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Traditionally it has been taken as a given that the economy of Antwerp declined sharply after the treaty of Münster (between the Dutch and the Spanish) in 1648, with international trade shifting to Amsterdam in the United Provinces because of the blockading of shipping in the Scheldt estuary. In fact, the city’s wealth did not vanish overnight (and indeed, movement of shipping and goods was significantly less severely constrained than is often implied). ‘Antwerp was still affluent, still home to a number of families who had held on to considerable fortunes generated in better days. They led a princely lifestyle which they were more than happy to demonstrate in the form of large houses, fine art collections and country estates.’1

Indeed, Antwerp enjoyed a minor economic boom in the years after 1648. ‘In these years Antwerp’s merchants were jubilant at the prospect of new economic opportunities. The riddertol, a tax levied on shipping on the Scheldt and a reliable fiscal parameter for gauging the volume of trade, particularly trade with the United Provinces, indeed points to a significant increase in harbour activity compared to the first half of the seventeenth century.’2

In particular, a market in luxury goods (small in bulk, and easy to transport) continued to thrive, with art dealers and dealers in precious stones and jewels enjoying a particularly buoyant period between 1648 and the 1680s. There remained in Antwerp a core community of extremely wealthy individuals – their wealth primarily established on trade – who continued to spend extravagantly.

The population of Antwerp in the mid-seventeenth century was around seventy thousand. The city was diverse, and impressively multicultural. Although it found itself on the threshold of the Catholic Netherlands, it was unusually tolerant of the religious observance of its Protestant population. The English Anglican divine, George Morley, canon of Christ Church, and later Bishop of Worcester, records that he ‘read the Divine Service of our Church twice a day’ at Antwerp in the 1650s (during which period he was also Elizabeth of Bohemia’s private chaplain). He ‘celebrated the Sacrament of the Eucharist once a month’, ‘did there bury the dead’ and ‘baptize children according to the form prescribed in our liturgy’; and ‘besides this did once a week, at least, catechize the whole family wherein I lived, in the principles of Christian doctrine as they are taught in our Church Catechism’.3

Antwerp was also quietly tolerant of the Sephardic Jewish merchants who lived and conducted their successful businesses there.4 Visitors commented on the freedom with which Jews observed their festivals (for example, they were able openly to set up huts in their gardens for the feast of Succoth). Prominent merchants like the diamond dealer Gaspar Duarte (who also dealt in paintings) were officially registered as Catholic, but they and their families seem to have continued discreetly to practise their Judaism reasonably freely, under the tolerant eye of their Christian neighbours.5

Gaspar Duarte was born in Antwerp, the son of Diego Duarte and Leonor Rodrigues, who had come to the city as refugees, escaping religious persecution in Lisbon, around 1591. He built a flourishing business in gems and artworks, which was subsequently continued by his family. Around 1632 Gaspar established a business outlet in London, where he and his sons Diego and Jacob were granted ‘denizen’ status as nationalised Englishmen in 1634. From 1632 to 1639 Gaspar Duarte was jeweller (and gem procurer and supplier) to Charles I – a position which effectively made him agent for Charles’s purchases and disposals of gemstones. He relocated the business to Antwerp after the outbreak of the Civil War, but remained in touch with many of his old clients from London.6

The imposing Duarte house on the broad boulevard which is still Antwerp’s main shopping street today, the Meir, a family home that John Evelyn described as more like a palace, was the focus for