These People Are So Diverse, and Many of Them Out
The Ownership of Paintings: From the Stadholder to a Fishwife Eric Jan Sluijter If foreigners visiting Holland in the seventeenth century had been asked who actually bought the huge numbers of paintings being produced there, they probably would have answered “everyone.” These foreign travelers, who were usually aristocrats or at least very affluent, were astonished by the art to be seen in Dutch cities, for to their mind there were paintings hanging everywhere. The English, French and Italians were accustomed to seeing paintings in their own countries in churches and convents, or at the homes of the aristocracy or the very rich; in Holland, however, they got the impression that paintings were omnipresent, for one reason because they often hung in the front room, and the tall windows made them easily visible from the street. The English merchant Peter Mundy described this phenomenon in his travel account: “All in generall striving to adorne their houses, especially the outer or street roome, with costly peeces, Butchers and bakers not much inferiour in their shoppes, which are Fairely sett Forth, yea many tymes blacksmithes, Cobblers, ettc. will have some picture or other by their Forge and in their stalle. Such is the generall Notion, enclination and delight that these Countrie Natives have to Paintings” (Peter Mundy, 1640).1 This descriptive passage, written in 1640, was probably not much of an exaggeration. John Michael Montias calculated in his pioneering study of 1982 that in Delft, around 1646, two-thirds of the population had paintings in their homes, with an average of eleven pictures per household.
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