Seller’s Market for the Masters

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The New York Sun

The new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, “The Age of Rembrandt,” puts on display the dozens of Dutch masterpieces in its collection. As well as a celebration of the genius of Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and other Dutch artists, it has an underlying theme which tells how the gallery acquired its first cache of pictures and how subsequent gifts from generous New Yorkers added to the glory of the collection.

There is also a less obvious thread which runs through the exhibit, the key role patrons play in art.

Wandering through the galleries, it would be easy to merely stop at the key works, among them Rembrandt’s “Flora,” possibly inspired by his dead wife, and a late self portrait of the artist, which, though he was just 54, betrays the ravages that money worries and a string of tragedies had exacted upon his visage.

There are Vermeer’s gentle studies in character, too, such as the enchanting “A Maid Asleep,” and “Study of a Young Woman,” a portrait perhaps of his own daughter, which, since the movie starring Scarlett Johansson, has become known as “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”

But if you look beyond the star turns and take a broader view, you see that Rembrandt and the others were painting the world of their time populated with Dutch merchants of the early 17th century who were becoming newly rich from the boom in worldwide trade.

These are not artists dependent upon the Roman Catholic Church for their patronage, nor, like the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck, reliant upon generous commissions from kings and courtiers. The Dutch school were employed by businessmen caught in a rare moment, when they were just on the cusp of acquiring great wealth. They are self made, confident men, spending their money on fancy clothes for themselves and their wives.

Their small houses, which the Dutch masters portrayed with the soft northern European light glancing the bare furniture and offering tantalizing glimpses of rooms just out of reach, are becoming burdened with conspicuous displays of affluence.

Pieter de Hooch shows us in “Paying the Hostess” how whole walls would be covered with leather embossed with “Spanish gold” from the New World, which the Dutch found they could fake by using varnished silver.

There is the beginning of pretension. In Matthys Naiveu’s “The Newborn Baby,” in which the Dutch liked to show off their new offspring along with their wealth of silver possessions, the patron wanted to imply a larger establishment than the home he lived in, so the artist borrowed the high ceilings and grand fireplace of the local town hall.

The new American millionaires of the late 19th and early 20th century found something they could relate to in these pictures and they started collecting them. They found aspects of themselves in the hard working, self made, protestant, democratic men and women portrayed. The Dutch masters were more interested in real lives and real homes and less in religious subjects and classical allegories, which suited the no nonsense Americans. Collecting Dutch pictures became a common hobby among those New Yorkers who had made their money speculating on Wall Street or in real estate, retail, and the railroads. Many of them became so interested in art as a sideline to making money they joined the board of the nascent Metropolitan Museum.

They began competing with each other for works as they came onto the market, rather like boys rival each other for baseball cards. And when they came toward the end of their lives, the Altmans and the Havemeyers, the Marquands and the J. Pierpont Morgans, naturally donated their collections to the Met.

There is therefore a pleasing symmetry in the exhibit. The wealth and produce from the New World was transported across the Atlantic to Amsterdam, where it was used to record the lives of Dutch traders and employ the skills of painters like Rembrandt.

Two centuries later, the art recording that confident time was shipped back across the Atlantic, to what used to be New Amsterdam, where it adorned the drawing rooms of the new rich before arriving on the walls of the Met.

The new rich today are also attracted to art, but they are a century too late to find many old master paintings, which have mostly lodged themselves permanently on the walls of public collections around the world. Nor is there any obvious link between them and the content of their art as there was between the stern protestant ethic of the old time tycoons and the subjects of the pictures they acquired.

The wealthy today must buy what is available and hope for the best. It is a sellers’ market and a treacherous game, as there is a great deal of dross among the rare seams of gold.

And in that, too, there is a symmetry with the Spanish quest for El Dorado and the riches of the New World which set off the age of exploration that eventually came to fund the Dutch masters.


The New York Sun

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