 Rembrandt is recorded as having painted him twice, both as a young man and at a more advanced age. An unusual, large-scale and freely painted portrait from 1667 in the Mauritshuis (Fig. 114) may be Rembrandt’s second, “elderly” portrait of De la Tombe, when he was 70 years old. The picture’s distinctive cropped composition and the sitter’s extremely casual presentation suggest that it is a friend-portrait, quite possibly of De la Tombe.110 The dissemination of these impressions in personalized, non-commercial circuits of exchange is a revealing feature of Rembrandt’s later art. Erik Hinterding’s watermark research has clarified that Rembrandt focused his production on two 107 Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné, cat. no. 66, cited in Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 68. Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, pp. 140-141, justifiably dates the print somewhat later than most earlier cataloguers, who dated it to 1652. 108 See Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 68. For Clement de Jonghe’s inventory, see Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden, no. 346; De Hoop Scheffer and Boon, “De inventarislijst”; and De Hoop Scheffer, “Nogmaals de inventarislijst.” See further Roscam Abbing, “Drie Rembrandt-titels.” 109 Van Gelder and Van der Veen, “A Collector’s Cabinet,” pp. 65, 144, and Van Eeghen, “De Familie de la Tombe.” For the documents, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1650/4; doc. 1656/12, no. 109; doc. 1658/27. The plate may also have been commissioned by Pieter’s relative Nicolaes de la Tombe, as is suggested in Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 68. 110 The painting has also been identified, less persuasively, as a portrait of Lodewijck van Ludick, who was one of Rembrandt’s contacts during his later years. See Dudok van Heel, “Rembrandt,” p. 26, and Broos and Van Suchtelen et al., Portraits in the Mauritshuis, p. 219. But Van Ludick, who suffered a substantial loss due to Rembrandt’s inability to repay a loan that he was forced to assume as guarantor, was not in a financial position to commission a portrait in 1667, and moreover was not likely to have been on friendly terms with the artist by that date. See Bikker and Weber et al., The Late Works, pp. 208-211. For the more compelling identification of the painting as De la Tombe, proposed by Jaap van der Veen and endorsed by Ernst van de Wetering, see Van de Wetering, Corpus 6, no. 316. Van de Wetering further notes that the picture’s inexpensive materials and canvas support the idea that the picture was painted for a friend.

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109. Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside Her, 1658. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 15.8 × 12.7 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

discrete groups of print collectors or markets: The highly discriminating customer and the more anonymous buyer.111 Deluxe, early state impressions of later prints 111 Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, esp. pp. 118-124, 144-145, and idem, “Watermark Research.” For additional remarks on Rembrandt’s later printmaking and his exclusive circles of collectors, see

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

110. Rembrandt van Rijn, Arnout Tholinx, ca. 1656. Etching, engraving, and drypoint, 19.7 × 14.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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111. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait Etching at a Window, 1648. Etching and drypoint, 16 × 13 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

112. Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe), ca. 1657. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 15.5 × 20.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

such as the drypoints The Three Crosses of 1653 (Fig. 115) and Christ Presented to the People of 1655 (Fig. 108) – printed with varied amounts of surface tone and rich accents of drypoint burr and often on Japan, China, or India paper or vellum to enhance their pictorial effects – would have been available only to a small network of admirers. Woman at the Bath with a Hat Beside Her from 1658 (Fig. 109) and other plates were even printed exclusively or almost exclusively on these luxurious and expensive supports. The number of states also grew dramatically, indicating that in his later graphic art Rembrandt increasingly cultivated a select and discerning audience for early, experimental states. The many extra impressions of Rembrandt’s trial-proof states that are preserved – such as the first incomplete state of Saint Francis Beneath a Tree Praying (Fig. 116), which is printed on vellum and even signed and dated 1657 – also reveal that he was encouraging these collectors to become witnesses to his creative process.112 Woman at the Bath with Hat Beside Her, where a partially undressed model sits unselfconsciously next to a man’s hat, even seems Luijten, “Rembrandt the Printmaker,” pp. 17-22. 112 See Luijten, “Rembrandt the Printmaker,” p. 21; Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, pp. 342-343; and especially Rassieur, “Looking over Rembrandt’s Shoulder,” pp. 57-58.

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113. Rembrandt van Rijn, Clement de Jonghe, 1651. Etching printed on Japan paper, 20.5 × 16.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

114. Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of an Elderly Man (Pieter de la Tombe?), 1667. Oil on canvas, 81.9 × 67.7 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

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115. Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Crucified between Two Thieves: The Three Crosses, 1653. Drypoint printed on vellum, second state, 38.1 × 43.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

to offer this group of familiars privileged, discreet access to the private world of Rembrandt’s studio.113 Embedding Rembrandt’s works in a structure of intimate relations with collectors thus allows us to recognize self-conscious features designed to initiate a reciprocal exchange with attentive beholders, who originally were liefhebbers. The sensitivity and knowledge of these connoisseurs derived from regular visits to artists’ studios to acquire the cultural credentials considered an attribute of the cultivated burgher.114 This alliance between painters and liefhebbers in the Republic, which Ernst van de Wetering aptly calls “symbiotic,” not only propelled artists’ careers but also stimulated 113 As Honig, “Space of Gender,” p. 192, perceptively remarks, Rembrandt “allows us an inappropriate view of the woman in a state of pre-aestheticized privacy.” 114 See Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Beginnings,” esp. pp. 27-32; Roodenburg, “Visiting Vermeer”; Tummers, Eye of the Connoisseur, pp. 165-180; Weststeijn, Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain, pp. 197-206; Chapman and Weststeijn, “Connoisseurship as Knowledge,” pp. 26-31; and Blanc, “Mettre des mots sur l’art.”

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

116. Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint Francis Beneath a Tree Praying, 1657. Drypoint, printed with light plate tone on Japan paper, first state, 18 × 24.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

the creation of a number of pictorial studio visits, including Frans van Mieris’s In the Artist’s Studio (Fig. 117).115 These cultured and knowledgeable elites were themselves often proficient practitioners who had learned the basic principles of painting and draftsmanship, as we shall see in the next chapter. When these art lovers received Rembrandt’s prints in the form of gifts, the works’ intimacy of address must have been magnified, giving them compelling agency in creating and sustaining the social ties that revolved around their presentation, reception, and display. It is significant that Rembrandt’s creative embrace of gift exchange and the intimate address it involves intensified during the period leading up to his filing for bankruptcy protection in 1656. In the earlier part of his career, Rembrandt practiced printmaking as a good businessman would, often reprinting from older plates to meet market demand. Yet Rembrandt’s reprintings ceased abruptly two years before his insolvency, indicating that he had either sold or transferred his etching plates, a number of which were those listed in Clement de Jonghe’s possession in 1679.116 Presumably in response 115 For Dutch paintings of studio visits, see Yeager-Crasselt, “Knowledge and Practice Pictured,” and Doherty, “Painting Connoisseurship.” 116 Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, pp. 133-144.

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117. Frans van Mieris, In the Artist’s Studio, ca. 1655-1657. Oil on panel, 63.9 × 46.8 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden / Bridgeman Images.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

to financial pressures, Rembrandt immersed himself in the production of new and highly ambitious plates like The Three Crosses (Fig. 115) and Christ Presented to the People (Fig. 108), and the Passion series. But rather than prioritizing the broad distribution of relatively uniform editions to maximize sales, as might be expected, Rembrandt concentrated on satisfying and nurturing the discriminating, exclusive end of his market with etchings and drypoints such as these, often issued in multiple states that register his ongoing creative process. If his practice as a printmaker previously conformed more to that of a businessman, by 1654, as Hinterding puts it, “Rembrandt appears to have been more like a connoisseur.”117 No doubt these exclusive editions were expensive and difficult to procure for those not part of Rembrandt’s inner circle. Similarly Rembrandt’s printed portraits of Thomas Jacobsz and his cousin Pieter Haaringh (Figs. 118, 119), which he likely gave to these auctioneers in 1655 in exchange for assistance with the private sale of his art collection in the months before and after filing for bankruptcy protection, cannot be reduced to pecuniary motivations alone.118 Rembrandt’s unusual execution of these portraits in fragile drypoint worked up with a burin, which would yield only a limited number of good impressions, made them unsuitable for broad distribution. While impractical, the exceptional technique gave the prints an aura of exclusivity. Both Haaringhs were connoisseurs and collectors as well as auctioneers, and would have valued the prints’ delicate aesthetic qualities despite their limited practicality. Thomas, concierge of the Desolate Boedelskamer (Bankruptcy Chamber) for Amsterdam, was, according to his will, a liefhebber of graphic art, while Pieter, receiver for the Amsterdam Weeskamer (Orphan’s Chamber), bequeathed to his son Jacob portraits of himself, including Rembrandt’s copperplate. Rembrandt would have come into contact with Pieter as early as 1639, when Pieter acted as auctioneer of paintings from the estate of Lucas van Uffel and during which Rembrandt recorded the sale of Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione for an astonishing 3500 guilders.119 Pieter also seems to have commissioned from Rembrandt unusual and magnificent pendant paintings of himself and his wife, Lysbet Jansdr Delft, in the early 1660s (Figs. 120, 121).120 If so, Rembrandt showed Pieter as a connoisseur of paintings 117 Ibid, p. 144. 118 Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, p. 17, and Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 62-63, 68. 119 Thomas Haaringh’s will indicates that he was a connoisseur of graphic art. See Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, p. 62, and Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 81. The 1707 inventory of Pieter Haaringh’s son Jacob, which includes paintings and prints of his father, also lists “A copper plate being the portrait of my father,” suggesting that the plate remained in the family. For Pieter as auctioneer of the Raphael portrait, see Liedtke, Dutch Paintings, vol. 2, p. 699. 120 Liedtke, Dutch Paintings, vol. 2, pp. 698-699, endorsed by Van de Wetering, Corpus 6, nos. 310, 311. For Pieter’s portrait Rembrandt may have been inspired by and wanted to allude to Raphael’s portrait of

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118. Rembrandt van Rijn, Thomas Haaringh, ca. 1655. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 19.6 × 15 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

119. Rembrandt van Rijn, Pieter Haaringh, 1655. Etching and drypoint printed on Japan paper, 19.6 × 14.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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120. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man with a Magnifying Glass (Pieter Haaringh?), ca. 1655. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 74.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

and luxury goods by portraying him holding a magnifying glass, introducing a gilded frame behind his wife, and dressing the couple in “antique” or imaginary Castiglione, which he had witnessed Pieter auction in 1639. X-ray photographs show that the painting initially resembled more closely Raphael’s composition, with Pieter’s hands clasped and resting on a parapet.

Rembrandt’s Art as Gift 

121. Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman with a Pink (Elizabeth Delft?), ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 74.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

Renaissance clothing. Pieter probably also provided Rembrandt with legal and personal assistance during the artist’s financial crisis.121 Like his other drypoints 121 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, p. 68.

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from the same years, Rembrandt’s portraits of the Haaringhs are personalized objects conceived to appeal to rarified tastes and fulfill discrete purposes, rather than conventional prints that could be put to use in broadly circulating the men’s social or professional positions. Even works directly associated with Rembrandt’s attempt to mitigate his money problems defy explanation based on f inancial considerations alone. Evidently Rembrandt recognized that the flexibility and mobility of the print facilitated the spontaneous presentations required by the ethics of the gift. The medium’s reproducibility and relatively modest price compared to painting and its intimate size made it ideally suited for gift giving, and Rembrandt’s increasing focus on deluxe, individuated impressions and technically unusual prints undoubtedly enhanced the appeal of receiving one of his presentations. In embracing prints as a way to conduct personalized relations with an inner sanctum of liefhebbers, Rembrandt apparently sought to evade the alienation and taint of commercial transactions and deepen social ties with his collectors. Nicolas Poussin, as discussed in Chapter 1, similarly preferred to present his works as exchanges of friendship, not money (though, as with Rembrandt, money certainly was exchanged).122 Rembrandt’s withdrawal of himself and a segment of his art from the restrictive calculus of economic or utilitarian logic and relations – his defiance of the economics of conventional artistic patronage – must have been particularly poignant to both himself and his patrons in the increasingly market-oriented economy of early capitalist Holland.

Rembrandt’s Printed Portraits as Gifts Portrait prints like the Haaringh drypoints form a distinct category in Rembrandt’s art, and were intended for circulation as gifts that fostered intimate, non-commercial relations and personal attachments. There are 17 apart from self-portraits, and Rembrandt was personally associated with most of the sitters. The prints comprise a more limited social profile than his painted portraits, which depict men and women from a broad range of social, professional, and confessional backgrounds. The sitters of Rembrandt’s printed portraits are exclusively men who belonged primarily to the circle of his personal contacts, fellow artists, dealers, and liefhebbers, and include members of his inner sanctum (see Figs. 104, 113, 118, 119, 123).123 Most 122 For Poussin’s cultivation of his patrons as friends, see Chapter 1, pp. 73-75, and Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, pp. 177-215. 123 On Rembrandt’s portrait prints, see in particular Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, and Dickey, Portraits in Print.

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of these men were not public figures of whom portrait prints were normally made and circulated. The strikingly informal imagery Rembrandt developed especially for his later portrait prints constituted and sustained the intimacy of his relations with the men, and some prints were clearly conceived to fulfill a private role in the relations among his familiars. In this sense, the group parallels friendship portraits made and presented by artists to initiate, sustain, or enhance professional or social bonds. Hendrick Goltzius, as we have seen, participated in the tradition with highly finished drawings of artists he met during his trip to Italy that were likely presented as personal gifts or mementoes (Fig. 82). Rembrandt adapted the conventions of friendship portraits in prints of his inner circle of contacts and collectors, enlisting printmaking to expand his networks of affiliation through their distribution. Portrait prints were phenomenally popular in seventeenth-century Holland, and normally featured inscriptions in margins below the image so as to secure the sitter’s identity in their widespread circulation. Most of Rembrandt’s portrait prints, however, lack the customary margins bearing identifying captions, indicating that they were designed for distribution as gifts within inner circles of personal contacts and intimates.124 Although the vast majority of portrait prints in this period were engravings, Rembrandt executed his portrait prints in the more delicate techniques of etching and drypoint, making them ill-suited for broad distribution.125 The relative impracticality of Rembrandt’s etched portraits is demonstrated in an episode from 1665 when the artist’s son Titus, anxious to secure a commission for his father, claimed that Rembrandt could engrave a portrait of Dr. Jan Antonides van der Linden (Fig. 122) to serve as a frontispiece for the physician’s posthumous edition of Hippocrates. Despite the stipulation that Rembrandt produce an engraving, which would be less susceptible to wear, he delivered an etching, which explains why the print was never used in the publication.126 The formality and conventionality of the portrait of Van der Linden, which resulted from relying on a prototype by another artist, also sets it apart from Rembrandt’s normally highly unconventional portrait etchings. Rembrandt’s etched portrait of the print publisher Clement de Jonghe of 1651 (Fig. 113), who possessed a large number of Rembrandt’s etching plates by 1679 and may have been a friend, typifies the latter group with its striking

124 Ekkart, Introduction in Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, esp. pp. 13-14. 125 That Rembrandt printed an unusually large number of proof states of these portraits on a variety of supports, including Japan paper and vellum, further suggests the works’ exclusive circuits of exchange. See Fucci, Rembrandt’s Changing Impressions, esp. pp. 22-24. 126 See Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, pp. 84-87, and Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 159-162. Notarial documents from 1665 record Titus’s conversation with the book’s publishers Daniel and Abraham van Gaasbeeck in Leiden in 1664. See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1665/5, doc. 1665/6.

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122. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Antonides van der Linden, 1665. Etching, drypoint, and burin, 17.3 × 10.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

informality.127 In a sparse setting with no allusion to his identity or trade, De Jonghe 127 Although the identity of the sitter in the portrait has been questioned in the past, an inscription dating from Rembrandt’s lifetime corroborates that the man is Clement de Jonghe. Dated 1668, the inscription is on the back of an impression of the print owned at the time by the Parisian print dealer Pierre Mariette II; he probably also penned the inscription: “Clement de Johnge [sic] marchand de tailles douces a Amsterdam.” See Hinterding et al., Rembrandt the Printmaker, cat. no. 66, and Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, pp. 141-142.

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123. Rembrandt van Rijn, Abraham Francen, ca. 1657. Etching, drypoint, and engraving, printed with plate tone on Japan paper, 15.8 × 21 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

is not formally posed but casually seated on a simple wooden chair, still wearing his hat, cloak, and gloves, as if he has just entered Rembrandt’s studio from the outdoors. Rembrandt’s free, sketch-like handling of the etching needle, with only a sparing use of drypoint accents, strengthens the impression that the portrait was rendered directly from life. Much more elaborate than the deceptively simple portrait of De Jonghe are the two renowned and very similar etched portraits of Jan Six from 1647 (Fig. 104) and Abraham Francen (Fig. 123) from about ten years later. Rembrandt’s relationship with the wealthy dilettante Six, as we have seen, for a time went well beyond that of a mere business arrangement, while Francen, an apothecary and art lover of modest means, was a close friend entrusted with the guardianship of Rembrandt’s daughter, Cornelia, and with handling the artist’s business negotiations.128 These liefhebbers are depicted at a remove from the social and aesthetic conventions of public life, leisurely pursuing the literary and visual arts, and thus enacting the 128 On Rembrandt’s etched portraits of Six and Francen and his intimate relations with these collectors from very different social strata, see Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 112-119, 142-149.

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appreciation for art that served as the basis for their intimacy with Rembrandt. The casual poses, open collars, and self-contained gazes of Six and Francen also reinforce the portraits’ intimate character. Leaning on a windowsill, Six is absorbed in a text that may be one of his own literary works, perhaps his tragedy Medea, for which Rembrandt would etch a frontispiece in 1648 (Fig. 103). Francen is ensconced in an art collector’s cabinet as he admires a print or a drawing by the light of an open window, mirroring and modeling our experience as viewers of the print. Characteristically, Six’s and Francen’s prints lack the customary margin for an identifying inscription. Only in the rare fourth state of Jan Six was a roughly scratched identifying inscription – “IAN SIX AE: 29” – squeezed into the very narrow border, perhaps by a later hand.129 Recall that this was exceptional in the portrait print trade, where inscriptions were needed to broadcast a sitter’s status because of the print’s wide circulation.130 In contrast with official images, Six’s and Francen’s portraits are of private, exclusive address and would have been presented as personal gifts. Many of the impressions are printed on luxurious and expensive Japan paper.131 Rembrandt also designed the portraits to heighten the impression of familiarity. The recipient or beholder is welcomed into the private spaces of these collectors as an unacknowledged yet privileged guest, becoming a member of the sitter’s network of like-minded art lovers. Rembrandt, whose artistry serves as the admired object being exchanged, is also implied as a participant in this informal and familiar encounter. When offered by Six or Francen as a token of personal bonds, these distinctive and exquisite prints would have marshaled a strong social agency that epitomizes the task that theorists assign to things in constituting and ordering social activity.132 Conceived by Rembrandt both to acknowledge and activate intimate reciprocities between subject and beholder, the portraits were empowered by the conditions of their trade to materialize and extend the reciprocal ties through which these networks were negotiated. In this way Rembrandt amplified the friendship portrait’s capacity to consolidate and expand social bonds.133 The intimate form of address of Rembrandt’s printed gift portraits corresponds with the “epistolary mode of address” that Shira Brisman identifies in Albrecht Dürer’s work, which she relates 129 The inscription in capital letters does not seem to correspond to Rembrandt’s signature at the right, which was present since the second state. As Dickey, Portraits in Print, p. 62, n. 48, suggests, the name could have been introduced after the plate came into the possession of the Six family. 130 Ekkart, Introduction in Ekkart and Ornstein-van Slooten, Oog in oog, esp. pp. 13-14. 131 All of the early states of Six’s portrait were printed on Japan paper, and this may have been Rembrandt’s earliest use of Asian paper. See Hinterding, “Rembrandt’s geëtste portret van Jan Six,” p. 35. 132 See Latour, Reassembling the Social, and Zell, “Rembrandt’s Gifts.” 133 On friendship portraits and gift giving, see Koerner, “Friendship Portraits.”

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to the developing Renaissance culture of letter writing as a means of creating social networks.134 Rembrandt’s innovative portrait prints had become markers of discernment among Amsterdam’s liefhebbers, and entry into the network of sitters for whom he created them was both highly desirable and not easily attained. In 1655 the collector Otto van Kattenburgh, brother of the dealer Dirck mentioned above, contracted with Rembrandt for a portrait print to be done “from life, equal in quality to the portrait of Mr. Jan Six” (Fig. 104), for which he agreed to pay the staggering price of 400 guilders.135 Van Kattenburgh was clearly willing to pay exceptionally well to have himself portrayed in a medium Rembrandt normally reserved for intimates and close associates.136 No portrait is known of Van Kattenburgh, and his proposed arrangement with Rembrandt seems to have come to nothing. But it has been suggested that the portrait of Francen, which is formally and technically similar to Six’s etched portrait, Van Kattenburgh’s specified model, may have originated in the aborted commission.137 Whatever the case may have been, some Amsterdam collectors were clearly willing to go to great lengths to secure a work from Rembrandt.138 In 1662 Lodewijck van Ludick, a merchant involved in art dealing who loaned Rembrandt money, even filed an official request that Rembrandt honor his promise to paint a portrait.139

134 Brisman, Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address. I am grateful to Natasha Seaman for this reference. 135 The wording of the 1655 contract reads: “een conterfeijtsel van Otto van Kattenburch, twelck de voorsz. van Rijn sal naer’t leven etsen, van deucht als het conterfeijtsel van d’Heer Jan Six” (“A portrait of Otto van Kattenburgh which the aforementioned van Rijn shall etch from life, equal in quality to his portrait of Mr. Jan Six”). See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1655/8. For commentary on the negotiations, see in particular Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 64-65. At the time of his financial crisis, Rembrandt entered into the contract as part of his negotiation to purchase a new, less expensive house owned by Van Kattenburgh on the Handboogstraat. Rembrandt agreed to etch Van Kattenburgh’s portrait and supply other works by his own hand and from his collection as part of the payment. It is not clear why the arrangement fell through. 136 Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 64-65. Hinterding, Rembrandt as an Etcher, vol. 1, p. 64, concludes that the steep price likely “gives a faithful picture of the prices Rembrandt could charge for commissions of this kind in 1655.” 137 The idea that the Francen print was a reworking of the aborted portrait of Van Kattenbergh was f irst advanced by Jan Six (a descendant of Rembrandt’s patron) in “Iets over Rembrandt,” p. 156, and “Rembrandt’s voorbereiding van de etsen,” pp. 64-65, and revived by Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, pp. 65-66, 174-75, n. 102. Dickey, Portraits in Print, p. 148, suggests that the Francen portrait may depict Abraham Francen’s brother Daniel, a successful surgeon who loaned Rembrandt 3150 guilders in 1656. No portrait of Daniel Francen is known, however. 138 For Herman Becker’s extraordinary efforts to encourage Rembrandt to complete a painting of Juno in the 1660s, see Held, Rembrandt Studies, pp. 99-117. 139 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1662/6. See further Van der Veen, “Faces from Life,” p. 78.

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124. Anthony van Dyck and an unidentified engraver, Paulus Pontius, from the Iconography, ca. 1627-1630. Etching and engraving, second state, 23.3 × 18.3 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The invocation of Six’s portrait in both the Van Kattenburgh contract and Francen’s portrait (Fig. 123) also indicates that Rembrandt and members of his inner circle of admirers perceived these prints as visualizations of an aestheticized social ideal that could transcend traditional social hierarchies. The dramatic contrast in the social positions of Six and Francen not only exemplifies the shift in Rembrandt’s patronage base away from the patrician elite and toward art lovers of the well-to-do burgher class, but also suggests that the appreciation for and circulation of his prints fostered the possibility of asymmetrical social alliances.140 Rembrandt’s printed portraits in effect materialized networks of association between art lovers of 140 Dickey, Portraits in Print, p. 148, notes that Francen did not have the means to own the impressive curiosity cabinet in which Rembrandt depicted him.

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divergent backgrounds, reinforcing and extending this aspiration through distribution among intimates and beyond to collectors of various social levels. Seen from this perspective, Rembrandt’s portraits of Six and Francen are comparable in some respects to Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography, an anthology of portrait prints of the artist’s contemporaries produced under his direction and published in the 1630s and 1640s.141 The Iconography for the first time assembled a group of artists and even printmakers (mostly Netherlandish) together with princes, military figures, statesmen, scholars, and art connoisseurs (including Constantijn Huygens), creating in visual form an ideal society in which the sign of virtue and public recognition was a devotion to art. Since artists are only very rarely presented in the series with attributes of their profession, and are portrayed with the dignified bearing and commanding presence of aristocratic portraiture, as in the portrait of the Flemish engraver Paulus Pontius (Fig. 124), it is impossible visually to distinguish artists from noblemen. Rembrandt’s portrait prints of Dutch liefhebbers of vastly different social rank similarly erase signs of class distinction to evoke an ideal community predicated on the love of art.

Rembrandt, De Decker, Zeuxis: For the Love of Art, not Money A poem of gratitude composed by a member of Rembrandt’s inner sanctum who received his portrait as a personal gift from the artist allows us rare insight into the affective dimensions of such transfers. Penned by the gifted poet Jeremias de Decker, the poem was published posthumously in 1667 in a collected edition of De Decker’s works.142 Almost certainly it refers to a portrait in the Hermitage (Fig. 125) which has recently been dated to 1656.143 Herman F. Waterloos, who, like 141 Van Dyck appears to have initiated the portrait series known since the eighteenth century as the Iconography in Antwerp sometime around 1630, and continued to oversee production after his move to London in 1632 to become court painter to Charles I. For the Iconography and its complicated genesis, see Mauquoy-Hendrickx, L’Iconographie d’Antoine van Dyck; Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, pp. 106-107; Spicer, “Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography”; Luijten, “The Iconography,” pp. 73-91 and cat. nos. 5-29; and Alsteens and Eaker et al., The Anatomy of Portraiture, pp. 135-190. 142 For De Decker’s poem, published in the anthology Lof der geldsucht, vol. 2, pp. 34-36, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1667/11. Lof der geldsucht includes two other poems on Rembrandt’s portrait of De Decker by the poet Jan van Petersom and the sitter’s brother, David de Decker (see ibid, docs. 1667/9, 1667/10). On De Decker and Rembrandt, see De Raaf, “Rembrandt’s portret van Jeremias de Decker”; Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, pp. 46-49; Schwartz, Rembrandt, pp. 340-343; Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, pp. 643-645; Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 162-167; and Schwartz, Rembrandt’s Universe, esp. pp. 217-218, 331-334. 143 The date on the painting was formerly read as 1666 but Van de Wetering reads it as 1656, which is more consistent with its style. See Van de Wetering, Corpus 6, no. 250. Karsemeijer, De dichter Jeremias

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De Decker, was another of Rembrandt’s friends, published a poem on the painting in 1660.144 Jan van Petersom, another member of De Decker’s circle of literary friends, praised Rembrandt’s portrait of the poet as “So artful that his soul seems to radiate from his countenance.”145 De Decker had already written a moving sonnet on Rembrandt’s Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene or “Noli me tangere” – most likely a poorly preserved painting from 1651 in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig – dedicating it to their mutual friend Waterloos, whose own poem exalting Rembrandt’s mastery as an interpreter of the Bible is inscribed on an impression of The 100 Guilder Print in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.146 De Decker’s deeply pious poetry, such as Goede vrijdag (“Good Friday”) of 1651, resonates strongly with Rembrandt’s biblical art from the period of their association, suggesting that they shared ideas about the representation of sacred texts.147 The relationship between De Decker and Rembrandt was a free, horizontal alliance of equals, and the reciprocal works the two artists exchanged express their mutual admiration and devotion to art. The portrait painting and its accompanying poem are poignant examples of how the gift exchanged between friends can animate Rembrandt’s art. De Decker writes that Rembrandt, whom he calls “the Apelles of our time,” painted his likeness “not for the sake of monetary gain, but purely as a favor, attracted nobly

de Decker, p. 44, and Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, pp. 47-48, n. 5, earlier suggested that the date on the Hermitage picture may have been misread. 144 Revising the painting’s date to 1656 clarifies that Waterloos’s 1660 poem refers to the Hermitage panel, rather than a second, lost portrait, as was previously assumed. Waterloos’s poem was published in Hollantsche Parnas, p. 406. See also Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1660/26. An anonymous engraving after the Hermitage portrait was used for an eighteenth-century edition of De Decker’s works. 145 See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1667/9. Van Petersom was ControllerGeneral of Amsterdam from 1663. 146 In the past De Decker’s poem was generally thought to refer to Rembrandt’s 1638 Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene or “Noli me tangere” in the Royal Collection, but Rüdiger Klessmann argued persuasively that it corresponds more closely with Rembrandt’s later picture in Braunschweig. The poem’s wording also suggests that De Decker saw Rembrandt working on the painting in his studio, and that he perhaps even influenced the artist’s interpretation of the scene. See Klessmann, Die Holländischen Gemälden, cat. no. 235, endorsed by Van de Wetering et al., Corpus 5, no. V 18, and idem, Corpus 6, no. 219. The poem was published in Hollantsche Parnas, p. 405. See also Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1660/25. For Waterloos’s poem inscribed on the verso of an impression of The Hundred Guilder Print in the Bibliothèque nationale (transcribed and translated in Bevers et al., The Master and His Workshop, vol. 2, p. 242), see in particular Schwartz, Rembrandt’s Universe, pp. 324-326. As noted above, Waterloos’s poem on Rembrandt’s portrait of De Decker also appeared in Hollantsche Parnas in 1660. 147 See in particular Visser ’t Hooft, Rembrandt and the Gospel, pp. 74-77; Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, pp. 46-47; Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, pp. 643-645; Schwartz, Rembrandt, pp. 340-343; Dickey, Portraits in Print, pp. 163-167; Schwartz, Rembrandt’s Universe, esp. pp. 217-18, 331-334; and Van de Wetering et al., Corpus 5, no. V 19.

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by the Muses and out of love for art.”148 He structures the poem as a reciprocal gift, asking rhetorically: “O if only I could requite your art with art, instead of merely gold, and thus portray as masterfully on my paper, as you have drawn me on a piece of wood.” De Decker calls his verses “mere simple signs of gratitude to reward you for your favor and your art […]. So, three times thank you for your gift and favor, so do accept this brief poem, as a token of my gratitude, my debt for your kind favor.” Praising Rembrandt’s artistry, De Decker’s verses reciprocate the spontaneous and gratuitous gesture of the gift, intensifying the nature of the two artists’ relationship as reflected in and constituted by the portrait. De Decker’s statement that Rembrandt was inspired by the love of art rather than monetary gain to present the gift has often been dismissed as mere rhetoric.149 But in Dutch culture the common refrain “the love of art” invoked an ideal of art production, derived from Seneca’s triad of artistic motivations, that privileged “love” or inborn desire for the creation of art over the pursuit of profit and fame, as we have seen. Giving away one’s work was understood to enact this social ideal, and was sanctioned by repeated citations in early modern art literature as the demonstration of art’s inestimable value. The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, as we also saw, was immortalized by theorists as the prototype for the artist who gifts his works as a means of signaling that no amount of money could adequately compensate his art. Rembrandt pointedly and very unusually aligned himself with this legendary sponsor of gift giving in his late Self-Portrait as Zeuxis (Fig. 126). Zeuxis was known principally for his selective imitation of nature to achieve ideal beauty and his triumph over Parrhasius with a competitive display of mimetic artifice, topoi disseminated widely in early modern art theory. But Rembrandt depicts himself in this canvas as the ancient painter literally dying of laughter while painting a portrait of a “wrinkled, droll old woman,” an anecdote about Zeuxis published by Van Mander in 1604 and repeated by Van Hoogstraten in 1678.150 Arent de Gelder, Rembrandt’s most loyal pupil, also painted a Self-Portrait as Zeuxis in 1685 (Fig. 127) which, when compared to Rembrandt’s Cologne painting, clarifies the shadowy profile on the left as the old woman’s portrait on which Rembrandt works.151 Resting his maulstick on the surface of the canvas, 148 For quotations from De Decker’s poem in this paragraph, see See Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1667/11. 149 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, doc. 1667/11, p. 573, and Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, p. 49. 150 Blankert, “Ideal Beauty,” was the f irst to identify the subject, citing Van Mander, Schilder-boeck, Appendix, note to fol. 301, and Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 110. For an overview of interpretations of the painting and further comments, see Van de Wetering et al., Corpus 4, no. 25. 151 Blankert, “Ideal Beauty,” pp. 34, 42, maintains that the painting has been cropped on all sides and therefore originally was closer to the dimensions of De Gelder’s canvas. However, Van de Wetering, Corpus

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125. Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremias de Decker, 1656. Oil on panel, 71 × 56 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg / Tarker / Bridgeman Images.

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Rembrandt, like De Gelder, turns over his shoulder and laughs at the patron’s vanity, and perhaps our own. No previous artist appears to have depicted the subject of Zeuxis maniacally laughing himself to death while painting an old woman, suggesting that this humorous yet tragic tale of the painter’s subversive amusement at customer narcissism appealed especially to Rembrandt and his most committed student.152 Multiple explanations have been proposed to account for Rembrandt’s odd choice of this lesser-known anecdote, ranging from Zeuxis’s role as a model for Rembrandt’s naturalizing aesthetic or his talents in depicting the passions to the artist as critic of human vanity and foolishness, and Rembrandt’s confrontation with his own mortality and the transcendence of art.153 While each proposal has merit, the congruity between Zeuxis’s fame for demonstrating art’s inestimable worth by giving it away, Rembrandt’s embrace of gift exchange, and his conviction that his work deserved exceptional, even exorbitant remuneration suggests an alternative meaning compatible with other readings. In casting himself as Zeuxis engaging the beholder, Rembrandt includes us in an insider joke at the expense of the old woman sitting for her portrait to proclaim his independence from patrons’ ignorance and demands, his total dedication to art, and the immeasurable value of his work. The Self-Portrait as Zeuxis emblematizes Rembrandt’s identification with the paradigmatic ancient painter who promoted gift giving as a means of expressing artistic autonomy and art’s exemption from ordinary estimations of value. The insufficiency of monetary and material rewards is also the theme of De Decker’s longest and most celebrated work, the moralizing satire Lof der geldsucht (Praise of Avarice), published in 1667 in the same anthology with his poetic thanks for Rembrandt’s gift portrait (Fig. 125).154 De Decker’s rhetoric of the gift in the poem 4, no. 25, observes that the canvas shows signs of cusping at the left, indicating that no more than about 10 cm are missing from either side. He dates The Self-Portrait as Zeuxis to the early 1660s, though it was previously assigned to the late 1660s. On De Gelder’s painting, which may be his only self-portrait, see Mai, “Zeuxis, Rembrandt, en De Gelder.” 152 Westermann, “Molenaer in the Comic Mode,” pp. 53-54, identifies a Jan Molenaer painting of about 1632 depicting a young painter and an old woman offering him coins (Raber Collection, London) as a self-portrait as Zeuxis, which would mean that Molenaer’s painting predates Rembrandt’s and De Gelder’s canvases. However, Molenaer’s genre scene, which shows the painter working on a vanitas still life stretched on the easel rather than a portrait, seems more consistent with the conventions of the comic theme of unequal lovers. See also Tummers et al., Art of Laughter, p. 24 and cat. no. 46. 153 See respectively Blankert, “Ideal Beauty”; Van de Wetering et al., Corpus 4, no. 25 (with references to Van Mander); Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits, pp. 102-104; Müller, Der sokratische Künstler, pp. 107-109; and Suthor, Rembrandt’s Roughness, pp. 180-193. 154 De Decker, Lof der geldsucht. For De Decker and his writings, see Karsemeijer, De dichter Jeremias de Decker.

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126. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, 1663. Oil on canvas, 82.5 × 65 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. Photo: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne / Bridgeman Images.

on Rembrandt takes up similar concerns, and can be seen to refer not only to the painting’s material transaction but also to its visual character, social function, and claims to incalculable worth. Though at first sight seemingly conventional, the portrait invites the beholder into an intimate relationship with De Decker.

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127. Arent de Gelder, Self-Portrait as Zeuxis, 1685. Oil on canvas, 141.5 × 167.3 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main / Ursula Edelmann / Art Resource, ny.

The panel’s format is smaller and Rembrandt’s characterization of the sitter more informal than the artist’s commissioned portraits from the same period.155 We encounter De Decker at very close range, almost life-size and commanding the full picture field. Head slightly tilted, eyebrows raised, he appears to be responding to our presence with a fixed but soft gaze; the transparent shadow cast over his eyes subtly evokes the complexity of character and thought. De Decker does not speak; his mouth is closed, but this only heightens the impression of a quietly familiar exchange. The portrait, I would argue, embraces the beholder, sitter, and Rembrandt himself in an intimate reciprocity analogous to De Decker’s verses. Taken together the painting and poem articulate in visual and verbal form the affection between intimates who share, in De Decker’s words, a mutual love for art. Thus the viewer re-enacts before the work the dialogue of familiarity and honor that the gifting of art – both the portrait and poem – served to constitute and sustain. 155 Van de Wetering, Corpus 6, no. 304.

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Rembrandt’s implicit presence in De Decker’s painting as both author and intimate also calls up the relation between portrait and sitter in Poussin’s Louvre Self-Portrait from 1650 (Fig. 13), which, as we saw, was painted for his patron and friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou.156 Poussin self-consciously cultivated an identity not beholden to either the demands of traditional patronage or the vicissitudes of the market, and thus offers a useful parallel to Rembrandt’s gift portrait of De Decker. Certainly the picture portrays a different subject and was shaped by dramatically different conditions and aesthetic commitments; yet, like Rembrandt’s portrait, Poussin’s memorializes the love of painting and the friendship shared by the artist and his patron. Poussin wrote to Chantelou in 1650, emphasizing that he intended the portrait as a gift and expressing grave offence for the payment that Chantelou had sent in return for his gesture. He writes: I promised myself that you would receive the little present with a favorable eye, but I expected nothing more, and did not claim that it placed you under any obligation to me. I was content enough to have a place in paint in your cabinet without filling my purse with money. It is a kind of Tyranny for you to render me so much your debtor that I can never pay off my debt.157

Rembrandt’s portrait of De Decker, like Poussin’s Self-Portrait, resists the conditions imposed by the “tyranny” of both the market and conventional patronage to foster an alliance based on friendship, not dependency. Seen from the perspective of the ethics and aesthetics of the gift, such paintings, however distinct in style and context, continue to engage the beholder in the kind of familiar reciprocity they were created to engender and nurture.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Trans. Cecil Grayson, intro. Martin Kemp. London: Penguin, 1991. Alpers, Svetlana. Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Art Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Alsteens, Stijn, and Adam Eaker et al. Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture. Exh. cat. New York: Frick Collection. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. 156 For the role of Poussin’s self-portrait in the dialogue of intimacy between the artist and his patron Chantelou, see Chapter 1, pp. 73-75, and Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, pp. 177-215. 157 Quoted in Cropper and Dempsey, Poussin, p. 187. For the letter, see Jouanny, ed., Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, p. 418.

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Weststeijn, Thijs. The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Trans. Beverly Jackson and Lynne Richards. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. ———. Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain: The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591-1667). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. Wetering, Ernst van de. “Rembrandt’s Manner: Technique in the Service of Illusion.” In Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel, Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop, vol. 1, Paintings, pp. 12-39. Exh. cat. Berlin: Gemäldegalerie SMPK at the Altes Museum; Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; London: National Gallery. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. ———. “Rembrandt’s Satire on Art Criticism Reconsidered.” In Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive, edited by Cynthia P. Schneider et al., pp. 264-270. Cambridge, ma, 1995. Reprint in Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis (2008), pp. 2-13. ———. Rembrandt: The Painter at Work. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997. ———. “Rembrandt’s Beginnings: An Essay.” In Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg et al., The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt, pp. 22-57. Exh. cat. Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel; Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. Wolfratshausen: Minerva, 2001. ———. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Vol. 6, Rembrandt Paintings Revisited. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. Wetering, Ernst van de, et al. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Vol. 4, The Self-Portraits. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. ———. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Vol. 5, Small Scale History Paintings. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. White, Christopher, and Karel G. Boon. Rembrandt’s Etchings: An Illustrated Critical Catalogue. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1969. Williams, Julia Lloyd, et al. Rembrandt’s Women. Exh. cat. Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland; London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001. Wilson, Bronwen. “Social Networking. The ‘Album amicorum’ and Early Modern Public Making.” In Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe, edited by Massimo Rospocher, pp. 205-225. Bologna and Berlin: Il Mulino/Duncker & Humblot, 2012. Winkel, Marieke de. Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. ———. “Rembrandt en Jan Six: Een vriendschap in portretten.” In Rembrandt en Jan Six: De ets, de vriendschap, pp. 21-27. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 2017. Woodall, Joanna. “For Love and Money: The Circulation of Value and Desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album amicorum.” In ‘Ut pictura amor’: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700, edited by Walter S. Melion, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell, pp. 649-703. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017.

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Wybe de Kruyter, Claas. “Jacobus Heyblocq’s Album amicorum in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek at The Hague.” Quaerendo 6 (1976), pp. 110-153. Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Knowledge and Practice Pictured in the Artist’s Studio: The ‘Art Lover’ in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands.” De zeventiende eeuw 32 (2016), pp. 185-210. Zell, Michael. “The Gift Among Friends: Rembrandt’s Art in the Network of his Patronal and Social Relations.” In Rethinking Rembrandt, edited by Alan Chong and Michael Zell, pp. 173-193. Zwolle: Waanders, 2002. ———. “Rembrandt’s Gifts: A Case Study of Actor Network Theory.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 3/2 (2011), doi: 10.5092/jhna.2011.3.2.2.

4. Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and Landscape Representation Abstract This chapter identifies a correspondence between Dutch amateur art and the place of landscape in Rembrandt’s artistic production, and in doing so illuminates the link between gift culture and the withholding of certain types of artworks from the domain of the marketplace. Dutch amateurs favored landscapes drawn from nature as a pastime, thus enacting interrelated ideals of art and leisure that also governed the status of landscape in contemporary art theory. This aestheticized social construct of sketching nature as a leisure activity also shaped the landscape art of prominent history painters, including Rembrandt, whose landscape drawings share close affinities with amateur landscapes. Rembrandt’s sketching excursions in Amsterdam’s suburban countryside, like those of Dutch amateurs, were not purely a commercial undertaking. Keywords: Landscape Art; Rembrandt; Amateur Art; Leisure: Gifts; Gift Giving

Although famous for its thriving and dynamic art market, the Dutch Republic was also home to more amateur artists than anywhere else in seventeenth-century Europe, and many of them were talented artists. Favoring sketching landscapes from nature as a recreational pastime, these non-professional practitioners enacted intertwining ideals of art and leisure that governed the status of landscape representation in the early modern discourse on art. This social construct of sketching nature as a pastime or diversion also shaped the landscapes of prominent history painters, including Rembrandt, whose many landscape drawings of Amsterdam’s suburban countryside were made on sketching excursions sometimes in the company of his amateur pupils, and correspond in key respects with amateur landscape art. Drawn exclusively during the years he lived in a ruinously expensive house in a fashionable Amsterdam neighborhood, Rembrandt’s sketches of identifiable sites along the Amstel River were rarely preparatory to more formal works, indicating that his sketching excursions, like those of Dutch amateurs, were not solely a professional

Zell, M., Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/ 9789463726429_ch04

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or commercial undertaking. In Rembrandt’s time, moreover, landscape sketches by famous painters were identified reflexively with the non-market ethics of gift exchange. In 1618 the English miniaturist and gentleman Edward Norgate commented that artists’ “first and sleight drawings,” specifically landscapes, are “things never sold but given to frends [sic] that are Leefhebbers [art lovers].” For Norgate, the early modern construct of landscape drawing as a recreation converged with the discourse of the gift to define the allure of artworks that lay beyond the reach of the market. The aestheticized social arenas of amateurism, landscape representation, and gift exchange, when seen together, therefore offer a conceptual framework to historicize and rethink a significant body of early modern artworks that defy categorization as either marketable productions or purely personal artistic exercises.

Amateur Art and Landscape Representation In his treatise Miniatura or the Art of Limning, written in 1627-1628 and revised in 1648, Edward Norgate famously acknowledged the preeminence of the Dutch in landscape representation, confessing “to say truth the Art is theirs.”1 Probably the most popular and diversified subject of art in seventeenth-century Holland, landscape was also the subject favored by Dutch amateur artists, many of whom were highly accomplished draftsmen and printmakers. Among the most talented and celebrated of these figures are Jan de Bisschop, also known as Episcopius,2 an advocate at the Law Court in The Hague, and the statesman Constantijn Huygens the Younger, son of Rembrandt’s patron and supporter, both of whom produced hundreds of landscape drawings.3 Other Dutch amateurs concentrated virtually exclusively on landscape themes. The painter and draftsman Jacob van der Ulft, who never became a member of the painter’s guild, served on Gorinchem’s city council and was burgomaster of the town. Lambert Doomer, a major topographical landscape draftsman and probable Rembrandt pupil, enjoyed financial security through income from a factory run by his brother. 4 The textile merchant Abraham * This chapter is an expanded and revised version of two previously published essays: Zell, “A Leisurely and Virtuous Pursuit” and “Landscape’s Pleasures.” 1 Muller and Murrell, eds., Edward Norgate, p. 82. 2 For De Bisschop, see in particular Van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop”; Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop. For his landscapes, see Plomp, “Landschappen en stadsgezichten,” and Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, pp. 22-37. 3 For Huygens the Younger’s landscapes, see in particular Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, and Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, pp. 16-17. 4 For Doomer, see Schultz, “Lambert Doomer also Maler”; idem, Lambert Doomer; Altseens and Buijs, Paysages de France, pp. 29-39, 74-189; and Robinson, with Anderson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt, cat. nos. 62-63. Although Doomer is often identified as Rembrandt’s pupil, there

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Rutgers drew in his leisure time, and Rutgers’s friend Jacob Esselens, another Amsterdam textile merchant, probably sketched landscapes on business travels. Valentijn Klotz made numerous topographic drawings, including many executed while accompanying Willem III on his military campaigns in 1674-1676, though his official military position is unknown. Jan van Brosterhuysen, Professor of Greek and Botany at the Illustre School in Breda; Nicolaes van Beresteyn, a Haarlem patrician; the surveyor Johannes Leupenius; and the otherwise unknown Pieter de With, who was likely Rembrandt’s pupil, were amateurs who made drawings and a small group of etchings depicting woodland and other landscape scenes. Herman van der Hem, brother of the Amsterdam lawyer Laurens van der Hem – who assembled the 46-volume Atlas Blaeu-van der Hem of topographical drawings, prints, and maps – also sketched landscapes.5 Even The Hague schoolteacher David Beck, who exchanged gifts of art and poems, recorded in his diary of 1624 that he made landscape drawings (see Chapter 2).6 Amateur art and amateur artists’ particular focus on landscape therefore constitute notable phenomena of the Dutch art world’s social characteristics. Since these dilettantes emulated the professionals who taught them how to represent nature, their drawings closely resemble landscape sketches by professional artists. But the similarities between amateur and professional artists’ drawings of landscape scenes go beyond formal considerations. Landscapes produced by amateurs embody a cultural and social ideal that also informed certain professional artists’ approach to rendering nature from life, allowing us an insight into landscape representation as both an aesthetic and social practice in early modern Holland. It is important to note at the outset that the term “amateur,” like “connoisseur,” derived from French, did not exist in either seventeenth-century Dutch or English. The English adopted the Dutch word liefhebber (“art lover”) as a synonym of the Italian virtuoso, though neither was equivalent to the current understanding of amateur as a non-professional artist rather than a connoisseur, which emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 Amateurism nowadays tends to be heavily freighted with the pejorative term “amateurish,” meaning of limited skill compared to the work of professional artists, and therefore not of sufficient quality to be is no documentary proof of his apprenticeship. Rembrandt also painted portraits of Doomer’s parents (1638, Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Hermitage), of which Doomer made copies. 5 For Herman van der Hem, see Demont and Favreau, Herman van der Hem. On the albums, see De Groot and Van der Krogt, The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem. 6 Beck, Spiegel van mijn leven, pp. 167 (12 September), 187 (14 October), 192-194 (25-26 October), and 198 (1 November). Cited in Gibson, Pleasant Places, p. 46. 7 See Muller and Murrell, Edward Norgate, p. 162, n. 157, and esp. Taylor, “Birth of the Amateur.” Taylor discusses the roots of the modern concept of the amateur and the evolving meanings of liefhebber, kenner (knower), and connoisseur in seventeenth-century Dutch and French sources.

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considered seriously. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dilettantism carried a far more positive set of associations precisely because of its status as a pastime. The practice of art at one’s leisure was perceived as a productive, virtuous diversion for the cultural elite.8 Humanists beginning with Baldassare Castiglione in 1528 had recommended in their courtesy books that skill in drawing and painting be acquired as a “worthy and necessary” aristocratic accomplishment.9 By the early seventeenth century Henry Peacham’s manual The Art of Drawing with a Pen of 1606, later expanded and restyled as The Gentleman’s Exercise of 1612, had identified drawing, which he called “an exquisite practice,” as a prerequisite of both the courtier and the private gentleman. Essential to this aestheticized social ideal was that such expertise be performed as a recreation and never as an arduous or laborious activity. Learning to draw was also a requirement for Dutch cultural elites and liefhebbers, who received instruction from professional artists, including Rembrandt, as part of their education in the arts. In 1604 Karel van Mander emphasized the usefulness of drawing, particularly for discussing and judging artworks, in his Het schilder-boeck, which he addressed to both artists and liefhebbers.10 In De graphice, sive de arte pingendi (The Art of Painting) of 1650, the humanist and pedagogue Gerardus Vossius promoted the basic principles of painting and draftsmanship as fundamental to the cultural and moral development of the burgher class.11 Constantijn Huygens also described in his autobiography his father’s decision to ensure that he and his brother Maurits acquire basic artistic skills to prepare them to speak intelligently about the arts.12 And in 1636 the preacher and poet Cornelis Pietersz Biens published a practical drawing manual intended for beginners and liefhebbers, indicating that there was a broad Dutch audience interested in learning about and making art.13 Familiarity with the practice of drawing was not confined to members of the upper strata of the burgher class. A Scotsman studying at the University of Leiden between 8 For English amateur artists, see Bermingham, Learning to Draw, and Sloan, A Noble Art. For eighteenthcentury French amateurs, see Guichard, “Taste Communities.” For French amateur printmakers specifically, see Stein et al., Artists and Amateurs. On the tradition of amateur drawing, see Kemp, Zeichnen und Zeichenunterricht der Laien. 9 Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, pp. 96-97. See also Bermingham, Learning to Draw, esp. pp. 12-14. 10 Van Mander, Schilder-boeck, fol. 10r, cited in Yeager-Crasselt, “Knowledge and Practice Pictured,” p. 198. 11 Vossius, De graphice, the main parts of which are translated in Weststeijn, Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain, pp. 315-326, and discussed on pp. 199-202. 12 Huygens, Mijn jeugd, p. 72, quoted in Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Beginnings,” p. 28. 13 The manual, entitled De teecken-const: ofte een korte ende klaere aen-leydinghe tot de lofelijcke const van teeckenen tot dienst ende behulp van de eerstbeghinnende jeucht ende liefhebbers, is lost but its content is preserved in a transcription by Cornelis Müller-Hofstede. See De Klerk, “De Teecken-Const,” and Yeager-Crasselt, “Knowledge and Practice Pictured,” p. 199.

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1694 and 1697 wrote that in Holland “all their young Folks learn to draw from their being seven years of age, and find it vastly useful to them in most stations in Life.”14 Drawing was also considered an essential skill for a variety of professions, such as surveying, cartography, and military engineering; the landscape draftsman and etcher Leupenius, for example, was a surveyor. It is not surprising, therefore, that there were more noteworthy artists who were amateurs in the Dutch Republic than elsewhere in Europe. Many amateur practitioners were also liefhebbers whose skills and aesthetic sensibilities developed from the unusually close relationships between liefhebbers and artists in the Republic. As is attested by diaries and numerous paintings (see Van Mieris, In the Artist’s Studio, Fig. 117), cultured Dutch burghers regularly visited artists’ studios to learn the fundamentals of art as part of their fulfillment of elite codes of behavior.15 Exceptionally, Dutch dilettantes were as likely to come from the middle classes as from the aristocracy.16 Sometimes even the distinction between professional artist and amateur could be elusive in the burgher republic. Even though financially independent amateurs did not need to sell their works in order to make a living, some probably did. A case in point is Jan van de Cappelle, a master of marine paintings and winter landscapes who never became a member of Amsterdam’s Guild of St. Luke, and who inherited his father’s dye-works business, allowing him to draw and paint primarily for his own pleasure. It seems that he sketched boats and shipping, the subjects of his placid marine scenes, while sailing leisurely in his pleasure yacht along Amsterdam’s waterways and the Dutch coast.17 Van de Cappelle was also an important art collector who assembled a stunning collection of more than 7000 drawings by a wide range of artists, including 500 sheets by Rembrandt, in addition to 200 paintings.18 Norgate’s treatise on miniature painting, Miniatura, though English, is useful for investigating the characteristics of amateurism in Holland because the author addresses himself to his amateur friends and patrons as well as to professional artists. Norgate was an artist, musician, connoisseur, secretary, and gentleman who belonged to the circle surrounding Sir Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, 14 Quoted in Van der Veen, “Rembrandt’s Late Pupils,” p. 19. 15 For the Dutch cultural elite’s access to studios, their knowledge and practice of art making, and the increasingly important role these liefhebbers played in art critical discourse, see in particular Van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Beginnings,” esp. pp. 27-32; Roodenburg, “Visiting Vermeer”; Weststeijn, Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain, pp. 197-206; Taylor, “Birth of the Amateur”; Chapman and Weststeijn, “Connoisseurship as Knowledge,” pp. 26-31; and Blanc, “Mettre des mots sur l’art.” On Dutch paintings of studio visits, see Yeager-Crasselt, “Knowledge and Practice Pictured,” and Doherty, “Painting Connoisseurship.” 16 Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, p. 17. 17 Russell, Jan van de Cappelle, p. 12. 18 The 1680 inventory of Van de Cappelle’s collection is published in Russell, Jan van de Cappelle, pp. 49-57.

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the extraordinary art collector of the Caroline court discussed in Chapter 1.19 In the treatise Norgate credits the Dutch with primacy in landscape representation and acknowledges his countrymen’s adoption of landscape art from the Dutch model. Landscape plays a distinctive and revealing role in his text. In the book’s first version of 1627-1628, Norgate frames his section on landscape as a relaxing interlude from the rigors of his more technical discussion of “limning” (miniature painting): “If your Eyesight be weary […] You may bee pleased to proceede to my Second Division, which is Landscape” because “there is not in my oppinion in all the Arte of Paynting such variety of Delectable Collours, Nor Cann the Eye bee soe Richly feasted as with the Prospecte of a well wrought Landscape.”20 Norgate adds pointedly that he himself owes “much to this harmeless and honest Recreation.”21 In a marginal note, he also remarks that landscape is “now a privado [confidant] and Cabinet Companion for Kings and Princes.”22 Norgate thus expresses a number of interrelated ideas central to understanding the place of landscape among elites who both collected and made art. A familiar conceptual framework structures his thinking about the genre: By invoking the pastoral convention of the locus amoenus (“pleasant place”) he conceptualizes landscape art as a pleasurable diversion, a private pastime suitable even for princes.23 In the pastoral tradition, the countryside is conceived in a dyadic relationship with urban life as a recreational, even therapeutic escape from the pressures of the public sphere. Much Dutch landscape art and nature poetry of the seventeenth century follows this conventional rhetoric of nature as a site for the enjoyment of relaxation away from the pressures of the urban environment.24 Frequently this is thematized as a pleasant walk in the local countryside. For example, on the title page to his Plaisante Plaetsen (Pleasant Places) – a series of twelve etchings depicting the environs of Haarlem from about 1611-1612 by Amsterdam printmaker and publisher Claes Jansz Visscher – Latin verses invite the viewer to “come, let your eager eye roam these open vistas offered by the sylvan surroundings of Haarlem.”25 Country estates like Hofwijk (which translates as “Leave [or Retire from] Court”), built by Constantijn Huygens the Elder outside The Hague in the 1640s, revived and transformed the ancient Roman ideal of private retreat (otium) from public 19 On Norgate and his treatise, see Muller and Murrell, Edward Norgate, pp. 1-36. 20 Ibid, p. 157, n. 141. 21 Ibid, p. 83. 22 Ibid, p. 85. See also Sloan, A Noble Art, p. 78. 23 Muller and Murrell, Edward Norgate, p. 157, n. 141. 24 See Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, and Gibson, Pleasant Places. On viewing landscape art as an extension of this ideal of relaxation and restoration in early modernity, see Gage, “Exercise for Mind and Body,” and idem, Painting as Medicine. 25 Quoted in Gibson, Pleasant Places, p. 93.

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128. Jan de Bisschop, Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk, from the South, ca. 1648-1671. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 9.8 × 15.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

or commercial life (negotium) to suit the circumstances of the Dutch urban elite. Hofdichten, or country-house poems, celebrate the pleasures of nature, the intellectual pursuits, and forms of sociability to be enjoyed by the estate’s owner as a diversion from the affairs of court and commerce. Huygens’s own Hofwijk, first published in 1653 with a preface by his son, the amateur Constantijn Huygens the Younger who later inherited the estate, belongs to this genre.26 Such social constructs also illuminate the cultural foundations for the popularity of landscape among Dutch amateur artists. Neither the subjects nor style of their works is particularly distinctive; rather, the defining feature of dilettante art is its occasional practice as a form of recreation or diversion from professional obligations. Numerous drawings of or near country estates like Jan de Bisschop’s Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk (Fig. 128) and Lane of the Huis ter Noot at The Hague (Fig. 129), and Two Draftsmen at Zorgvliet (Fig. 130), formerly attributed to De Bisschop but more likely executed by Constantijn Huygens the Younger, embody the aestheticized social ideals structuring amateur landscape art.27 Constantijn the Younger’s sheet depicts two well-dressed draftsmen – it has been suggested that they are Huygens and his friend De Bisschop – sketching in a sunlit landscape at the entrance to the country house Zorgvliet (“flee [from] Care”) that belonged to the statesman and author Jacob Cats. 26 For the hofdicht tradition in Dutch literature, see De Vries, Wandeling en verhandeling. 27 For these drawings, see Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, p. 32, and cat. nos. 16, 20, 22, 36, 37.

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129. Jan de Bisschop, Lane of the Huis ter Noot at The Hague, 1658. Pen and brown ink, brown wash and black chalk, 9.7 × 154 cm. Teylers Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Teylers Museum.

130. Constantijn Huygens the Younger (attributed to), Two Draftsmen at Zorgvliet. Pen and brown ink, brown wash over traces of graphite, 24.3 × 37.3 cm. Haags Gemeentearchief. Photo: Collectie Haags Gemeentearchief.

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131. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, View of the Waal with the Castle Zuilichem, 1671. Pen and pencil and brown ink, 9.4 × 16 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Huygens also made sketching excursions while at his own family estate of Zuilichem (Fig. 131), which he inherited together with the title “Heer van Zuilichem” after his father’s death in 1687.28 De Bisschop did not own a country retreat, but he visited and sketched properties belonging to the stadholders, including the Huis ter Nieuburch (Fig. 128), rebuilt by Frederik Hendrik in the 1630s, and the Huis ter Noot (Fig. 129). The merchant and amateur Abraham Rutgers made numerous drawings with views along the banks of the River Vecht outside Utrecht, a popular site for suburban estates where members of his family owned property. Some of these sheets are among the 88 landscapes contained in an album from 1686-1687 with a title page describing them as Principale, Inventive & Copijen.29 His charming views of houses along the Vecht, such as The Castle of Nijenrode (Fig. 132), presumably fell under the category Principale, or originals. Professional artists also produced portraits of country houses, and sometimes these estates appear in their landscapes, as in two paintings from the late 1640s by Paulus Potter which show, with slight variations, the Huis de Werve near Voorburg.30 But the sheets of Huygens, De Bisschop, and Rutgers, made in their spare time as exercises of leisure, are enactments and records of the cultural ideal that gave rise to such country retreats. 28 Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, cat. nos. 12-17. 29 For Rutgers, see Niemeijer, “Varia topografica”; Van Eeghen, “Abraham en Antoni Rutgers”; and Broos, Rembrandt en tekenaars uit zijn omgeving, cat. nos. 56-59. 30 See Walsh et al., Paulus Potter, pp. 80-82, and cat. nos. 9, 14, 96.

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132. Abraham Rutgers, The Castle of Nijenrode on the Vecht, 1665. Pen and brown ink, brown wash over a sketch, 20.3 × 32.4 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

Dutch Amateur Landscape Artists About 200 landscape drawings by Jan de Bisschop have been preserved; The Avenue of the Huis ter Noot from 1658 (Fig. 129) exemplifies his signature combination of pen and a broad application of luminous reddish-brown wash, known in the eighteenth century as bisschops-inkt after the artist.31 While the majority and currently most admired of De Bisschop’s sheets depict landscape views, he also made many highly finished drawings after paintings by Renaissance and later masters; drawings of sculptures, both ancient and modern; copies after drawings by mainly Italian artists; and a few figure, portrait, and genre studies. His etched reproductions of some drawings serve as illustrations for his two influential classicist treatises, the two-volume Signorum veterum icones of 1668-1669, with prints after classical sculptures and dedicated to Jan Uytenbogaert and Constantijn Huygens the Younger, and the Paradigmata graphices variorum artificum of 1671, with prints after mostly Italian Old Master drawings and dedicated to Rembrandt’s patron Jan Six.32 In these publications De Bisschop laid out a program for reforming Dutch art 31 The first recorded use of the term appears in the inventory of Valerius Röver’s collection, which dates from 1705-1731. See Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, p. 18, n. 23. 32 For De Bisschop’s Icones and Paradigmata, see Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop.

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based on the idealizing canon embodied in ancient and Italian art. De Bisschop belonged to a distinguished network of connoisseurs, intellectuals, collectors, artists, and fellow amateurs in The Hague and Amsterdam. This group included his intimate friend Constantijn Huygens the Younger, whose drawings (especially his landscapes) are often confused with De Bisschop’s. In 1660 he founded a private drawing academy in The Hague, which met four nights a week to draw after a live model, with Constantijn the Younger, Jacob van der Does, Maerten Lengele, and Willem Doudijns.33 De Bisschop seems to have inspired Constantijn the Younger to begin regularly sketching landscapes in the 1660s.34 Constantijn’s father, himself an amateur artist, had ensured that instruction in art was part of the education of all four of his sons: Constantijn; Christiaan, who was to become a renowned mathematician, astronomer, and physicist; Lodewijk; and Philips. The two eldest boys received drawing lessons from the little-known artist Pieter Monincx in The Hague, and were later taught by Pieter Couwenhorn while attending Leiden University.35 When he was sixteen, Christiaan wrote to Lodewijk that he had painted a copy of a head of an old man by Rembrandt “which can hardly be told apart from the original.”36 As prominent members of the Dutch urban elite, these men were raised to be proficient in all cultural pursuits, including playing musical instruments, writing poetry, and dancing.37 Constantijn the Elder’s efforts to cultivate his sons’ artistic skills permanently imprinted the life not only of his eldest son, Constantijn the Younger, but also of Christiaan, whose later scientific endeavors never diminished his interest in the visual arts.38 From the beginning of his activities as an amateur artist in 1648 up to his untimely death in 1671, De Bisschop sketched landscapes. Early drawings record sites he visited on recreational walks in Leiden and its surroundings while studying law at the university from about 1648 to 1652 (Fig. 133), and on excursions to other Dutch towns and the southern Netherlands (Fig. 134). The Italian landscapes and ruins he drew may have been made on an otherwise undocumented journey, though they 33 Van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop,” p. 211. For Constantijn Huygens the Younger’s description of the academy in a 1661 letter to his brother Christiaan, see ibid, App. VI, no. 3. 34 Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, p. 33, and cat. nos. 8, 59-60. See also Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, p. 10. 35 De Heer, “Het tekenonderwijs,” and Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, pp. 26-27. On the importance of art instruction for Constantijn Huygens, his father, and his children, see Broekman, De rol van de schilderkunst, pp. 17-18. 36 Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, no. 1654/3. The letter is dated 29 June 1645. 37 See De Jong, Een deftig bestaan, esp. p. 130. 38 For Constantijn Huygens the Younger as a connoisseur of art, see Dekker, Family, Culture, and Society, esp. pp. 67-87.

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133. Jan de Bisschop, Pelikaansbolwerk at Leiden (?). 1649. Pencil in brown and grey, black chalk, 8.8 × 15.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

134. Jan de Bisschop, Ruins of the Zaandpoort at Mechelen, 1649. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, black chalk, 9.5 × 15.3 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

135. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, Bergen (Mons) from the Vicinity of Glin, 1675. Brown ink, with a partial framing line in graphite, on light tan antique laid paper, 12.5 × 19.3 cm. Accession no. 1979.64. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Frances L. Hofer. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

may have been based on prints.39 Constantijn Huygens the Younger did undertake a Grand Tour of France, Switzerland, and Italy in 1649-1650, 40 and from the 1660s made a habit of drawing landscapes and cityscapes, ranging from Dutch sites to views in the southern Netherlands (Fig. 135), and northern Germany, most of which he meticulously dated and inscribed with their locations. The majority date from the period after 1672, when he succeeded his father as secretary to Willem III, Prince of Orange, and accompanied the new stadholder on military campaigns to defend the Dutch Republic against the combined forces of France, England, and the German states of Cologne and Münster. On 9 November 1673 he sketched the outskirts of Bonn, Germany (Fig. 136), where Dutch forces under Willem III’s command were laying siege to the city. In his journal Huygens recorded that he made the drawing in his unoccupied time, noting also that when Bonn surrendered four days later: 39 De Bisschop based his Panorama of Rome (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) on a print by Theodoor Matham, and his drawing S.S. Cosma e Damiano in Rome (Kupferstichtkabinett, Berlin) shows the church as it appeared in about 1630, when the artist was only two years old. See Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, cat. no. 14. 40 Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, p. 27.

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136. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, Landscape on the Outskirts of Bonn, 1673. Pen and brown ink, brush in brown and blue, 17 × 33.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

“Les ennemys sortirent de la Ville et nous les vismes marcher.”41 His placid drawing gives no hint of the hardships of war, since it was intended as a distraction from military and state affairs. In the evening of 30 September 1675, Huygens showed his drawings to Willem III, recording that they pleased the Prince. 42 Valentijn Klotz also drew some of the same towns and cities through which the stadholder and his army passed in campaigns of 1674, 1675, and 1676 (Figs. 137, 138). Although sometimes identified as a military engineer, his relationship to the army remains unclear. 43 Klotz’s drawings, such as a scene of a military encampment outside Nivelles drawn on 8 August 1674 (Fig. 138), seem not to have served a military purpose and, like Huygens’s sheets, were apparently executed in his free time. The Amsterdam textile merchant Jacob Esselens probably also drew landscapes as a diversion, and his View of Rye (Fig. 139) may have been made on a business trip to England and Scotland in 1665-1666. 44 As in the views of or near country retreats, 41 Huygens, Journaal, pp. 18, 20, quoted in Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, cat. no. 28: “Je beus du choccolate chez Mr de Bosvelt, et estant monté a cheval avec luy je montay sur une eminence pour desseigner, comme je fis, la ville.” 42 Huygens, Journaal, p. 67, quoted in Heijbroek at al., Met Huygens op reis, p. 34: “Le soir je fis voir a S. A. les petits desseins que j’auois faits durant la campagne qui me les auoit demandés le jour precedent et y prit quelque plaisir.” 43 See Breitbarth-Van der Stok, “Josua de Grave,” p. 103. Valentijn Klotz often made topographical drawings together with the professional artist Josua de Grave while on Willem III’s military campaigns. In earlier years they were joined by Bernardus Klotz, who disappears from the record by 1674. 44 For Esselens, see Hulton, “Drawings of England,” and Broos, Rembrandt en tekenaars uit zijn omgeving, cat. nos. 31-33. On Esselens’s drawing of Rye, see Royalton-Kisch, Light of Nature, cat. no. 60.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

137. Valentijn Klotz, View of Ghent, 1674. Pen and brown ink, light grey pencil, 9.1 × 15.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

138. Valentijn Klotz, Encampment near Nivelles, 1674. Pen and brown ink, light grey pencil, 8.2 × 13.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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139. Jacob Esselens, A View of Rye from Point Hill. Pen and brown ink with grey wash, over black chalk, 25 × 37 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge / Bridgeman Images.

these drawings are expressions of the private recreation of sketching nature as a respite from professional work. While De Bisschop and Constantijn Huygens the Younger never intended their landscapes for wider distribution, the dilettantes Nicolaes van Beresteyn and Jan van Brosterhuysen produced a few landscape prints for circulation within small networks of affiliation. Van Beresteyn, member of a prominent Catholic Haarlem family, etched eight or nine prints (Fig. 140), each of which depicts a dense thicket of spindly trees and is reminiscent of the early etchings and paintings of his fellow Haarlemer Jacob van Ruisdael. 45 Officially Van Brosterhuysen was Professor of Greek and Botany at the Illustre School in Breda, a position he secured with the influence of his steadfast patron Constantijn Huygens the Elder, but he also actively pursued interests in poetry, music, drawing, printmaking, painting, and architecture, and etched sixteen delicate prints of woodlands in the 1640s (Fig. 141).46 In letters to Huygens written while staying at the country estate of the architect 45 For Van Beresteyn’s life and art, see Gerson, “Leven en werken van Claes van Beresteyn”; Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, p. 225, and cat. no. 153; and Bakker and Leeflang et al., Nederland naar ‘t leven, cat. no. 44. 46 For Van Brosterhuysen’s art, see in particular Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, p. 191, and cat. nos. 128-129. For his biography, see Van Seters, “Prof. Johannes Brosterhuysen.”

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

140. Nicolaes van Beresteyn, Rider in a Forest, 1650. Etching, 19.8 × 21.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Jacob van Campen in Randenbroek near Amersfoort in 1645, Van Brosterhuysen discussed his leisure-time activity of sketching landscapes from life. In one letter he acknowledges Huygens’s preference for renderings drawn from nature (nae’t leeven) over painters’ “dreams” (dromen of grillen).47 While at first sight Van Brosterhuysen’s personal and somewhat fantastical vision of nature in his woodland etchings seems puzzling given what one might expect of a botanist, the contrast only highlights the conditions governing his practice as an amateur. Charting an independent course from Van Brosterhuysen’s professional scientific endeavors, his landscape prints are performances of a leisure pastime. 48 Many seventeenth-century amateur artists set themselves the task of mastering the technique of etching with a needle on a copper plate, which, unlike engraving’s 47 Van Brosterhuysen to Huygens, 20 June 1645, in Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 4, no. 3985, quoted in Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, p. 191. 48 Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, p. 191.

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141. Jan van Brosterhuysen, Landscape with Two Dead Fir Trees, ca. 1645. Etching, touched with grey wash, 9.7 × 10.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

more arduous burin work, can be learned relatively easily by anyone who knows how to draw. In 1645 Abraham Bosse dedicated his Traicté des manieres de graver en taille douce, the first manual devoted to etching “aux amateurs de cet art,” noting that he intended the treatise as “some sort of introduction to the art” for those who wished to pursue it either as a “diversion” or “occupation.”49 By the seventeenth century, instruction in etching had become a component of aristocratic education. Prince Rupert of the Palatinate made a few etchings, including Landscape with a Man Driving a Wagon,50 and even Louis XIV etched a small landscape with a bridge and tower when he was just thirteen. The English virtuoso John Evelyn owned 49 Bosse, Traicté, Dedication, quoted in Griffiths, “Etchings of John Evelyn,” p. 62: “J’ay pense qui’il ne vous seroit pas desgreable de la voir publiée avec toute la franchise & naifveté qui m’as esté possible, afin que ceux qui voudront commencer à se donner cette sorte d’occupation ou de divertissement, y puissant trouver d’eux-mesmes s’il y a moyen, quelque sorte d’introduction a l’Art.” 50 Sloan, A Noble Art, cat. no. 2 (b).

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

an impression of the French king’s print, which was inscribed: “Première ouvrage a leau forte de Louis 14me Roy de France et de Navarre &, faite en l’année 1651 sur la fin.”51 Evelyn, who was the first English amateur to make prints, produced thirteen etchings, all but two of which belong to two landscape series published in 1649. One set with six small views between Rome and Naples, based on drawings Evelyn made on his tour to Italy in 1645, would have fulfilled the category of “true designes drawn after life, of those surprising landskips, memorable places, cities” that he would later praise as “immense refreshment for the curious” in his treatise Sculptura from 1662.52 In contrast to the output of a professional printmaker, the amateur Evelyn – like the contemporary amateurs Prince Rupert, Van Beresteyn, and Van Brosterhuysen – made only a few etchings. Amateur artists normally printed only a small number of impressions of their works for private distribution among a select group of intimates and personal contacts. Evelyn’s rather unusual decision to publish his etchings can be accounted for by his desire to promote landscape printmaking in England, where the art paled by comparison with the continent.53 Van Brosterhuysen’s landscape prints appeared in very small issues for a select audience, and therefore not as a commercial undertaking. Impressions of most of his prints are exceedingly rare and some, such as the little Landscape with Two Dead Fir Trees from about 1645 (Fig. 141), have touches of wash that Van Brosterhuysen himself may have applied.54 De Bisschop did transpose some of his drawings into the more public medium of the print in order to give them wider currency. But these were principally drawings after ancient sculptures and Italian drawings, which he etched as illustrations for his Icones and Paradigmata, and three etchings after history paintings by Bartholomeus Breenbergh and Annibale Carracci. Exemplifying the public side of De Bisschop’s activities as an amateur artist, these prints are exclusively figural representations and generally intended to educate Dutch collectors and artists about the rigorous standards of beauty, and thus the “perfections of art” embodied in classical antiquity and revived in the Italian Renaissance. By contrast, De Bisschop reserved landscape drawings for the private purpose of sketching from nature in his unoccupied time, never publicizing them in the form of prints. That women amateur artists in seventeenth-century Holland tended not to make landscapes, unlike their male counterparts, is significant and sheds light on the social underpinnings of landscape representation in this period. For men like De Bisschop, Constantijn Huygens the Younger, Abraham Rutgers, and David 51 Griff iths, “Etchings of John Evelyn,” p. 62, noting that the print was sold at Christie’s, London, 29 June 1977, lot 32. 52 Evelyn, Evelyn’s Sculptura, pp. 100-101, quoted in Griffiths, “Etchings of John Evelyn,” p. 63. 53 Griffiths, “Etchings of John Evelyn,” pp. 62-63. 54 Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, cat. no. 128.

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Beck, sketching landscapes was not only a hobby but also a distraction from their professional careers as lawyers, statesmen, merchants, or schoolteachers. Since women were largely excluded from participation in this public sphere, their art mediates a different set of values. Dutch women amateur artists, of which there were many, tended to diversify their subjects and media, unlike male amateurs and most professional artists in the Republic, who tended to specialize.55 Women also usually depicted subjects easily obtainable indoors. Nature studies by women amateurs were largely confined to flower pieces. The oeuvre of Gesina ter Borch, the half-sister of the genre painter and portraitist Gerard ter Borch, comprising 59 separate drawings and the Materi-Boeck (Theme Book), the Poetry Album (Fig. 178), and the Scrap Book, relate to Petrarchan love poetry and the customs of small-town life in the area of her native Deventer. She almost always based her work on a two-dimensional model, rather than direct study from life.56 Like amateurs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seventeenth-century Dutch amateur practitioners pursued art as a form of leisure and recreation. Making art as a vocation or for f inancial remuneration could have potentially jeopardized this.57 Dilettantes from the higher strata of Dutch society, like Constantijn the Younger, De Bisschop, and the wealthy merchant Abraham Rutgers, usually did not sign their drawings, which generally remained in the possession of their makers and their descendants – Constantijn the Younger’s drawings remained together until they were auctioned in 1832.58 Some amateurs did give away examples of their art to friends and contacts. Van Brosterhuysen presented impressions of his etchings as gifts to Constantijn Huygens the Elder, as noted in Chapter 2.59 Constantijn the Younger gave a drawing of the village of Lembeek (Fig. 142), which he drew in the southern Netherlands on 30 July 1675, to his clerk Pieter de Wilde.60 De Bisschop sometimes made autograph replicas of his landscape drawings, perhaps as keepsakes of those he had presented as gifts or tokens of appreciation.61 He also apparently shared his drawings with fellow 55 Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’.” On Netherlandish women artists, see Sutton, ed., Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands. 56 For Gesina ter Borch, see Kettering, “Ter Borch’s Studio Estate”; idem, Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate, vol. 2, pp. 362-760, 832-833; and Brouwer, Gesina ter Borch. 57 See Sloan, A Noble Art; Bermingham, Learning to Draw; and Stein et al., Artists and Amateurs. 58 Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, p. 42. 59 Van Brosterhuysen to Huygens, 1 November 1645, in Worp, Briefwisseling, vol. 4, no. 4186, cited in Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, p. 191, n. 2. 60 Heijbroek et al., Met Huygens op reis, p. 34, and cat. no. 55. 61 For example, two versions of The Burcht at Leiden are known (Teylers Museum, Haarlem and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), and two of The Oostpoort at Delft (Amsterdam Museum and Rijksmuseum). See Plomp, “Landschappen en stadsgezichten,” pp. 261-262.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

142. Constantijn Huygens the Younger, View of Lembeek, 1675. Pen and brown ink, 10.8 × 16.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

143. Jacob van der Ulft after Jan de Bisschop, Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk seen from the Southeast, ca. 1660-1670. Pen and brush in brown ink, brown wash, 17.5 × 27.2 cm. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Dietmar Katz / Art Resource, ny.

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amateurs, as drawings by De Bisschop with dates inscribed by Constantijn the Younger suggest that they may have been exchanged as gifts.62 The burgomaster Jacob van der Ulft also made a number of copies of De Bisschop’s landscapes, including drawings in an album in the Lugt Collection in Paris and the Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk (Fig. 143).63 Van der Ulft may have had access to De Bisschop’s drawings after the latter’s death. However, the lines between amateur and professional were not always so clear. Van der Ulft and other artists identified today as amateurs, such as Esselens – whom contemporary documents refer to as both coopman (merchant) and schilder (painter) – did derive incomes from the sale of their works. The wealthy Jan van de Cappelle, while undoubtedly not motivated by financial gain, also must have sold his work, since only five of his paintings were in his possession at the time of his death in 1679.64 Apparently, some Dutch amateur artists from the middle and merchant classes who practiced art as an avocation did not feel compelled to dissociate themselves from the market.65

Rembrandt’s Landscape Drawings: Pleasure and Profit Amateur artists fashioned their landscapes after models created by professional artists. De Bisschop’s style of draftsmanship, for instance, recalls that of the Dutch Italianate landscapist Breenbergh, who may have been his teacher.66 But other affinities between amateur and professional landscape art help illuminate the distinctive place assigned to landscape within the hierarchy of certain artists’ production. While many Dutch artists specialized in landscape, some, preeminently Rembrandt, generally reserved it for less formal, occasional representation. The most recent, authoritative catalogue of Rembrandt’s paintings accepts only eight landscape paintings as autograph, the majority of which are fictional and dramatized displays of painting uyt den geest, or from the imagination (Fig. 144).67 By contrast, Rembrandt made over 200 landscape drawings and 27 etchings, almost 62 Plomp, “Landschappen en stadsgezichten,” pp. 261-262, and Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, pp. 12-13. 63 Van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop,” p. 58, and Jellema and Plomp, Episcopius, pp. 16-17, and cat. no. 20. For the album, see Van Hasselt, Landschaptekeningen van Hollandse meesters, cat. no. 150. For Van der Ulft, see in particular Tissink and De Wit, Gorcumse schilders, pp. 32-57. 64 Russell, Jan van de Cappelle, p. 13. 65 On this phenomenon, see Honig, “The Space of Gender,” p. 190. 66 De Bisschop also etched two large prints after Breenbergh’s paintings Joseph Selling Corn to the People (1644, lost) and Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (1647, Städelmuseum, Frankfurt am Main). 67 Van de Wetering, Corpus 6, nos. 152, 159, 175-176, 205-207, 214. See also Schneider, Rembrandt’s Landscapes.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

144. Rembrandt van Rijn, Stormy Landscape, ca. 1638. Oil on panel, 52 × 72 cm. Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig. Photo: Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig © De A Picture Library / Art Resource, ny.

all of which date from the early 1640s to the early 1650s.68 No other seventeenthcentury artist who was not a landscape specialist made so many landscape scenes from life.69 Rembrandt’s landscapes on paper, unlike the paintings, are usually based directly on specific and often recognizable locations in the vicinity of Amsterdam, such as the Amstel River near the manor of Kostverloren or the village of Ouderkerk (Figs. 145, 146), the hamlets of Diemen (Fig. 147) and Sloten (Fig. 148), and houses along the Schinkelweg (Fig. 149), which he sketched outdoors in the tradition of recording motifs naer het leven, or from life.70 The prestige accorded to historical subjects and painting in Rembrandt’s aesthetic priorities accounts in part for landscape’s relatively subordinate status in his art. Demonstrations of his versatility and mastery of all the subfields encompassed by the category of history painting, 68 For Rembrandt’s landscape drawings and prints, see in particular Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes; Schatborn, “Met Rembrandt naar buiten”; Royalton-Kisch, “Rembrandt’s Landscape Drawings”; Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt; and Rutgers, “Rembrandt’s Landscapes on Paper.” 69 Rutgers, “Rembrandt’s Landscapes on Paper,” p. 173. 70 Stone-Ferrier, “Rembrandt’s Landscape Etchings,” argues that the dialectic between town and countryside in Rembrandt’s landscape etchings indicates his critical view of urban expansion.

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145. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bend in the Amstel near Kostverloren House, ca. 1650. Pen and brown ink and wash, white highlights on cartridge paper, 13.6 × 24.7 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.

146. Rembrandt van Rijn, A Man sculling a Boat on the Bullewijk, with a View toward Ouderkerk, ca. 1650. Pen and ink with brown wash and white body color, 13.3 × 20 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

147. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Diemen, ca. 1650. Pen and brown ink, color washes, 10.4 × 18.5 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp.

148. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Sloten, ca. 1650. Pen and brown ink with wash on paper, 9.6 × 18 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.

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149. Rembrandt van Rijn, Houses on the Schinkelweg, ca. 1652. Brown ink on cream antique laid paper, prepared with grey wash, partial framing line in brown ink, 10 × 22.8 cm. Accession no. 1.2018.100. Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston, ma, Long-Term Loan. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

his landscapes illustrate the period’s ideal of algemeenheyd (universality).71 But the discrete role landscape served for Rembrandt is also consonant, in key respects, with the activities of amateur artists. Boudewijn Bakker and his colleagues systematically studied Rembrandt’s drawn and etched landscapes, localizing them within the topography of seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s surrounding districts and landscape art from that time. Building on Frits Lugt’s seminal Walks with Rembrandt in and around Amsterdam (1915), Bakker and his colleagues were able to identify convincingly the locations of about 140 works. Their research has also demonstrated that Rembrandt followed traditional walking routes along the medieval dyke roads that connected Amsterdam with neighboring villages. Earlier and contemporary artists also followed these routes to sketch favored spots, such as the castle of Kostverloren (Fig. 145), the villages of Diemen (Fig. 147) and Sloten (Fig. 148), the road along the Schinkel between the Overtoom and Sloten (Fig. 149), and the small hamlet of Houtewael (Fig. 150), which lay about a mile east of the city on the Diemerdijk. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam printmaker and publisher Claes Jansz Visscher, who helped to codify and popularize the image of the Dutch landscape, had made excursions to draw many of

71 Samuel van Hoogstraten identified algemeenheyd as the ideal for ambitious artists. See Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 69-73, quoted in De Witt, “Studying under a Genius,” p. 88. For a discussion of landscape as a subject fit for the universal painter, see Weststeijn, Visible World, pp. 241-252.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

150. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Diemerdijk at Houtewael, ca. 1648-1649. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, white highlights (some washes in a later hand), 13.2 × 18.2 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam / Photo: Studio Tromp.

these sites, including Houtewael (Fig. 151). Comparison of his sheet, inscribed “houtewael,” with Rembrandt’s drawing of the same village (Fig. 150) shows that even his viewpoint resembles Visscher’s, though the latter chose a somewhat closer vantage point. Houtewael’s proximity to Amsterdam and picturesque wooden houses and taverns made it one of the most popular attractions for landscape drawing outings. But, as Bakker emphasizes, in contrast to Visscher’s and other artists’ landscapes on paper, Rembrandt’s drawings of the surrounding districts of Amsterdam evidently were not undertaken as a commercial activity.72 Rembrandt rarely inscribed a location on the sheets, and seldom can they be identified as preparatory studies. Only one preliminary drawing for a painting (Fig. 152) and about five drawings for his landscape prints have been preserved, including studies for Cottage with White Paling among Trees (Fig. 153), View at the Inn Huis te Vraag, and View of Haarlem

72 Bakker, “Art and Reality,” esp. pp. 32-34.

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151. Claes Jansz Visscher, View of Houtewael, ca. 1607-1608. Brown ink on cream antique laid paper, framing lines in brown ink, 14.3 × 18.6 cm. Accession no. 1.2018.304. Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston, ma, Long-Term Loan. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

152. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with a Stone Bridge, ca. 1638. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 13.3 × 21.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Franck Raux © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

153. Rembrandt van Rijn, Cottage with White Paling among Trees, 1645. Quill and reed pen and brown ink, with brown wash and opaque white; later additions in greyish-mauve wash; framing line in brown ink, 17.1 × 25.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

154. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Haarlem with the Saxenburg Estate in the Foreground, ca. 1650-1651. Pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with wash, 8.9 × 15.2 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (former Collection Koenigs) / Photo: Studio Tromp.

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155. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Diemen, ca. 1650-1652. Pen and brown ink, and wash on paper, 8.8 × 15.5 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: The Courtauld Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

with the Saxenburg Estate (The Goldweigher’s Field) (Figs. 154, 172).73 Five other landscape prints were assembled from two or three different views in the same area, indicating that his drawings of these sites have been lost. Rembrandt also very rarely signed his landscape drawings, though a large number are fully composed works of art elaborated in the studio, presumably from informal sketches. In two comparatively finished sheets that depict the polder hamlet of Diemen (Figs. 147, 155), for example, contemporary maps show that Rembrandt rearranged some structures to achieve a balanced town profile set within a wide expanse of sky and flat land.74 Perhaps he intended some such drawings as preparatory to landscape prints that he never executed. Yet, as Bakker rightly notes, the vast majority surely were made as independent artworks. A substantial number, moreover, were drawn on rough cartridge or oatmeal paper (Fig. 145) or on paper prepared sensitively with colored washes to suggest weather and atmosphere and to enhance the sheets’ pictorial effects.75 To be sure, Rembrandt generally made few preliminary studies for paintings and prints and seldom signed his drawings. Whether fully composed historical subjects, genre scenes, or figure or animal studies, the drawings seem to have served 73 Ibid, pp. 30-32. For a convincing defense of the attribution of Rembrandt’s Cottage with White Paling among Trees as a preliminary study for the etching of the same title, see Schatborn, Cottage with White Paling. 74 Schmitz, “Rembrandt in Diemen,” pp. 17-18, and Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt, pp. 237-239. 75 On Rembrandt’s use of toned paper for landscape drawings, see Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes, pp. 24-25, and cat. no. 18.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

156. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Banks of the Amstel River, Amsteldijk, near the Hamlet of Meerhuizen, with View towards Het Molentje, ca. 1648-1650. Pen and brush in brown, brown wash, white highlights (washes by a later hand), 14.6 × 26.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Tony Querrec © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.

chiefly as vehicles to practice his skills as a draftsman and unofficial displays of his creativity, arranged in albums for his collection, which also contained drawings by the “most esteemed masters.” Of course, they also functioned as source materials or motifs for Rembrandt himself and his pupils, as with the landscapes noted above.76 However, the striking contrast between Rembrandt’s landscapes on paper and his more visionary landscape paintings, and the limited period of his preoccupation with drawing and printing the subject, points to its discrete status and therefore function in his practice. Bakker concludes that Rembrandt made most of his landscape drawings primarily for private enjoyment, or perhaps also for a select group of friends and admirers.77 Rembrandt may have presented The Banks of the Amstel River, Amsteldijk, near the Hamlet of Meerhuizen, with View towards Het Molentje (Fig. 156) to his friend, the painter Philips Koninck, who noted on the sheet’s verso (Fig. 157): “Dees tekeningh vertoont de buiten amstelkant / Soo braaf getekent door heer Rembrants eijgen hand / P. Ko” (“This drawing shows the Buiten-Amstel, most ably drawn by Mr. Rembrandt’s own hand”).78 The collecting of drawings, especially unfinished sheets and sketches, was in its infancy in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam, and dominated by a 76 Schatborn, “Aspects of Rembrandt’s Draughtsmanship,” pp. 11-13. 77 Bakker, “Art and Reality,” p. 34. See also Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes, p. 22. 78 For the drawing and its inscription, see Schatborn, “Geschiedenis van een tekening,” pp. 20-23; Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes, p. 229; Schatborn, “Met Rembrandt naar buiten,” p. 34; Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt, p. 274.

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157. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape Sketch with Bend of the Amstel River at Kostverloren, verso of View of Banks of the Amstel River, Amsteldijk, near the Hamlet of Meerhuizen, with View towards Het Molentje, ca. 1649-1650. Black chalk, inscriptions, 14.6 × 26.9 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Tony Querrec © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.

small group of artists and liefhebbers that did not yet constitute an established market.79 Finished drawings of landscapes were certainly collected in the seventeenth century; many survive by Jan van Goyen, Pieter de Molijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, Allart van Everdingen, and Herman Saftleven, among others, often signed and dated.80 De Molijn even made copies of his own drawings for the market.81 But since the inventory of Rembrandt’s property drawn up in connection with his cessio bonorum in 1656 lists two albums of drawings specifically described as “full of landscapes nae’t leven” by Rembrandt and another “book full of views drawn by Rembrandt,” he likely kept most of the landscape sheets and the rest of his drawings until forced to sell them, along with the rest of his collection of paper art, at auction in 1656-1658.82 Presumably it was then that the artist and collector Jan van de Cappelle acquired 79 For the early collecting of drawings in seventeenth-century Holland, see in particular Schatborn, “Van Rembrandt tot Crozat”; Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop, pp. 196-211; Van der Veen, “Liefhebbers, handelaren, en kunstenaars”; Plomp, Hartstochtelijk verzameld, esp. pp. 17-40; and Royalton-Kisch, “Dutch Drawings Abroad,” pp. 15-17. On early modern collecting of drawings, see also relevant essays in Baker et al., Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe. 80 Rutgers, “Rembrandt’s Landscapes on Paper,” p. 174. See Buijsen, “De schetsboeken van Jan van Goyen,” pp. 22, 34. In 1604 Karel van Mander noted that Abraham Bloemaert’s landscape sheets were prized by collectors. See Van Mander, Lives, fol. 298r. 81 Beck, “Pieter Molyn,” pp. 341-342. 82 Bakker, “Art and Reality,” p. 15. For the inventory entries, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, 1656/12, nos. 244, 256, 259.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

the two portfolios containing 277 landscape drawings by Rembrandt recorded in his collection of more than 7000 drawings in 1680.83 In landscape representation, then, Rembrandt appears not to have worked solely to the public’s or professional expectations of art. Bakker identifies as the impulse for these works Rembrandt’s “inner compulsion” as an artist, which on a fundamental level is undeniable.84 Yet this is only a partial explanation. By sketching the picturesque villages, castles, and towns encountered on regular summer walks in his local surroundings and reserving these sheets primarily as exercises of his leisure, Rembrandt also appears to have been participating in the aestheticized social arena we have associated with the amateur. Like them, he apparently made landscape drawings as a form of recreation or diversion. That Rembrandt began sketching landscapes in about 1640 and apparently abandoned the habit in the 1650s is significant. The pastime coincides with his purchase in 1639 of a disastrously expensive townhouse on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat in a fashionable district of Amsterdam, and ends with the unraveling of his financial situation that ultimately led him to move in 1658 to a rented house on the Rozengracht, in the humbler Jordaan neighborhood where many other artists had recently settled. Rembrandt’s regular sketching excursions thus can be seen, in part, as performances and records of his self-image as a member of the urban elite. Rembrandt’s motivations for conducting these drawing exercises in the suburban countryside were multifaceted, and the drawings’ practical as well as commercial applications played a role in their production. His increased activity in experiencing and recording his natural environment gave rise to a significant number of commercially viable artworks in the form of prints. But Rembrandt’s intensified engagement with the category of landscape encompasses multiple and overlapping aesthetic and social realms that are not reducible to utilitarian or economic priorities alone. Rembrandt’s sketching excursions in the countryside and the dramatic increase in his production of landscapes coincide with a pause in his production of selfportraits, and hence an interlude in his usual artistic output.85 For Eleanor Saunders, Rembrandt’s turn to landscape constitutes a “pastoral of the self,” a process of selfdiscovery through engaging with nature that catalyzed a shift in his self-portrayal from social preoccupation and exaggeration to a forthright embrace of himself in the late 1640s through the 1660s. Rembrandt also experienced personal misfortune in these years: his wife Saskia’s death in 1642 and mounting financial pressures. 83 Schatborn, “Van Rembrandt tot Crozat,” pp. 10-11. 84 Bakker, “Art and Reality,” p. 34. 85 Saunders, “Rembrandt and the Pastoral of the Self.” On the decline in Rembrandt’s production of self-portraits in the 1640s, see Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits, pp. 79-104.

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158. Peter Paul Rubens, An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen, ca. 1636. Oil on panel, 131.2 × 229.2 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

While I certainly would not want to revive the romanticized and anachronistic view of Rembrandt’s art as the unmediated expression of his personal experiences and emotional life, his drawings of Amsterdam’s rural environs and his personal troubles seem to be interrelated. Seventeenth-century Dutch poems and landscape prints frequently present the pleasantness of the countryside as a therapeutic escape from the pressures of the city. The Amsterdam poet Gerbrandt Adriaensz Bredero wrote: “If I am sad at home, I wander outside the city.”86 Art, social behavior, and conceptions of nature are thus mutually dependent constructs, and landscape’s place as an occasional, generally private pastime for Rembrandt and amateur artists was insepararble from and an accessary to their official, professional personas. The works of other artists can also be conceptualized in terms of such elite social practices. Rubens’s late landscape paintings, including the majestic An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen (Fig. 158) and its pendant The Rainbow Landscape, are rightly interpreted as personal expressions of his withdrawal from the pressures of his career as a courtier, and embodiments of the aristocratic values with which he identified as Lord of Steen.87 These two exceptionally large panels were among the eighteen landscape paintings listed in the inventory of Rubens’s personal property at his death in 1640, and most likely hung at Het Steen, his country 86 Quoted in Gibson, Pleasant Places, p. 77, and Briels, Vlaamse schilders, p. 367. The original reads: “Verdrietet my in huis, ick wandel buiten steê.” 87 See in particular Brown, Making and Meaning, and Kleinert, Rubens and his Landscapes.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

159. Anthony van Dyck, Landscape, ca. 1640. Pen and brown ink and watercolor, 18.9 × 36.4 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

retreat outside Antwerp. Rubens painted landscapes mainly for his own pleasure and for a few friends, including his brother-in-law Arnold Lunden and favored patrons such as the Duke of Buckingham and Everhard Jabach, whose collections most of his other landscapes entered.88 Van Dyck’s delicate watercolors and pen and ink studies of the English and Flemish countryside (Fig. 159), like Rembrandt’s landscape drawings, rarely relate directly to more formal works, and have also been regarded as leisure exercises carried out for personal enjoyment. 89 The Italian painter Guercino was a more prolif ic landscape draftsman than either Fleming, and in fact his landscape drawings (Fig. 160) outnumber any other Italian seventeenth-century artist’s, including the specialist Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi.90 While the vast majority of Guercino’s drawings were preparatory studies mainly for paintings, his landscape sheets, like his genre and caricature drawings, did not serve this utilitarian purpose. He abandoned painting landscapes once he became engrossed with commissions for altarpieces and history paintings, yet continued to produce 88 Brown, Making and Meaning, p. 11. An annotated edition of the list of artworks in Rubens’s house compiled after his death in 1640 is published in Muller, Rubens, pp. 89-146. For Lunden’s collection, see Vlieghe, “Une grande collection Anversoise.” For Jabach’s collection, see Vey, “Die Bildnisse Everhard Jabachs.” 89 Van Puyvelde, Van Dyck, p. 168, writes that Van Dyck made landscape drawings “pour le plaisir de dessiner.” Quoted in Royalton-Kisch, Light of Nature, p. 56, n. 37. 90 For Guercino’s landscape drawings, see in particular Mahon and Turner, The Drawings of Guercino, pp. 101-103, and Stone, Guercino, pp. 153-154.

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160. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Landscape. Brown ink on white antique laid paper, 28 × 42.3 cm. Accession no. 1969.104. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Austin A. Mitchell. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

landscape drawings of various types throughout his long career. Though no documentary evidence of such exchanges is known, it has been suggested that Guercino made landscapes for his own pleasure and to give away as gifts.91 Guercino’s landscapes are anomalous within the artist’s otherwise clearly defined system of production, but the language and economy of the gift offers purchase on our understanding of them.92 Landscape drawings by another celebrated Dutch artist have also been categorized not as works for the market or public consumption, but as exercises and embodiments of leisure. Goltzius’s three drawings depicting the dunes and countryside near Haarlem from 1603 (Fig. 161) are hailed as the inauguration of the naturalistic, naer het leven tradition of rendering the local Dutch countryside. Yet they were never translated into print, unlike the landscape drawings of the next generation of Haarlem artists, including Esaias van de Velde and his cousin Jan van de Velde, among other contemporaries, who codified and disseminated this image of the Dutch landscape in numerous print series that were reissued throughout 91 Stone, Guercino, p. 153. 92 On Guercino’s fixed prices, see Chapter 1, p. 71, and Chapter 2, pp. 228-229; and Spear, “Guercino’s ‘prix-fixe’”; idem, Divine Guido, pp. 210-224; and Spear and Sohm et al., Painting for Profit, p. 52.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

161. Hendrick Goltzius, Dune Landscape near Haarlem, 1603. Pen and brown ink, framing lines in brown ink, 9.1 × 15.4 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (former Collection Koenigs) / Photo: Studio Buitenhof.

the century.93 Goltzius’s pioneering landscapes, by contrast, are intimate and informal drawings altogether distinct from his virtuoso performances with the pen, or penwerken, for which he was renowned as well as from his other drawings of landscape views, which are usually fantastical images done in an ornamental, calligraphic style of penmanship. Scholars have sought to explain these exceptional works as therapeutic and pleasurable exercises that Goltzius, who suffered from a recurring and debilitating illness, drew on the daily walks that Van Mander reported he made in the environs of Haarlem “to liven his spirits.”94 Rembrandt, Goltzius, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Guercino shared a professional and personal identity as history painters, with landscape occupying a less privileged, relatively informal, and occasional space within the hierarchy of their production. Since the Renaissance, landscape had been conceived as a leisure exercise for history painters, a pleasurable diversion from and reward for the serious business of creating histories. Already in 1527 Bishop Paolo Giovio praised the landscapes of Dosso Dossi as parergon (by-works) to his “proper works,” remarking that Dossi painted them “with pleasurable labor” and as “the delightful diversions of painting.”95 93 See in particular Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints. 94 Van Mander, Lives, fol. 284r, quoted in Luijten and Leeflang et al., Hendrick Goltzius, cat. no. 74. 95 Quoted in Wood, Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, p. 55, and Gibson, Pleasant Places, p. 81, and earlier in Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” pp. 113-114. Wood, pp. 54-65, argues compellingly for landscape’s status as a diversion or pastime for figure painters in the Renaissance.

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It was a conception informed by the ancient associations of landscape with the locus amoenus or pleasant place of recreation and enjoyment, and the ideal of villa life, a rarefied form of elite sociability predicated on the opposition between otium and negotium.96 Landscape in the Renaissance came to function as what Jacques Derrida defines as “supplement,” a fundamental extra or superfluity to work.97 If work and recreation are enclosed in a mutual dependency, representing landscapes could be recognized as an enactment of leisure, the obverse of or counterbalance to an artist’s professional, public identity. Such an understanding of landscape, as we have seen, also reverberates in seventeenth-century art treatises and in Dutch landscape art. Van Mander recommended sketching excursions in the countryside as a useful exercise and revitalizing respite from the studio.98 Norgate wrote that he himself owed “much to this harmeless and honest Recreation.”99 By 1668 Willem Goeree, author of a Dutch handbook on drawing, called sketching landscapes “an enjoyable Study, and a useful relaxation.”100 And in the later eighteenth century Gainsborough would extol the freedoms and pleasures of landscape representation over the drudgery of his business as a society portraitist, famously complaining: “I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to walk off to […] where I can paint Landskips and enjoy […] Life in quietness and ease.”101

Rembrandt, Amateurs, Landscape Rembrandt’s practice as a landscape draftsman thus largely conforms to that of other artists of high social standing who successfully claimed their place among the 96 For the relevance of these concepts to Dutch landscape imagery, see Gibson, Pleasant Places. 97 Wood, Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, pp. 54-56, citing Derrida, Of Grammatology. For the ancient roots of this dyad between work and recreation, its elaboration in Netherlandish culture, and its relationship to Dutch landscape art, see Gibson, Pleasant Places, esp. pp. 66-84. 98 Van Mander, Schilder-boeck, fol. 34r–34v, introduces his 8th chapter on landscape by advising young painters to rise early on a summer morning and take a recreational sketching excursion in the countryside: “Come let us, soon as the city gate opens, while away the time together and enlighten our minds by going to see the beauty outside, where beaked musicians sing in the open. There we will look at many views, all of which will help us create a landscape either on canvas or on solid Norwegian oak panels. Come, you will – I am sure – be pleased with the journey.” Quoted in Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape, p. 2, and Gibson, Pleasant Places, p. 68. Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 231, repeats the prescription. For an English translation of the verses, see Brown et al., Dutch Landscape, pp. 35-43. 99 Muller and Murrell, Edward Norgate, p. 83. 100 Goeree, Inleydinge, p. 120: “een vermaekelijcke Study, en een nuttighe uytspannigh.” Quoted in Van den Boogert, Buiten tekenen in Rembrandts tijd, p. 23. 101 See Hayes, ed., Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, p. 68, quoted in Rosenthal and Myrones, eds., Thomas Gainsborough, p. 212.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

illustrious history painters of past and present, and for whom landscape representation was often a recreational pastime. Rembrandt was also in close contact with Dutch dilettantes who drew landscapes in their leisure time. Constantijn Huygens the Younger refers to Rembrandt in a letter of 1663 written to his brother Christiaan, then in Paris, asking him to visit the renowned art collection of the banker Jabach, who he heard owned about 50 landscape drawings by Annibale Carracci. Constantijn wanted Christiaan to make a quick sketch or petit brouillon of a sheet of bathers in water in order to compare it with a Carracci landscape drawing he had seen in Rembrandt’s collection.102 He hoped the copy of Jabach’s sheet would confirm his impression that Rembrandt’s drawing was an authentic Carracci, given the strength of the pen work.103 The letter shows that even after Rembrandt’s bankruptcy and the sale of his fashionable house on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat, he associated with cultured connoisseurs who also practiced art. Rembrandt’s close patron Jan Six was also intimately involved with amateur artists. Jan de Bisschop dedicated his Paradigmata to Six, probably as a gesture of gratitude for access to Six’s drawing collection, where he may have made copies to reproduce as illustrations for his treatise on exemplary drawings; according to the dedication, the two gentlemen engaged in discussions about art and beauty.104 But placing Rembrandt in the company of Dutch social elites who collected and made art does not sit easily with his contentious interactions with prominent patrons, as discussed in the previous chapter, or with his reputation for preferring the company of niedrigen Leuten (“low-class people”), a legend that originated in Joachim von Sandrart’s classicist critique of the artist of 1675.105 Nonetheless Sandrart, who knew Rembrandt from the time he worked in Amsterdam from 1637 to 1641, also reports that the master attracted “countless prominent children” (unzahlbaren fürnehmen Kindern) who came to his studio for instruction, paying 100 guilders annually for the privilege.106 Sandrart’s statement probably refers to advanced painters who spent 102 For the letter, dated 6 December 1663, see Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden, no. 261, and Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, 1663/9. For commentary, see Slive, Rembrandt and His Critics, pp. 42-43; Van Gelder, “De jonge Huygensen en Rembrandt”; and Tummers, Eye of the Connoisseur, pp. 63-64. The drawing may be one now in a private collection in London of which two copies are known. 103 Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden, no. 26, and Van Gelder, “De jonge Huygensen en Rembrandt,” suggested that Constantijn the Younger was interested in purchasing the drawing from Rembrandt’s art dealership. 104 Van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop,” p. 225, and Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop, vol. 1, p. 211. For the dedication, see David Freedberg’s translation in Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop, pp. 227-230. De Bisschop also made an etching after one of Six’s prized possessions, Annibale Carracci’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria, and drawings by De Bisschop are listed in the 1702 auction catalogue of Six’s collection. 105 Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, II, Book 3, p. 326. 106 Ibid: “mit fast unzahlbaren fürnehmen Kindern zur Instruktion und Lehre erfüllet.” Bruyn, “Rembrandt’s Workshop,” p. 70, interpreted Sandrart’s statement as a reference only to the advanced pupils that Rembrandt trained, and whose works he sold at a profit.

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162. Constantijn Daniël van Renesse (attributed to), Amstel Landscape with Bathers. Pen and brown ink, wash, heightened with white, 14.6 by 27.3 cm. bpk Bildagentur/ Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.

time in Rembrandt’s studio after having already served apprenticeships with another master, as well as elite young men who paid to receive instruction from Rembrandt in the fundamentals of art. These were amateurs who practiced art as an avocation, and some of them sketched outdoors together with Rembrandt himself.107 The best known is the amateur Constantijn Daniël van Renesse, who studied with Rembrandt from 1649 at the latest through the early 1650s, or later. He never pursued a career as a professional artist, serving instead as town clerk of Eindhoven from 1653 until his death in 1680.108 A number of Van Renesse’s drawings of historical subjects, which are highly Rembrandtesque, are inscribed with notes referring to his exchanges with Rembrandt when he was a pupil, and some of these sheets contain corrections by another hand, traditionally identified as Rembrandt himself. Martin Royalton-Kisch has reassigned to Van Renesse on stylistic grounds a group of landscape drawings and etchings that were long attributed to Rembrandt, most compellingly Amstel Landscape with Bathers in Berlin (Fig. 162).109 Another landscape sheet also in Berlin (Fig. 163), once considered “a masterwork of Rembrandt,” has also recently been ascribed to Van Renesse.110 If these proposals are correct, the drawings may have been executed by Van Renesse on a sketching excursion undertaken with his teacher. 107 On Rembrandt’s sketching excursions with pupils and friends, see De Witt, “Drawing Together Outdoors.” 108 For Van Renesse, see in particular Vermeeren, “Constantijn Daniël van Renesse.” 109 Royalton-Kisch, “From Rembrandt to Van Renesse.” 110 Bevers et al., Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils, cat. no. 32.2.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

163. Constantijn Daniël van Renesse (attributed to), Landscape with Two Cottages between Trees, ca. 1657-1658. Pen and brown ink, wash, 19.5 × 31 cm. bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.

The work of the amateur Pieter de With provides a yet more direct link between Rembrandt and amateur landscapists. Like Van Renesse, De With appears to have taken occasional drawing lessons from Rembrandt in the 1650s.111 Although almost nothing is known about De With’s life, a small number of distinctly Rembrandtesque landscape drawings and prints survives, a few of which bear his monogram and the date 1659. De With’s high social status is indicated by a seventeenth-century inscription on the verso of a landscape drawing by Jacob Koninck, which uses the title “d’hr” (Mister) for De With, but not for Koninck, who was a professional artist.112 De With’s contribution of two landscape drawings to Jacob Heyblocq’s album amicorum, which as we saw includes a Rembrandt drawing, suggests that he moved in elevated and learned circles.113 Heyblocq’s album contains numerous landscape drawings, several of which are signed by otherwise unknown artists 111 For De With, see Schatborn, “Tekenigen van Rembrandt en Pieter de With”; idem, “Getekende landschappen van Pieter de With”; idem in Bevers et al., Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, pp. 217-225; and Van der Veen, “Rembrandt’s Late Pupils,” pp. 41-43. 112 Quoted in Van der Veen, “Rembrandt’s Late Pupils,” pp. 42-43, and n. 92: “12 tekeningen van d’hr. P. de Widt en Jacobus Coninck.” See also De Vries Az., “Aanteekeningen,” p. 305 and n. 32, and Giltaij, Drawings by Rembrandt and His School, cat. no. 89. 113 Van der Veen, “Rembrandt’s Late Pupils,” p. 42. Both drawings are signed, but not dated. See Thomassen and Gruys, eds., Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq, pp. 285 and 287 [album amicorum], and nos. 196 and

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who were presumably amateurs.114 Recently a number of more elaborate landscape sheets have been reassigned to De With, including Landscape with Farm Buildings at Chatsworth (Fig. 164), previously ascribed to Rembrandt.115 Since De With’s Boathouse between Trees in Berlin (Fig. 165) shows the same site from a different angle that Rembrandt depicted in the drypoint etching Clump of Trees with a Vista of 1652, the first state of which (Fig. 166) was probably executed outdoors, De With may have been sitting next to Rembrandt, making his own study directly from nature. The drawing style of the dilettante landscapist Johannes Leupenius (Fig. 167) also indicates that he was either in direct contact with Rembrandt or with the master’s landscape drawings.116 As noted above, Leupenius was a surveyor, a profession for which draftsmanship skills were vital. Rembrandt’s drawing of a well-dressed young man seated in an inn, seemingly absorbed in making a drawing (Fig. 168), may portray an amateur who accompanied him on one of his sketching trips and was perhaps executed when they stopped at a taphouse. The draftsman is seated next to a window open to a view of the River IJ at a bend in the Diemerdijk looking towards Naarden, which is a partial view of the same site Rembrandt depicted in a drawing in Rotterdam (Fig. 169).117 The young man seems to be drawing the same landscape scene that Rembrandt drew in its entirety.118 Rembrandt not only taught and sketched alongside amateur landscapists, but some of his most famous landscape prints depict the country estates of wealthy Amsterdammers with whom he was closely affiliated. Landscape with a Farm Building and the House with the Tower (Fig. 170), dateable to about 1650, and a related drawing from about the same date (Fig. 171) show the manor house outside Amsterdam known as Het Huys met het Torentje or simply Het Torentje (“the little tower”) that belonged to Jan Uytenbogaert.119 Uytenbogaert, as we saw in Chapter 3, was a government 197. On drawings in Heyblocq’s album, including those by amateurs, see Noorman, “Drawings Collection in the Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq.” 114 Thomassen and Gruys, eds., Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq, pp. 112, 160, 170, 177, 270, 275, 295 [album amicorum], and nos. 188, 191 (Jacob Gorter), 107 (M. van Goor), 200 (Cornelis van Goor). 115 Schatborn, “Tekenigen van Rembrandt en Pieter de With”; idem, “Getekende landschappen van Pieter de With”; and Schatborn in Bevers et al., Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils, cat. nos. 37.2, 38.2. 116 Van der Veen, “Rembrandt’s Late Pupils,” p. 41; De Witt, “Studying under a Genius,” p. 103; and Rutgers, “Rembrandt’s Landscapes on Paper,” p. 196. Since Leupenius’s drawings date from the 1660s, when Rembrandt was no longer producing landscapes, he may have been a follower rather than a pupil. 117 Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt, p. 229. 118 In 1915 Frits Lugt suggested that the draftsman was Jan Six and that Rembrandt drew the scene when he was staying at Six’s country house somewhat further along the dyke, though Six did not own the property at this time. See Lugt, Wandelingen, pp. 144-146. 119 The building in Rembrandt’s print was identified as Uytenbogaert’s country property by Van Regteren Altena, “Retouches aan ons Rembrandt-beeld,” p. 12.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

164. Pieter de With (attributed to), Landscape with Farm Buildings, ca. 1652. Pen and brown ink with brown wash, 11.6 × 20.4 cm. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by Permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.

165. Pieter de With, Boathouse between Trees, 1652. Pen and brown ink, 9.2 × 17 cm. bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg Anders / Art Resource, ny.

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166. Rembrandt van Rijn, Clump of Trees with a Vista, 1652. Drypoint, first state, 14.8 × 21.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

167. Johannes Leupenius, View of Weeresteyn Manor on the Vecht. Brown ink on Asian paper, 11.4 × 18.5 cm. Accession no. 1.2018.100. The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, ma, Promised Gift. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

168. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man Writing or Drawing Next to a Window with View over the River IJ, 1650-1653. Pen with brown ink, brown and grey wash, heightened with white, on paper, 13.5 × 19.7 cm. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, ny.

169. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Schellingwou from the Diemerdijk over the IJ, shortly after 1651. Pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, framing lines with pen and brown ink, 8.1 × 13.8 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Loan: Stichting Museum Van Beuningen (former Collection Koenig) / Photo: Studio Tromp.

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170. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with a Farm Building and the House with the Tower, ca. 1650. Etching and drypoint, 12.2 × 32 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

171. Rembrandt van Rijn, Landscape with the House with the Little Tower, ca. 1651, pen and brown ink, brush and tan wash. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

172. Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Bloemendaal with the Saxenburg Estate (The Goldweigher’s Field), 1651. Etching and drypoint, 12 × 31.9 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

official and avid art collector who assisted Rembrandt in securing payment from the stadholder for the Passion cycle paintings; Rembrandt etched his portrait in 1639 (Fig. 96), perhaps as a token of gratitude.120 It is conceivable that Rembrandt went on a sketching trip while visiting Uytenbogaert at his country retreat and subsequently used the drawing as the point of departure for his etching. The print is not a formal portrayal of Het Torentje, however. The manor, seen from a distance and across a path, is identifiable only by the octagonal tower for which it is named, and nestles within trees, a farmhouse barn, and cottage that were not part of the property.121 Rembrandt also burnished out the tower’s cupola in the third state of the print, indicating that his primary goal was not to create an accurate portrait of the estate. Rembrandt nonetheless included Het Torentje as a reference to the print lover Uytenbogaert, who probably welcomed him to his country retreat where Rembrandt made sketches of the manor and its environs. Uytenbogaert is also connected, though wrongly, to The Goldweigher’s Field of 1651 (Fig. 172). The title dates from the eighteenth century, when the print was mistakenly identified as a representation of the rural manor of Uytenbogaert, who was popularly known as “the Goldweigher” after Rembrandt’s 1639 etched portrait showing him as a tax collector weighing and dispensing gold coins (see Fig. 96).122 The Goldweigher’s Field actually records the Saxenburg estate at Bloemendaal, outside of Haarlem, which belonged to Christoffel Thijs, the Amsterdam merchant who owned the deed to Rembrandt’s house on the Breestraat.123 By 1651 Rembrandt owed Thijs 8400 guilders in interest and the balance due on the purchase price of the house in addition to unpaid real estate taxes and two years later Thijs began proceedings to force payment of the debts, ultimately leading Rembrandt to file for bankruptcy protection in 1656. From Rembrandt’s fragmentary comments on the back of a drawing depicting a child being taught to walk, we know that he had attempted to offer paintings to his creditor, noting as a reminder to himself to “Ask Thijs whether he might not like one of the paintings to be touched up […] it being that he wants neither of the two.”124 Rembrandt’s negotiations with Thijs may have been intended as partial payment of the large debt or as a gesture of goodwill, or 120 See Chapter 3, pp. 246-247. 121 See Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt, pp. 316-317. 122 The print was identified as Uytenbogaert’s country estate in Valerius Röver’s hand-written list of his Rembrandt prints from about 1730: “buitenplaats van Uitenbogaert buiten Naarden.” See Van Gelder and Van Gelder-Schrijver, “De ‘Memorie’ van Rembrandt’s prenten,” p. 16. In 1751 Gersaint gave the print its traditional title of La Campagne du Pesseur d’Or (The Goldweigher’s Field). See Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné, cat. no. 226. 123 Van Regteren Altena, “Retouches aan ons Rembrandt-beeld.” 124 On the inscription in relation to Rembrandt’s negotiations with Thijs, see Crenshaw, Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, p. 49. For the inscription, see Strauss and Van der Meulen, Rembrandt Documents, pp. 610-611, no. 16.

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173. Ferdinand Bol, View in the Dunes near Haarlem, ca. 1651. Black chalk, brown and grey wash, 14.7 × 29.2 cm. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris.

perhaps the notation refers to an otherwise unknown commission. At any rate, Rembrandt attempted to engage this creditor in a personal transaction involving his art. The Goldweigher’s Field may have emerged from the two men’s interactions over the debt, perhaps as a gift.125 Whatever the case, Rembrandt presumably created this panoramic view of the dunes and countryside outside Haarlem, his only identifiable landscape not of Amsterdam’s surroundings, from a sketch or sketches made on a visit to Thijs’s property, one of which survives (Fig. 154). Two drawings of the same view of Haarlem from the dunes but from a less elevated vantage point – by Rembrandt’s pupil Ferdinand Bol (Fig. 173) and by his friend Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (Houbraken identifies him as a pupil and “a great friend”) in Berlin – suggest that all three artists made a sketching excursion to the duneland while visiting Thijs’s Saxenburg estate.126 The seated figures apparently drawing in the foreground in Bol’s sheet may even refer to their shared activity. One other landscape print by Rembrandt is permanently associated with the country estate of a patron and art collector: Six’s Bridge of 1645 (Fig. 174), whose title originated in the 1731 inventory of the Delft collector Valerius Röver.127 In 1751 125 Van Regteren Altena, “Retouches aan ons Rembrandt-beeld,” p. 9. 126 Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt, p. 378. For the drawings and their relationship to Rembrandt’s depictions of the site, see also Schatborn, Bij Rembrandt in de leer, pp. 44-47. For Van den Eeckhout’s connection with Rembrandt, see Sluijter, Rembrandt’s Rivals, pp. 346-347, and Manuth, “Rembrandt’s Artist Friends.” 127 In Röver’s inventory the print is listed as “Six bruggetje.” See Van Gelder and Van Gelder-Schrijver, “De ‘Memorie’ van Rembrandt’s prenten,” p. 16.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

174. Rembrandt van Rijn, Six’s Bridge, 1645. Etching, 12.9 × 22.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Edmé-François Gersaint elaborated by incorporating an anecdote about Rembrandt’s visit to Six’s country estate, where supposedly he was a frequent guest. According to the well-known story, Rembrandt wagered successfully that he could draw on a plate the view seen from the manor’s dining room before a servant could return with mustard for their lunch from a neighboring village.128 Though apocryphal, the anecdote provides a narrative account for Rembrandt’s extraordinarily free execution of the landscape scene. Six did own a house near Hillegom called Elsbroek, though Rembrandt’s etching shows another location outside the village of Ouderkerk, whose church tower is seen in the distance. Lugt had tried to link Six with the estate of Klein-Kostverloren, near where the view appears to have been taken, but at the time Rembrandt made the etching the house belonged to the burgomaster, Albert Coenraadsz Burgh.129 Recently, however, Marieke de Winkel tentatively identified the site with property near Ouderkerk owned by Six’s mother, Anna Wijmer (Fig. 146), which he inherited.130 As De Winkel stresses, the tradition of linking Six with the print predates the eighteenth century: A seventeenth-century inscription on the verso of an impression in Washington, D.C. identifies it as Sickx brúggetje (“Six’s little bridge”). 128 Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné, cat. no. 200. 129 Lugt, Wandelingen, pp. 116-119. 130 De Winkel, “Rembrandt en Jan Six,” pp. 25-27. For the inscribed impression, see Hinterding, Rembrandt Etchings from the Frits Lugt Collection, vol. 1, cat. no. 163, n. 2.

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As we saw in the previous chapter, Rembrandt portrayed Jan Six in 1654 as a country gentleman by showing him wearing a grey riding suit with a red cape casually worn over the shoulder (Fig. 105).131 Six inherited the manor Elsbroek in 1651 and actively embraced the leisure activities and social identity associated with ownership of a country manor. In the same year he acquired Elsbroek, Six published a country house poem dedicated to his friend Hendrik Hooft: Landt-leven aen de Heer Hendrick Hooft (“Country Life to Sir Hendrik Hooft”). Like the hofdichten discussed above, Six’s poem follows the tradition of Georgic poetry by conceptualizing his manor as a sanctuary from the cares of the city and public life.132 Rembrandt’s portrait etching of Six from 1647 (Fig. 104), which emphasizes the young patrician’s virtuous pursuit of learning and the arts, already intimates Six’s cultivation of the persona of a country gentleman. A game bag and hunting knife (in a sheath) hang on a hook by the window.133 The allusion to the pleasures of country life is even stronger in Rembrandt’s preliminary study for the portrait, where a dog, likely a greyhound used for hunting, jumps up on his master’s leg.

Landscape Drawings and the Gift Like the amateur landscapes discussed above, Rembrandt’s landscape drawings not only correlate well with early modern constructs of the suburban countryside as a site for elite recreation and sketching nature as a pleasurable pastime, but also form a category of artwork understood in the period to operate outside of normal market conditions and relations. In a letter of 1618 Edward Norgate mentions landscape sketches as works that circulated irregularly and only in the form of gifts. Writing to William Trumbull, royal agent in Brussels, Norgate requested help in securing such drawings for his patron, the Earl of Arundel: “how very welcome a few Desseings […] or Drawings of Rewbens or Guill: [Guillaume] van Nieulandt [Willem II van Nieulandt] would have bene, or would be yet,” he writes, especially “some of theire first and sleight drawings either of Landskip or any such kind as might happily be procured.” Norgate adds that these drawings are “things never sold but given to frends [sic] that are Leefhebbers.”134 Here, then, is striking confirmation of the personal, exclusive character of landscape sketches and recognition of their status as distinctly non-commercial productions. 131 De Winkel, Fashion and Fancy, pp. 113-132. 132 See Six, “Landt-leven aen de Heer Hendrick.” 133 De Winkel, Fashion and Fancy, pp. 98, 117-118. 134 Quoted in Muller and Murrell, Edward Norgate, p. 5. Parts of the passage are also cited in Howarth, Arundel and His Circle, p. 231, n. 3.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

Because informal sketches by celebrated artists, specifically landscapes, were not intended for sale, and therefore exceedingly difficult to secure on the open market, Norgate instinctively identified them with the culture of gift giving. Drawings of this type were assumed to be traded primarily within circuits of gift exchange comprised of artists and liefhebbers, those discriminating collectors who maintained close relations with artists and appreciated such works for their very particular, intimate aesthetic qualities. That these drawings were believed to leave the artist’s possession in exceptionally personal circumstances, and hence beyond the reach of the market, only intensified their desirability. Norgate also registers an awareness of the privileged status of drawing within the gift economy. We have seen that the presentation or gift drawing emerged in the Renaissance as a new class of artwork associated with Michelangelo’s refined, beautifully realized sheets given to intimates such as Tomasso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna (Figs. 21-23).135 The medium’s relative intimacy served Michelangelo as a kind of refuge from the dependency of conventional patronage relationships, allowing him to foster relationships of mutuality and regard with select patrons and admirers.136 Yet while originally intensely private works, Michelangelo’s presentation drawings were well-known among cultural elites and already entered the public realm in his own lifetime. In 1562 Cavalieri presented Cosimo I de’ Medici with the Cleopatra (Fig. 22) which he had received from Michelangelo as a personal gift, writing “it was so dearly beloved by me that I feel as though I am losing one of my sons, for hitherto no one else in the world was able to get it from me.”137 In the sixteenth century they were also reproduced in drawings, prints, and paintings, as well as cameos and rock crystals in emulation of ancient gems. Michelangelo’s sheets and presentation drawings by later artists are normally highly finished works, with little of the medium’s potentially experimental character and freedom from the conventional and formal expectations of painting and printmaking of the period. Norgate’s specification that he wanted a slight sketch, a casual, incomplete rendering, is therefore illuminating. Not only did he desire works endowed with transcendent value due to their unavailability, but specifically drawings that gave an impression of access to the unmediated creativity of their makers. In 1638 Franciscus Junius, Arundel’s librarian and a member of Norgate’s circle, also wrote that true connoisseurs perceived in unfinished drawings “the very

135 For Michelangelo’s presentation drawings, see Chapter 1, pp. 86-90; Wilde, Michelangelo, pp. 147-159; Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings, pp. 105-118; and Bambach et al., Michelangelo, pp. 130-155. 136 See in particular Nagel, “Art as Gift.” See also idem, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna”; and idem, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, pp. 169-187. 137 For the letter, see Paola Barocchi’s translation in Hirst, Michelangelo Draftsman, p. 116. On the drawing, see in particular Cropper, “Place of Beauty,” esp. p. 201, and Bambach et al., Michelangelo, p. 142.

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thoughts of the studious Artificer, and how he did bestirre his judgment before he could resolve what to like and what to dislike.”138 Norgate’s and Junius’s remarks reveal a nascent discrimination among connoisseurs for works perceived virtually to dissolve the distinction between the privacy of the artist and the art object itself.139 If presented as a gift, a sketch’s aura of privacy became simultaneously magnified and publicized, for, as Mauss showed, any object exchanged as a gift retains a powerful association with its donor.140 Normally sketches and study sheets remained part of artists’ studios, as was the case with Rembrandt’s drawings, but occasionally they were given to fellow artists or favored patrons. Raphael’s famous presentation to Albrecht Dürer of a life study of nude men in red chalk (Fig. 175), on which the German artist proudly inscribed that he had received it as a gift in 1515, endowed the sheet with a unique aura of publicized privacy.141 Landscape’s affiliation with leisure and freedom from professional or commercial pressures clarifies its circumscribed and anomalous role in certain artists’ practices – including Rembrandt and fellow Netherlanders Goltzius, Rubens, and Van Dyck – and suggests why landscape occurred to Norgate when requesting drawings that normally did not circulate on the market. As virtually inalienable possessions, landscapes could constitute performances and embodiments of their maker’s temporary retreat or escape from the usual economics of the art market. It might be said that the landscapes such artists either presented as gifts or that collectors thought only left an artist’s possession in the form of gifts fulfill what anthropologists Annette Weiner and Maurice Godelier call the paradox of “keepingwhile-giving” or “keeping-for-giving.” These drawings, not surrendered through normal channels of exchange and transcending a mere cash economy, accumulated tremendous imaginary power, and as a consequence potentially provided collectors and their collections with powerfully symbolic capital.142 *** 138 Junius, Painting of the Ancients, vol. 1, p. 239, and idem, De schilderconst der oude, pp. 259-260, quoted in Van Gelder and Jost, Jan de Bisschop, pp. 194-195. See further Weststeijn, Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain, pp. 270-271. 139 As West, “Nothing as Given,” p. 5, n. 6, writes, gift economies dissolve the distinction “between the privacy of a person and the publicity of the things the person exchanges.” 140 See Mauss, The Gift. 141 Dürer’s inscription reads: “1515 Raffahell de Vrbin der so hoch peim pobst geacht ist gewest hat de hat dyse nackette bild gemacht vnd hat sy dem albrecht dürer gen nornberg geschickt Im sein hand zw weisen.” On the drawing, see in particular Kaplan, “Dürer’s ‘Raphael’ Drawing Reconsidered”; Nesselroth, “Raphael’s Gift to Dürer”; and Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, p. 96. 142 See Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, and Godelier, Enigma of the Gift.

Art and Leisure: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and L andscape Representation 

175. Raphael, Two Studies of Male Nudes, 1515. Red chalk and metalpoint with pen and ink inscription by Albrecht Dürer, 40.3 × 28.3 cm. Albertina, Vienna. Photo: © Purix Verlag Volker Christen / Bridgeman Images.

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Rembrandt’s practice as a landscape draftsman seems to lie at the intersection of these converging social and aesthetic constructs about art and nature, and thus defies full explanation as a commercial enterprise. Rembrandt sketched his experience of his local surroundings as a pastime, though in landscape etchings, especially Six’s Bridge (Fig. 174), he introduced his drawings’ private, informal character into the public arena of art. Balancing entrepreneurialism and prescience about the potentialities of demand for art with complete dedication to and identification with his artistic calling, Rembrandt produced an oeuvre that will always evade the reductive logic of economic calculation.

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For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift Abstract This chapter explores Vermeer’s art in relation to the ethics and aesthetics of the gift. The gift culture of Dutch burgher society together with the conceptual framework of the gift paradigm cast new light on Vermeer’s exceptionalism. Vermeer’s depictions of beautiful women and refined courtship encourage the art lover to experience his paintings as if in love with their seductive beauty, figuring the ideal relationship between beholder and artwork, and painter and painting, in contemporary Dutch art theory. As objects of desire of the viewer and Vermeer himself, his paintings thematize art’s inspiration in love, not the desire for fame or profit, laying claim to a gift-like status and carving out a symbolic space exempt from ordinary measures of value. Keywords: Vermeer; Poetics of Painting; Women in Art; Art Theory; Mimesis; Gifts

The sophisticated representational effects of Vermeer’s paintings assume a discriminating, specialized clientele of liefhebbers. These connoisseurs would have recognized that Vermeer’s uniquely equivocal approach to the conventions of Dutch realist artifice set his pictures apart from their models in Gerard ter Borch’s and Frans van Mieris’s meticulously painted and fashionable Petrarchan images of beautiful women and dignified courtship. In contrast to the comparatively prolific Ter Borch and Van Mieris and most contemporaries, Vermeer’s output was also remarkably limited, with an oeuvre consisting of only 36 extant paintings. This chapter maps the continuities between the rarefied conditions of Vermeer’s practice, his novel paintings of Petrarchan poetic themes, and the discourse of the gift to clarify Vermeer’s place within the Dutch artistic economy. Vermeer’s adaptation of the modern Petrarchan subjects of beautiful women and gracious courtship invite the discerning male liefhebber to experience his work as if witnessing or entering into a courtship of a beautiful woman, figuring the ideal relationship between viewer and artwork, and painter and painting, of contemporary Dutch art theory. By analogizing the beholder’s encounter

Zell, M., Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/ 9789463726429_ch05

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with his work to the poetic structure of lover and unattainable beloved, Vermeer also aestheticized the desiring, possessive gaze of liefhebbers and himself to thematize his art’s inspiration in love, not merely the desire for fame or profit. At once objects of the art lover’s desire and products of Vermeer’s own love of art, his paintings generate a symbolic social space defined through his culture’s ethics of the gift as antithetical to economic relations. Engaging the beholder in a dialogue grounded in the interrelated anti-economic discourses of the love of art and the gift, Vermeer laid symbolic claim to a status for his art and himself beyond ordinary measures of value.

Vermeer and Petrarchan Poetics1 Images of beautiful women and elegant courtship pervade Vermeer’s art. In many of his paintings fashionable young burgher women read or write letters, contemplatively perform domestic activities, entertain dignified men in musical courtship rituals, or gaze at the viewer as if to invite us into an amorous exchange. Vermeer’s feminine idylls also relate to the Petrarchan lyrical tradition of the suffering poet’s longing for an idealized and unattainable woman that dominated the contemporary literary imagination and was popularized in genre painting by his close contemporaries Ter Borch and Van Mieris, among others. As Alison Kettering has shown in a groundbreaking study, Ter Borch, with whom Vermeer was acquainted, pioneered in the 1650s modern genre paintings with decorous women who conform to the Petrarchan convention of elusive female objects of desire.2 Ter Borch’s The Introduction from about 1662 (Fig. 176) exemplifies the type with a graceful woman in gleaming satin allowing a bowing suitor to touch her fingertips, even as her erect posture and averted gaze indicate reticence and reserve. In Lady at her Toilette from about 1660 (Fig. 177) another elegant woman, again in Ter Borch’s hallmark gleaming satin, enacts the role of the cool and elusive Petrarchan lady conscious of the suitor’s, and by extension the viewer’s, imagined gaze as she distractedly fingers a ring that evokes courtship. Ter Borch often modeled these idealized women on his half-sister Gesina, herself an amateur artist and devotee of Petrarchan poetry who drew vignettes of Dutch maidens’ indifference to their suitors in her poetry album (Fig. 178).3 As has long been recognized, however, Vermeer’s equivocal approach to pictorial mimesis distinguishes him from other seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters. 1 This section is adapted from Zell, “Vermeer’s Poetics of Painting.” 2 Kettering, “Ter Borch’s Ladies in Satin.” 3 For Gesina ter Borch, see Kettering, “Ter Borch’s Studio Estate,” pp. 446-447; idem, Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate, vol. 2, pp. 362-760, 832-833; and Brouwer, Gesina ter Borch. For Dutch amateur women artists, see Honig, “The Art of Being ‘Artistic’.” On Netherlandish women artists, see Sutton, ed., Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

176. Gerard ter Borch, The Introduction (An Officer Making his Bow to a Lady), ca. 1662. Oil on canvas, 76 × 68 cm. Polesden Lacey, UK. Photo: National Trust Photo Library / Art Resource, ny.

Ter Borch and Van Mieris embraced an aesthetic ideal that defined “perfect painting,” as the artist and theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten wrote in 1678, as “a mirror of nature making things that are not there appear to be and which deceives in a permissible, pleasurable and praiseworthy way.”4 Ter Borch’s paintings, as well as Van Mieris’s 4 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 25, quoted in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 252: “Want een volmaekte Schidery is als een spiegel van der Natuer, die de dingen, die niet en zijn, doet schijnen te zijn, en op een geoorlofde, vermakelijke en prijslijke wijze bedriegt.” Karel van Mander already equated painting and

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177. Gerard ter Borch, Lady at her Toilette, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 59.7 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Eleanor Clay Ford Fund, General / Bridgeman Images.

mirroring in Het schilder-boeck of 1604. Quoting his teacher Lucas de Heere, Van Mander praises the paintings of Jan van Eyck: “These are mirrors, mirrors, not panels” (T’sijn spieghels, spieghels zijnt, neen t’zijn geen Tafereelen). See Van Mander, Lives, fol. 201r. On Van Mander’s concept of reflexy-const (the art of depicting reflections), see Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, esp. pp. 70-77.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

178. Gesina ter Borch, Gentleman Kneeling before a Lady, drawing from her poetry album, ca. 1655. Watercolor and pen and ink, 31.3 × 20.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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179. Frans van Mieris, The Duet (Lady at the Harpsichord), 1658. Oil on panel, 31.6 × 24.9 cm. Staatliches Museum Schwerin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliches Museum Schwerin / Elke Walford / Art Resource, ny.

The Duet, dated 1658 (Fig. 179), are virtuoso performances of this ideal of mimetic artifice. Each detail of surface and texture – especially the womens’ shimmering silk dresses – is meticulously described, creating a glittering reflection of visual tactility on the smooth, mirror-like surface of the panel or canvas. Vermeer, by contrast, became absorbed with the limits of mimesis, eschewing his colleagues’ painstakingly detailed and virtually invisible brushwork to call unusual attention to the illusory nature of his pictorial fictions. However compelling the suggestion of presence in Vermeer’s paintings, the illusion of tangibility is at the same time subtly denied. By dispensing with conventional modeling to define forms, Vermeer focused increasingly on tone and light at the expense of resolution and even of credibility. In his iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring (Fig. 180), for example, a sentient yet fragile beauty simultaneously offers and withdraws the illusion of her presence. As the woman emerges from

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

darkness into light her features nonetheless remain indistinct, the outline of her face merging softly with the background to create an ethereal effect, as if she were a vision. Showcasing the illusory status of his pictorial fiction, Vermeer self-consciously challenges and complicates the paradigm of the mirror as painting’s model. The most sustained and perceptive investigation of the peculiar suspension between presence and absence in Vermeer’s art probably remains Lawrence Gowing’s classic study of 1952. For Gowing, Vermeer’s “obliquity,” as he calls it, reveals and compensates for the artist’s psychological fear or detachment from the women who constitute the central focus of his art.5 Yet few today would subscribe to the idea that Vermeer’s work directly reflects his own elusive, complex personality. The link between Vermeer’s art and the cultural world it inhabited emerges from a closer consideration of the complementarity between his work and early modern poetics, specifically the thematics of the absent beloved that pervaded Petrarchan poetry, writings on art, and even elite social conduct throughout the seventeenth century.6 The heightened artifice and distinctive self-reflexivity of his art also underwrite and animate Petrarchan lyricism. The unattainability of a beautiful and virtuous woman in Petrarchism is a poetic device that liberates the author’s creative subjectivity, and moreover thematizes the beloved’s absent presence in the descriptive praise of her loveliness.7 The fragmentation of the woman’s physical features – a hallmark of Petrarch’s sonnets rehearsed sometimes monotonously by his seventeenth-century followers as they catalogue their lady’s blonde hair, dark eyes, rose-colored lips, etc. – also alludes to the limits of figurability itself.8 While the painter reassembles these scattered features in a unified portrayal of the ideal woman, she remains, as in textual recreations of her appearance, necessarily beyond possession.9 As Elizabeth Cropper demonstrated, the poetic trope of the elusive 5 Gowing, Vermeer, p. 26, ultimately finds a resolution for Vermeer’s purported anxiety in the confines of the camera cabinet or camera obscura, where “behind the thick curtains […] he entered the world of silent, undemanding relationships. There he could spend the hours watching the women move to and fro.” 6 The importance of early modern poetics to the development of Renaissance and Baroque painting has been demonstrated by a number of important studies. See in particular Cropper, “On Beautiful Women”; idem, “Beauty of Woman”; idem, “Place of Beauty”; Cranston, Poetics of Portraiture; Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting; and idem, “The Poetics of Desire and Pictorial Generation.” 7 The classic study of the literary phenomenon of Petrachism is Foster, Icy Fire. See also Minta, Petrarch and Petrarchism, and especially two insightful studies: Kerrigan and Braden, Idea of the Renaissance, pp. 157-189, and Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance. On Petrarch’s reception in seventeenth-century Holland, see Ypes, Petrarca, and Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets, pp. 109-110. 8 See Vickers, “Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” and idem, “Petrarchan Lyric and Strategies of Deception.” 9 Cropper, “Beauty of Woman,” p. 183.

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180. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665. Oil on canvas, 44.5 × 39 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

beloved not only informed Italian Renaissance paintings of beautiful women, but redefined paintings as objects of subjective desire for the beholder and, by extension, the painter himself.10 In explicitly signaling the contingent nature of his modern images of female beauty, Vermeer, I suggest, gives visual form to the structure of absent presence with which contemporary poets and authors, following Petrarch, meditated upon 10 See ibid, pp. 175-190; idem, “Place of Beauty”; and idem, “On Beautiful Women.”

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

the foundational paradox of representational art. His paintings of amatory themes therefore can be seen to participate in and dramatize a poetic discourse enthralled with art as a seductive “semblance without being,” as the Dutch painter and author Philips Angel put it in 1642.11 From the moment Vermeer embraced the fashionable Petrarchan subjects of beautiful women and decorous courtship he conspicuously signaled a new preoccupation with the dialectics between presence and absence in pictorial mimesis. Woman Reading a Letter by an Open Window from about 1657 in Dresden (Fig. 181), Vermeer’s first treatment of a modern Petrarchan theme, offers an intimate glimpse of an elegant young woman absorbed in her own thoughts, captured in a moment of privacy as she decorously reads a love letter; her tense emotional state seems displaced onto the overflowing bowl of fruit and agitated carpet in the foreground.12 His earlier works are history paintings of biblical and mythological subjects, and two large-scale canvases depicting moralizing genre scenes (see Fig. 188). Vermeer’s inspiration for the new direction of his art would have been paintings such as Ter Borch’s smaller Woman Writing a Letter from about 1655 (Fig. 182) or his Letter Reader of a few years later. X-rays of Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter reveal that he originally included a large painting of Cupid on the back wall, reminiscent of the inset painting in his Woman Standing at a Virginal from about 1670-1672 (Fig. 183).13 Contrary to the assumption that Vermeer himself removed this explicit clue that the woman’s thoughts, similar to those of Ter Borch’s women, are focused on love, recent technical analysis of the painting indicates that it was covered up decades later, after his death.14 Vermeer calls unusual attention to the fiction of this vividly mimetic presentation of female solitude by introducing, for the first and only time, the illusionistic device of a curtain and rod hanging before the painting’s nominal surface. Imitating the display practice of hanging curtains over pictures to protect and enhance their illusionistic effects, the motif also alluded to the legendary contest between the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius in which the latter triumphed by painting a curtain that deceived the former.15 Contemporary Delft painters of 11 Angel, Lof der schilder-konst, p. 24: “schijn, sonder sijn.” On Angel’s sources for this phrase, see Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 211. 12 For Vermeer’s modern subject matter, see in particular Blankert, “Vermeer’s Modern Themes”; Vergara, “Antiek and Modern”; and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, esp. pp. 56-61. 13 Vermeer probably based his paintings of Cupid on a picture that was recorded as a cupido in the possession of his widow Catharina Bolnes in 1676. See Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, pp. 220-221, and doc. 364. The same painting also hangs in the background of Vermeer’s Woman Interrupted at her Music (Frick Collection, New York). 14 See Neidhardt and Schölzel, “Restoration of Vermeer’s ‘Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window’.” 15 In 1662 Dou was praised for his illusionism as “the Dutch Parrhasius” (den Hollandschen Parrhasius) by the Leiden poet Dirk Traudenius (Tyd-zifter, p. 17), quoted in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 209. For the illusionistic curtain motif in seventeenth-century painting, see Heuer, “Picture Curtains and the

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181. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter by an Open Window, ca. 1657. Oil on canvas, 83 × 64.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Bridgeman Images.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

182. Gerard ter Borch, Woman Writing a Letter, ca. 1655. Oil on canvas, 38.3 × 27.9 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

church interiors often incorporated this trompe l’oeil device in their work, beginning probably with Gerard Houckgeest’s Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft dated 1651 (Fig. 184), and the Leiden genre painter Gerrit Dou used it in Man Smoking a Pipe from about 1650 (Fig. 185). Founder of the fijnschilder school of painting and Rembrandt’s first pupil, Dou was famous for a meticulously crafted technique which was further refined by his pupil Van Mieris, whose paintings were, as we have seen, foundational to Vermeer’s development. Vermeer, however, retreats from unconditional illusionistic displays. In other artists’ works, the trompe l’oeil device Dutch Church Interior”; Hénin, “Parrhasius and the Stage Curtain”; and Fucci, “Parrhasius and the Art of Display.”

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183. Johannes Vermeer, A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 51.7 × 45.2 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

is accompanied by a shadow and a feigned picture frame to reinforce the pictorial claim that the drawn curtain belongs to the physical world in front of the fictive view depicted within.16 Vermeer withholds explicit confirmation of his painting’s

16 For the painting’s “complex play with credibility,” see Gowing, Vermeer, pp. 34-35. According to Wadum (citing Winfried Heiber), “Contours of Vermeer,” p. 212, Vermeer included in the painting a shadow cast by the fictive frame, though I have been unable to confirm this observation.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

184. Gerard Houckgeest, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft, 1651. Oil on panel, 49 × 51 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

multiple levels of illusionism by omitting the feigned frame and the curtain rod’s shadow, both of which are conspicuous features of Houckgeest’s and Dou’s panels. Vermeer’s equivocation also extends to the painting’s structure. Despite its ambiguous status, the curtain rod, like the carpeted table and still life in the foreground, functions as a physical and visual barrier to the woman’s private space. Vermeer suggests our proximity by placing her within the narrow confines of a corner of the room, the back wall of which appears almost parallel to the picture

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185. Gerrit Dou, Man Smoking a Pipe, ca.1650. Oil on panel, 48 × 37 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

plane.17 At the same time, though, as has often been noted, the physical obstacles in the foreground contradict and attenuate the impression of closeness to the woman. These obstacles initiate a tension, both perceptually and emotionally, between near and far, closeness and distance, immediacy and remoteness.18 Thus with the theme of modern and decorous female beauty Vermeer began to experiment with a pictorial structure that destabilizes and reorients the beholder’s physical and emotional relationship with the painted world before him.

17 Gowing, Vermeer, p. 35. 18 On the juxtaposition of opposites in Vermeer’s work, see in particular, Gowing Vermeer, pp. 18 and 25; Snow, A Study of Vermeer; Arasse, Vermeer, pp. 60-61; and Nevitt Jr., “Vermeer on the Question of Love,” p. 108.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

186. Johannes Vermeer, A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), early 1660s. Oil on canvas, 74.1 × 64.6 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

Vermeer heightened this juxtaposition of opposites in his slightly later Music Lesson (Fig. 186), intensifying the effect of being simultaneously drawn into and yet withheld from the depicted scene.19 In this image of refined courtship a stylish woman, seen from the back, stands before a virginal as a dignified suitor seems to 19 For sensitive readings of the emotional tensions conveyed by The Music Lesson, see Gowing, Vermeer, esp. p. 52; Arasse, Vermeer, pp. 34-35; and Vergara, “Perspectives on Women,” esp. p. 66. Gowing, p. 34,

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watch or listen intently. The view into a spacious and elegant burgher interior is characteristic of Vermeer’s paintings of this period, and a feature that Pieter Teding van Berkhout would praise as a marvel of perspective in 1669 after journeying twice from The Hague to Delft to visit the artist.20 But our access to this expansive room and to the human event in the background is impeded in the immediate foreground by an exaggerated table covered by a Turkish carpet on which sits a glittering silver tray and a brightly illuminated white ceramic pitcher. Vermeer enlarged the scale of these foreground objects and accentuated their physicality with the encrusted facture typical of his early technique, which differs from the more smoothly applied paint he used in other areas of the canvas.21 The effect emphasizes the inanimate objects’ closeness and the couple’s distance. The mirror hanging at an angle above the woman, however, defies the logic of the painting’s perspective by offering a closer view of her downturned face. The reflection also shows her face turned more clearly toward her suitor than is suggested by the view we are given of the back of her head. The man’s mouth is actually slightly open, indicating speech or perhaps singing as he accompanies the lady’s playing. Vermeer initially positioned the man closer to and leaning toward the woman, but repainted him to lessen the couple’s intimacy and introduce a degree of emotional tension.22 The cropped painting to the man’s right depicts Pero and Cimon or Roman Charity, the Roman tale of an imprisoned father condemned to die by starvation who is breastfed by his devoted daughter. As Gowing recognized, this suggests his emotional state of utter dependence on the woman and love.23 An inscription on the lid of the virginal reinforces the sentiment: “Music is the companion of joy, balm for sorrow” (MVSICA LETITIAE CO[ME]S MEDICINA DOLOR[VR]). Vermeer’s highly unusual structure, in which elements near and far are incongruously juxtaposed, strengthens and extends the picture’s Petrarchan theme by soliciting in the viewer the emotional state of longing experienced by the woman’s suitor.24 The writes that Vermeer places in the foreground of the picture “veritable fortifications” that act as barriers to the figural scene. 20 For Teding van Berkhout’s visit to Vermeer’s studio, see Broos, “Un célèbre peijntre nommé Verme[e]r,” pp. 49-50, and Montias, “Recent Archival Research,” pp. 99-100. 21 On Vermeer’s technique for building up the textural effects of foreground elements in The Music Lesson, see Wheelock Jr., Vermeer and the Art of Painting, pp. 92-93. 22 Ibid, p. 95, and Nevitt Jr., “Vermeer on the Question of Love,” p. 92. 23 Gowing, Vermeer, p. 124. Vermeer’s mother-in-law Maria Thins probably owned the painting. A description of “A painting of one who sucks the breast” is recorded in an inventory drawn up at the time of her legal separation from her husband Reynier Bolnes in 1641. She apparently brought it with her when she moved shortly afterwards from Gouda to Delft. See Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 122. 24 Liedtke, Vermeer, p. 107, notes that the woman’s misaligned reflection in the mirror places Vermeer and the beholder “in a position like that of the suitor” and results in the paradoxical effects of both attraction and restraint.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

187. Johannes Vermeer, A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson), early 1660s, detail. Oil on canvas, 74.1 × 64.6 cm. Royal Collection, London. Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

work effectively transforms the beholder and the artist himself into the desiring but frustrated lover of poetic convention, and thus suggests Vermeer’s growing receptivity to the literary conventions of contemporary love poetry.25 In this richly complex depiction of Petrarchan love, as in the earlier and less fully resolved Dresden Woman Reading a Letter, Vermeer introduces an exceptionally 25 Vergara, “Perspectives on Women,” p. 66.

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188. Johannes Vermeer, The Procuress, 1656. Oil on canvas, 143 × 130 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Photo: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Bridgeman Images.

candid reference to his painting’s status as an act of creative artifice. The reflection in the mirror, as has often been recognized, shows part of an object that cannot be seen in the room: A painter’s easel, the bottom of which is clearly visible (Fig. 187).26 The mirror, reigning metaphor and metonym of illusionist painting, emphatically points to and frames Vermeer’s stunning artistic and perspectival performance in 26 Gowing, Vermeer, p. 121, and Wheelock Jr., Vermeer and the Art of Painting, pp. 89-90. On the mirror’s reflection, see also Arasse, Vermeer, pp. 33-39.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

creating the scene and his presence before it. For Vermeer the Petrarchan subjects of decorous female beauty and elegant modern courtship, which contrast starkly with his frank depiction of the sexual trafficking of a woman in his early Procuress dated 1656 (Fig. 188), were conceptually related to the dialectics of painting itself. Vermeer’s insistence upon the contingency of mimetic representation in these refined images of amorous themes and the ambiguous structures he creates to instill in the beholder a sense of frustrated longing are complementary and mutually reinforcing effects. They cohere as a thematic unity when considered in relation to seventeenth-century lyrical poetry, and suggest Vermeer’s cultivation of what can be called a poetics of illusion in pictorial form. Gowing intuited in Vermeer’s art “a tension of feeling that is in essence poetic,” an insight echoed by many subsequent scholars and authors in response to Vermeer’s evocative images of thoughtful serenity.27 We can give historical precision to the vague term “poetic” and shed light on Vermeer’s highly original response to the literary culture of his time by examining the intersection between pictorial and poetic practices in seventeenthcentury Holland. Of course, Dutch art theorists had long espoused the Renaissance paragone between painting and poetry, or the parallel between painting and poetry, partly to dignify painting by association with the far more intellectually esteemed art of poetry. In 1678 Van Hoogstraten advised aspiring painters and collectors that, “Since Poetry and Painting follow similar paths in many things, it is well for our Youthful Painters to follow, with their mute brushes, the speaking pen of the poets.”28 Vermeer’s meditation on the subject of the beloved, however, indicates a very specific engagement with the Petrarchan lyric. As the dominant literary convention, Petrarchism also permeated early modern artistic culture. Sixteenth-century Italian treatises on painting had adopted as their model contemporary treatises on love, which were themselves shaped by Petrarchan concepts.29 Dutch theoretical writings on art, heavily indebted to Italian models, also reveal the impact of love treatises. Eric Jan Sluijter has highlighted the eroticized and gendered language that Dutch theorists used to describe the ideal relationship between painter, beholder, and painting.30 As Sluijter emphasizes, Karel van Mander’s Het schilder-boeck of 1604 and especially Philips Angel’s Lof der schilder-konst, delivered as a lecture in 1641 and published the following year, characterize the painter as a devoted lover of his work who seduces liefhebbers or art lovers with stunning illusionistic displays. Van Mander praised “images that entangle the viewer and through 27 Gowing, Vermeer, p. 35. 28 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 193: “Dewijl ook Poëzy met de Schilderkonst in veel dingen gelijk loopt, zoo zal’t onze Schilderjeugt geoorloft zijn, met het stomme penseel, de spreekende penne der dichters te volgen,” quoted in De Jongh, “Questions of Understanding,” p. 55, n. 64 (pp. 217-218). 29 Cropper, “Beauty of Woman,” p. 189, citing Mendelsohn, Paragoni. 30 See in particular Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, and Vanhaelen and Wilson, “The Erotics of Looking.”

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his insatiable eyes, makes his heart cleave fast with desire.”31 Van Hoogstraten also wrote that the most important quality for a painter is “That he not only appear to adore art, but that he is in love with representing the pleasantries of beautiful nature.”32 The most fully elaborated literary discussion of the affiliation between art and love in seventeenth-century Holland is Adriaen van de Venne’s poetic praise of painting from 1623, which also corresponds very closely to Vermeer’s pictorial poetics of illusion.33 Although Van de Venne spent his career in Middelburg and The Hague, he was born in Delft; and Dirck van Bleyswijck’s lavish Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft (Description of the City of Delft) of 1667 claims him, along with Vermeer, among the city’s most illustrious artists.34 Van de Venne’s poem, entitled Zeeusche meyclacht: ofte schyn-kycker (“Zeeland May Lament: Or Reflecting on my Reflection”), interweaves a paean to mimetic painting with the Petrarchan convention of frustrated love. It opens with a melancholic, lonely author wandering through the countryside outside Middelburg as dawn approaches. He becomes captivated by the reflection of his own face on the surface of a stream, assuming the guise of a contemporary Narcissus, who, according to Alberti, was the founder of painting. Taking up a lute, he sings “of amorous pain” (van lieffelicke pijn) and is comforted by the power of painting to console with a substitute for the beloved: “What I presently hold dear and cannot obtain, I must, and I shall bring forth out of art, / and see if I can capture my love sweet and good.”35 Van de Venne’s reflection on his reflection then prompts a meditation on the dialectical tension between absence and presence in mimetic representation, a tension poeticized as the relation 31 Van Mander, Schilder-boeck, fol. 48r, stanza 21: “door ooghen onversadich, / T’herte vast cleven met lusten ghestadich,” quoted in Georgievska-Shine, Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth, p. 122. For the successful painter’s seductive deception of the beholder with pictorial artifice, see further Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, p. 61. 32 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 11-12: “Dat hey niet alleen schijne de konst te beminnen, maer dat hy in der daet, in der aerdicheden der bevallijke natuur uit te beelden verlieft is,” quoted in Sluijter, “Vermeer, Fame, and Beauty,” p. 283, n. 78, and idem, Seductress of Sight, p. 213. On the theme of the painter inspired by love for his model, see in particular idem, Seductress of Sight, pp. 141-144. 33 Van de Venne, “Zeeusche mey-claecht.” On the poem in relation to Dutch painting, see Sluijter, “Didactic and Disguised Meanings?,” p. 84; idem, “Vermeer, Fame, and Beauty,” pp. 274-277; and idem, Seductress of Sight, pp. 12-13. For the poem, see Meertens, Letterkundig leven in Zeeland, pp. 243-244; and Porteman and Smidts-Veldt, Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen, pp. 316-318. The volume was reprinted three times in the seventeenth century (Rotterdam 1632, Amsterdam 1633, and Amsterdam 1651). For Van de Venne’s writings and book illustrations, see Bol, Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, pp. 112-141. On Van de Venne as an artist, see in particular Royalton-Kisch, Adriaen van de Venne’s Album, and Westermann, “Playing the Market.” 34 Van Bleyswijck, Beschryvinge der stadt Delft, pp. 857-858. 35 Van de Venne, “Zeeusche mey-claecht,” p. 59: “Het geen ick nu bemin, althans niet can berecken, / Dat moet ic, en ic salt, door cunst te voor-schijn trecken, / En sien of ick mijn lief can treffen soet en goet.” Translation by Katie Kist.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

between the desiring (male) lover and the elusive (female) object of affection. Assigning to both artist and beholder the role of unrequited lover before the image of his beloved, Van de Venne defines painting as “a sweet art […] That creates out of nothing a beloved sweetheart […]. The eyes desire, man longs / And I long all the more for this reason: / Because I see before me an image that has neither body nor speech / Nor movement or feeling, and is but a semblance / As though it would turn its face toward mine.”36 Van de Venne analogizes the representational act and its reception to the unfulfillable desire of Petrarchan convention. In his words, “The eye is never satisfied, desire is never sated / As long as one courts art and love.”37 Vermeer explicitly stages and figures his embrace of the early modern poetics of frustrated desire in Girl with a Pearl Earring (Fig. 180). In this arresting image a beautiful young woman turns with searching eyes and sensuously parted lips to look over her shoulder in response to the beholder’s arrival. Despite the vivid illusion of the woman’s presence, she also appears transient, as if a fugitive vision of loveliness. Her features are vague, the modeling indistinct, and the outline of her face, painted with softly modulated brushwork, merges subtly with the dark background. Gently but assuredly insisting upon the woman’s illusory nature, Vermeer poises her on the threshold between presence and absence, being and dissolution, proximity and distance. Subtly acknowledging the limits of art’s capacity to make present the object of desire, Vermeer parallels the beholder’s longing for the depicted woman with a frustrated desire for the painting to bring her into being. Vermeer’s beguiling woman in Girl with a Pearl Earring thus plays the part of the absent beloved for both the viewer and the artist, personifying Van de Venne’s definition of painting as “a sweet art […] That creates out of nothing a beloved sweetheart.” The delicately erotic encounter that Vermeer depicts also resonates strongly with Van de Venne’s poetic description of an elusive “image that has neither body nor speech / Nor movement or feeling, and is but a semblance, as though it would turn its face toward mine.” Designating both beholder and artist as the unrequited lover from the poetic trope of the absent beloved, Vermeer’s painting, like Van de Venne’s poem, thematizes the condition of unfulfillable desire of the Petrarchan tradition. Inviting a triangulation between painting, beholder, and maker, he visually recapitulates the Petrarchan poet’s fixation on the unavailability of his object of desire. 36 Ibid: “Van sulcken soeten const, soo nut en vol gerief, / Dat door haer wert gemaect van niet een soete lief. / Ick sie (tis waer) mijn lief, door constelicke streken, / Maer evenwel de spraeck die salder aen gebreken; / Nochtans ic ben genoucht, mijn oog heeft wil en wens, / Begeerich is de oog, verlangend’ is de mens: / ’t Verlangen is in my te meer om dese reden, / Om dat ick sie een beelt dat lijf en heeft noch reden, / Beweging noch gevoel, en evenwel een schijn, / Als of het sijn gesicht ging drayen tegen ‘tmijn.” Translation adapted from Sluijter, “Vermeer, Fame, and Beauty,” pp. 274-277, and idem, Seductress of Sight, pp. 12-13. 37 Van de Venne, “Zeeusche mey-claecht,” p. 60: “De oog is noyt vervult, ‘t gewens is noyt versaet, / Soo lang men met de cunst en min-sucht omme-gaet,” quoted in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 13.

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189. Titian, Violante (La Bella Gatta), 1515-1518. Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 50.8 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Remo Bardazzi / Bridgeman Images.

The woman, enacting the dynamic relation between presence and absence that Vermeer and Van de Venne articulated through the highly conventionalized language of Petrarchan love, therefore serves as a metonym for painting itself. As a picture type, the canvas probably descends ultimately from Venetian Renaissance half-length images of idealized and eroticized women, exemplified by Titian’s Violante of 1515 (Fig. 189). Such half-lengths are themselves poeticized expressions

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

of ideal female beauty that also thematize the beauty of art itself.38 The woman’s exoticizing turban may evoke the timelessness of her figurative status and the allegorical picture type itself.39 Drawing from this pictorial tradition, Vermeer creatively adapted the ideal encapsulated in the Dutch motto Liefde baart kunst, or love gives birth to art. Invoked regularly as a rhetorical means of distinguishing artists’ creative labor from other forms of production, and based on Seneca’s trio of artistic motivations, the adage privileged ardent desire or love for art over the desire for profit and fame, though it was assumed that these rewards would accrue to the virtuous artist. 40 Ivan Gaskell has demonstrated that Vermeer also pictorialized Liefde baart kunst as a refined modern genre scene in Woman Standing at a Virginal (Fig. 183), a late work that displays the artist’s increasingly abstracted, tonal approach to painting. 41 In this image, as in Girl with a Pearl Earring, a woman turns to the beholder with an address whose amorous nature is indicated by the framed picture of Cupid directly behind her. In locking gazes with her, as with the figure in the Mauritshuis canvas, we become involved in an intimate exchange that activates the seductions of painting. The woman’s solicitation of the viewer, perhaps to begin a duet similar to the scene depicted in his earlier Music Lesson (Fig. 186), aligns desiring subject and desired object in musical harmony. The model for Vermeer’s and Van de Venne’s figurations of the absent beloved can ultimately be traced to the literary prototype of Laura, Petrarch’s own object of unrequited love. Laura was a well-known figure among Dutch elites, and Constantijn 38 On the poeticized image of female beauty in Italian Renaissance art, see Cropper, “On Beautiful Women”; idem, “Beauty of Woman”; idem, “Place of Beauty”; and Unglaub, “Poetics of Desire and Pictorial Generation.” For Venetian paintings of beautiful women, see Ferino-Pagden, “Pictures of Women.” Vermeer’s painting has also been linked to tronies by Michael Sweerts. See Wheelock Jr., Johannes Vermeer, p. 168, and Liedtke, Vermeer, p. 132. 39 On the woman’s turban and enormous pearl earring in relation to Dutch artistic engagement with the exotic, see Swan, Rarities of These Lands, pp. 129, 137. 40 For the motto and its importance in Dutch art and art theory, see De Jongh, Portretten van echt en trouw; Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, pp. 213 and 253; Woodall, “Love is in the Air,” esp. pp. 216-220 and 235-236; Chapman, “Cornelis Ketel,” p. 265; Chapman and Woodall, “Introduction,” esp. pp. 7-21, 37; and Chapman, “Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Spousal Model/Muse.” For the relevance of the motto to Vermeer’s work, see Arasse, Vermeer, p. 34; Vergara, “Antiek and Modern,” pp. 243-245; and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, esp. pp. 63-74. In 1678 Van Hoogstraten cited Seneca’s hierarchy of artistic motivations and identified the love of art as the painter’s highest goal. See Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 345-351. He also depicted the conceit in a drawing (Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris) and on the outside of his perspective box in London (Fig. 41), where an artist is seen at his easel painting a portrait of Urania/Nature while receiving inspiration from a winged putto, with the words Amoris causa inscribed in an accompanying cartouche. For Van Hoogstraten’s privileging of love over other artistic motivations, see Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, pp. 213, 253-256; Woodall, “Love is in the Air,” p. 214; and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, pp. 63-67. On the general theme of love in seventeenth-century Dutch art, see Nevitt Jr., Art and the Culture of Love. 41 Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, esp. pp. 63-74.

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Huygens eagerly sought copies of Simone Martini’s putative portrait of her.42 Whether or not Laura ever existed, her name itself – referring to the laurels that honor poetic achievement – signifies the beloved’s symbolic status as a vehicle through which the poet, in conjuring her vivid presence, achieves eternal fame and thus immortality.43 The specific association of Laura with the laurels of poetic accomplishment was also understood by Dutch cultural elites. In 1656 the poet Jeremias de Decker – whose portrait (Fig. 125), as we saw, Rembrandt painted as a gift – published the following epigram: “When you read of Laura, the doubt will be, / whether Laurel or Laura fits for thee.”44 It may well be significant that Vermeer’s Art of Painting (Fig. 190), a showpiece of art that he retained for his studio, shows an extravagantly dressed artist in the process of painting a woman who wears a crown of laurels and holds a trumpet and a large book. 45 Vermeer emphasizes that the depicted artist, who has completed a chalk underdrawing for a half figure of his model, is in the process of painting her laurel wreath, symbol of everlasting fame and honor. The woman’s attributes identify her as Clio, the muse of history, and her inclusion has prompted interpretations of the picture as an allegory of history painting as the highest goal of art. Eric Jan Sluijter has shown, however, that Clio’s meanings were not so narrowly defined in the seventeenth century, when she was understood to signify more generally the desire for fame and immortality, inspirations for the writing of history as well as the practice of art. He concludes that Vermeer identifies the portrayal of contemporary female beauty, the primary focus of his work, with the painter’s fame, honor, and immortality. 46 In a studio staged as a site of artistic triumph, Vermeer therefore claims his place among the illustrious painters of the Netherlands (indicated by the elaborately illustrated wall map) through his ability to render 42 In 1668 Huygens received copies of portraits of Laura and Petrarch as gifts from De Vaurose, a member of the Parliament of Orange, France. (Orange was part of the scattered possessions of the Dutch stadholders, the Princes of Orange-Nassau.) On Huygens’s correspondence relating to the portraits, see Ypes, Petrarca, pp. 135-137; on the popularity in the Netherlands of a collection of Petrarch’s writings that included an engraved portrait of her [Iac. Phil. Tomasinus, Petrarcha redivivius (Padua, 1630)], see ibid, pp. 193-194. 43 See Braden, Petrarchan Love, pp. 7-60; Kerrigan and Braden, Idea of the Renaissance, esp. pp. 157-167; and Sturm-Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels. 44 De Decker, Gedichten, p. 4: “Uw’ Laura lesende ‘k en weet nau (‘k belijt) / Of ghy den Lauwer-hoed of Laura waerder zijt,” quoted in Ypes, Petrarca, p. 174. De Decker’s epigram is a translation of a Latin epigram by John Owen. 45 Shortly after Vermeer’s death in 1675 (and again in 1677), his widow and mother-in-law attempted unsuccessfully to save the picture from creditors. See Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, pp. 219-230, and docs. 363, 379, 380. In one of these documents (doc. 363) she refers to the painting’s subject as de Schilderconst (“the Art of Painting”). On the status of the picture as a display piece for visitors to Vermeer’s studio, see Sluijter, “Vermeer, Fame, and Beauty,” pp. 265-266. 46 Sluijter, “Vermeer, Fame, and Beauty,” esp. p. 277.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

190. Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting, ca. 1665-1666. Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / Bridgeman Images.

the vivid presence of a beautiful woman. In this complex pictorial equivalent of the motto Liefde baart kunst, the model/muse, like the women in Girl with a Pearl Earring and Woman Standing at a Virginal, performs the role of Vermeer’s absent beloved – his Laura, instrument of his artistic ambition. As object of desire that forever remains beyond the reach of both painter and viewer, she embodies and enables artistic creativity, just as Laura and her successors did for the poetry of Petrarch and his epigones.

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In focusing on the laurel-wreathed woman, Vermeer points to his creation of a poetics of painting while acknowledging the desires that underwrite and animate pictorial and literary representation alike. The Art of Painting, a self-consciously consummate image of artistic ambition, showcases the conventionalized and gendered aesthetic terms that govern Vermeer’s meditations on the paradox of absent presence in mimetic artifice. Vermeer’s model/muse, like Petrarch’s Laura, is the absent beloved who inspires and serves his undertaking to represent, as Edward Snow puts it, “painting’s own impossible desires.”47 The beautiful women and amatory themes of Vermeer’s paintings are therefore inseparable from his interrogation of the nature of pictorial mimesis itself. Vermeer’s ambiguity and self-reflexivity reveal and elegantly visualize the nexus between painting, poetry, and love that underlies the seventeenth-century Dutch discourse on the nature of perfect mimesis.

Vermeer and the Art Lovers Vermeer’s clientele would have understood and appreciated his cultivation of this visual form of Petrarchan poetics. The liefhebbers who comprised Vermeer’s primary audience formed an exclusive group that had access to his extraordinarily limited output. Only 36 paintings are securely attributed to Vermeer; and, according to estimates based on the unusually high survival rate of paintings attributed to him listed in early inventories and sales catalogues, he probably painted between 45 and 60 paintings, or perhaps as few as 40. 48 By contrast, most of Vermeer’s contemporaries were enterprising and highly productive artists, eagerly embracing the expanding economic opportunities offered by the Dutch Republic’s vibrant and competitive art market. Rembrandt was staggeringly prolific: Approximately 350 of his paintings survive, according to the most recent authoritative catalogue, 49 and about 1400 drawings; and thousands of impressions of his nearly 300 printing plates were pulled during his lifetime. The celebrated and financially successful genre painters who decisively shaped Vermeer’s work were also comparatively prolific. More than 120 paintings are known by the Leiden fijnschilders Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris.50 So limited was Vermeer’s production that one scholar 47 Snow, Study of Vermeer, p. 3. 48 Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 184, gives the higher estimate. Jaap van der Veen maintains that the smaller figure is more realistic. See Van der Veen, “Art Market in Delft,” p. 135, n. 43. 49 See Van de Wetering, Corpus 6. 50 For Dou, see Baer et al., Gerrit Dou; for Van Mieris, see Buvelot et al., Frans van Mieris. Gabriel Metsu, who died when he was only 37 or 38, produced nearly five times the number of paintings as Vermeer, who lived to the age of 43. For Metsu, see Waiboer, Gabriel Metsu. For all three relative to Vermeer’s productivity, see Franits, Vermeer, p. 123.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

questioned whether he ever painted to sell, and another characterized Vermeer’s artistic development as that of a “dilettante.”51 The economist John Michael Montias, whose seminal research in Delft’s archives has transformed our understanding of Vermeer’s social and economic circumstances, made a compelling case for the artist’s special relationship with a single couple, the Delft liefhebber Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, Lord of Spalant, and his wealthy wife Maria de Knuijt, who lived a life of leisure. Van Ruijven and De Knuijt probably collected almost half of Vermeer’s entire production over the course of a long association, perhaps at the rate of one picture a year. The couple’s son-in-law Jacob Dissius owned 21 Vermeer paintings, 16 or 17 of which are known today, at the time of his death in 1695.52 Dissius almost certainly inherited this exceptionally large and varied collection of Vermeer paintings from his wife Magdalena, the Van Ruijven-De Knuijt’s only surviving child, who inherited her parents’ entire estate at the time of her mother Maria’s death in 1681 (Pieter van Ruijven had died in 1674, one year before Vermeer). Documents also record close contacts between Vermeer and the couple, including Maria de Knuijt’s bequest to the artist of the substantial sum of 500 guilders, a highly unusual and perhaps even unique testament.53 The Van Ruijven-De Knuijts’ association with Vermeer, as Montias argued persuasively, went beyond the conventions of patronage relationships, and was probably closer to an alliance animated by a shared a devotion to art. Pieter van Ruijven was also related to Pieter Spiering van Silvercroon, envoy of the Swedish Queen Christina to The Hague who, according to Philips Angel, agreed to pay Dou an annual fee or retainer of 500 guilders in exchange for the right of f irst refusal of the artist’s highly sought-after paintings.54 As Angel exulted, “the perfect and excellent Gerrit Dou […] received 500 Carolus guilders annually because he allows Mr. Spiering the f irst selection of his paintings.” Montias suggested that Van Ruijven modeled his relationship with Vermeer on his relative’s high prof ile and unusually generous arrangement with Dou. Frans van Mieris is also reported to have enjoyed a similar arrangement with a single

51 Arasse, Vermeer, p. 14, and Liedtke, “Vermeer Teaching Himself,” p. 31, respectively. Franits, Vermeer, p. 125, writes that Vermeer was “content” to paint on a part-time basis. 52 Montias, “Vermeer’s Clients and Patrons”; idem, Vermeer and His Milieu, pp. 246-257; and idem, “Recent Archival Research,” pp. 93-99. For Arthur Wheelock Jr.’s hesitation to accept that Van Ruijven was Vermeer’s patron, see in particular Wheelock Jr., “Vermeer of Delft,” pp. 22-23. See Montias’s refutation in “Recent Archival Research,” pp. 93-96. 53 Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 250.” 54 Angel, Lof der schilder-konst, p. 23. See also Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 247. On Dou’s association with Spiering van Silvercroon, see Gaskell, “Gerrit Dou,” and Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 216-217. On Spiering van Silvercroon as a collector, see Veldman, “Portrait of an Art Collector.”

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patron,55 and the Rotterdam genre painter Jacob Ochtervelt may have entered into such an arrangement.56 The support of collectors like the Van Ruijven-De Knuijts and the small circle of his admirers undoubtedly insulated Vermeer from the pressures and exigencies of working for the open, speculative art market. Vermeer also was the beneficiary of significant income from investments and regular subsidies provided by his wealthy mother-in-law Maria Thins, in whose house on Delft’s Oude Langendijck he lived and worked together with his wife and eleven children.57 Combining these supplements with Vermeer’s earnings as a painter and his apparently modest trade in pictures, Montias estimated the artist’s income to have ranged from 850 to 1500 guilders annually.58 Vermeer’s comfortable situation was undone by an economic decline exacerbated by the French invasion of the Republic in 1672, after which, as Vermeer’s widow Catharina declared, he “had been able to earn very little or hardly anything at all.”59 But before the crisis of Vermeer’s final years, his financial independence allowed him the luxury of time to devote himself to painting only two or three exquisitely crafted canvases a year.60 That Vermeer enjoyed exceptional freedom to take his time while he worked has been confirmed by technical examination of the surfaces of his paintings. As the conservator Nicola Costaras has shown, Vermeer painted some details over dried, “premature” cracked passages, indicating that considerable intervals of time elapsed between painting sessions.61 The Van Ruijven-De Knuijts and the few other liefhebbers who belonged to Vermeer’s inner circle of clients also must have given him license to create his uniquely complex and sophisticated art, and they would have been sensitive to his delicate pictorial refinements. Thus the extraordinary subtleties of style and meaning of Vermeer’s paintings, and his exceptional and lavish use of ultramarine, the most expensive pigment, indicate that his work, in Walter Liedtke’s words, “could not have been sufficiently compensated in the open market.”62 Although Gerrit Dou and Frans van Mieris both enjoyed the support and protection of a personal Maecenas and both commanded exceptionally high prices for their work, they were also prolific painters who, very much unlike Vermeer, did 55 According to Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 3, p. 3, Van Mieris received a f ixed fee from Franciscus de la Boe Sylvius for the right of f irst refusal on his annual production. However, Sylvius may have only been a committed customer. The inventory of Sylvius’s estate, drawn up in 1673, records seven paintings by Van Mieris and eleven by Dou. See Sluijter, “Two Case Studies of Paintings in Wealthy Interiors,” pp. 110, 229, n. 34. For the inventory, see Naumann, Frans van Mieris, vol. 1, p. 175. 56 Chong, “Jacob Ochtervelt’s Rotterdam Patron.” 57 Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, pp. 183-187. 58 Ibid, pp. 185-186. See also Arasse, Vermeer, p. 14, and Liedtke, “Vermeer Teaching Himself,” p. 31. 59 Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, doc. 367, and pp. 344-345. 60 Ibid, p. 184. 61 Costaras, “Materials and Techniques,” and Franits, Vermeer, pp. 123-125. 62 Liedtke, Vermeer, p. 36.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

not dramatically change their styles over the course of their careers. These Leiden painters were so industrious that, as we saw, more than 120 paintings survive by each, despite their painstakingly slow, labor-intensive fijnschilder technique. Dou was renowned in his day for his near-obsessive, laborious style of painting, while Van Mieris, as Quentin Buvelot colorfully puts it, “produced with ant-like industry and saintly patience.”63 Dou’s and Van Mieris’s productivity and the relative stylistic uniformity of their output, in contrast to Vermeer’s extremely limited but stylistically varied production, suggest that they adopted a relatively craftsman-like approach to painting for the market, in which prices were calculated according to the number of hours of labor expended.64 As Sluijter has emphasized, Dou’s arrangement with Spiering Silvercroon to pay for the right to choose from his production should not be understood as an avoidance of the open market, as has sometimes been argued, but as a product and mechanism of the market.65 Unlike traditional patronage relationships in which the artist works on commission, Dou’s agreement with his Maecenas involved no obligation on his part: He continued to produce paintings on his own initiative for the open market, merely granting Spiering Silvercroon the right of first refusal of his annual production in exchange for a substantial fee. Vermeer’s arrangement with the Van Ruijven-De Knuijts may have been structured similarly to that of Dou’s agreement, but Vermeer’s art and practice bear virtually no trace of his working for the market.66 Technical examination, besides demonstrating that Vermeer took his time to complete his paintings, shows that his working method was neither as laborious nor as time-consuming as that of Dou and Van Mieris. Applying certain passages of paint rapidly and wet-on-wet, and sometimes only after long periods of time between working sessions, Vermeer followed his own creative impulses, which were fostered by collectors like the Van Ruijven-De Knuijts who shielded him from commercial demands.67 Moreover, Vermeer’s paintings in the Dissius sale of 1696, which in all likelihood came from the Van Ruijven-De Knuijt collection, comprised a broad range of the artist’s styles of painting, beginning with the early Woman Asleep at a Table (A Maid Asleep) from about 1656-1657 (Fig. 191) and ending with the The Lacemaker and probably The Guitar Player from about 1670-1672 (Fig. 192), both of which are painted with 63 Buvelot, “Frans van Mieris’ Reputation,” p. 16. 64 For a discussion of the craftsman-like approach to painting and calculating prices adopted by Dou, Van Mieris, and other Dutch painters, see Chapter 3, pp. 229-231, and Sluijter, “Determining Value,” pp. 10-11. 65 Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 216-217. For the alternate view, see Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, pp. 94-95. 66 The sole exception may be the small and relatively formulaic Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (Leiden Collection, New York), which was painted on canvas cut from the same bolt as Vermeer’s Lace Maker (Louvre). See Liedtke and Wheelock Jr., “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal.” 67 Costaras, “Materials and Techniques,” pp. 156-175, and Franits, Vermeer, pp. 123-125.

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191. Johannes Vermeer, A Maid Asleep, ca. 1656-1657. Oil on canvas, 87.6 × 76.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

the disjointed patches of color characteristic of Vermeer’s abstracted late style.68 The collection also included, in addition to iconic works like the View of Delft and 68 The Kenwood House Guitar Player (Fig. 192) is often identif ied with a painting left in Vermeer’s studio at the time of his death, which his widow exchanged together with another picture as security for a debt owed to Hendrick van Buyten. However, Liedtke, Vermeer, cat. no. 35, notes that while the picture transferred to Van Buyten was described in 1676 as een personagie spelende op een cyter (“a person playing a cittern”) the description of the painting in the Dissius sale of Een speelende Juffrouw op een Guiteer (“A young woman playing on a guitar”) corresponds more closely to the Kenwood picture. The painting may

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

192. Johannes Vermeer, The Guitar Player, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 53 × 46.3 cm. The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London. Photo: The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London © Historic England / Bridgeman Images.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Fig. 180), atypical subjects such as a lost picture described as “The portrait of Vermeer with various accessories uncommonly beautifully painted by him.”69

have been one of the last works Vermeer sold to Pieter van Ruijven, who died in 1674. On Van Buyten, see below. 69 For the lost self-portrait, see Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, doc. 439, no. 3.

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Van Ruijven and De Knuijt, and subsequently Magdalena van Ruijven and her husband Jacob Dissius, must have delighted in their rich array of pictures showcasing Vermeer’s multifaceted talents and his remarkable stylistic transformations over the span of almost two decades of their association. In contrast, Johan de Bye, who owned 27 paintings by Dou and exhibited them in Leiden in 1665, probably valued above all the relative consistency of the artist’s patiently crafted and expensive illusionist paintings.70 For De Bye and other collectors, Dou’s neat, painstaking style and the illusionistic properties of his works apparently could be more important than the subjects he depicted.71 The Van Ruijven-De Knuijts and other members of Vermeer’s circle of admirers therefore constituted an unusually open-minded, liberal clientele that sheltered him from market pressures and facilitated the innovative and distinctly non-commercial character of Vermeer’s extraordinary artistic project.

A Labor of Love: Vermeer and the Gift Vermeer’s fashioning of a visual poetics of the absent beloved not only assumes a rarefied audience of liefhebbers but engages them in a discourse that aims to distinguish his art as a labor motivated by love, not profit. As we have seen, Vermeer evolved a deeply personal approach to representing modern amorous subjects that figuratively transform the beholder and the artist himself into the desiring yet frustrated lover of poetic convention. Simultaneously objects of the viewer’s desire and creations of Vermeer’s own love of art, his paintings are embedded within an alternative, aestheticized frame of values defined in opposition to the realm of ordinary economic exchange. That frame of values was encompassed by the ethics of the gift, an aestheticized form of trade and deeply ingrained cultural discourse through which contemporaries articulated resistance to the logic of economic transactions and relations. By imaginatively adapting his culture’s ethics of the gift, Vermeer, I argue, held in suspension the economics of artistic production and consumption to stake out a status for his art that exceeds market-oriented determinations of value. Bryan Jay Wolf has similarly argued that Vermeer stages a withdrawal from the economic conditions of the proto-capitalist, merchant society of seventeenth-century Holland. For Wolf, Vermeer’s focus on quiet moments of privacy, particularly in paintings of elegant burgher women reading or writing 70 For Dou and Johan de Bye, see Gaskell, “Gerrit Dou,” p. 21; Sluijter, “Leidse ‘fijnschilders’ in contemporaine bronnen,” pp. 36-37, and Baer et al., Gerrit Dou, p. 30. Sluijter, op. cit., p. 37, notes that De Bye probably also had commercial interests in the exhibition of Dou’s paintings. 71 Baer et al., Gerrit Dou, p. 30.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

letters, and the aura of inscrutability generated by his muting of narrative and emblematic conventions demonstrate Vermeer’s identif ication with what he terms the “exclusionary class needs of an emergent social tier.”72 Undoubtedly, Vermeer’s paintings reflect the increasingly raref ied codes of behavior of the Dutch merchant elite; but Wolf anachronistically imposes later constructs of the bourgeois imaginary onto the seventeenth century. Vermeer’s effort to distance his work from what Wolf calls “the sphere of social utility” needs to be situated within the complex of practices and values that characterized the upper strata of Dutch burgher society, which differed tremendously from that of the modern bourgeoisie or middle class.73 One of the social institutions that distinguish the norms of the Dutch burgher civility from that of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie is the differing nature and cultural significance of gift exchange, which was essential to the conduct of business and personal relations in the Republic. The alternate economy of the gift played a far more important and even critical role in emergent capitalism than previously thought, providing a vital instrument with which early modern Europeans navigated complex professional, social, and personal relationships within an increasingly impersonal, commercialized social environment. No records survive of Vermeer’s practice of gift giving, or of any other means of transacting his paintings. But viewing Vermeer’s unequivocally non-commercial production and his intensive engagement with the thematics of love in the context of the gift culture of burgher society and together with the conceptual framework of the gift paradigm exposes new depths. Seen from the ethics the gift, Vermeer’s poetics of desire in paintings of alluring women and refined courtship invite the beholder to participate imaginatively in a symbolic transaction defined by “the love of art,” a ubiquitous phrase in Dutch cultural discourse that signified the pursuit of art for its own sake over the desire for profit and fame, as we have seen. Based on Seneca’s triad and hierarchy of artistic motivations, which Van Hoogstraten promoted in his 1678 painting treatise, the phrase was repeatedly invoked to validate painting’s status as a liberal art, and which thereby was beyond quantifiable measures of value.74 This pervasive cultural ideal of art mingled seamlessly with gift giving’s anti-economic rhetoric. Jeremias de Decker, who as we saw thanked Rembrandt for the gift of his portrait (Fig. 125), praised the artist’s motivation as being “not for the sake of monetary gain, but purely as a favor […] and out of love for art.” In 1667 De Decker also wrote that “Lady painting [… is] more devoted to honor than profit,” 72 Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing, p. 158. 73 Ibid, p. 172. 74 Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, pp. 355, 348. See further Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, pp. 213, 253-256, and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, pp. 63-65.

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193. Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 51.5 × 45.5 cm. National Gallery, London. Photo: National Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

articulating succinctly Vermeer’s gendered and poeticized aestheticization of the economics of his creative labor.75 One of Vermeer’s last paintings, Woman Seated at a Virginal in the National Gallery, London from about 1670-1672 (Fig. 193), offers a vivid pictorial statement of his adaptation of the aesthetics of the gift to engage his audience in this discourse about 75 De Decker, Alle de rym-oeffeningen, vol. 1, p. 127: “Vrouw Schilderkunst […] meer (zoo’t schynt) op eer dan geld winst afgerecht,” quoted in De Jongh, “Realism and Seeming Realism,” p. 35.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

194. Dirck van Baburen, The Procuress, 1622. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 107.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ma. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Theresa B. Hopkins Fund / Bridgeman Images.

the transcendent status of his art. To date, analyses of the painting have revolved around the interpretive significance of Vermeer’s prominent inclusion of Dirck van Baburen’s Procuress from 1622 (Fig. 194) as a framed painting within his painting. Van Baburen’s canvas, which Vermeer cropped and enlarged considerably, shows an elderly brothel madam demanding payment from a male customer who offers a coin in exchange for the amorous attentions of a buxom prostitute strumming a lute. The painting, or probably a version of it, once belonged to Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins, and hung in the house where the artist lived and worked.76 76 See Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 122. The picture is listed as “a painting wherein a procuress points to the hand” in a 1641 document dividing the possessions of Maria Thins and her husband Reynier Bolnes at the time of their separation. She presumably took the painting with her when shortly afterwards she moved from Gouda to Delft. On the likelihood that Maria Thins owned a copy or replica of the picture

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Paintings-within-paintings in Vermeer’s art seem to conform to the period’s rhetorical theory of exempla, supplying suggestive commentaries that amplify the scene depicted through either an antithetical or similar exemplum.77 Walter Liedtke, elaborating upon an interpretation first proposed by Christine Armstrong, read Vermeer’s citation of Van Baburen’s bawdy scene of prostitution as a negative commentary on the virtue of the elegantly dressed young woman seated at the virginal, whose gaze solicits us to participate in the picture’s dynamic by accompanying her in a musical duet.78 (That the woman’s address is an invitation to join in her music making is reinforced by the large viola da gamba with the bow in its strings awaiting the viewer in the immediate foreground.)79 They considered the picture to be conceptually related to Woman Standing at a Virginal (Fig. 183), which we saw also shows an elegant woman awaiting the viewer’s participation in a musical duet. Although apparently not sold as pendants (as their different early provenances demonstrate), the paintings are approximately the same size, and, according to this reading, present the opposing yet complementary categories of sacred and profane love. Armstrong and Liedtke generated a moral contrast between the two types of desire by setting the painting-within-a-painting of Cupid holding up a card in Woman Standing at a Virginal in opposition to the Van Baburen brothel scene in the darker Woman Seated at a Virginal. The Cupid painting was also in Vermeer’s household, and has been related to Otto van Veen’s emblem of fidelity entitled “A Lover Ought to Love Only One” (Fig. 195). The differing landscapes painted on the lids of the two virginals also purportedly reinforce this moralizing meaning: A rocky mountain path in Woman Standing and a flat, open landscape in the Woman Seated signify the difficult path to virtuous love versus the easy path to temptation and vice. Arthur Wheelock, on the other hand, interpreted the inclusion of Van Baburen’s image as a thematic contrast to the decorous scene Vermeer represented in the painting.80 The juxtaposition of pure with mercenary love would then allude to the increasing refinement of civil and aesthetic values cultivated by the Dutch burgher elite in the second half of the seventeenth century, a social transformation also reflected in the progressively more elegant subject matter and refined painting rather than the original, see Franits, Paintings of Dirck van Baburen, cat. no. A 23, and idem, Vermeer, pp. 47, 170-171. For Dutch procuress paintings, see Van de Pol, “The Whore, the Bawd, and the Artist.” 77 Weber, “Vermeer’s Use of the Picture-within-a-Picture.” 78 Armstrong, “An Iconographical Note on Vermeer”; Liedtke et al., Vermeer and the Delft School, cat. no. 79; idem, Vermeer, cat. no. 34; and Chapman, “Inside Vermeer’s Women,” pp. 100-105. Franits, Vermeer, p. 279, rejects this moralizing interpretation. 79 See Wieseman in Waiboer et al., Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, p. 136. On music in Vermeer’s paintings, see Wieseman, Vermeer and Music. 80 Wheelock Jr. et al., Johannes Vermeer, cat. no. 22.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

195. Otto van Veen, “A Lover Ought to Love Only One” (Perfectus amor non est nisi ad unum), from Otto van Veen, Amorum emblemata (Antwerp, 1608), p. 55. Engraving. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Photo: Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

techniques of Vermeer and many Dutch artists, including Gerard ter Borch and Frans van Mieris.81 It seems much more likely, however, that Vermeer made the starkly contrasting motif of illicit love central to the decorous drama of Woman Seated at a Virginal not to moralize on the woman’s sexual availability or modesty but to address and comment on the virtue and dignity of his art. The woman’s invitation to the beholder to take part in her music making activates the topos of viewing the painting as an intimate exchange comparable to a lover’s affection for his elusive object of desire. In paintings like this, Vermeer created a subtle pictorial equivalent for the absent beloved of Petrarchan poetics and Dutch art theory, figuring and thematizing both the perfect beauty of his art and his idealized relationship to his work. By pointedly juxtaposing his refined painting of an elegantly decorous young woman engaged in 81 On the increasing refinement of manners and taste among the Dutch upper classes over the course of the seventeenth century, see in particular Roodenburg, Eloquence of the Body and cited literature. For the impact of this shift on Dutch art, see Woodall, “Sovereign Bodies”; Franits, “For People of Fashion”; Wieseman, Caspar Netscher; Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting,” pp. 220-222; Schavemaker, Eglon van der Neer; and Aono, Confronting the Golden Age, pp. 97-118. For an overview, see Aono, “Out of the Shadow of the Golden Age.”

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a courtship ritual of music making with an older painting of a prostitute seducing a man to part with his money, Vermeer also solicits the viewer’s consideration of two starkly different modes of experiencing and transacting art. If Vermeer’s modern image of dignified courtship models its ideal reception and exchange on virtue and honor, the older prostitution scene he strategically includes models an antithetical reception motivated by profit and the allure of money. Van Baburen’s life-size, sensual, and boldly naer het leven image thus aligns the seductions of painting and money by offering the beholder a pictorial economy that fulfills the fantasy of possession in exchange for a purchase price. The coins the old procuress demands, it has been astutely observed, parallel the connoisseur’s payment for a painting of this type.82 Vermeer, by contrast, invites the cultured male liefhebber into a hyper-refined realm of pictorial artifice in which his relationship to the painting is analogized to the courtship of an elegant and beautiful young woman. Vermeer’s distortion of Van Baburen’s brothel picture in his painting reinforces the appeal to virtue and honor in Woman Seated at a Virginal. Vermeer also cited Van Baburen’s Procuress as a painting-within-a painting in The Concert from about 1660 (Fig. 196) formerly in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. There, in contrast to its portrayal in the late Woman Seated at a Virginal, it is shown in correct scale, not cropped or compressed, and in a simple black frame instead of an elaborately carved and gilded one. The Concert’s elegant musical threesome of two women accompanied by a male suitor purposefully echoes Van Baburen’s lewd trio of lute-playing prostitute, procuress, and male customer, establishing a stark dissonance between decorous courtship and coarse sexual procurement, or virtue and venality.83 As with Woman Seated at a Virginal, Vermeer appears to comment with this dyad both on burgher propriety and the status and ideal reception of his art. By pairing Van Baburen’s Procuress on the back wall with a rugged woodland painting of about the same size and in an identical black frame and contrasting it with an arcadian landscape on the lid of the virginal, Vermeer seems to suggest the taming or civilizing of natural desires in the refinement of behavior and, implicitly, his rarefied art. 82 Franits, Vermeer, p. 43. 83 The role of Van Baburen’s painting in The Concert has been interpreted variously. While A. P. de Mirimonde read the parallel between the three f igures in both compositions as an indication that Vermeer’s painting is an elegant brothel scene, Arthur Wheelock Jr. and other scholars rightly emphasize Vermeer’s juxtaposition of opposing values of decorous versus illicit social interaction. See Mirimonde, “Sujets musicaux,” p. 120; Moreno, “Vermeer’s The Concert”; Snow, A Study of Vermeer, p. 92; Arasse, Vermeer, p. 29; Wheelock Jr., Vermeer and the Art of Painting, pp. 112-119; Wheelock Jr. et al., Johannes Vermeer, cat. no. 22; Weber, “Vermeer’s Use of the Picture-within-a-Picture,” p. 302; Goodman, “Landscape on the Wall,” p. 86; and Nevitt Jr., “Vermeer on the Question of Love,” p. 94.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

196. Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, ca. 1658-1660. Oil on canvas, 72.5 × 64.7 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, ma (stolen). Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston / Bridgeman Images.

The subject of The Concert, as Elise Goodman suggests, then, revolves around “domesticized, civilized, and civilizing love.”84 Vermeer reiterated this meaning more forcefully in the later Woman Seated at a Virginal by dramatically enlarging, cropping, and altering the format of the prostitution scene, making it more insistently present within the composition in order to focus the viewer’s attention on the procuress’s emphatic demand for payment. Woman Seated and Woman Standing 84 Goodman, “Landscape on the Wall,” p. 88. See also Liedtke, Vermeer, pp. 110-111.

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at a Virginal thus beckon us as potential suitors to enter into their burgher and pictorial idylls, like the cavaliers in The Concert and The Music Lesson, and engage the poeticized discourse of love and desire prevalent in Dutch artistic theory. While the large painting of Cupid in Woman Standing at a Virginal signifies, as we saw, Vermeer’s pictorial translation of the Dutch motto liefde baart kunst, or love gives birth to art, the even larger brothel picture in Woman Seated at a Virginal, cropped conspicuously, asks more provocatively that we recognize his art as an object and a labor of love.

Women, Money, and the Love of Art The interrelationship between women and money in art has a long and complicated history, of course. In the Dutch pictorial imagination it is generally women, not men, who are associated with money, with both positive and negative connotations. In Dutch art of this period, both the huisvrouw who spends money responsibly for the maintenance of the household and the prostitute who seduces men to part with their money became, as Elizabeth Honig writes, “manifestations of women’s essential nature.”85 Vermeer’s invocation of these contradictory roles assigned to women in his culture in Woman Seated at a Virginal contrasts pointedly with The Procuress of 1656 (Fig. 188), his earliest dated painting, where the misogynistic trope of woman as whore takes center stage. The painting is an impressively large (almost life-size) modernization and reimagining of the prostitution scene that Van Baburen and other Dutch painters helped popularize in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Vermeer revised pictorial precedent by rendering the beautiful prostitute as decorously clothed and softly smiling, which inflects rather than undercuts the subject’s sexual and misogynistic content. The prostitute smiles in anticipation of a coin that the male client, who lewdly grabs her breast, is about to drop into her open hand. This is the one and only time in Vermeer’s art that a man physically touches a woman.86 Vermeer may have included a self-portrait in the figure of the man at the left dressed in slashed-sleeves, a luxurious lace collar, and a large black beret, who smiles as he toasts us while suggestively holding the phallic tail piece of a cittern.87 If so, Vermeer participated in the Northern tradition of boisterous self-portraits as the Prodigal Son, exemplified and domesticated by Rembrandt and 85 Honig, “Counting Out their Money,” p. 53. 86 Ibid, p. 58. 87 The figure’s unusual and somewhat old-fashioned clothing recalls that of the seated painter in The Art of Painting(Fig. 190). For “dissolute” self-portraits in Dutch art, see Cartwright, “Hoe schilder hoe wilder.” On the implications of identifying the man as a self-portrait, see Snow, A Study of Vermeer, pp. 74-76.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

197. Hendrick Goltzius, Danäe (The Sleeping Danäe Being Prepared to Receive Jupiter), 1603. Oil on canvas, 173.36 × 200.03 cm. Gift of the Ahmanson Foundation. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: lacma.org.

Metsu with paintings of themselves carousing with their wives. Vermeer may even have recognized in Van Baburen’s Procuress (Fig. 194) a self-portrait of the artist as the laughing customer.88 Whatever the case, Vermeer’s Procuress suggests that he was wrestling with the complex and fraught position of women as metonyms for painting’s seductions, and the role of money in these pictorial and cultural conventions. Other Dutch artists also engaged the entanglement between women, art, and money to comment on the conditions and ambitions of their work. Vermeer would have been aware of Van Mander’s praise of Hendrick Goltzius’s monumental Danäe from 1603 (Fig. 197), his first painting of the canonical subject of the reclining female nude. As Eric Jan Sluijter showed, Goltzius allegorized the Ovidian myth of Jupiter’s 88 Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, p. 78, identifies the self-portrait on the basis of Leonard Bramer’s portrait drawing of Van Baburen (Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels).

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rape of Danäe as a wittily erotic scene that entices the liefhebber to shower the painter with riches.89 Goltzius elaborated upon the myth’s widely held interpretation as an allegory of the triumph of money over all obstacles, which Van Mander published in his moralizing allegorization of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Wtlegghingh op den Metamorphosis) in Het schilder-boeck.90 This understanding of the ancient fable as a parable of the power of money was in fact encoded into pictorial tradition, since Jupiter is conventionally shown gaining access to the imprisoned Danäe by transforming himself into a shower of gold coins, rather than a golden shower, as Ovid describes. An old woman, usually identified as a procuress, is often included, sometimes gathering up the coins in her apron.91 Goltzius surrounded his Danäe with piles of gold coins and other treasures to emphasize the idea of the power of money, and introduced an anomalous, grinning figure of Mercury, god of commerce and eloquence and patron of the arts, as an allusion to his capacity to tempt the art lover into opening his purse.92 The unmistakably phallic form of the moneybag with a wooden handle (a stockbeurs) held by a putto at left, together with the spewing “rain” of gold emitted from Jupiter’s thunderbolt and directed by the laughing Mercury, reinforce the painting’s highly charged eroticism and amusingly self-reflexive recasting of the Ovidian myth. At the right, putti pull aside the bed curtains to reveal a life-size sleeping nude unaware of the beholder’s presence. Encouraged to enjoy Danäe’s beauty voyeuristically, the male liefhebber is seduced by the painting’s sensual, erotic appeal into rewarding the artist with untold riches in return. As Sluijter writes perceptively, “Goltzius wittily shows that the painter’s eloquence and power of persuasion – represented by Mercury – is capable, by means of the desirable beauty he has created, […] of presenting the true connoisseur with such a tempting sight that he is lured into buying the painting, for it is he who ultimately falls in love with this Danäe and is willing to pay a lot of money to own her.”93 The liefhebber who purchased Goltzius’s painting was the Leiden financier Bartholomeus Ferreris, to whom Van Mander 89 Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 150-153, and idem, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, pp. 232-234. Sluijter identifies the eagle as both Jupiter and the attribute of Sight, the most powerful but potentially dangerous of the senses. For Van Mander’s discussion of the painting in the Life of Goltzius, see Van Mander, Lives, fol. 286v. 90 Van Mander, Schilder-boeck (Wtlegghingh op den Metamorphosis), fol. 39r/v: “through riches and gifts […] one can do and achieve anything: For undoubtedly Jupiter has charmed and deceived his beloved and her maidservant with lavish gifts of gold: […] That cherished and coveted gold quenches everything, and is victorious,” quoted in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 318-319, n. 195. 91 Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, pp. 225, 230-231. 92 Goltzius depicted Mercury as a painter in a large-scale canvas in the Frans Hals Museum, where the god holds a palette and brush in one hand and in the other his caduceus as if it were a painter’s maulstick. On this, see in particular Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 136-137, and idem, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, p. 232. 93 Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 232-233.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

dedicated his “Lives of Italian Painters” in Het schilder-boeck, and whom he identified as an amateur painter, art lover, and “my very dear friend.”94 Goltzius’s unique invention, as Sluijter also demonstrated, plays ingeniously on his personal device of Eer boven Gold or “Honor above Gold,” a pun on Goltzius’s name. He depicted the motto in four surviving drawings, including one for the album amicorum of Ernst Brinck van Harderwijk, which shows a laurel-crowned cherub head or personification of honor hovering above Mercury’s caduceus of entwined snakes rising from a pile or pot of gold coins, moneybags, and other gold objects (Fig. 63).95 As Van Mander wrote, Goltzius “has ‘Honor above Gold’ as his motto, and in practice shows plentifully that he strives not so much for money as for honor.”96 Goltzius’s prominent signature in Danäe on the overflowing treasure chest at the left (it is the only painting he signed in full) underscores his pictorial invention as a personal witticism. Sluijter rightly regards the painting as playfully mocking the high-mindedness of Goltzius’s personal motto; yet the picture’s exaltation of money, despite the comic overtones, does not necessarily undercut the ideal to which Goltzius subscribed. As we have often seen, early modern artists repeatedly expressed the dignity of art by demanding very high, sometimes outrageous prices. By asserting a value that theoretically could not be measured by ordinary, market calculations, the artist symbolically detached his creative work from other forms of labor and distanced his products from association with commodities. Goltzius himself, we also saw, aff irmed this conception of art when, according to Van Mander, he was confronted by a merchant unwilling to pay his asking price, and replied: “Your trade is not to be compared with our art. I can become a merchant with money, but you cannot, with all your money, become an artist.”97 Inflated, sometimes even exorbitant rates of remuneration were understood by both producers and buyers to demonstrate artistic status and worth. Goltzius and those contemporaries who conceived of themselves as virtuous and honorable practitioners of the arts did not suppress money’s role in artistic production, but acknowledged, exploited, and sometimes evidently parodied the inevitable interdependencies between aesthetic and monetary value and of creativity and consumption. 94 Van Mander, Lives, fol. 72r, quoted in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 153, and idem, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, p. 23: “Schilder, Schilder-Const Liefhebber, mijnen besonderen goeden vriend.” According to Van Mander, Ferreris was an amateur painter, a pawnbroker, money changer, money lender, and deposit holder. 95 Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 152. 96 Van Mander, Lives, fol. 286r: “seggende voor avijs, Eer boven Golt, en bewijst oock daedlijck genoech, niet soo gheltsuchtigh als eerliefdigh te wesen.” 97 Ibid, fol. 286v: “V Coopmanschap heeft doch geen gelijcknis met onse Const. Ick can met gelt wel een Coopman worden: maer ghy moeght met al u ghelt geen Constenaer worden.”

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Van Mander acknowledged the entanglement between art and money in his dedication of the Leven to Ferreris, the owner of Goltzius’s Danäe, writing that “anyone who considers money or precious metals of no use, may also deem the Art of Painting small and unworthy.”98 Moreover, Joost van den Vondel composed a poem on a Danäe painting by Dirk Bleker that links the creation of a seductive illusion of naked female flesh with Dutch economic prosperity. Van den Vondel concludes the poem by stating that just as the power of art can outwit a god, its beautiful deceptions stimulate the buyer – in this case the Lord Van Halteren, Bailiff of Kennemerland – to pay to possess its fictions, thus allowing trade to flourish.99 Money was the just reward for the virtuous artist, an idea rooted in the Senecan trilogy of artistic motivations: The love of art, the desire for profit, and the pursuit of fame. The traditional primacy of the love of art over the other two artistic motivations underwent some modification in seventeenth-century Holland, where the desire for prof it in and of itself was identif ied as a worthy enthusiasm, particularly if pursued within the ancient and humanist framework of values.100 The nexus between women, art, and money in the Dutch artistic imagination also informs Dou’s Woman Playing a Clavichord from about 1665 (Fig. 198), a work more directly relevant to Vermeer’s genre scenes of dignified women and refined courting, specifically his Woman Seated at a Virginal (Fig. 193). In fact, the resemblance between Vermeer’s composition and Dou’s slightly earlier painting suggests that Vermeer likely saw it, perhaps in Leiden in 1665, when it was exhibited together with 26 other Dou paintings owned by Johan de Bye. In Dou’s cabinet painting, like Vermeer’s, the eroticism, humor, and monumentality of Goltzius’s earlier Danäe give way to an intimate and decorously suggestive scene of a young woman in an elegant interior that typif ies the shift away from overtly sexual imagery and toward more refined “high life” scenes in Dutch genre painting from the second half of the seventeenth century.101 Nonetheless, Dou’s picture, with its alluring woman gazing directly out to the viewer as she pauses expectantly at the 98 Ibid, fol. 92r/v, quoted in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 319, n. 201: “Dies isser yemandt, die gheldt, oft de beste metalen onnut oft ondiestigh acht, mach oock de Schilder-const cleen, en onweerdigh achten.” 99 Van den Vondel, “Op Bleker Danäe,” quoted in Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, p. 233. 100 See Introduction, p. 33; Angel, Lof der schilder-konst, pp. 27-30; and Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, p. 351. See further Sluijter, “Didactic and Disguised Meanings?,” pp. 177-179; idem, Seductress of Sight, pp. 213-217; and Brusati, Artifice and Illusion, p. 256. 101 Dou’s turn from modest burgher interiors in favor of upper-class scenes around 1660 may have been influenced by Vermeer’s work, and certainly by paintings of Ter Borch and Van Mieris. See Baer et al., Gerrit Dou, p. 39. For correspondences between Dou’s and Vermeer’s two pictures of women at keyboards, see recently Wieseman in Waiboer et al., Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, pp. 135-139. On the circulation of motifs and compositions among Vermeer, Dou, Ter Borch, Van Mieris, and other painters of refined genre paintings, see Sluijter, “Emulative Imitation among High-Life Genre Painters.”

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

198. Gerrit Dou, Woman Playing a Clavichord, ca. 1665. Oil on panel, 37.7 × 29.8 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Photo: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London / Bridgeman Images.

keyboard, activates the same chain of meanings that animate Goltzius’s eroticized celebration of art’s capacity to entice the liefhebber to open his purse. As Sluijter puts it, Dou’s “lovely lady […] literally seduces the interested buyer, because he must disburse a substantial sum to own such a beauty.”102 The painting’s diaphragm arch and sumptuous tapestry theatrically pulled aside set the stage for the viewer to 102 Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, p. 294.

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be charmed into remunerating Dou with compensation commensurate with the notoriously high prices that he commanded on the art market. Frans van Mieris pictorialized the same constellation of ideas in The Cloth Shop, dated 1660 (Fig. 199), in which a grinning male customer in officer’s clothes is depicted stroking the chin of a beautiful saleswoman while touching the rich fabrics and textiles on offer.103 A pile of fabrics on the carpeted table in the right foreground includes a banner with the partially legible Latin inscription COMPARAT CUI VULT, the first word of which, as Eddy de Jongh argued, is likely a form of the verb comparare, meaning “to compare” or “to purchase.”104 This invocation suggests that the viewer is to emulate the male customer in the painting by assessing Van Mieris’s virtuoso rendering of both the woman’s soft skin and the incredible array of surfaces, textures, objects, and reflections. Van Mieris thus parallels the desire transacted between the beholder and the painting with the depicted customer’s erotic interaction with the shopkeeper. By locating the scene within a shop full of merchandise, Van Mieris also thematizes his seduction of the liefhebber into paying him handsomely based on a discerning appraisal of his exceptional mimetic skills. Van Mieris’s early biographers all emphasize the extremely high prices his paintings commanded, and collectors are known to have been willing to pay exorbitantly for his work.105 Sandrart noted in 1675 that the little Cloth Shop was purchased for an astounding 2000 guilders by Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands.106 In the early eighteenth century Arnold Houbraken corrected the figure to 1000 guilders, which was still an exceptionally high price for a small cabinet picture.107 Although archival records of valuations of paintings by Van Mieris and his teacher Dou are not as high as Sandrart and Houbraken reported, they are nonetheless significantly higher than for pictures by other genre painters.108 So exclusive and expensive had Van Mieris’s labor-intensive paintings become that most collectors in his hometown of Leiden could not afford them.109

103 For Van Mieris’s Cloth Shop, see recently Ho, “An Invitation to Compare.” 104 De Jongh, Tot lering en vermaak, cat. no. 142. 105 Ho, “An Invitation to Compare,” p. 699, citing Gerard Hoet’s compilation of auction catalogues, in which the average price for a painting attributed to Van Mieris from 1687 to 1728 was about 340 guilders. Several of the paintings mentioned were valued exceptionally highly, at between 600 and 1100 guilders. See Hoet, Catalogus. 106 Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, p. 321. According to Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 3, p. 111, the Archduke subsequently invited Van Mieris to be his court painter in Vienna, which the artist declined. 107 Houbraken, De groote schouburgh, vol. 3, p. 111. 108 See Bakker, “Painters of and for the Elite,” pp. 88-91. 109 Sluijter, “Schilders van ‘cleyne, subtile ende curieuse dingen’,” pp. 39-40. See also Ho, “An Invitation to Compare,” p. 699.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

199. Frans van Mieris, Cavalier in a Draper Shop (The Cloth Shop), 1660. Oil on panel, 54.5 × 42.7 cm. Kunst­ historisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, ny.

Although we know relatively few prices for which Vermeer’s paintings sold during his lifetime, there are indications that he could command very high rates of remuneration, albeit not as high as Dou and Van Mieris. When the French diplomat Balthasar de Monconys called on Vermeer in 1667, discovered that the artist had no paintings of his own to show, and was directed to the home of a baker, most likely Hendrick van Buyten, he was amazed to learn that Van Buyten had paid Vermeer 600 livres (600 guilders) for a picture with merely a single figure.110 While De Monconys recorded in his diary that he would have considered six pistoles (60 guilders) an overpayment, neither Vermeer nor the liefhebbers who were the primary audience for expensive genre pictures would have shared the Frenchman’s 110 Monconys, Journal, vol. 2, pp. 148-149, quoted in Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, pp. 180-181.

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assessment. Two days later in Leiden, Dou quoted De Monconys the same price for a painting with one figure, indicating that by the 1660s Vermeer’s paintings were as highly valued by connoisseurs as the extremely expensive works of the famous Leiden fijnschilder.111 That Vermeer had no paintings of his own to show De Monconys when he visited also confirms that besides the Van Ruijven-De Knuijts the artist had cultivated an audience prepared to pay handsomely – according to De Monconys even excessively – to procure one of his paintings. Van Buyten was no ordinary baker. He left one of the richest estates in Delft when he died in 1701, and paid Vermeer’s widow Catharina Bolnes over 617 guilders for two of the artist’s paintings, which he agreed to hold as security for a large debt of over 726 guilders that Vermeer owed for the delivery of bread.112 The arrangement Van Buyten contracted with Catharina was generous, allowing her twelve years to repay the principal at no interest. Goltzius, Dou, and Van Mieris, by engaging the triangulation between women, art, and money central to the discourse of painting, addressed the economics that underlay their creative labor. Vermeer, as we have seen, also engaged these interrelated themes in his early Procuress (Fig. 188), and probably inserted a selfportrait to accentuate his role as artist-purveyor within the pictorial economy of production, possession, and consumption. Although Vermeer later refrained from overtly eroticizing money and instead visualized a refined poetics of desire, money does reappear in Woman Holding a Balance of about 1664 (Fig. 200). This painting predates his citation of Van Baburen’s depiction of the exchange of a coin for a woman in Woman Seated at a Virginal (Fig. 193), to which we shall return shortly. Woman Holding a Balance is an exquisite and evocative modernization of the Netherlandish pictorial type of a woman weighing gold that originated in the early sixteenth century.113 In it, Vermeer subtly confronts the entanglement between women, art, and money in his culture. The picture was a highlight of the Van Ruijven-De Knuijt collection, where it was contained within a protective box.114 111 Broos, “Un celebre peijntre nommé Verme[e]r,” p. 146, and Liedtke, Vermeer, p. 36. For Monconys’s visits to artists’ studios on his travels, see Ducos, “Tour of Holland,” esp. pp. 107-110. 112 Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, pp. 216-218. One of the paintings is described as depicting two f igures, possibly Lady with a Maidservant (Frick Collection, New York) or Lady Writing with her Maid (Fig. 203); the other of a f igure playing a “cyter” (a cittern or some other stringed instrument), which has often but probably incorrectly been identified with the Kenwood House Guitar Player (Fig. 192). See Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 259, and note 68, above. 113 For example, Jan van Hemessen’s Woman Weighing Gold, ca. 1530-1535 (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), cited by Liedtke, Vermeer, pp. 118, 120. 114 The painting is listed first among the 21 Vermeers in the Dissius sale catalogue of 1696 and described as “A young lady weighing gold, in a box by J. van der Meer of Delft, extraordinarily artful and vigorously painted” (“Een Juffrouw die goud weegt, in een kasje van J. vander Meer van Delft, extraordinaer konstig en kraghtig geschildert”). It sold for 155 guilders, the third highest price in the sale, after The View of Delft

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

200. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, ca. 1664. Oil on canvas, 39.7 × 35.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

In this composition, a beautiful burgher woman stands before a table on which lies a jewelry box overflowing with pearls and a gold chain, delicately balancing the dangling pans of a pair of scales that await three gold coins placed conspicuously at the table’s edge. A smaller box used for storing the balance and a stack of weights complete the scene of the woman steadying herself as she prepares to determine (200 guilders) and The Milkmaid (175 guilders). See Hoet, Catalogus, vol. 1, p. 34, lot 1, and Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, doc. 439, no. 1.

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the weight of the coins. This was a common task in the pre-modern age when the value of gold and silver coins, which could be clipped or shaved, depended upon their precise weight. A small mirror in a black frame hangs at the left. Vermeer strategically positioned an imposing Last Judgment painting directly behind the woman as a counterpoint to her absorption in the mundane task of weighing coins. The inescapable presence of this scene of Christ’s judgment of souls and the visual parallel between the woman’s action and Christ’s upheld hands invite the viewer to meditate on Vermeer’s juxtaposition of the worldly and spiritual realms. Multiple and often conflicting theories have been proposed to explain the work’s iconographic meaning, with identifications of the woman ranging from that of a personification of Vanitas, Truth, Religious Truth, Purity, Free Will, and, most recently, Conscience.115 Setting aside these complicated readings, Walter Liedtke sensibly and perspicaciously concluded that “Balance is the picture’s theme: that is, measure, the comparative values of material and spiritual things. As the mirror and the Last Judgment remind the viewer, all the treasures on the table, together with youth, beauty, happiness, and life itself, will come to nothing in the end, or rather, at the beginning of eternal life.”116 Wayne Franits, determining that Woman Holding a Balance “defies conclusive explanation,” also argues that the picture’s ambiguity and open-endedness likely catered to the fashion for sophisticated conversation among the connoisseurs who comprised Vermeer’s rarefied audience.117 Yet the painting’s resistance to a singular, f ixed interpretation suggests an alternative reading of Vermeer’s prominent inclusion of a painting of the Last Judgment. If we shift focus away from theological and moralizing questions and toward reflecting on the status of Vermeer’s refined genre painting relative to the traditional biblical picture set within it, another dimension of meaning emerges. Embracing the interpretative possibilities of such a shift also helps account for the insistent presence of money in this idyll of burgher domesticity and captures more fully the exceptionalism of Vermeer’s painting. Woman Holding a Balance offers a subtle pictorial commentary in which the elegant woman and the inset Last Judgment painting can be understood to point beyond themselves and toward claims about the discrete status and value of Vermeer’s art. The beautiful woman embodying Vermeer’s vision of female loveliness and grace not only reflects genteel ideals of social refinement and restraint. As a figure for the refined and studied perfection of Vermeer’s art, she also and 115 For a recent overview of the various interpretations of Woman with a Balance, see Franits, Vermeer, pp. 156-162, with citation of literature. 116 Liedtke, Vermeer, p. 118. 117 Franits, Vermeer, pp. 162-167.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

perhaps more pertinently embodies the aesthetic ideal of perfect beauty exemplified by his exquisite modern cabinet painting. The Last Judgment, by contrast, is a large-scale history painting that epitomizes the most prestigious category of pictorial representation within the early modern hierarchy of aesthetic values. It exemplifies the type of picture with which Vermeer began his career and to which he returned in his ambitious later allegories, The Art of Painting (Fig. 190) and Allegory of the Catholic Faith (Fig. 201). Although the exact model for the painting is not known, Vermeer deliberately invoked an older, archaic prototype, which may have been by the late sixteenth-century Flemish mannerist Jacob de Backer, who specialized in comparable Last Judgment scenes (Fig. 202).118 Given the presence in Vermeer’s household of both Van Baburen’s Procuress (Fig. 194) and the Cupid painting in Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (Fig. 181) and Woman Standing at a Virginal (Fig. 183), a Last Judgment by De Backer or another mannerist artist may have been in the artist’s possession, perhaps as part of his stock as an art dealer. In Woman Holding a Balance, the Last Judgment represents a vestige of an earlier era of art than that represented by Vermeer’s modern picture, similarly to the contrast between Van Baburen’s older and cruder image of the interaction between the sexes and Vermeer’s dignified and delicate paintings The Concert and Woman Seated at a Virginal. Woman Holding a Balance is an intimate, intricate, jewel-like genre painting of a genteel burgher woman performing an ordinary routine, in which the outdated Last Judgment painting is an insistent backdrop. The inset painting alerts the informed and sensitive beholder to its status as a pictorial counterpoint within Vermeer’s image and initiates reflection on the distinctions between two discrete categories of picture making.119 Woman Holding a Balance, the most accomplished and intellectually complex of Vermeer’s genre pictures incorporating a painting-within-a-painting, invites comparison with the esteemed istoria and its privileged status as a performance of the artist’s intellect and powers of invention as well as painterly skill.120 By the last quarter of the seventeenth century the most highly valued Dutch paintings were genre scenes.121 Although history paintings were the most expensive type of picture in the period 1600-1625, 50 years later the situation had changed 118 Wheelock Jr., “Johannes Vermeer/Woman Holding a Balance/c. 1664.” On the picture’s archaism, see also Franits, Vermeer, p. 156. 119 Weber, “Vermeer’s Use of the Picture-within-a-Picture,” pp. 304-305. 120 Hammer-Tugendhat, Visible and the Invisible, pp. 202-218, similarly emphasizes Vermeer’s citation of an outdated picture as a commentary on the status of painting itself, though as part of a broader claim about the role Dutch painting played in shaping modern subjectivity. 121 See Chong, “Market for Landscape Painting,” esp. Table 1, p. 116; North, Art and Commerce, pp. 99-100; and De Marchi and Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices,” p. 460.

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201. Johannes Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith, ca. 1670-1672. Oil on canvas, 114.3 × 88.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: metmuseum.org.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

202. Jacob de Backer, The Last Judgment, ca. 1583. Oil on canvas, 119 × 53 cm. Photo: Hampel Auctions.

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dramatically. The value of history painting remained relatively constant, but genre paintings – especially the refined pictures by the Leiden fijnschilders Dou and Van Mieris – had become the most expensive pictures. Despite their generally modest dimensions and lack of significant narrative subjects, genre paintings by these celebrated artists, who partly inspired Vermeer’s move away from the istoria and his turn toward elegant scenes of domestic burgher ideals, had attained astronomical market valuations. Paintings by Dou and Van Mieris reportedly could command prices in excess of 1000 guilders. Dutch theorists also acknowledged the ascendance of genre painting. In 1642 Philips Angel effusively praised his fellow Leidener Dou for achieving financial success with meticulously painted cabinet pictures, and made no qualitative distinction between Dou’s accomplishments with genre painting and Rembrandt’s mastery of the intellectual demands and rigors of history painting.122 Moreover, Angel publicized the annual fee for the right of first refusal paid to Dou by Pieter Spiering van Silvercroon. In his treatise Het groot schilderboeck, first published in 1707, the artist Gerard de Lairesse attempted to accommodate the popularity of what he called “modern” genre painting to the authority of “antique” historical subjects, advising painters to dignify scenes of contemporary life by depicting burghers performing rituals of urbane living, such as young ladies at tea or gentlemen drinking.123 Refined high-life pictures from the second half of the century by Ter Borch, Dou, Van Mieris, Metsu, and Vermeer, among others exemplify De Lairesse’s ideal of an elevated type of modern genre painting, and for which he provided specific instructions in his chapter “Aanwyzinge om het burgerlyke of cierlyke modern wel uit te beelden” (Method for correctly representing what is city-like or elegant modern).124 Vermeer’s stylish modern genre paintings thus emerged from changing market conditions and aesthetic orientations, which De Lairesse codified in the early eighteenth century. Yet more than any other contemporary Dutch genre painter, Vermeer seems to have approached the subject of elegant modern life with a seriousness of purpose and an intellectual rigor usually associated with history painting.125 As a modernized allegory, The Art of Painting (Fig. 190) testifies to Ver122 Sluijter, “Didactic and Disguised Meanings?,” pp. 79-83, and idem, Seductress of Sight, esp. pp. 200, 262-263. 123 De Lairesse, Groot schilderboeck, vol. 1, pp. 167-201. On De Lairesse, Vermeer, and the increasing refinement of Dutch genre painting, see Vergara, “Antiek and Modern,” pp. 246-247, and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, pp. 56-61. For De Lairesse and Dutch genre painting in general, see Kemmer, “In Search of Classical Form”; Franits, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, esp. pp. 222, 224-225; De Vries, How to Create Beauty; and Aono, Confronting the Golden Age, pp. 101-104. 124 Lairesse, Groot schilderboeck, vol. 1, pp. 175-182. 125 On the relationship between history and modernity in Vermeer’s work, see Vergara, “Antiek and Modern,” pp. 245-249, and Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager, pp. 56-61. Gaskell interprets Vermeer’s Woman Standing at a Virginal (Fig. 183) as a modern adaptation of the mythological subject of Venus and Cupid.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

meer’s continued regard for the istoria, even if the painting is no longer considered a valorization of the primacy of history painting. Vermeer conceived his modern cabinet pictures for an audience of discerning collectors who could appreciate his elevation of genre painting beyond its theoretically lesser, subservient status. By incorporating history paintings conspicuously as paintings-within-paintings in scenes of contemporary life, including the Last Judgment in Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer introduced a discursive element into this project to elevate and dignify genre painting. In Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid (Fig. 203), for example, the juxtaposition of the inset classicizing painting of the Finding of Moses with the modern domestic scene in the foreground enacts a visual and conceptual interchange in which history painting, as Lisa Vergara writes, “recede[s] behind the potent modesty, and majesty, of Vermeer’s mundane subject.”126 The complexity, self-consciousness, and elusiveness of Vermeer’s art gently challenge the viewer to engage in prolonged, contemplative viewing; and for informed beholders that absorptive viewing experience would have involved reflection on the status of Vermeer’s ambitious cabinet pictures relative to the prestige of traditional history painting. But what are we to make of the conspicuous gold coins in Woman Holding a Balance? On the one hand, they could allude to the literal, material value of Vermeer’s refined and ingenious painting. Still life painters such as Clara Peeters and Jan Brueghel sometimes placed gold coins in their compositions to denote the monetary value of their mimetic artistry, and the commodification of their works.127 Brueghel explained to his patron Archbishop and Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1606 that the coins, jewel, and rare seashells in a sumptuous flower still life (Fig. 204) were a witty allusion to the excellence of his art: “Under the flowers I have placed a jewel with minted coins and rarities from the sea. Your excellency must judge for yourself if the flowers do not surpass gold and jewels.”128 In 1625 Borromeo confirmed his appreciation of Brueghel’s conjoining of aesthetic and monetary values in another flower still life painting in his Musaeum, which he described as a “battle of the flowers, whose merit Brueghel himself – who made them – indicated with a most graceful invention. He painted at the bottom of the vase a diamond, which makes

126 Vergara, “Antiek and Modern,” p. 249. 127 Brusati, “Stilled Lives,” p. 175, and idem, “Natural Artifice and Material Values,” pp. 150-151. 128 Brueghel to Borromeo, 25 August 1606, quoted in Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values,” p. 150. For the letter, see Crivelli, Giovanni Brueghel, p. 75. On Brueghel’s work for Borromeo in relation to compensation and the assessment of quality, see Honig, Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale, pp. 33-34. For Borromeo’s appreciation of still life and landscape paintings as objects of religious contemplation, see Jones, “Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes,” and idem, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana, pp. 64-95.

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203. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid, ca. 1670. Oil on canvas, 71.1 × 60.5 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Photo: National Gallery of Ireland HIP / Art Resource, ny.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

204. Jan Brueghel the Elder, Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins, and Shells, 1606. Oil on copper, 64 × 45 cm. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Photo: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan © Paolo Manusardi / Mondadori Portfolio / Bridgeman Images.

us understand that which we would have thought just the same, namely: The work is as valuable as a gem, and we paid for it as such.”129 Vermeer and the select group of contemporary Dutch painters who achieved exceptional prices must have been aware of genre painting’s displacement of the primacy of history painting on the art market. Dou may have responded to this 129 For the letter, see Borromeo, Musaeum, p. 26, quoted in Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values,” p. 150. It is reprinted and translated in Quint, Cardinal Federico Borromeo as Patron and Critic of the Arts, p. 245.

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altered market situation in Woman Playing a Clavichord (Fig. 198), where a decorous woman appears to await the beholder’s decision whether to accept her selling price for the possession of this refined little painting. In Woman Holding a Balance, by contrast, Vermeer seems more specifically to invite the liefhebber to consider his picture of burgerlijk virtue in relation to traditional history painting, exemplified by the outdated Last Judgment in the background. This vestige of a bygone era, when the istoria held uncontested status in the field of painting, is visually subordinate to Vermeer’s modern and majestic little genre painting of a domestic situation. Yet the inclusion of coins to assert his painting’s value in monetary terms contradicts Woman Holding a Balance’s dignified refinement and reticence. The suggestion of an unsubtle equivalence between artistic and monetary value disrupts – even violates – the picture’s conditions of balance, reverie, virtue, and spirituality, and risks reintroducing the illicit entanglement between money, women, and art that Vermeer studiously avoided after The Procuress of 1656. The specificity of the woman’s action, however, suggests an alternate reading of the image consistent with the rarefied world reflected and embodied in Vermeer’s art. Although the woman was formerly thought to be weighing gold (as the picture is described in the 1696 Dissius sale catalogue), microscopic examination has revealed no trace of a coin or any other object on the pans.130 This indicates that her action, as already noted, is suspended as she delicately balances the empty swinging pans in preparation for weighing the gold coins. By fixing on this poignant interval in her activity, unlike Pieter de Hooch’s contemporaneous Woman Weighing Coins (Fig. 205), Vermeer asks the beholder to reflect upon the relative merits and claims to priority of the two types of painting rather than their value as expressed in crudely monetary terms.131 Perhaps Vermeer suggests through the woman’s gentle but meaningful pause in her action the equivalent value of the istoria and his own modern, complex, jewel-like genre painting. Turning away from the mirror, which, when combined with a woman in Netherlandish art traditionally signifies vanity, the graceful woman mediates the rivalries between history painting and fine genre painting, modeling the work’s ideal reception in its own time, and ours.132 In Woman Holding a Balance Vermeer, rather than engaging the viewer in a theological dialogue, seems to ask us to consider the very ontology of his art. The late Woman Seated at a Virginal (Fig. 193) distills and represents a deepening of Vermeer’s meditation on the intertwining operations of money and the erotics of 130 Wheelock Jr. et al., Johannes Vermeer, cat. no. 10, p. 140. 131 On the relationship between Vermeer’s and De Hooch’s paintings of the subject, see recently Wheelock Jr. in Waiboer et al., Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, cat. no. 14. 132 On the tradition of women with mirrors in Dutch art, see in particular Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, pp. 90-99, 108-118; and Zell, “Mirror as Rival.” On mirrors in Vermeer’s work, see Zell, “Liefde baart kunst,” pp. 153-163.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

205. Pieter de Hooch, Woman Weighing Coins, ca. 1664. Oil on canvas, 61 × 53 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Artothek / Bridgeman Images.

painting in the valuation of his work. Pointedly contrasting the restrained behavior of the elegant virginal player with the easy availability of Van Baburen’s crude temptress who extracts payment from the male customer, Vermeer puts on display the civilized, genteel values not only of his rarefied clientele, but also of himself as a member of the burgher elite. Already by 1655, as Montias observed, Vermeer was dignified with the title “Sr ” (signior or seigneur), following his recent marriage to

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Catharina Bolnes, daughter of a Catholic patrician family.133 Vermeer’s presentation of an older and vulgar aesthetics of consumption as the antithesis to the gracious courtship scenario that plays out both within and before Woman Seated at a Virginal articulates his own virtuous motivations as well as those of the cultured liefhebbers who comprised his audience. Soliciting the viewer to appreciate his creative labor as an undertaking inspired by love, not the desire for money, Vermeer metaphorically detaches himself from the logic of the market to assert the transcendent status of his painting. His very high prices paradoxically demonstrate his independence from quantifiable measures of judgment or value. Vermeer’s response to the inadequacy of market valuations of his work thus was not limited to his cultivation of sympathetic patrons like Van Ruijven and De Knuijt, who shielded him from the exigencies of competing on the open market, or liefhebbers like Van Buyten who were prepared to pay above-market prices for his work. Vermeer also produced sophisticated artworks that are themselves figurations of and commentaries on the insufficiency of market calculations in the valuation of art. By engaging the sophisticated beholder in a dialogue about the ontology of his art and its transcendent worth through the antithesis between a money payment and aestheticized exchange, Vermeer assimilated his project to the ethics of the gift, the deeply embedded cultural discourse of interpersonal exchange that took on new meaning in the increasingly commercialized, commodified societies of early modernity. The anti-market and affective rhetoric of the gift economy underwrote Vermeer’s reconfiguration of the beholder’s relationship to his paintings and, by implication, their maker – symbolically freeing him from the constraints and logic imposed by the marketplace as well as the subservience and dependence inherent to the economics of conventional patronage relationships. Vermeer’s fashioning of a refined and profoundly gendered poetics of desire therefore can also be understood to give visual form to the gift economy’s aestheticization of exchange. Woman Seated at a Virginal encloses the viewer, artwork, and Vermeer himself in a relationship defined by ideals of mutuality, virtue, and honor, weaving together a network of interaction between people and things analogous to that activated by the offering of a gift. In the process, Vermeer facilitates and nurtures aestheticized social formations reenacted with each new reciprocal encounter between viewer and painting.

133 Montias, Vermeer and His Milieu, p. 134. For the 1655 document in which Vermeer is identified as “Sr Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer master painter” and his wife as “Juff re Catharina Bollenes,” see ibid, doc. 262. See also Vergara, “Antiek and Modern,” p. 248, and Franits, Vermeer, p. 132.

For the Love of Art: Vermeer and the Poetics of the Gift 

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Conclusion The burgher republic’s vibrant gift culture interacted dynamically with its thriving commerce and trade, flourishing art scene, and competitive art market, and had a catalyzing effect on the art of the Golden Age. Dutch political, social, and cultural elites gifted artworks to initiate and perpetuate webs of reciprocity at home and abroad, and gift exchange was integrated into, not separate from, the Dutch artistic economy. Whether as strategic distributions or generous offerings, Dutch artists embraced gift exchange to cultivate professional and social relationships, while some highly self-conscious artists enlisted the cultural and social values encoded in the period’s ethics of the gift in order to lay claim to social distinction, the prestige of their artworks, and to acknowledge the burgerlijk civility of the art lovers who supported them. Rembrandt adopted a particularly inventive approach grounded in the gift’s capacity to nurture and reify social bonds, producing distinctive prints for circulation within gifting circuits. His many landscape drawings, which share affinities with Dutch amateur landscapes and likewise operated beyond the domain of the marketplace, also conform to the type of artwork associated by contemporaries with the alternate, social economy of gift giving. And both Rembrandt and Vermeer creatively engaged the gift system in unique works of art designed to engender viewing encounters that aestheticize the economics of artistic production and reception. Although this book has traced the interplay between gift culture and Dutch art from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, or the entirety of the Dutch Golden Age, it is significant that the most intensive and imaginative interactions date from the 1650s through the early 1670s. Recognized as the highpoint of the Golden Age, this period also marked the end of the Dutch art market’s remarkable expansion and dynamism. Following decades of unprecedented growth and resilience, the art market began to stagnate from the 1660s onward due both to a general economic decline, accelerated by the French invasion of the Republic in 1672, and to the oversupply of paintings produced by earlier generations of artists.1 After the 1660s, the number of Dutch painters declined precipitously. Not coincidentally, Rembrandt and Vermeer ended their careers in diminished financial and social circumstances. However, the economic hardships of this decline were not distributed evenly across the Republic’s social classes, a phenomenon that fundamentally altered the course of Dutch painting from the second half of the seventeenth and into the 1 On the collapse of the art market beginning in the 1660s, see in particular De Vries, “Art History,” pp. 255-271, and Bok, “Vraag en aanbod,” pp. 120-130. See also Munt, “Impact of the Rampjaar,” pp. 24-30.

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eighteenth century. Wealthy citizens who maintained their privileged positions continued to collect art and patronize contemporary painters, but on a much reduced scale.2 This smaller and more socially exclusive group gravitated toward a classicizing style, which Dutch painters adopted even while emulating the “old master” genre paintings by Dou and Van Mieris, among others, for which these elite collectors also paid enormous sums.3 The situation contrasts starkly with the first half of the seventeenth century, when many more buyers from a broader segment of the population propelled a booming market for contemporary art. Capitalizing on this thriving market of burghers, tradesmen, and wealthy regents, Dutch artists developed entrepreneurial strategies that established their positions or brands within a highly competitive marketplace, and produced an estimated and unprecedented 5-10 million paintings. 4 Painters who operated at the upper end of the market, as we saw, cultivated patronage relationships with individual collectors or forged alliances within wealthy and politically powerful social networks to build privileged and remunerative careers. Rembrandt also nurtured close personal relationships with liefhebbers, which informed his experimental approach to printmaking. But by the late seventeenth century artists could no longer rely on the open, speculative market as a reliable source of income, and so it became imperative for them to cater to a smaller, more elite group of collectors. Johann van Gool acknowledged this new reality in 1750: “The number of these rich and generous art patrons is nowadays small, and this type of art lover (liefhebber) is so thinly sown that one needs a lantern, with which Diogenes looked for people in bright sunshine on the market of Athens, to search for them.”5 The conditions of the art market remained relatively stable until the end of the 1660s, when Rembrandt’s and Vermeer’s primary audiences comprised more socially inclusive circles of liefhebbers than would be the case within a generation. Their creative engagements of gift culture therefore represent the culmination of a social alliance between artists and collectors unique to the merchant republic. Unlike elsewhere in early modern Europe, the Dutch Republic’s merchant classes were the principal sponsors and collectors of the most innovative contemporary artists.6 2 For Dutch elite collectors of the eighteenth century, see Korthals Altes, De verovering van de internationale kunstmarkt; Jonckheere, Auction of King William’s Paintings; and Aono, Confronting the Golden Age, p. 21. For this period’s increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, see Soltow and Luiten van Zaanden, Income and Wealth Inequality in the Netherlands, pp. 37-41. 3 Aono, Confronting the Golden Age, esp. pp. 22-42. 4 Van der Woude, “Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland.” 5 Van Gool, De nieuwe schouburg, vol. 1, p. 195, quoted in Aono, Confronting the Golden Age, p. 22: “Doch het getal dezer ryke en milde Kunstbeloners is tans klein, en die zoort van Liefhebbers zo dun gezaeit, dat men de Lantaren, waer mede Diogenes by klaeren Zonneschyn, op de markt van Athenen, naer menschen zocht, wel nodig had om hen te zoeken.” 6 Sluijter, “Ownership of Paintings,” esp. pp. 90-91.

Conclusion 

The Dutch aristocracy, which retained significant though depreciated political and social prestige, was a comparatively static class that generally patronized conventional portrait painters and favored tapestries over contemporary paintings for display in their residences. In addressing their inventive adaptations of the gift to the burgher liefhebbers who drove the expansion and dynamism of the Dutch art market, Rembrandt and Vermeer aligned themselves with these collectors in interdependent networks of affiliation and regard. Rembrandt’s experiments with gift giving’s aestheticized economy and Vermeer’s project to carve out for himself a symbolic space insulated from ordinary market relations and valuations by means of the anti-economic rhetoric of the gift evolved from their ties with this urbane class of exceptionally knowledgeable and sympathetic burgher art lovers. As we have seen, liefhebbers from a range of social backgrounds regularly visited artists’ studios to learn about contemporary artistic developments (see Van Mieris, In the Artist’s Studio, Fig. 117) and were themselves proficient in making art. As Thijs Weststeijn has shown, learned art theory was also accessible to them through Franciscus Junius’s 1641 Dutch translation of his Painting of the Ancients and Gerardus Vossius’s pedagogical text The Art of Painting (De graphice, sive de arte pingendi) of 1650, which advocates for the inclusion of art in the curriculum that molded the ideal burgher’s social and moral development.7 However erudite, Junius and Vossius, who were brothers-in-law, offered their Dutch readership popularized, accessible versions of humanist learning on the visual arts. Junius’s Dutch version of his Painting of the Ancients is less scholarly than his earlier Latin (1637) and English editions (1638), and considerably longer. Translating the Latin into Dutch himself, Junius sought to develop for his fellow Netherlanders a schilderspraeke (vocabulary to speak about painting), even coining Dutch neologisms for words and concepts that he envisioned as the basis of a vernacular art critical discourse. The distinctive works of art Rembrandt and Vermeer created and embedded within a cultural discourse defined by the ethics of gift giving acknowledge their associations with this well-informed and sympathetic class of burgher art lovers. Yet while fixing their mutual affinities for posterity, these artworks were not inert objects within the social environments that characterize this culminating phase of the Dutch Golden Age. Rather, they functioned as instruments of sociability, nurturing webs of reciprocity built upon a mutual dedication to art that epitomize the entanglement of persons and things posited in recent social theory. By means of the converging anti-economic discourses of the love of art and the gift, Rembrandt’s virtuoso prints and Vermeer’s sophisticated paintings exerted agency within the social circuits for which they were conceived, co-constructing the affinities that brought together artists and liefhebbers. Reimagining the culture of the gift that 7

See Weststeijn, Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain, pp. 197-206.

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gave rise to the production and reception of these exceptional works sets in motion again the viewing experiences they were designed to generate, enfolding beholder, artist, and artwork in relationships of mutuality and regard.

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et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, pp. 1-27. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. ———. “Johannes Vermeer/Woman Holding a Balance/c. 1664,” Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Collections of the National Gallery of Art, NGA Online Editions, http:// purl.org/nga/collection/catalogue/17th-century-dutch-paintings (accessed 1 July 2016). Wheelock, Arthur K. Jr., et al. Johannes Vermeer. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; The Hague: Mauritshuis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven and London, 2008. White, Christopher, and Karel G. Boon. Rembrandt’s Etchings: An Illustrated Critical Catalogue. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1969. Wieseman, Marjorie E. Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting. Doornspijk: Davaco, 2002. ———. Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure. Exh. cat. London: The National Gallery, 2013. Wilde, Johannes. Michelangelo: Six Lectures by Johannes Wilde. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Williams, Julia Lloyd, et al. Rembrandt’s Women. Exh. cat. Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland; London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001. Willigen, Adriaan van der. Les artistes de Harlem. Notices historiques avec un précis sur la Gilde de St. Luc. Haarlem and The Hague, 1870. Wills, John E. Jr. Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666-1687. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Asia Center, 1984. Wilson, Bronwen. “Social Networking. The ‘Album amicorum’ and Early Modern Public Making.” In Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe, edited by Massimo Rospocher, pp. 205-225. Bologna and Berlin: Il Mulino/Duncker & Humblot, 2012. Winkel, Marieke de. Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. ———. “Rembrandt en Jan Six: Een vriendschap in portretten.” In Rembrandt en Jan Six: De ets, de vriendschap, pp. 21-27. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 2017. Witt, David de. “Studying under a Genius.” In David de Witt, Leonore van Sloten, and Jaap van der Veen, Rembrandt’s Late Pupils: Studying under a Genius, pp. 75-114. Exh.cat. Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. Houten: Terra, 2015. ———. “Drawing Together Outdoors.” In Epco Runia and David de Witt et al., Rembrandt’s Social Network: Family, Friends, and Acquaintances, pp. 104-109. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis. Zwolle: Waanders, 2019.

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Wittkower, Richard. “Inigo Jones: ‘Puritanissimo Fiero’.” The Burlington Magazine 90 (1948), pp. 50-51. Wolf, Bryan Jay. Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Wood, Christopher S. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Woodall, Joanna. “Love is in the Air: Amor as Motivation and Message in SeventeenthCentury Netherlandish Painting.” Art History 19 (1996), pp. 208-246. ———. “Sovereign Bodies: The Reality of Status in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portraiture.” In Portraiture: Facing the Subject, edited by Joanna Woodall, pp. 75-100. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. ———. “For Love and Money: The Circulation of Value and Desire in Abraham Ortelius’s Album amicorum.” In ‘Ut pictura amor’: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700, edited by Walter S. Melion, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell, pp. 649-703. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Worp, J. A. De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens. 7 vols. Groningen, 1892-1899. ———. Briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens, 1608-1687. 6 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1911-1917. Wotton, Henry. Panegyrick to King Charles. London, 1649. Woude, Ad van der. “The Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland at the Time of the Dutch Republic.” In Art in History / History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, edited by David Freedberg and Jan de Vries, pp. 284-329. Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1991. Wybe de Kruyter, Claas. “Jacobus Heyblocq’s Album amicorum in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek at The Hague.” Quaerendo 6 (1976), pp. 110-153. Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Knowledge and Practice Pictured in the Artist’s Studio: The ‘Art Lover’ in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands.” De zeventiende eeuw 32 (2016), pp. 185-210. Ypes, Catharina. Petrarca in de Nederlandse letterkunde. Amsterdam: De Spiegel, 1934. Zandvliet, Kees. Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Oversees Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries. Amsterdam, 1998. Zandvliet, Kees, et al. Maurits Prins van Oranje. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000. ———. The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950. Exh. Cat Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum/ Zwolle: Waanders, 2003. Zell, Michael. “The Gift Among Friends: Rembrandt’s Art in the Network of his Patronal and Social Relations.” In Rethinking Rembrandt, edited by Alan Chong and Michael Zell, pp. 173-193. Zwolle: Waanders, 2002. ———. “A Leisurely and Virtuous Pursuit: Amateur Artists, Rembrandt, and Landscape Representation in Seventeenth-Century Holland.” In VIRTUS: Virtuositeit en kunstliefhebbers in de Nederlanden, 1500-1700, edited by Jan de Jong et al., pp. 334-368. Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 54 (2003).

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485

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aachen, Hans von 199 Abbas I, Persian Shah 133 Abbas II, Persian Shah 127–128, 133 Abrams collection (Harvard Art Museums), Pieter Spiering van Silvercroon’s album 193 Actor-Network-Theory 38 n. 12 Aelst, Willem van 193 Ahmed I, Sultan 142, 143 Akbar, Mughal Emperor 130 Alau’d-din Riayat, Sultan of Aceh (Sumatra) 142 n. 126 alba amicorum see friendship albums (alba amicorum) Albani, Francesco 51 Alberti, Leon Battista 68–69, 239, 388 Alfonso II, King of Naples 69 algemeenheyd (universality) 330 Alpers, Svetlana 222 n. 3, 223 n. 4, 257 n. 92 “amateurism” concept 307–308 see also Dutch amateur artists, Rembrandt, and landscape representation amicitia (friendship) humanist ethos of 249 see also friendship; friendship albums (alba amicorum) Amsterdam contributions to “Dutch Gift” 107, 108, 113, 120 gift of Cleopatra statue to Amalia van Solms 150 gifts to municipal authorities (e.g. Richelieu portrait) 154–155 maagschappen (networks of powerful families) 173 new Town Hall 121 Bol’s Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp 123, 124, 175 Bol’s Moses and the Tablets of the Law 175 Flinck’s Batavian Revolt commission (not completed) 173–174 Flinck’s Manius Curius Dentatus Rejecting the Gifts of the Shunamites 122, 124 Vondel’s and Vos’s poems 124 Port of Amsterdam, View of the IJ (Backhuysen) 139, 140, 153 regents’ power during stadholderless period 121, 124, 149 Rembrandt’s relationship with Amsterdam patricians/merchants 249-250 Amsterdam Admiralty Bol’s history paintings for 175 Dell family’s offices in 175 Van Wieringen’s Battle of Gibraltar for Stadholder Maurits 139, 140, 153 Vroom’s uncooperative behavior 153 n. 144

Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild 156–157 Ancrum, Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancrum 64, 68 portrait by Jan Lievens 67, 68 Anderson, Carrie 149–150 Andrade, Diego d’ 224–225, 226 Andriesz, Claes 133 Angel, Philips 33, 133, 169, 377, 387, 395, 422 Anglo-Spanish peace treaty (1630) 55–57, 78–79, 134 Anne of Denmark, Queen consort of England 130 anthropology, on gift economy 42, 44, 45, 47 Appadurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things (ed.) 44–45 Arasse, Daniel 395 n. 51 aristocratic societies and diplomatic gifts of art 104 Dutch aristocracy’s conventional tastes 441 and etching instruction 322–323 and gift economy 32, 35, 48, 98, 102, 163 and portraits as diplomatic gifts 48-49 and prestige of Italian Renaissance paintings 49 Armstrong, Christine M. 404 art agency of 37–38 market valuations of 46 see also “love of art” “art lover” (liefhebber), and “amateur” concept 307 artists’ gifts in 17th century disdain for commerce 68–70 Daniël Seghers 68 Giuliano da Sangallo 69 Guido Reni 68 Joos van Cleve 69 Nicolas Poussin 68 Rubens 70 Titian 69 Zeuxis 68–69 expectation of generous returns Guido Reni 70 Salvator Rosa 70 motivations behind gift giving artists adopting pricing structure 71 economic, social, cultural dimensions of gifting 70–71, 77–78 “institutionalized” gifting 72 Paggi/Lupis/Bellori’s dislike of merchandising 72 Poussin’s gifts for friendship and love of art 73, 74, 75 Reni’s “extraordinary painter” argument 72–73 Resta’s charitable gifting campaign 75, 77 seeking above-market remuneration 73

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Seghers’s gifts to Society of Jesus 75, 76 valore di stima system 73 range of artists’ gifts combination of gift and market exchanges 78 Gentileschi’s gift of The Finding of Moses to Philip IV 79, 81, 81 Gentileschi’s gift to Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany 79 Gentileschi’s gifts to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy 79, 80 Guidotti’s gifting for generous rewards 78 Jan Brueghel’s gifts (not his own art) to Cardinal Borromeo 78 Rubens’s gift of Allegorical Portrait to Count-Duke Olivares 81, 82, 83 Rubens’s gift of Minerva Protects Pax from Mars to Charles I 78–79 rhetoric and true friendship etiquette vs. genuine affection 83 friendship between Erasmus and Gillis 83–84, 84, 85, 248 Michelangelo’s presentation drawings 86–90, 87, 88, 89, 355 Poussin’s gift of self-portraits to Fréart de Chantelou and Pointel 86 Rubens’s gift of self-portrait to Peiresc 86 see also Dutch artists’ gifts Arundel, Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel 59, 62–63, 158, 161–162, 309-310, 354, 355 Assendelft, Jan van 178 Auwers, Michael 56 Baburen, Dirck van, The Procuress 403–406, 403, 409, 416, 419, 427 Backer, Jacob de, The Last Judgment 419, 421 Backhuysen, Ludolf, Port of Amsterdam, View of the IJ 139, 140, 153 Baglione, Giovanni 199 Bailly, David, Vanitas Still Life (Montigny de Glarges’s friendship album) 193, 194 Bakker, Boudewijn 330–331, 334, 335, 337 Baldinucci, Filippo 237 Barbary pirates 154 Barberini, Francesco, Cardinal-Protector of England 50–51 Barlaeus, Caspar 181, 182 Battle of Gibraltar (1607) paintings 114, 115, 137, 139, 140, 153 Baudartius, Willem 141–142 Baxandall, Michael, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy 38 n. 12 Beatrice de Cusance, Archduchess of Lotharingen 162 Beck, David 101–102, 193, 196, 307, 323–324 Becker, Herman 260 n. 94, 285 n. 138 Becx, Jasper (or Jeronimus) 144 Bellori, Giovan Pietro 69–70, 72, 229 n. 26 Berchem, Nicolaes, Harbor Scene 130 n. 84

Beresteyn, Nicolaes van 307, 320, 323 Rider in a Forest 320, 321 Besselman, Johannes 127 Beveren, Cornelis van 115, 118 Bichitr, Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings 131, 132 Biens, Cornelis Pietersz 308 Binstock, Benjamin 409 n. 88 Bisschop, Jan de (a.k.a. Episcopius) biographical details amateur landscape artist 306, 311, 313, 314, 315, 323-324, 326 Constantijn Huygens the Younger, friendship with 315 other works 314, 323 private drawing academy 315 drawings The Burcht at Leiden 324 n. 61 Christ and the Woman of Samaria (after Carracci) 343 n. 104 Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk, from the South 311, 311, 313 Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk seen from the Southeast (Ulft after Bisschop) 325, 326 Joseph Selling Corn to the People (after Breenbergh) 326 n. 66 Lane of the Huis ter Noot at The Hague 311, 312, 313, 314 Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (after Breenbergh) 326 n. 66 The Oostpoort at Delft 324 n. 61 Panorama of Rome 317 n. 39 Pelikaansbolwerk at Leiden (?) 315, 316 Ruins of the Zaandpoort at Mechelen 315, 316 S.S. Cosma e Damiano in Rome 317 n. 39 treatises Paradigmata graphices variorum artificum 252, 314–315, 323, 343 Signorum veterum icones 252, 314–315, 323 bisschops-inkt 314 Blankert, Albert 175 n. 192, 175 n. 193, 293 n. 150, 289–291 n. 151 Bleker, Dirk, Danäe painting 412 Bleyswijck, Dirck van, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft 388 Bloemaert, Abraham 62, 199, 336 n. 80 Bol, Ferdinand 124, 173, 175–176, 249, 352 Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp 123, 124, 175 Moses and the Tablets of the Law 175 The Persian King Cyrus Returns the Treasure Looted from the Temple 175–176, 176 portraits of Michiel de Ruyter 175 View in the Dunes near Haarlem 352, 352 Bol, Hans, portrait by Hendrick Goltzius (engraving) 199, 201 Bolnes, Catharina 377 n. 13, 396, 416, 428 Bolnes, Reynier 384 n. 23, 403 n. 76 Boonen, Jacob, Bishop of Mechelen 162–163

489

Index 

Borch, Gerard ter 324, 369, 371–374, 405, 412 n. 101, 422 The Introduction 370, 371 Lady at her Toilette 370, 372 Woman Writing a Letter 377, 379 Borch, Gesina ter 324, 370 Materi-Boeck 324 Poetry Album 324, 370 Gentleman Kneeling before a Lady 373 Scrap Book 324 Borkowski, H. 150 n. 141 Borromeo, Federico, Cardinal, Archbishop of Milan 78, 423 Bosse, Abraham 322 Both, Jan portrait by Cornelis van Poelenburch 178–179, 178 Portrait of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst (with Helst, Poelenburch, and Duck) 177 Bramer, Leonaert 165, 409 n. 88 Bray, Jan de 193 Self-Portrait Playing Chess (Jacob Heyblocq’s friendship album) 193, 194 Bray, Salomon de 235 Brazilian artifacts/artworks see under Maurits, Johan, Count of Nassau-Siegen Brechtel, Hans Coenraad van, Painter’s Palette of Daniël Seghers, Five Brush-Holders, and Painter’s Maulstick (copies) 75, 77, 181 Breckerfelt, Herman 193 Bredero, Gerbrandt Adriaensz 338 Breenbergh, Bartholomeus 323, 326 bribes, and gift giving practice 103, 121, 124 Brisman, Shira 284–285 Brosterhuysen, Jan van 183, 307, 320–321, 323, 324 Landscape with Two Dead Fir Trees 320, 322, 323 Brown, Christopher 64 n. 67 Brown, Jonathan 49 Brueghel, Jan, the Elder 78 Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins, and Shells 423–425, 425 Brueghel, Pieter, Massacre of the Innocents 119 Brune, Johan de 102 Brusati, Celeste 167 n. 170 Bruyn, Josua 343 n. 106 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham 52, 59–61, 62, 339 Burgh, Albert Coenraadsz 353 burgher society acquisition of drawing skills or cultural/moral development 308, 441 civil/aesthetic values, increasing refinement of 404–405, 422 cultural credentials and visits to artists’ studios 272–273, 274, 309, 441 and Dutch artists 33–34, 163, 171, 440–441 and friendship albums (alba amicorum) 193 and gift giving 30, 97–98, 99–100, 101, 104, 401, 439

honnêteté concept 165–166 and Rembrandt 36, 249 and Vermeer 32, 37, 427-428 Burke, Edmund 46 Buvelot, Quentin 400 Buyten, Hendrick van 398 n. 68, 415–416, 428 Bye, Johan de 400, 412 Bynkershoek, Cornelius van 121 Calvinist Church condemnation of Rembrandt’s relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels 260 prohibition of representational imagery 163– 164, 165 Campen, Jacob van 183, 321 Triumphal Procession with Goods from East and West 142 n. 127 capitalism and gift economy 30, 34, 47–48, 401 proto-capitalism in early modern Netherlands 100, 171, 400 Cappelle, Jan van de 309, 326, 336–337 Caravaggio 63 Carleton, Dudley, 1st Viscount Dorchester 60–64, 180 portrait by Michiel van Mierevelt 61 Caroline court Van Honthorst’s dealings with 179–180 see also under diplomatic gifts of art in 17th century Caron, François 137 Caron, Noël de 114 Carracci, Annibale 323, 343 Christ and the Woman of Samaria 343 n. 104 Castiglione, Baldassare 165, 249, 257, 308 portrait by Raphael 275, 275 n. 120 Castro, Dom Miguel de 144 Catholic Church see papacy Cats, Jacob 33, 138 n. 113, 169 n. 177, 311 Caulery (or Caullery), Joris de 154 Cavalieri, Tomasso 86, 87, 355 Chantelou see Fréart de Chantelou, Paul Chapman, H. Perry 222 n. 3 chapter descriptions 34–37 theoretical issues 37–38 charitable institutions, gifts to 155–157 Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy 79 Charles I, King of England fondness for Italian Renaissance/Venetian paintings 49, 59 gifts of art from Gentileschi’s gift of The Finding of Moses to Philip IV (endorsed by) 79 paintings to Shah Safi 133 n. 97 portraits to Thomas Wentworth 52 n. 36 gifts of art to donated works (Van der Doort’s catalogue) 64 Dutch gift (1636) 115–120, 116, 117

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Italian paintings from Barberini 50–51 Italian Renaissance art from Philip IV 51–52, 52, 53, 54 “Rembrandt” paintings delivered by Earl of Ancrum 64–68, 65, 66, 67 Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den from Carleton 63–64, 63 Rubens’s gift of Minerva Protects Pax from Mars 56–57, 56, 78–79 Van Honthorst’s gifts of portraits 179–180 Parliament’s selling of his art collection (“Commonwealth Sale”) 112–113 Van Dyck’s appointment as court painter 81 see also diplomatic gifts of art in 17th century; Dutch Republic and diplomatic gift exchange Charles II, King of England fondness for Italian paintings 119 gift of diamond rings to Willem Frederik 103 purchase of 72 paintings from William Frizell 119 n. 54 purchase of Pieter Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents 119 see also “Dutch Gift” Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V with a Dog (Titian) 52, 53 Titian’s gift of Annunciation to 69 Chieppo, Annibale 43, 48 China, and Dutch East India Company’s gift giving 140–141, 143 Cicero 249 Cigoli, Ludovico, Ecce Homo 57, 58 Cleopatra statue (Reynst collection) 150, 153 Cleve, Joos van 69 Cocks, Richard 137 n. 110 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon 139 Coke, John, Sir 79 Colantuono, Anthony 119 Colonna, Vittoria 86, 87, 355 communism, and gift economy 47 “connoisseur” concept 307 Constantinople painting, as gift to Dutch Republic 143 Convent of the Descalzas Reales (Madrid, Spain) 55 Conway, Edward 59–60 Correggio, Antonio da 51, 57 corruption, and gift giving practice 103, 121, 124 Corsini, Neri Maria 49 Cortona, Pietro da 51 Costaras, Nicola 396 Cottington, Francis 51, 52 country estates drawings, and pastoral tradition 310–311, 312, 312, 313, 313, 314 country-house poems (hofdichten) 311 Court, Pieter de la 120–121 court societies portraits between princely courts 48–49 prestige of Italian Renaissance paintings 49 see also diplomatic gifts of art in 17th century

Couwenbergh, Christiaen van 193 Couwenhorn, Pieter 315 Coymans (family) 171 Cranevelt, J. 162 Crenshaw, Paul 226 n. 15, 259, 262 n. 103, 285 n. 137 Critz, John de, portrait of James I 131 Cropper, Elizabeth 375 Cunaeus, Jan 127–128 The Dutch Ambassador Jan Cunaeus on his Way to Isfahan (J. B. Weenix) 127–128, 128 curtain hanging (as illusionistic effect) 377, 378, 379–382, 381, 382 Danäe myth 409–410 D’Andrade, Diego see Andrade, Diego d’ Davis, Natalie Zemon 42, 43, 83 n. 114 Decker, David de 287 n. 142 Decker, Jeremias de Goede vrijdag (“Good Friday”) 288 on “Lady painting” 401–402 Lof der geldsucht (Praise of Avarice) 291–292 poem of gratitude to Rembrandt for portrait 250, 287–289, 291–293, 401 portrait by Rembrandt 31, 33, 287–288, 290, 292–293 on Rembrandt being motivated by “love for art” 31, 33, 401 “When you read of Laura” epigram 392 Delft Vroom’s gifts to municipal authorities 188–189 View of Delft from the Northwest 188, 189 View of Delft from the Southwest 188, 189 Delft, Lysbet Jansdr, Rembrandt’s Woman with a Pink (Elizabeth Delft?) 275, 278–279, 279 Delft Guild of St. Luke 165 Dell (family) 175 Dell, Elbert 175 Dell, Elizabeth 175 Derrida, Jacques 342 Dickey, Stephanie S. 284 n. 129, 285 n. 137, 286 n. 140 Dijck, Floris van 165 “dilettantism” concept 308 diplomatic gifts of art in 17th century art and politics diplomatic gifts commonplace and mainly paintings 48 gifts of portraits between princely courts 48–49 prestige of Italian paintings (e.g. Rosa’s gift of Heroic Battle to Louis XIV) 49, 50 prestige of Italian Renaissance paintings 49–51 Caroline court art and political patronage 59 Buckingham’s art collection 59–61, 62 Carleton’s gifts of art 60–64, 61, 63 Charles I’s collection, donors’ paintings/ sculptures in 64

491

Index 

Charles I’s collection, “Rembrandt” paintings in 64–68, 65, 66, 67 princely gifts of art Philip IV statuette (not Cigoli’s Ecce Homo) from Ferdinand II to Haro 57–58, 58 Philip IV’s gift of Italian Renaissance art to Charles I 51–52, 52, 53, 54 Rubens tapestries from Isabella Clara Eugenia to Convent of the Descalzas Reales 52, 55, 55 Rubens’s diplomatic contribution to AngloSpanish peace 55–57 Rubens’s gift of Minerva Protects Pax from Mars to Charles I 56–57, 56 see also Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art; “Dutch Gift”; Dutch Republic and diplomatic gift exchange Dissius, Jacob 395, 400 Dissius sale catalogue 397, 398 n. 68, 416 n. 114, 426 Does, Jacob van der 315 Il Dono (2001 exhibition) 31 Doomer, Lambert 306 Doort, Abraham van der 63–64, 68 Dossi, Dosso 341 Dou, Gerrit genre painter fijnschilder (“fine painter”) 119, 229, 379, 394, 397, 416, 422 illusionism 377 n. 15, 379 Man Smoking a Pipe (illusionism) 379, 382 The Tooth Puller (in “Dutch Gift”) 107, 108, 111, 119 Woman Playing a Clavichord (women, art, and money) 412–414, 413, 425–426 The Young Mother (in “Dutch Gift”) 104, 108, 110, 119 high market prices 414, 416, 422, 440 valore di fatica system 229 high productivity 394, 396–397 Johan de Bye paintings bought by 400 Spiering van Silvercroon’s arrangement with 193, 395, 397, 422 Sylvius’s collection of his paintings 396 n. 55 Doudijns, Willem 315 Duck, Jacob, Portrait of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst (with Helst, Poelenburch, and Both) 177 Dudok van Heel, S. A. C. 261 n. 97 Dürer, Albrecht 196, 284 Raphael’s gift of Two Studies of Male Nudes 356, 357 Dutch amateur artists, Rembrandt, and landscape representation chapter abstract and introduction 305–306 chapter overview 36 Dutch amateur art and landscape representation amateur, connoisseur, liefhebber 307–308

amateurs’ and professionals’ artistic/social similarities 307 art as form of leisure and recreation 311, 318, 320, 321, 323–324 etching technique and aristocratic instruction 322–323 Norgate on amateur landscape art 310 pastoral tradition and country estates drawings 310–311, 311, 312, 313, 313, 314 private distribution for intimates 323, 324, 326 selling their work 326 visits to professional artists’ studios 309 widespread drawing skills among elite and professions 308–309 women’s vs. men’s subjects 323–324 Dutch amateur landscape artists Abraham Rutgers 306–307, 313, 314, 323–324 Constantijn Huygens the Younger see Huygens, Constantijn, the Younger David Beck 307, 323–324 Herman van der Hem 307 Jacob Esselens 307, 318, 320, 326 Jacob van der Ulft 306, 325, 326 Jan de Bisschop see Bisschop, Jan de (a.k.a. Episcopius) Jan van Brosterhuysen 307, 320–321, 322, 323, 324 Jan van de Cappelle 309, 326 Johannes Leupenius 307, 309, 346, 348 Lambert Doomer 306 Nicolaes van Beresteyn 307, 320, 321, 323 Pieter de With 307, 345-346, 347 Valentijn Klotz 307, 318, 319 landscape drawing and gift giving Norgate on scarcity of landscape sketches on market 354–355, 356 Rembrandt’s commerce-art balancing act 356, 360 role of gift drawing (e.g. Michelangelo) 355 sketches and aura of publicized privacy (e.g. Raphael) 356, 357 symbolic capital of gifted landscape drawings 356 Rembrandt’s landscape drawings 8 landscape paintings as autograph 326, 327 27 landscape etchings 326–327 200+ landscape drawings 326–327 based on locations nr Amsterdam 327, 328–330, 330–331, 331, 334 drawings sold at auction (1656-58) 336–337 few preserved preliminary drawings 331, 332, 333, 334, 350 history paintings, landscapes and algemeenheyd (universality) 327, 330 leisure activity and other motivations 305– 306, 330, 334–335, 335, 336, 337–338 other artists’ landscape painting as leisure 338–342, 338, 339, 340, 341

492 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

Rembrandt’s links with amateur landscapists amateurs from social elite 342–343 amateurs studying with him 343–344 Constantijn Daniël van Renesse 344, 344, 345 Johannes Leupenius 346, 348 Pieter de With 345–346, 347 Rembrandt’s drawing of amateur artist (possibly) 346, 349 Rembrandt’s drawings of acquaintances’ country estates 346, 350, 351–353, 353 Dutch artists’ gifts context burgher behavior and gift giving 163 examples of Michelangelo’s and Titian’s gift giving 163 prohibition on representational art in Calvinist churches 163–164, 165 example of Van Hoogstraten advice for successful gift giving 165–166, 168 letter-rack paintings as gifts 166–167, 167 examples of donations to Delft Guild of St. Luke 165 to Haarlem Guild of St. Luke (altarpiece by Van Heemskerck) 163–164, 164 to Haarlem Guild of St. Luke (paintings for assembly room) 165 gift and market economies accommodating market strategies 163, 169 Angel in praise of similarity between artists and merchants 169 Goltzius’s “Honor above Gold” motto 169, 170 Schellinks’s negative view of market forces 169 gift economy as mode of interpersonal exchange Ferdinand Bol’s elite networks 173, 175–176, 176 Flinck’s elite networks 173–175, 174 Lievens’s gifts of paintings to Joan Huydecoper 171–173 Van Wyttenhorst’s (art collector) gifts from artists 176–179, 177 gifts to court and government officials at home and abroad gifts from Flinck and Van Hoogstraten 179 gifts to members of States General 183, 184–187, 188 gifts to municipal authorities (“Vroom and Delft” example) 188–189, 188 gifts to stadholder’s court via Constantijn Huygens 180–183 Huygens’s dealings with Barlaeus 181, 182 Huygens’s dealings with De Verwer 182 Huygens’s dealings with Rembrandt 182 Huygens’s dealings with Seghers 181–182 Huygens’s dealings with Soutman 182 Huygens’s dealings with van Brosterhuysen 183

Huygens’s dealings with Van Campen 183 Van Honthorst’s dealings with Caroline court 179–180 gifts to foster social bonds and friendships David Beck’s diary and social network 193, 196 drawings and other informal works 189–190 friendship albums (alba amicorum) 189, 192–193, 194, 195 Gerrit Pietersz’s gift of Mercury to Van Vianen 190, 190, 192 Goltzius’s drawings of artists met during trip to Italy 197, 199, 200 Goltzius’s Letter with a Bust of a Man to Van Wely 191, 192 Goltzius’s portrait drawings and medallions as gifts 196–197, 197, 198 Goltzius’s portrait of Jan Govertsen van der Aer 203, 204 Goltzius’s portraits of artists engraved by Matham and Muller 199, 201 prints dedicated to friends 199, 202, 204 see also artists’ gifts in 17th Century Dutch Brazil 143, 149 Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art gifting campaigns in South and East Asia gift cultures and transcultural trade negotiations 125–126 lavish presentations, e.g. Japan 126 policies calibrated to amount of trade/profit e.g. Tonkin 127 presentations and types of gifts India (Mughals) 125, 127 Japan 125, 126, 127–129, 129 Ottoman Turks 127 Persia (Safavids) 127–128, 128 rariteyten and others from VOC 127 robes of honor as counter-gifts 127–129, 128, 129 response of Asian rulers Europeans/Dutch not treated as equals 139–140 example of Dutch trade embassy to China 140–141 example of Jahangir and England’s gifts 141 no symbolism of reciprocity (Ottoman Turks example) 141–142 works of art as gifts generally less desirable 130 gift to Japan of Gerritsz’s Toshogu Shrine Lantern 134, 135 gift to Japan of marine paintings 137–139 gift to Japan of painted peep-box 134, 136, 137 gifts of naval triumph paintings to emphasise Dutch might 139 Mughal India’s fondness for Western paintings 130–131, 132

493

Index 

Safavid court and Dutch painters 133–134 VOC’s misapprehension of Islamic rulers’ opposition to figural paintings 131, 133 works of art from Asian rulers Chinese scroll paintings to Joan Huydecoper II 143 Japanese painted screens and armor to James I 142 Japanese painted screens, daggers and armor to Stadholder Maurits 142 painting of Constantinople 143 “Dutch Gift” 1660 gift to Charles II 29, 35, 48, 104 Dutch authorities’ reasons for gift 108, 112–114, 119–120 Dutch paintings Dou’s The Tooth Puller 107, 108, 111, 119 Dou’s The Young Mother 104, 108, 110, 119 Elsheimer’s The Mocking of Ceres 107, 108, 112 Saenredam’s Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, Haarlem 104, 109, 119 Italian paintings 16th-century paintings (22 items) 104, 112–113 Allegory of Painting (Reni, now ascribed to Gezzi) 104 Guercino’s Semiramis 104, 108 Lotto’s Portrait of Andrea Odoni 107, 113 Romano’s Portrait of Margherita Palelogo 106, 113 Schiavone 113 Tintoretto 113 Titian’s (workshop) Madonna and Child in a Landscape with Tobias and the Angel 105, 108, 113 Veronese’s (workshop) The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria 105, 113 Italian sculptures, ancient Roman (12 items) 104, 113 other gifts 600,000 guilders towards journey back to England 104 French bed and furnishings 107, 113–114 Joost van den Vondel’s celebratory poem 108 robes and other exotics 128 tapestries woven with gold and silver 107 yacht Mary 107, 114 presentation ceremony (Banqueting House, Whitehall) 104, 118 works of art as privileged currency 124–125 Dutch marine paintings Battle of Gibraltar (1607) paintings 114, 115, 137, 139, 140, 153 Dutch East India Company’s gifts of to Japan 137–139 gifts of within Dutch Republic 153–154, 154 Dutch Republic collapse of art market 439–440 First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) 113, 138

French invasion 121, 443 Twelve Years’ Truce (1609) 114–115, 139, 153 War of Devolution (1667-1668) 153 see also burgher society; stadholder’s court; States General, Dutch Republic Dutch Republic and art as gift brief overview 29–34 theoretical issues 37–38 chapter abstract and introduction 97–98 chapter overview 35 gift economy in studies of Golden Age art focus on market and monetary gain 98 gift economy viewed as regressive aristocratic practice 98 socio-economic approach to analyzing Dutch painting 98–99 gift in early modern Netherlands burgher society and gift culture 99–100 capitalism and proto-capitalism 100 co-existence of market and gift economies 100–101 Dutch terms for “gift” 102 honor, trustworthiness and gift giving 101 instrumental and emotional role of gift giving 102 political/aristocratic patronage (Willem Frederik example) 102–103 prohibition of public officials from accepting gifts 103 types of gifts 101–102 gifts of art within Dutch Republic gifts from governing bodies to House of Orange 150 gifts of marine paintings 153–154, 154 gifts to Amalia van Solms 150, 151–152, 153 gifts to Amsterdam’s municipal authorities (e.g. Richelieu portrait) 154–155 gifts to charities and guilds 155–157, 159–160 gifts to cultural elites (e.g. Vondel) 162–163 gifts to members of States General 154, 154 gifts to officials of stadholder’s court (e.g. Constantijn Huygens) 150, 158, 161–162 see also Dutch artists’ gifts; Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art; “Dutch Gift”; Dutch Republic and diplomatic gift exchange; Maurits, Johan, Count of Nassau-Siegen Dutch Republic and diplomatic gift exchange art (contemporary/Old Masters) and other valuables as gifts 104 gift to Charles I (1636) Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ 115, 116 Geertgen tot Sint Jans’s Legend of the Relics of Saint John the Baptist 115 Jan Gossaert’s Adam and Eve 115, 117 Lucas van Leyden’s Saint Jerome (now attributed to Aertgen van Leyden) 115

494 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

other valuables (incl. ambergris and other rariteyten) 115, 118 political reasons for gift 115, 118, 119–120 gift to Charles II (1660) see “Dutch Gift” gift to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (1610) ivory fan and Bezoar stones 114 Moroccan tapestries 114 political reasons for gift 115 Vroom’s (or Porcellis’s) Storm at Sea 114, 115, 139 Vroom’s Battle of Gibraltar 114, 115, 139 importance of ceremonial display 118–119 political failure of the Dutch gifts 119–121 presentation of both Italian and Dutch paintings 119 prohibition of Dutch ambassadors from accepting gifts 121 promotion of virtuous governance and new Town Hall 121, 124 Bol’s Gaius Fabricius Luscinus in Pyrrhus’s Army Camp 123, 124 Flinck’s Manius Curius Dentatus Rejecting the Gifts of the Shunamites 122, 124 Vondel’s and Vos’s poems 124 system regularizing diplomatic gifts 124–125 see also Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art; Maurits, Johan, Count of Nassau-Siegen Dutch terms for “gift” 102 Dutch West India Company (Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie, WIC) 143 Dutch women amateur artists 323–324 Dyck, Anthony van see Van Dyck, Anthony East India Company see Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art; English East India Company Eckhout, Albert 144 African Man 144, 147 Tapuya Dance 144, 148 Tapuya Woman 144, 145 Tupi Man 144, 146 economic turn (in studies of Dutch paintings) 98–99 Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den 352 Eikema Hommes, Margriet van 175 n. 192 Elizabeth Stuart, Electress of the Palatinate 62, 64, 179 Elsheimer, Adam, The Mocking of Ceres (in “Dutch Gift”) 107, 108, 112 Engelbrecht, Johannes 197 England Anglo-Spanish peace treaty (1630) 55–57, 78–79. 134 First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) 113, 138 English East India Company 130–131, 133, 137, 141, 142 Episcopius see Bisschop, Jan de (a.k.a. Episcopius) Erasmus on friendship (Parabolae) 83, 250

friendship with Pieter Gillis 83–84 portrait by Quentin Metsys 84, 248 Erckel, Anna van 175 Esselens, Jacob 307, 318, 320, 326 A View of Rye from Point Hill 318, 320 etching, technique and instruction 321–322 Evelyn, John 322 n. 49, 322–323 Sculptura (treatise) 323 Everdingen, Allaert van 165, 262 n. 103, 336 Everdingen, Cornelis van 262 n. 103 Eyck, Jan van 371 n. 4 Faret, Nicolas, L’honneste-homme 165–166 Ferdinand I, Grand Duke of Tuscany 52 Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany 57–58, 79 Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor 166 Ferreris, Bartholomeus 410–411, 412 fijnschilders (fine painters) 119, 229, 379, 394, 397, 416, 422 First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54) 113, 138 Flinck, Govert 173–175, 179, 249 Batavian Revolt commission for Amsterdam new Town Hall (not completed) 173–174 drawings in Jacob Heyblocq’s friendship album 193 Manius Curius Dentatus Rejecting the Gifts of the Shunamites 122, 124 Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom 174, 174 Florentine Republic diplomatic gifts of art 49–50 painters’ gift giving 72 Francavilla, Pietro 199 Francen, Abraham, portrait by Rembrandt (print) 283–284, 283 Franits, Wayne 395 n. 51, 404 n. 78, 418 Fréart de Chantelou, Paul 73, 86, 295–296 Frederick III, King of Denmark, Johan Maurits’s gifts to 144, 145–148, 149 Frederick V, Elector Palatine 179 Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange and Stadholder Arundel’s request to support position for Earl of Oxford 158, 161 French gift of Richelieu portrait to 155 Huis ter Nieuburch, rebuilt by 313 portrait of after Michiel van Mierevelt (Jacob Matham’s engraving) 187, 188 portrait of gifted to Sultan Ahmed I 142 “Rembrandt” paintings possibly as gifts to Charles I from 68 Rembrandt’s commission from 29 Rembrandt’s Passion cycle commissioned by 182, 231, 232–234, 235, 236, 237, 245 Seghers’s paintings gifted to 75 Utrecht provincial executive’s gifts of painting to 150, 151–152 Van Honthorst’s gifts of portraits to 179 Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Cleves Johan Maurits’s gifts to 143, 144, 149, 150

495

Index 

miniature portrait of himself to Flinck 175 friendship amicitia (friendship), humanist ethos of 249 friendship and gift giving see under artists’ gifts in 17th century; Dutch artists’ gifts friendship albums (alba amicorum) 102, 189, 192–193 Burchard Grossmann the Younger’s album, Rembrandt’s Bust of an Old Man 250–251, 251 Cornelis de Montigny de Glarges’s album, David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life 193, 194 Ernst Brinck van Harderwijk’s album, Goltzius’s The Artist’s Emblem: Eer boven Gold (‘Honor above Gold’) 169, 170, 411 Jacob Heyblocq’s album 193, 345–346 Jan de Bray’s Self-Portrait Playing Chess 193, 194 Rembrandt’s Simeon’s Song of Praise 251– 252, 253 Pieter Spiering van Silvercroon’s (?) album (Abrams collection) 193 Emanuel de Witte 193, 195 Rembrandt’s contribution of sketches to three albums 193, 250–252, 254, 255, 257 Friesland, States of West Friesland 104 Frijhoff, Willem 102 Frizell, William 119 n. 54 Fucci, Robert 247 n. 72 “fungibility” concept 43 Gainsborough, Thomas 342 Galle, Philips 199 Gaskell, Ivan 391, 422 n. 125 gave (Dutch term) 102 Geertgen, tot Sint Jans Lamentation over the Dead Christ 115, 116 Legend of the Relics of Saint John the Baptist 115 Gelder, Arent de Collector with Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print 262, 263 Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 289, 293 Geleijnsz, Wollebrant 131, 133 genre painting 370, 394, 412, 418, 419, 422–423, 425–426 see also fijnschilders (fine painters) Gentileschi, Francesco 79 Gentileschi, Orazio gift of Lot and his Daughters Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy 79 gift of painting to Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany 79 gift of The Annunciation to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy 79, 80 gift of The Finding of Moses to Philip IV 79, 81, 81 Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (WIC, Dutch West India Company) 143 Gerritsz, Joost, Toshogu Shrine VOC Lantern 134, 135

Gersaint, Edmé-François 266, 353 n. 122, 353 geschenk (Dutch term) 102 Gezzi, Francesco, Allegory of Painting (previously attributed to Reni) 104 Gheyn, de (family) 162 Gheyn, Jacques de, II 247 gift of illustrated manual of arms to States General members 183, 184 Gheyn, Jacques de, III portrait by Rembrandt 226 n. 15, 247, 248, 249 Rembrandt’s paintings owned by 248 n. 74 Giambologna (or Giovanni Bologna) portrait by Hans von Aachen 199 portrait drawing by Hendrick Goltzius 199, 200 Samson Slaying a Philistine 52, 54 “gift”, Dutch translations of 102 gift and art in early modernity brief overview 29–34 theoretical issues 37–38 chapter abstract and introduction 41–42 chapter overview 34–35 economy of the gift anthropologists’ and Mauss’s gift theory 42, 44 financial remuneration as gift (Rubens example) 43, 44, 48 gift as symbolic system of relational and monetary exchange 43–45 gift transactions vs. market/commodity exchanges 45 gifts as and in history from gift economy to self-interest (Mauss and Mandeville) 45–47 gift economy and capitalism 47–48 gift giving as means to enact social prestige 48 see also artists’ gifts in 17th century; diplomatic gifts of art in 17th century; Dutch Republic and art as gift gift gowns (schenkagieroken) 127–128 see also robes of honor Gillis, Pieter friendship with Erasmus 83–84 portrait by Quentin Metsys 83–84, 85, 248 Giovanni Bologna see Giambologna (or Giovanni Bologna) Giovio, Paolo, Bishop 341 Glarges, Cornelis de Montigny de friendship album, David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life 193, 194 Gobelins, Tentures des Indes (The Old Indies) 144 Godelier, Maurice 356 Goeree, Willem 342 Goldgar, Anne 102 Goldthwaite, Richard A. 70–71 Goltzius, Hendrick art and money The Artist’s Emblem: Eer boven Gold (‘Honor above Gold’) 169, 170, 411

496 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

Danäe painting 409–411, 409, 412 “Your trade is not to be compared with our art” (to merchant) 169, 411 friendship gifts Letter with a Bust of a Man to Jan van Wely 191, 192 portrait of Jan Govertsen van der Aer 203, 204 landscape drawing for pleasure 340–341, 356 Dune Landscape near Haarlem 340, 341 portrait drawings and medallions as gifts 196–197 Portrait of a Friend of the Artist 197 Self-Portrait (for Johannes Engelbrecht) 198 portrait drawings of artists met during Italy trip 197, 199, 281 Portrait of Giambologna 199, 200 portraits of artists engraved by Matham and Muller 199 Portrait of Hans Bol 199, 201 prints dedicated to friends 199 St. Jerome after Palma Giovane to Alessandro Vittoria 199, 202, 204 Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus 192 Goodman, Elise 407 Gool, Johann van 440 Gossaert, Jan, Adam and Eve 115, 117 Govertsen van der Aer, Jan, portrait by Hendrick Goltzius 203, 204 Gowing, Lawrence 375, 375 n. 19, 384, 387 Goyen, Jan van 193, 229, 231, 336 Graeff, Andries de 104, 173, 223 n. 6 Graefff, Cornelis de 173 Grafton, Anthony 192 Grave, Josua 318 n. 43 Grebber, Pieter de 235 Gregory, Christopher A. 45 Grimaldi, Giovanni Francesco 339 Grossmann, Burchard, the Younger friendship album 250–251 Rembrandt’s Bust of an Old Man 250, 251 group portraiture 155–156 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) 71, 228 n. 20, 228–229, 339–340, 341 Landscape 339, 340 Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon 104, 108 Guidotti, Paolo 78 guilds gifts to 155–157, 163–165 see also Delft Guild of St. Luke; Haarlem Guild of St. Luke; St. Luke guilds Haaringh, Pieter Man with a Magnifying Glass (Pieter Haaringh?) 275, 278–279, 278 portrait by Rembrandt (print) 275, 277, 279–280 Haaringh, Thomas Jacobsz, portrait by Rembrandt (print) 275, 276, 279–280

Haarlem Guild of St. Luke artists’ donations of paintings for new assembly room 165 Van Heemskerck’s St. Luke Painting the Virgin (altarpiece) 163–164, 164, 165 Habsburg dynasty collection of Italian Renaissance art 51–52 Isabella Clara Eugenia’s support for 55 Haga, Cornelis 142, 143 Hals, Frans, Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse 155, 160 Hammer-Tugendhat, Daniela 419 n. 120 Harderwijk, Ernst Brinck van 237 friendship album, Goltzius’s The Artist’s Emblem: Eer boven Gold (‘Honor above Gold’) 169, 170, 411 Haro, Luis de 57 Hasselaer, Gerard 153 Heda, Cornelis Claesz 133 n. 98 Heemskerck, Maarten van, St. Luke Painting the Virgin 163–164, 164, 165 Heere, Lucas de 371 n. 4 Heinsius, Daniel 253 Heintz, Joseph 199 Helst, Bartholomeus van der, Portrait of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst (with Poelenburch, Both, and Duck) 177 Hem, Herman van der 307 Atlas Blaeu-van der Hem 307 Hem, Laurens van der 307 Hemessen, Jan van, Woman Weighing Gold 416 n. 113 Hennion, Antoine 38 n. 12 Henrietta Maria, Queen consort of England 51, 52 n. 36, 115, 133 n. 97, 179–180 Henry Frederick, Electoral Prince of the Palatinate 62, 64 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales Dutch gift to 114–115, 139 see also Dutch Republic and diplomatic gift exchange Heyblocq, Jacob friendship album 193, 345–346 Jan de Bray’s Self-Portrait Playing Chess 193, 194 Rembrandt’s Simeon’s Song of Praise 251– 252, 253 Hidetada, Shogun 142 Hinterding, Erik 246 n. 68, 265–266, 275, 285 n. 136 Hirst, Michael 87 n. 122 Hobbes, Thomas 46 Hoefnagel, Joris 162 Hoet, Gerard, Portrait of Anna Elisabeth van Reede 129 n. 84 hofdichten (country-house poems) 311 Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis 261 n. 97 Holbein, Hans 62 Holland, States of 103, 104, 113, 114, 120 Holland, States Party of 104

497

Index 

Homer, Rembrandt’s Homer Reciting Verses (Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album) 252, 254, 257 Honig, Elizabeth Alice 37 n. 10, 69, 70, 168, 169, 171, 272 n. 113, 408 honnête homme (honnêteté) 165 Honthorst, Gerrit van Aeneas Fleeing Troy (now lost) gifted to Arundel by Carleton 62–63 letter to Edward Nicholas 179–180 portraits of Charles I and interrelated families 179 Charles I and Henrietta Maria as Apollo and Diana 179–180 Hooch, Pieter de, Woman Weighing Coins 426, 427 Hooft, Hendrick, Sir, Landtleven aen de Heer Hendrick Hooft (Jan Six’s poem) 354 Hooft, P. C. 181 Hoogstraten, Samuel van Den eerlyken jongeling (essay) expanded translation of Faret’s L’honneste-homme 165–166 gaining favor and art of giving 166, 168 included in letter-rack paintings 167 gifts of letter-rack paintings 166–167 A Trompe l’Oeil of Objects Attached to a Letter Rack 166–167, 167 gifts of paintings to Ferdinand III 166 gifts to foreign princes and dignitaries 179 Inleyding tot de hooghe schoole der schilderkonst (treatise) advice to young artists to find prominent patrons 168 appeal to use Dutch paintings as diplomatic gifts 119 criticism of naemkoopers (name-buyers) 227 market economy and value of artworks 168, 169 painter’s most important quality 388 “perfect painting” aesthetics 371 poetry and painting 387 Seneca and “love of art” 33, 391 n. 40, 401 Zeuxis anecdote 289 Perspective Box with Interior of a Dutch House 134, 136, 391 n. 40 Rembrandt’s former pupil 165, 227 on Van Goyen’s ability to work fast 231 Hoorn, Simon van 108, 113 Hopton, Arthur, Sir 79, 81 Houbraken, Arnold 166, 173–174, 175, 222, 352, 396 n. 55, 414 Houckgeest, Gerard, Interior of the Oude Kerk in Delft 379, 381, 381 House of Orange-Nassau 114, 143, 149, 150 Howard, Thomas see Arundel, Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel Howell, Martha C. 100 Hutter, Michael 71 Huydecoper (family) 101, 171, 172

Huydecoper van Maarsseveen, Joan, II 103, 143, 171–173, 245 Huygens, Christiaan 129, 317, 343 Huygens, Constantijn, the Elder amateur art drawing skills and amateur artist 308, 315 instruction in art for sons 315 Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of (in Iconography) 287 Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk (Thomas de Keyser) 161 Cranevelt’s gift of Hoefnagel’s drawing to 162 Earl of Arundel’s gift of untraceable painting to 158, 161–162 Erasmus and Gillis, seeking information about 248 function as secretary to stadholders and artists’ gifts 180–183 dealings with Barlaeus 181, 182 dealings with De Verwer 182 dealings with Rembrandt 182 dealings with Seghers 181–182 dealings with Soutman 182 dealings with Van Brosterhuysen 183, 320–321, 324 dealings with Van Campen 183 Hofwijk estate 310–311 Johan Maurits’s “Sugar Palace”, visit to 144 “Laura” portrait, seeking copies of 391–392 Lievens’s lost painting (An Old Woman) to Kerr (earl of Ancrum) 68 poems Hofwijk (country-house poem) 311 Momenta Desultoria 226 n. 15 poems in reciprocation for artworks to Adriana le Thoré 162 to Beatrice de Cusance “On a painting of Adam and Eve” 162 to Seghers 181–182 Rembrandt’s gifts to monumental painting for Passion price negotiations 29, 158, 182, 222– 223, 231, 235, 237, 240–245 other gifts of artworks 242, 243 Seghers’s gift of painting to 158, 240 Huygens, Constantijn, the Younger biographical details amateur landscape artist 306, 313, 315, 317–318, 323–324 auction of drawings 324 De Bisschop, friendship with 315 De Bisschop’s Signorum veterum icones dedicated to 314 father’s Hofwijk poem, preface to 311 Grand Tour of France, Switzerland, and Italy 317 military campaigns with Willem III 317–318 Rembrandt, contacts with 343

498 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

works Bergen (Mons) from the Vicinity of Glin 317, 317 Landscape on the Outskirts of Bonn 317, 318 Two Draftsmen at Zorgvliet (attributed to) 311, 312 View of Lembeek 324, 325 View of the Waal with the Castle Zuilichem 313, 313 Huygens, Lodewijk 315 Huygens, Maurits 247, 308 portrait by Rembrandt 247–249, 248 Huygens, Philips 315 Hyde, Lewis 31 Iemitsu, Shogun 134, 137, 138 Ietsuna, Shogun 138–139 Ieyasu, Shogun 142 illusionistic curtain motif 377, 378, 379–381, 381, 382 imperial robes (keyserroken) 128 see also robes of honor Incontri, Ludovico 57 India (Mughals) and Dutch East India Company’s gift giving 125, 127, 141 and English East India Company’s gift giving 130–131, 132 Inoue, Masashige 138 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of the Spanish Netherlands, gift of Rubens tapestries to Convent of the Descalzas Reales 52, 55, 55 Italian Renaissance art as diplomatic gifts 49–51, 59 gifts of from Philip IV to Charles I 51–52 gifts of to Charles II (“Dutch Gift”) 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 108, 112–113 and Petrarchan poetics 377–376 Italy artists’ gift giving and aristocratic behavioral norms 32 Il Dono (2001 exhibition) 31 scholarship on gift economy 29, 98 Jabach, Everhard 339, 343 Jahangir, Mughal Emperor 130–131, 141 James I, King of England 61–62, 63, 130, 141, 142 portrait by John de Critz 131 Janssen, Geert 102–103 Japan Dutch East India Company’s gift giving Japanese gift culture 125 presentations and types of gifts 126, 127–129, 129 Dutch gifts of works of art Gerritsz’s Toshogu Shrine Lantern 134, 135 marine paintings 137–139 painted peep-box 134, 136, 137 Japanese gifts of works of art

painted screens and armor to James I 142 painted screens, daggers, and armor to Stadholder Maurits 142 Japonse roken ( japon) 128–129, 129 Jesuit House (Antwerp) 75 Jones, Inigo 51 Jongh, Eddy de 257, 414 Jonghe, Clement de 265, 273 Rembrandt’s portrait (print) 265, 270, 281–283 Jordaens, Jacob 235 Jouderville, Isaac 64 n. 67 Junius, Franciscus 69, 239, 355–356, 441 Junta de Estado 56 Kano Tan’yu 137 Karsemeijer, J. 287 n. 143 Kattenburgh, Dirck van 262, 285 Kattenburgh, Otto van 262, 285–286 Keil, Bernhard 237 Kerr, Robert see Ancrum, Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancrum Kettering, Alison McNeil 370 Keyser, Thomas de, Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk 161 keyserroken (imperial robes) 128 khil’at or sarapa (robes of honor) 127–128, 128 Klessmann, Rüdiger 288 n. 146 Klotz, Bernardus 318 n. 43 Klotz, Valentijn 307, 318 Encampment near Nivelles 318, 319 View of Ghent 318, 319 Knuijt, Maria de 395–396, 397, 400, 416, 428 Kok, Erna 173 Koninck, Jacob 345 Koninck, Philips 335, 336 Kooijmans, Luuc 101, 102, 103 La Tombe, Nicolaes de 265 n. 109 La Tombe, Pieter de 265 Portrait of an Elderly Man (Pieter de la Tombe?) 265, 271 Lairesse, Gerard de 422 landscape art see Dutch amateur artists, Rembrandt, and landscape representation Latour, Bruno 38 n. 12 “Laura” literary prototype 391–392 Le Blon, Michel 59 n. 47 Le Thoré, Adriana 162 Leeuw, A. B. de 251 Lengele, Maerten 315 Leonardo da Vinci 51 Mona Lisa 60 Leopold Wiihelm of Austria, Archduke, Governor of Spanish Netherlands 414 Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, 1st Duke of Lerma 52 Leupenius, Johannes 307, 309, 346 View of Weeresteyn Manor on the Vecht 348 Leyden, Aertgen van, Saint Jerome 115

499

Index 

Leyden, Lucas van 237, 247 The Beggars (Eulenspiegel) 237, 238 Saint Jerome (now attributed to Aertgen van Leyden) 115 Liebersohn, Harry 46–47 Liedtke, Walter 384 n. 24, 395 n. 51, 396, 398 n. 68, 404, 418 Liefde baart kunst (love gives birth to art) motto 391, 393, 408 liefhebber (“art lover”), and “amateur” concept 307 Lievens, Jan 154 n. 149, 171–173, 243, 245 Capuchin Monk Praying 68 n. 70 Lamentation of Christ 171, 172 An Old Woman Called ‘The Artist’s Mother’ 64, 66, 68 Sir Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancrum 67, 68 Liezanus, A. 251–252 Linden, Jan Antonides van der, portrait by Rembrandt (print) 281, 282 Lionne, Hugues de, Marquis 139, 153 Lockhorst, Hendrick Boudewijn van 133 n. 100 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo 252 Loo, Jacob van 171 n. 183 Lopez, Alphonso 155 Lotto, Lorenzo, Portrait of Andrea Odoni 107, 113 Louis XIV, King of France invasion of Netherlands 121 Johan Maurits’s gifts to 143, 144, 148, 149, 150 landscape etching (at age 13) 322–322 portrait (as Dauphin) requested by Amalia van Solms 155 Rosa’s Heroic Battle presented to 49 War of Devolution (1667-68) 153 love gives birth to art (Liefde baart kunst) motto 391, 393, 408 “love of art” and gift giving 69–70, 441 and money 412 and Poussin 73 and Rembrandt 31, 33, 239, 289, 291, 293, 401 and Seneca 33, 69, 289, 391, 401, 412 and Vermeer 31, 391, 400–401, 408 Ludick, Lodewijck van 260 n. 94, 265 n. 110, 285 Lugt, Frits 330, 346 n. 118, 353 Lunden, Arnold 339 Lupis, Antonio 72 maagschappen (networks of powerful families) 173 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare 70, 228, 239 Man, Cornelis de 165 Mancini, Giulio 73, 228 Mander, Karel van Abraham Bloemaert’s landscape sheets 336 n. 80 Bartholomeus Ferreris, dedication of “Lives of Italian Painters” to 410–411, 412 David Beck’s interest in Het schilder-boeck 193 Goltzius to merchant: “Your trade is not to be compared with our art” 169, 411 Goltzius’s Danäe 409–410, 412, 415

Goltzius’s landscape drawings 341 Goltzius’s portrait drawings of artists 199 Jan Six’s copy of Het schilder-boeck 252 Joos van Cleve and money 69 Matthias Scheits’s annotated copy of Het Schilder-boeck 249 n. 78 painting, mirroring, and Jan van Eyck 371 n. 4 painting as seduction 387–388 Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 289 sketching excursions in countryside 342 usefulness of drawing 308 Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees 46 Mannerism 192, 204, 419 Marcgraf, Georg 144 Margaret Paleologo, Marquise of Montferrat, portrait by Giulio Romano 106, 113 Marie de’ Medici, Queen consort of France 150, 153, 155 Mariette, Pierre 282 n. 127 marine paintings see Dutch marine paintings Martini, Simone 392 Mary Stuart, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange 107, 113–114, 119 Massimo, Camillo, Cardinal 75 material turn (in social theory) 38 Matham, Jacob 199 Portrait of Frederik Hendrik, Prince of OrangeNassau (engraving after van Mierevelt) 187, 188 Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange (engraving after van Mierevelt) 188 Matham, Theodoor 317 n. 39 Maurits, Johan, Count of Nassau-Siegen collection of Brazilian artifacts/ artworks 143–144 Albert Eckhout’s works 144 Frans Post’s works 144 Georg Marcgraf’s works 144 Willem Piso’s works 144 display of collection Mauritshuis (“Sugar Palace”) 144 visited by Vorstius and Constantijn Huygens the Elder 144 Dutch Brazil Governor-General 143, 149 gift presentation to Frederick III, King of Denmark 144, 149 paintings by Eckhout 144, 145–148 gift presentation to Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg 143, 144, 149, 150 paintings by Eckhout (now lost) 144 gift presentation to Louis XIV, King of France 144, 149, 150 paintings by Eckhout 144 paintings by Post 144, 148 motivations behind gifting campaigns politics of stadholderless period 149 rewards from powerful rulers 149 social capital and ethics of gift giving 149–150

500 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

Maurits, Prince of Orange, Stadholder 139, 142, 153 portrait after van Mierevelt (engraving by Jacob Matham) 188 portrait after van Mierevelt (engraving by Jan Harmensz Muller) 183, 186 portrait by Michiel van Mierevelt 183, 185 Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies 42, 44, 45–46, 47, 356 Medici (family), diplomatic gifts of art 49–50 Medici, Cosimo I de’ 355 Medici, Cosimo III de’ 229 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 69 Medici, Marie de’ see Marie de’ Medici, Queen consort of France merchants see burgher society Metsu, Gabriel 394 n. 50, 409, 422 Metsys, Quentin 83–84 Desiderius Erasmus 83–84, 84, 248 Pieter Gillis 83–84, 85, 248 Meulen, van der (family) 101 Michelangelo bust from Italy donated to Haarlem Guild of St. Luke 165 presentation drawings 86–90, 355 Archers Shooting at a Herm 87, 87 Cleopatra 87, 88, 355 Pietà 87, 89 use of gift economy 163 Mierevelt, Michiel van 62, 63 Dudley Carleton, Viscount Dorchester 61 Portrait of Frederik Hendrik, Prince of OrangeNassau (Jacob Matham’s engraving) 187, 188 Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange 183, 185 Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange (Jacob Matham’s engraving) 188 Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange (Jan Muller’s engraving) 183, 186 Mieris, Frans van, the Elder genre painter In the Artist’s Studio 273, 274, 309, 441 Cavalier in a Draper Shop (The Cloth Shop) 414, 415 The Doctor’s Visit 229, 230 The Duet (Lady at the Harpsichord) 371, 374, 374 The Family Concert 229 fijnschilder (fine painter) 229, 379, 394, 397, 405, 422 Petrarchan tradition and “perfect painting” 370–371, 374 high market prices 414, 416, 422, 440 arrangement with single patron 395–396 valore di fatica system 229 high productivity 369, 394, 396–397 influence on Gerrit Dou 412 n. 101 Mirimonde, A. P. de 406 n. 83 “mirroring” concept 371, 374 Molenaer, Jan 291 n. 152 Molijn, Pieter de 165, 336

Monconys, Balthasar de 415–416 Monincx, Pieter 315 Montias, John Michael 98–99, 189, 231, 394 n. 48, 395, 396, 427 Moor, David de 196 More, Thomas 83–84, 248 Moreelse, Paulus, Shepherd Boy with Flowers 150, 151 Moyaert, Nicolaes 165 n. 163 Mughals see India (Mughals) Mulay Zaidan, Sultan of Morocco 114 Muller, Jan Harmensz 199 Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange (engraving after Michiel van Mierevelt) 183, 186 Muziano, Girolamo 199 Mytens, Daniël 52 n. 36 naemkoopers (name-buyers) 227 naer het leven (from life) 321, 327, 336, 406 Nagel, Alexander 87 Navigation Act (1651) 113 Neer, Aert van der 193 Nicholas, Edward 179–180 Nooms, Reinier paintings of North African ports 154 View of Algiers 154, 154 Norgate, Edward 36, 306, 309–310, 342, 354–356 Nostradamus, César 86 Ochtervelt, Jacob 396 Odoni, Andrea, portrait by Lorenzo Lotto 107, 113 Ogle, John (governor of Utrecht) 62 The Old Indies (Tentures des Indes) 144 Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán, 3rd Count of Olivares 56, 81, 83 Allegorical Portrait (Paulus Pontius after Peter Paul Rubens) 82 Oliver, Isaac 130 Orangists Turned Coat of Holland (1660 pamphlet) 120 n. 59 see also House of Orange Orlers, Jan Jansz 64, 68 Ostade, Adriaen van 165, 193 Ottoman Turks, and Dutch East India Company’s gift giving 127, 131, 141–142, 143 Ovid, myth of Danäe (Metamorphoses) 412–413 Oxford, Aubrey de Vere, Earl of 161 Paggi, Giovanni Battista 72 Palamedesz, Anthonie 193 Palembang, Sultan of Sumatra 139 Palma il Giovane, Jacopo 199 Hendrick Goltzius’s St. Jerome after 199, 202 Panzani, Gregorio 51 papacy, diplomatic gifts of art from 50–51 paragone (between painting and poetry) 387 Parker Brienen, Rebecca 149 Parrhasius 289, 377 Pascoli, Lione 70

501

Index 

pastoral tradition, and country estates drawings 310–311, 311, 312, 313, 313, 314 patronage as alternative within market system 173 gift economy vs. conventional patronage relationships 70, 73, 77–78, 172, 204 Rembrandt’s defiance of conventional patronage relationships 225, 227, 280, 291, 294 Vermeer’s freedom from conventional patronage relationships 396, 428 Paul V, Pope 78 Pauw, Adriaen 143 Peacham, Henry 308 peep-boxes 134, 137 Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Perspective Box with Interior of a Dutch House 134, 136, 391 n. 40 Peeters, Clara 423 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 86 Persia (Safavids), and Dutch East India Company’s gift giving 127–128, 128, 131, 133–134, 139 perspective boxes see peep-boxes Petersom, Jan van 288 Petrarchan poetics 37, 324 see also Vermeer and Petrarchan Poetics Philip II, King of Spain 52 Philip III, King of Spain 52, 118 Philip IV, King of Spain fondness for Italian Renaissance/Venetian paintings 49 gifts of Italian Renaissance art to Charles I 51–52, 52, 53, 54 gold statuette of from Ferdinand II to Haro 57 Isabella Clara Eugenia’s gift of Rubens tapestries to Convent of the Descalzas Reales 55, 55 Orazio Gentileschi’s gift of The Finding of Moses to 79, 81, 81 Rubens as diplomat, won over by 55–56 pictorial tradition 119 Pietersz, Barent 125 Pietersz, Gerrit, gift of Mercury to Adam van Vianen 190, 190, 192 Piso, Willem 144 Pliny the Elder 68, 239 Poelenburch, Cornelis van Banquet of the Gods 150, 152 gift of portrait of Jan Both to Van Wyttenhorst 178–179, 178 gift of portrait of Jan van Assendelft to Van Wyttenhorst 177–178 number of his paintings in Van Wyttenhorst’s collection 178 Portrait of Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst (with Helst, Both, and Duck) 177 Pointel, Jean 86 politics see diplomatic gifts of art in 17th century; Dutch Republic and diplomatic gift exchange Pomp, Dirck Gerritsz (a.k.a. Dirck China) 138 n. 111 Pontius, Paulus Allegorical Portrait of Gaspar de Guzman, CountDuke Olivares (after Rubens) 82, 83

portrait by Anthony van Dyck (etching, from Iconography) 286, 287 Porcellis, Jan, Storm at Sea (?) 114, 115 Post, Frans 144 The Old Portuguese Fort of the Three Wise Kings (or Fort Ceulen), near the Rio Grande in Brazil 144, 148 Pot, Hendrick 165 Potter, Paulus 313 Poussin, Nicolas ethics of the gift 68, 163, 280 letter to Paul Fréart de Chantelou 73, 86, 294 gift paintings Apollo and Daphne 75 Self-Portrait 74, 75, 86, 294 presentation drawings, Michelangelo’s 86–90, 87, 88, 89, 355 princely courts see court societies Puyvelde, Leo van 339 n. 89 Quintilian 69, 239 Raes, Jan, the Elder, The Triumph of the Eucharist (tapestry designed by Rubens) 55 Raimondi, Marcantonio The Assembly of the Gods on Mount Parnassus (after Raphael) 257 The Plague (La Pesta) 262 Raphael 57, 78 The Assembly of the Gods on Mount Parnassus 257 Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione 275, 275 n. 120 Two Studies of Male Nudes (gifted to Dürer) 356, 357 rariteyten 118, 127 Reede, Anna Elisabeth van, portrait by Gerard Hoet 129 n. 84 Rembrandt Research Project 64 n. 67, 64 n. 68 Rembrandt van Rijn biographical details auctioning of art collection to pay off debts 171 bankruptcy 223, 225, 260, 273, 275, 336, 337, 343, 351–352 daughter Cornelia’s guardian 283 gift giving practice (overview) 30–31, 32, 34, 98, 163, 171, 439, 441–442 Hendrickje Stoffels, extramarital relationship with 260 Saskia Uylenburgh, death of 337 Saskia Uylenburgh, marriage to 242, 243, 250 son Titus 281 staggeringly prolific 394 teaching elite to draw 308 collectors/collections Charles I’s collection 59, 64–68, 65, 66, 67 Jacques Specx, collector of paintings by 125 Jan van de Cappelle, collector of drawings by 309

502 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

pupils Arent de Gelder 289 Bernhard Keil 237 Constantijn Daniël van Renesse 344 Ferdinand Bol 173, 249, 352 Gerrit Dou 229, 379 Govert Flinck 173, 249 Johannes Leupenius (?) 346 n. 116 Lambert Doomer (?) 306 Pieter de With (?) 307, 345 Samuel van Hoogstraten 165, 227 works (landscape drawings and prints) The Banks of the Amstel River, Amsteldijk, near the Hamlet of Meerhuizen (and verso) 335, 335, 336 Bend in the Amstel near Kostverloren House 327, 328, 330, 334 Clump of Trees with a Vista 346, 348 Cottage with White Paling among Tree 331, 333 The Diemerdijk at Houtewael 330, 331 Houses on the Schinkelweg 327, 330, 330 Landscape with a Farm Building and the House with the Tower 346, 350, 351 Landscape with a Stone Bridge 331, 332 Landscape with the House with the Little Tower 346, 350, 351 A Man sculling a Boat on the Bullewijk, with a View toward Ouderkerk 327, 328 Man Writing or Drawing Next to a Window with View over the River IJ, 346, 349 Six’s Bridge 352–353, 353, 358 Stormy Landscape 326, 327 View at the Inn Huis te Vraag 331 View of Bloemendaal with the Saxenburg Estate (The Goldweigher’s Field) 331, 334, 350, 351–352 View of Diemen (Courtauld Gallery) 334, 334 View of Diemen (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) 327, 329, 330, 334 View of Haarlem with the Saxenburg Estate in the Foreground 333, 334, 352 View of Schellingwou from the Diemerdijk over the IJ 346, 349 View of Sloten 327, 329, 330 works (other than landscape drawings and prints) Abraham Francen (print) 283–285, 283, 285, 286–287 The Adoration of the Shepherds (Passion cycle) 235, 236, 245 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 155, 156, 159, 257 Arnout Tholinx (etching, engraving) 264, 267 Arnout Tholinx (painting) 264 The Ascension of Christ (Passion cycle) 231, 232 Balaam and the Ass 155

The Blinding of Samson 29, 222, 240, 241, 244–245 Bust of an Old Man (drawing) 250–251, 251 Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalene or “Noli me tangere” 288, 288 n. 146 Christ Crucified between Two Thieves: The Three Crosses (print) 269, 272, 275 Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe) (print) 265, 269 Christ Presented to the People (print) 262, 264, 269, 275 The Circumcision (Passion cycle, now lost) 235, 245 Clement de Jonghe (print) 265, 270, 281–283 Conus Marmoerus (etching) 129 n. 84 Danaë 240, 242, 245 The Descent from the Cross (Passion cycle) 231, 233 The Entombment and Resurrection (Passion cycle) 231, 234 Homer Reciting Verses (Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album) 252, 254, 257 The Hundred Guilder Print (Christ Healing the Sick) 260–262, 261, 263, 288 Jan Antonides van der Linden (print) 281, 282 Jan Six (portrait etching) 257, 258, 283–287, 354 Jan Six (portrait, oil on canvas) 257, 259–260, 259, 354 Jan Uytenbogaert (The Goldweigher) 246– 247, 246, 351 Jeremias de Decker 31, 33, 287–288, 290, 291–294, 392 Man with a Magnifying Glass (Pieter Haaringh?) 275, 278-279, 278 Medea, or The Wedding of Jason and Creusa 252, 256, 284 Minerva in her Study (Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album) 252, 255 The Night Watch 155, 159, 229 Old Man Asleep, Seated by a Fire 248 n. 74 Passion cycle 182, 231, 232–234, 235, 236, 237, 245 Pieter Haaringh (print) 275, 277, 280–281 Portrait of an Elderly Man (Pieter de la Tombe?) 265, 271 Portrait of Jacques de Gheyn III 226 n. 15, 247–248, 248, 249 portrait of Joris de Caulery 154 Portrait of Maurits Huygens 247–248, 248, 249 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (?) 64, 65 portraits of Lambert Doomer’s parents 306 n. 4 The Raising of the Cross (Passion cycle) 231 The Return of the Prodigal Son 242 Saint Francis Beneath a Tree Praying (print) 269, 273

503

Index 

St. John the Baptist Preaching (grisaille) 257 n. 92 The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild (The Syndics) 155, 160 Satire on Art Criticism (drawing) 226–227, 226 Self-Portrait, Etching at a Window 264, 268 Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 289, 291, 292 Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 155, 158 Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill 155, 157, 265 Self-Portrait with Saskia (etching) 242, 243 self-portraits (carousing with wife) 408–409 Simeon (unfinished) 262 n. 103 Simeon’s Song of Praise (drawing) 251–252, 253 Thomas Haaringh (print) 275, 276, 280-281 Two Old Men Disputing 248 n. 74 Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside Her (print) 264, 266, 269, 272 Woman with a Pink (Elizabeth Delft?) 275, 278–279, 279 see also Dutch amateur artists, Rembrandt, and landscape representation; Rembrandt’s art as gift Rembrandt’s art as gift chapter abstract and introduction 221–222 chapter overview 35–36 dealings with patrons/clients case of Andries de Graefff 223 n. 6 case of Diego d’Andrade 224–225, 226 case of Don Antonio Rufffo 225 n. 10 case of Francesco Maria Sauli 225–226 financial pressures and bankruptcy 223, 225 gift to C. Huygens and “money loving” reputation 222–223 intransigence, gift giving and valore di stima 223 Satire on Art Criticism drawing 226–227, 226 gifts, money, and valore di stima 19th-century view of artist as non-conformist 227 early modernity and valore di stima vs. valore di fatica 227–229, 231 examples of valore di fatica adopters (e.g. Franz van Mieris) 229, 230 Rembrandt’s adoption of valore di stima and gift giving 231, 237, 239 Rembrandt’s fee for The Nightwatch 229 Rembrandt’s gift giving and fees for Passion cycle 231, 232–234, 235, 236, 237 Rembrandt’s willingness to pay high prices for other masters 237, 238 gifts in 1630s gift to C. Huygens for Passion cycle fee negotiations 29, 158, 182, 240–245, 241, 242

gifts to C. Huygens before Passion 242, 243 portrait historié to Johannes (Jan) Uytenbogaert 246–247, 246 portraits of Maurits Huygens and Jacques de Gheyn III 247–249, 248 gifts in later career Amsterdam patricians/merchants 249–250 art lovers, dealers, and poets (from 1650s) 249 foreign patrons 249 reputation for delays/intransigence 249 gifts of drawings alba amicorum (friendship albums) drawings 250 Burchard Grossmann the Younger’s album (Bust of an Old Man) 250–251, 251 Jacob Heyblocq’s album (Simeon’s Song of Praise) 193, 251–252, 253 Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album (Homer Reciting Verses) 252, 254, 257 Jan Six’s Small Pandora Album (Minerva in her Study) 252, 255, 257 other artworks for Jan Six 252, 256, 257, 258, 259–260, 259 printed portraits as gifts 17 portraits of art lovers/artists of different social rank 196, 280, 286–287 Abraham Francen 283–285, 283 Clement de Jonghe 265, 270, 281–283 Jan Antonides van der Linden 281, 282 Jan Six 258, 283–285 prints as gifts (1650s-early 1660s) for art lovers in exclusive editions 260, 265–266, 269, 272, 275, 280 art lovers’ visits to artists’ studios 272–273, 274 bankruptcy and gift giving 273, 275, 279–280 Christ Crucified between Two Thieves: The Three Crosses 269, 272, 276 Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe) 265, 269 Christ Presented to the People 262, 264, 269, 275 Clement de Jonghe 265, 270, 281–283 The Hundred Guilder Print (Christ Healing the Sick) 260–262, 261 Pieter Haaringh 275, 277, 280 Saint Francis Beneath a Tree Praying 269, 273 Self-Portrait, Etching at a Window 264, 268 Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill 265 Thomas Haaringh 275, 276, 280 Woman at the Bath with a Hat beside Her 264, 266, 269, 272 Rembrandt, De Decker, Zeuxis De Decker’s poem of gratitude for Rembrandt’s portrait 287-289, 290, 291–293, 401 “love of art” concept 289, 293

504 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 289, 291, 292 tyranny of market/patronage vs. friendship and gift giving 294 Renaissance courtier 165 Renesse, Constantijn Daniël van 344 Amstel Landscape with Bathers (attributed to) 344 Landscape with Two Cottages between Trees (attributed to) 344, 345 Reni, Guido Allegory of Painting (now ascribed to Gezzi) 104 three distinct classes of painters 72–73 transaction of his works in form of gifts 31, 68, 70, 163 and valore di stima 228, 228 n. 20, 229, 231, 239 Resta, Padre Sebastiano 75, 77 Reynst, Gerard 113 Cleopatra statue 150, 153 Reynst, Jan 113, 119 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de 155 Rife, Ellen O’Neil 129 n. 84 Rifkin, Joshua 253 Rijn, Cornelia van 283 Rijn, Titus van 281 robes of honor 127–129, 128, 129 Roe, Thomas, Sir 130–131, 141 Romano, Giulio 51 Portrait of Margherita Paleologo (in “Dutch Gift”) 106, 113 Roosendael, Nicolaas 165 n. 163 Rosa, Salvator 70 Heroic Battle 49, 50 Roscam Abbing, Michiel 167 n. 170 Röver, Valerius 314 n. 31, 351 n. 122, 352 Royalton-Kisch, Martin 344 Rubens, Peter Paul Anglo-Spanish peace, diplomatic contribution to 55–57, 78–79, 134 Bellori’s praise of (for resisting lure of money) 70 Carleton, dealings with 60 Chieppo, letter to (financial remuneration as gift) 43, 44, 48 gifts from Rubens Allegorical Portrait of Gaspar de Guzman, Count-Duke Olivares 81, 82, 83 Minerva Protects Pax from Mars to Charles I 56–57, 56, 78–79 self-portrait to Peiresc 86 gifts of his paintings Daniel in the Lions’ Den from Carleton to Charles I 63–64, 63 The Triumph of the Eucharist (tapestries) from Isabella Clara Eugenia to Convent of the Descalzas Reales 52, 55, 55

landscape painting for his own pleasure 338– 339, 341, 356 An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen 338, 338 The Rainbow Landscape 338 on Philip III’s reception of Vincenzo Gonzaga’s gifts 118 Ruffo, Don Antonio 225 n. 10 Ruijven, Magdalena van 395, 400 Ruijven, Pieter Claesz van, Lord of Spalant 395– 399, 398 n. 68, 400, 416, 428 Ruisdael, Jacob van 320, 336 Rupert, Prince, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Landscape with a Man Driving a Wagon 322, 323 Rutgers, Abraham 306–307, 313 Principale, Inventive & Copijen, The Castle of Nijenrode on the Vecht 313, 314 Rutgers, Arent 157 n. 154 Ruysdael, Salomon van 165 Ruyter, Michiel de 154, 175 Sadeler, Johan 199 Saenredam, Pieter, Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, Haarlem (The ‘Groote Kerk’) 104, 109, 119 Safavids see Persia (Safavids) Safi, Persian Shah 133, 133 n. 97 Saftleven, Cornelis 193 Saftleven, Herman 179, 336 St. Luke guilds 165, 224, 309 see also Haarlem Guild of St. Luke Sandrart, Joachim von 237, 343–344, 414 Sangallo, Giuliano da 69 sarapa or khil’at (robes of honor) 127–128, 128 Saris, John 142 Sarto, Andrea del 51, 57 Sauli, Francesco Maria 225–226 Saunders, Eleanor 337 Savery, Roelandt, Paradise 150, 152 Scheits, Matthias 249 n. 78 Schellinks, Willem “On the Painting of the Indians” (poem) 32 view of market as debasing value of art 32–33, 169 schenkagie (Dutch term) 102 schenkagieroken (gift gowns) 127–128 Schiavone, Andrea, in “Dutch Gift” 113 Schwartz, Christoph 199 Schwartz, Gary 222 n. 3, 223 n. 4 Sebastiano, del Piombo 69 Sebek, Barbara 43–44, 47 n.20 Segers, Hercules 156–157, 179 Seghers, Daniël gift giving 68, 163 to Constantijn Huygens the Elder 158, 240 Garland of Flowers Surrounding a Sculpture of the Virgin Mary (with Willeboirts Bosschaert) 75, 76, 181 to Society of Jesus for rulers/dignitaries 75

505

Index 

gifts to gold maulstick from Amalia van Solm 75, 77 gold palette from Willem II 75, 77 poem by Constantijn Huygens sent with maulstick 181–182 self-interest, vs. gift giving economy 46–47 Seneca 33, 69, 289, 391, 401, 412 Severin, Simon 179 Sichem, Barend van 133 Silvercroon, Pieter Spiering van 193, 395, 397, 422 Six, Jan biographical details 252, 260 cultivation of ‘country gentleman’ persona, Landtleven aen de Heer Hendrick Hooft (poem) 354 De Bisschop’s Paradigmata treatise dedicated to 314, 343 Flinck, relationship with 173 Rembrandt, end of relationship with 260 Rembrandt’s grisaille St. John the Baptist Preaching, owned by 257 n. 92 in Rembrandt’s Man Writing or Drawing Next to a Window (possibly) 346 n. 118, 349 Rembrandt’s Medea, or The Wedding of Jason and Creusa 252, 256, 284 Rembrandt’s portrait etching of 257, 258, 283–287, 354 Rembrandt’s portrait (oil on canvas) of 257, 259–260, 259, 354 Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, Etching at a Window, impression of for 264, 268 Rembrandt’s Six’s Bridge 352–353, 353, 358 Small Pandora Album Rembrandt’s Homer Reciting Verses 252, 254, 257 Rembrandt’s Minerva in her Study 252, 255, 257 Six, Pieter 173 slavery, and sugar trade 144 Slive, Seymour 287 n. 143 Sluijter, Eric Jan Dou’s arrangement with Spiering van Silvercroon 397 Dou’s Woman Playing a Clavichord 413 Dutch theorists’ eroticization of painter/ beholder/painting relationship 387 Goltzius’s Danäe 409–411 Rembrandt and valore di stima 227–228 Rembrandt’s gift to Constantijn Huygens 240 n. 51, 245 n. 67 Rembrandt’s price negotiations for his paintings 235, 237 n. 41 Vermeer’s Art of Painting 392 Smith, Adam 46 Smythe, Thomas, Sir 130, 141 Snow, Edward 394 social classes, and artists’ gift giving 32 social theory, material turn 38

Sohm, Philip 72 n. 91 Solms, Amalia van gifts of artworks from Dutch governing bodies Cleopatra statue from Reynst collection 150, 153 Utrecht paintings 150, 151–152 request of portraits of Dauphin Louis XIV and his nurse 155 Seghers, gift of gold maulstick to 75 Seghers’s painting in her Huis ten Bosch “large cabinet” 75 n. 101 Van Honthorst’s portraits of 179 Somerset, Frances Carr, Countess of Somerset 130 Soutman, Pieter 182 Spain Anglo-Spanish peace treaty (1630) 55–57, 78–79, 134 Twelve Years’ Truce (1609) 114–115, 139, 153 Spanish Netherlands, artists’ gift giving and aristocratic behavioral norms 32 Spear, Richard 71, 72 n. 91, 228 n. 20 Specx, Jacques 125 Spiegel, de (family) 175 Spiering Silvercroon, Pieter see Silvercroon, Pieter Spiering van Spies, Marijke 102 Spilbergen, Joris van 114, 139 Spranger, Bartholomeus 199 stadholder’s court gifts to from Dutch artists (via Huygens) 179, 180–183 gifts to (from within Dutch Republics) 150, 158, 161–162 Stael, Michiel 103 States General, Dutch Republic and “Dutch Gift” 104, 113, 118, 120 gifts of art to members from Dutch artists 183, 184–187, 188 gifts of art to members from within Republic 154, 154 and gifts to Charles I 114, 115 and gifts to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 114, 115, 139 Haga’s letter to re. Constantinople picture 143 ordinaris present for departing foreign emissaries 124 prohibition for Dutch ambassadors to accept gifts 121 Stoffels, Hendrickje 260 Stone-Ferrier, Linda 327 n. 70 Stradanus, Johannes 199 Strauss, Walter 98 sugar trade, and exploitation of African slaves 144 Sumatra Sultan Alau’d-din Riayat of Aceh 142 n. 126 Sultan of Palembang 139 Swan, Claudia 118 Swanevelt, Herman van 179 Sylvius, Franciscus de la Boe 396 n. 55

506 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

Taylor, Paul 168 n. 175 Teding van Berkhout, Pieter 384 Tentures des Indes (The Old Indies) 144 Thijs, Christoffel 351–352 Thins, Maria 384 n. 23, 396, 403 Thoen, Irma 101–102 Tholinx, Arnout 264 portrait by Rembrandt (etching, engraving) 264, 267 portrait by Rembrandt (painting) 264 Thomas, Nicholas 44 Throsby, David 71 Thulden, Theodore van 235, 237 Tintoretto, in “Dutch Gift” 113 Titian 57 Annunciation as gift to Charles V 69 Charles V with a Dog 52, 53 Madonna and Child in a Landscape with Tobias and the Angel (workshop, in “Dutch Gift”) 105, 108, 113 Pardo Venus 52, 52 poesie 52 Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo 155, 156 use of gift economy 163 Violante 390, 390 Tonkin (Vietnam), and Dutch East India Company’s gift giving 127 trade and gift giving see Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art Traudenius, Dirk 377 n. 15 Trip (family) 171 Trip, Sophia 171 trompe l’oeil 164, 166, 379–380 Trumbull, William 354 tulips, as gifts 102 Tulp, Margarita 257, 260 Tulp, Nicolaes Jan Six’s father-in-law 257, 260 Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 155, 156, 159, 257 Turks see Ottoman Turks Tuscany, Grand Dukes of, diplomatic gifts of art 49–50 Twelve Years’ Truce (1609) 114–115, 139, 153 Uffel, Lucas van 275 Ulft, Jacob van der 306, 326 Huis ter Nieuburch at Rijswijk Seen from the Southeast (after De Bisschop) 325, 326 universality (algemeenheyd) 330 Urban VIII, Pope 50 Utrecht Province, gifts of artworks in honor of Frederik Hendrik 150, 151–152 Uylenburgh, Gerrit 173 Uylenburgh, Hendrick 223 n. 6, 250 Uylenburgh, Saskia 250, 337 Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (etching) 242, 243 Uytenbogaert, Johannes (Jan) 173, 246 n. 68, 314, 346, 351

Rembrandt’s portrait historié (The Goldweigher) 246–247, 246, 351 Uyttenbroeck, Moses van 154 n. 149 Valaresso, Alvise 60 Valle, Andrea 72 valore di fatica (or macchina) 227–229, 231 valore di stima 73, 223, 227–229, 231, 237, 239 Van Dyck, Anthony 52 n.36, 81, 154 n. 149, 199, 339, 341, 356 Iconography 287 Paulus Pontius 286, 287 Landscape 339, 339 Vasari, Giorgio 69, 87, 163, 252 Veen, Jaap van der 171, 172 n. 184, 394 n. 48 Veen, Otto van, “A Lover Ought to Love Only One” 404, 405 Velde, Esaias van de 340 Velde, Jan van 340 Vendramin, Andrea 113 Venetian painting half-length images of eroticized women 390– 391, 390 Old Master paintings as diplomatic gifts 49 Venne, Adriaen van de 138 n. 113 Zeeusche meyclacht: ofte schyn-kycker (poem) 388–389 vereering (Dutch term) 102 Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) see Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art Vergara, Lisa 423 Vermeer, Johannes chapter abstract and introduction 369–370 chapter overview 36–37 background genre paintings epitomizing burghers’ values 32, 37, 426 marriage to Catharina Bolnes 377 n. 13, 396, 416, 428 paintings-within-paintings The Concert 406, 407 Woman Holding a Balance 416–419, 417, 423, 426 Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid 423, 424 Young Woman Seated at a Virginal 402, 402–408 A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal 377, 380, 391, 404, 419 Vermeer and art lovers 36 extant paintings only 369, 394 association with Van Ruijven/De Knuijt couple 395–400 income from wealthy mother-in-law 396 not working for the market 396–397 paintings from Dissius sale as evidence 397–400, 398, 399 Vermeer and the gift

507

Index 

ethics of the gift and status for his art 30, 31, 33, 34, 400-403, 426-428, 439, 441-442 gift giving’s anti-economic rhetoric and “love of art” 400–401, 408 virtue/dignity of his art (The Concert) 406– 408, 407 virtue/dignity of his art (Woman Seated at a Virginal) 402–408, 402 virtue/dignity of his art (Woman Standing at a Virginal) 380, 404, 407–408 women, money, and the love of art ascendance of genre painting on market at expense of history painting 422–423, 425 Dou’s Woman Playing a Clavichord 412–414, 413, 416, 425–426 Goltzius’s Danäe 409, 409–412 Jan Brueghel’s Vase of Flowers with Jewel, Coins, and Shells 423, 425, 425 Mieris’s Cavalier in a Draper Shop (The Cloth Shop) 414, 415, 416 Vermeer, transcendent status of art, and ethics of the gift 426–428 Vermeer’s genre paintings and history painting 424, 425–426 Vermeer’s high prices 416–416, 428 Vermeer’s The Procuress 408–409, 416, 426 Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance 416– 419, 417, 423, 426 Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal 416, 426–428 works Allegory of the Catholic Faith 419, 420 The Art of Painting 392–394, 393, 419, 422–423 The Astronomer 129, 129 The Concert 409–410, 410, 411, 422 The Geographer 129 Girl with a Pearl Earring 374–375, 376, 389–391, 393, 399 The Guitar Player 397–398, 399, 416 n. 112 The Lacemaker 397 n. 66, 397–398 A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson) 383–387, 383, 385, 391, 408 Lady with a Maidservant 416 n. 112 The Milkmaid 416 n. 114 The Procuress 377, 386, 387, 408–409, 416, 426 The View of Delft 398, 416 n. 114 Woman Asleep at a Table (Maid Asleep) 397, 398 Woman Holding a Balance 416–419, 416, 423, 425 Woman Interrupted at her Music 377 n. 13 Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window 377, 378, 379–382, 385, 419 Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid 416 n. 112, 423, 424

Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (Leiden Collection) 397 n. 66 Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (National Gallery, London) 31, 402–408, 402, 412, 416, 419, 426–428 A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal 377, 380, 391, 393, 404, 407–408, 419, 422 n. 125 see also Vermeer and Petrarchan Poetics Vermeer and Petrarchan Poetics genre painting and Petrarchan poetics Frans van Mieris 369–370, 374, 374 Gerard ter Borch 369–370, 371, 372, 377, 379 Gesina ter Borch 370, 373 Petrarchan poetics literary prototype of Laura 391–392 poetry, love, and painting 370, 385, 387–389 Van de Venne’s Zeeusche meyclacht poem 388–389, 391 Vermeer’s approach absent presence 375–377, 389, 394 illusionistic curtain motif 377, 378, 379–381, 381, 382 juxtaposition of opposites 381–385 Liefde baart kunst (love gives birth to art) 391, 393 pictorial poetics of illusion 375, 387, 388–399 Vermeer’s paintings The Art of Painting 392–394, 393 Girl with a Pearl Earring 374–375, 376, 389–391, 393 A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson) 383–387, 383, 385, 391 The Procuress 377, 386, 387 Woman Interrupted at her Music 377 n. 13 Woman Reading a Letter by an Open Window 377, 378, 379–382, 385 A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal 377, 380, 391, 393, 404 Veronese, Paolo 51, 60 Mars and Venus 52 The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria (in “Dutch Gift”) 105, 113 Versteegen, Willem 134, 137 Verwer, Abraham de 182 Battle of Gibraltar 137 Vianen, Adam van, Gerrit Pietersz’s gift of Mercury to 190, 190, 192 Vietnam (Tonkin), and Dutch East India Company’s gift giving 127 Villiers, George see Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham Vimaladharmasuriya, King of Kandy (Ceylon) 139 Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua 43, 118 virtuoso term, and liefhebber (“art lover”) term 307 Visnich, Huybert 131 Visscher, Claes Jansz 310, 330–331 View of Houtewael 331, 332 Vittoria, Alessandro 204

508 

REMBR ANDT, VERMEER, AND THE GIF T IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY DUTCH ART

Vlaming van Oudtshoorn, Cornelis de 113 Vlieger, Simon 193 Vliet, Jan van 182 VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische) see Dutch East India Company (VOC) and global gifts of art Volger, Wilhelm 138–139 Vondel, Joost van den celebratory poem for Charles II (in “Dutch Gift”) 108 gifts from dedicatees 162 “Op Bleker Danäe” 412 poems beneath Amsterdam Town Hall pictures 124 rejection of Bishop Boonen’s gift of painted altarpiece 162–163 Vorhout, Johannes 165 n. 163 Vorstius, Adolph 144 Vos, Jan verses beneath Amsterdam Town Hall pictures 124 verses criticising VOC’s gift of Lantern to Japan 134 Vossius, Gerardus 310, 441 Vries, Adriaen de 199 Vries, Dirck de 199 Vries, Jan de 100 Vroom, Hendrick gifts to Delft municipal authorities 188–189 View of Delft from the Northwest 188, 189 View of Delft from the Southwest 188, 189 paintings gifted to Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales Battle of Gibraltar 114, 115, 139 Storm at Sea (?) 114, 115, 139 uncooperative behavior with Amsterdam Admiralty 153 n. 144 Wadum, Jørgen 380 n. 16 Wake, Isaac 59–60 War of Devolution (1667-68) 153 Warnke, Martin 48–49 Waterloos, Herman F. 287–288 Weenix, Jan Baptist, The Dutch Ambassador Jan Cunaeus on his Way to Isfahan 127–128, 128 Weiner, Annette 356 Wely, Jan (Hans) van, Goltzius’s Letter with a Bust of a Man to 191, 192 Welzel, Barbara 260 n. 96 Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of Strafford 52 n. 36 Werff, Adriaen van der 229 West, William N. 356 n. 139 West Friesland, States of 104 Westermann, Mariët 291 n. 152 Westerwolt, Adam 133 Weststeijn, Thijs 441 Wetering, Ernst van de 227 n. 16, 265 n. 110, 272, 287 n. 143, 289 n. 151 Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. 404, 406 n. 83 WIC (Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie, Dutch West India Company) 143

Wieringen, Cornelis Claesz van, Battle of Gibraltar 139, 140, 153 Wijmer, Anna 353 Wilde, Pieter de 324 Willeboirts Bosschaert, Thomas, Garland of Flowers Surrounding a Sculpture of the Virgin Mary (with Daniël Seghers) 75, 76, 181 Willem Frederik, Prince of Nassau-Dietz and Stadholder of Friesland 102–103 Willem II, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder death of and stadholderless period 120, 121, 149 “Dutch Gift” French bed originally bought by 107, 113–114 Saenredam’s offer of Interior of St. Bavo’s Church, rejected by 104 n. 29 taught to draw and paint in youth 182 Willem Frederik’s relationship with 102, 103 Willem III, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder and King of England (as William III) birth and family 107, 114, 119 installed as stadholder 120, 121 military campaigns (1672-76) 307, 317–318 Wilson, Bronwen 192–193 Windebank, Francis 51 Winkel, Marieke de 257 n. 92, 353 With, Pieter de 307, 345–346 Boathouse between Trees 346, 347 Landscape with Farm Buildings (attributed to) 346, 347 Witt, Johan de 103 Witte, Emanuel de, Medusa in “Abrams friendship album” 193, 195 Wolf, Bryan Jay 400–401 women Danäe myth 409–410 “Laura” literary prototype 391–392 women amateur artists see also under Vermeer, Johannes Wotton, Henry 59 n. 48 Wouwerman, Philips 165 Wyttenhorst, Willem Vincent, Baron van Wyttenhorst of Utrecht gifts from artists 176–179 Herman Saftleven’s gift of Segers painting 179 Van Swanevelt’s gift of Simon Severin print 179 from Poelenburch gift of Jan Both portrait 178–179, 178 gift of Jan van Assendelft portrait 177–178 number of his paintings in collection 178 portrait by Helst, Poelenburch, Both, and Duck 177 Zeeland, States of 103 Zeeuw, Jan 156–157 Zeuxis 68–69, 239, 289, 377 Arent de Gelder’s Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 289, 293 Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as Zeuxis 289, 291, 292 Zomer, Jan Pietersz. 261 n. 97