Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [54]
Furthermore, the Dutch already had a distinctly different attitude towards works of art from their English neighbours. Art-purchasing in the United Provinces was not confined to those in court circles and high society. In the Netherlands fine art already appealed to, and found a market among, town-dwellers and those in commercial circles with large amounts of disposable income. Paintings hung on the walls of the homes of prosperous tradesmen, and the wills of local dignitaries included carefully itemised inventories of paintings and art objects. English travellers comment in their letters and diaries on paintings hanging on the walls of those they would not expect (because of their rank and occupation) to own them. The same English assumption that only the nobility collect art informs the ‘world turned upside down’ sentiments expressed in London following Charles I’s execution when witnesses claimed to be aghast at the sight of van Dyck portraits of the King and his family hanging on the walls of the royal baker.
Dutch purchasers who acquired works from the English royal collection in 1651 were not necessarily of elevated rank, nor – in the 1650s and 1660s – necessarily associated with the house of Orange, prevented by legislation from taking up its traditional ruling position in the Republic. In the United Provinces, men of means, but not of elevated birth, were proud, by the mid-seventeenth century, to own and display works of art.
As a consequence, in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Rotterdam (the main centres for art production and its sale), dealers in cheaper works of art flourished alongside those controlling the commissioning, acquisition and sale of bespoke paintings for wealthy private purchasers. The leading historian of the economics of art at auction in seventeenth-century Holland, John Michael Montias, has distinguished between the activities of high-class dealers acquiring works by well-known artists for relatively knowledgeable and wealthy clients, and those encouraging a demand for less ostentatious art by ordering cheaper originals and copies: ‘while some dealers specialised in mediating the demands for art works, others concentrated on increasing the supply of works available in the market’.4 A figure like Huygens’s close friend, the Antwerp diamond merchant and art dealer Gaspar Duarte, for example, himself a very considerable art collector who entertained the great and the good in his luxurious private home, clearly helped shape and develop the tastes of those who purchased from him.5 We can see the effect of Gaspar Duarte’s influence if we look at the inventory of Duarte artworks made on behalf of his son Diego in 1683. This listed more than two hundred paintings including works by Holbein, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, van Dyck and Vermeer (Young Lady Playing the Clavecin, with Accessories, believed to have been given to Duarte by Huygens).
By contrast, the turnover in artworks offered to ordinary individuals on the open market – through general dealers or at auction – was much faster, and included those bought largely for investment purposes. Accessible markets held two or three times a year, at which paintings were freely bought and sold, were a source of some astonishment to English travellers. Visiting such a Dutch art fair in 1641, John Evelyn commented:
We arrived late at Rotterdam, where was their annual mart or fair, so furnished with pictures (especially landscapes and drolleries, as they call those clownish representations), that I was amazed. Some of these I bought, and sent into England. The reason of this store of pictures,