In this chapter

• Inmates of St. Job's Hospital, Utrecht, soliciting donations Jan van Bijlert
• Admitting children to the Haarlem church orphanage Jan de Bray
• Names of the regents of the St. Joris Proveniershuis

Fig. 4

Cornelis van der Voort
Regents of the home for the aged, 1618. Canvas, 152 × 200 cm. Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

Fig. 5

Werner van den Valckert (attributed)
An almoner and chief provost of the Amsterdam College of Almoners visiting a poor family, 1626 or 1627. Panel, 149 × 151.5 cm. Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

Charity

It was a great disappointment to the Calvinists that they failed to gain control of all the former property of the Catholic church. They were given the old cathedrals and parish churches, but not, as a rule, the monasteries and convents. Of the hospitals and old age homes that before the alteration had been owned and run by the church, only a few ended up under official Calvinist auspices. The new church also failed to acquire the extensive real-estate holdings of the Catholics outside the cities, the income of which was used to finance charitable institutions. The States General deemed it wiser to confiscate these holdings for the townships rather than the church. Because of this far-reaching decision, the Calvinist church was prevented from the start from taking over the all-pervasive role that Catholicism previously filled in Dutch society.

The townships, for their part, were not equipped to run the institutions of health and welfare as divisions of government, and had no desire to do so. Rather than assuming direct, city-wide responsibility for the welfare of the orphaned, the aged, the sick and the needy, they committed them to the care of boards of burgher regents, such as those that already ran other, non-church charities. The regents would supervise the institution's estates, invest its funds and use them for the good of their wards. The day-to-day running of the institutions was left up to paid administrators.

In general, the members of the governing boards were appointed for life by co-optation, and came, needless to say, from the richest families. They saw their function more as a pious duty than a public trust. In the exercise of this duty, they were moreover in a position to safeguard the interests of their relatives in the clans which were the basic unit of the patriciate which ruled the towns. 'Charity begins at home' is also a Dutch proverb, although couched in the somewhat obscure expression 'The shirt (that is one's own) is closer (to the body) than the robe (of public office).'

If the ecclesiastical authorities of the new church were a dead loss to the artists of Holland, not so the laymen who ran institutions of welfare. They understood how to use art for public purposes, and were not averse to doing so. They did have to be careful, though. One of the charges of the iconoclasts – and of many more moderate Christians as well – was that the Catholic Church spent too much money on art and did not give enough to the poor. Once a slogan of that kind proves its effectiveness, it remains potent for a long time. The Protestants who were now entrusted with the funds for relief had to avoid incurring the same charges that they themselves, in many cases, had hurled at their predecessors.

Within limits, however, there was a place of honour for art in the Dutch world of charity. In a recent dissertation, the American art historian Sheila Muller studied this phenomenon.¹ She distinguishes between three main types of art ordered by charitable bodies: sculptural decorations of the facades of institutions; group portraits of regents; and paintings symbolizing and glorifying their work.

The first new institutions to open under the Republic were the Amsterdam houses of correction for men and women, in 1596. They were extremely progressive for their time, if only because they served to punish criminals, beggars and such by incarceration and heavy labour rather than by branding, maiming or exile. The initiative behind the new establishments was taken by friends and followers of the biblical humanist Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, an avowed enemy of the Calvinists, and an outstanding engraver. Since the houses of correction were intended to be financially self-sufficient (they sold the labour of the inmates, charged admission to visitors and enjoyed certain trade advantages from the city and the province), they were freer than other institutions to indulge a taste for art. They ordered reliefs for their impressive entrance gates, were among the first group of charity regents to have their portrait painted, and attracted artists of all kinds to draw and engrave the goings-on within.

If Dutch charity began at home, it extended, in the first place, only as far as the parish borders. The highest ideal was also a practical one: to care adequately for one's own. Under the church, only parishioners were helped, and under the burgher regents, only registered citizens of the towns. Some of the charities were even stricter than that, operating more like retirement homes for paying customers than as welfare institutions. At the beginning of the Republic, the biblical humanists who designed the new institutions of charity believed that it was possible to defeat poverty by helping the deserving poor, coercing the undeserving into looking for gainful employ, and closing the town gates to undesirables from abroad. This proved to be an illusion. The prosperity of the Dutch cities attracted tens of thousands of immigrants from all over northern Europe, and not all of them were able to find work or support themselves. The streets of the towns began filling up with beggars whose presence undermined the confidence of the charitable rich that things were under control. To simply outlaw begging, as Amsterdam did in 1613, was obviously a hollow gesture. What may have helped would have been to redefine poverty in broader terms, and to create appropriately large-scale institutions to deal with it. But seventeenth-century Amsterdam was not fitted for that task. Instead, the existing institutions were beefed up, and the overflow from their work was picked up, with restrictions and limitations of all kinds, by the municipal College of Almoners.

One effect of the new measures was to add responsibility and prestige to the boards of the burgher charities. It was at this juncture that a new artistic tradition was born: the group portrait of charity regents. In 1617 and 1618, the first three such paintings came into being: the regents of the Amsterdam male house of detention, those of St. Peter's Hospital and of the home for the aged (fig.4) were all painted by Cornelis van der Voort. The sitters had themselves shown sitting and standing at their work table; around them were deeds, documents and account books referring to their administrative responsibilities. The painter, an immigrant from Flanders, had – it is nearly redundant to say it – excellent contacts in Amsterdam. His brother was a wealthy landowner, and he himself was one of the leading art dealers in the city, with the portraits of several important persons and groups to his credit.

New traditions are born from old ones. For a century or more, Amsterdam civic bodies had been painted for the meeting halls where they assembled. But until 1617 only the officers and members of certain guilds and civic guard groups had been portrayed in this way, not the boards of institutions. Following the example set in 1617-18, many other boards of regents ordered group portraits in the decades to come. The practice remained limited, however, to Amsterdam and Haarlem.

In 1626, the Amsterdam Almoners also decided to have themselves painted (fig. 5). They were the closest approximation in the city to a public welfare department, and apparently they did not think it appropriate to have themselves shown within the closed space of an office, like the regents of the more parochial charities. In five paintings, we see them engaged in their day-to-day work: registering new recipients of charity, distributing bread and clothing, looking in on the hennep works which they ran, and visiting the house of a poor family. In contrast to the group portraits of regents, the depiction of charity as it was actually practiced did not become a recognized category in Dutch painting.

The duty to help one's fellow man in need was, in the seventeenth century, considered a religious one. Those who practiced it looked forward to the moment described in Matthew 25: 'When the Son of man comes in his glory, ...he will say to those at his right hand, "Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'" The faithful ask the Lord in surprise when they performed these acts, and he replies: 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.' To these acts of kindness to the living, Christian tradition later added the burial of the dead, as the last of the Seven Works of Mercy.

Although Dutch charity put more emphasis on helping the brethren, in the limited sense of fellow citizens or parishioners, than the parable of the talents may have intended, the regents of institutions nonetheless thought of themselves as being at the right hand of Christ. Complementing the portraits of themselves at their voluntary service, they also hung in their board rooms paintings of the Seven Works of Mercy, which revealed the greater goodness of their work. Depictions of all the works of mercy in one canvas are easy to recognize; but acts of mercy could also be tucked away into a landscape, a scene from everday life or a biblical subject. A painting of that sort, encountered on the wall of a charitable institution, would be perceived as a depiction of charity. But once it is removed from its original site and cast onto the art market or hung in a museum, it becomes a mere landscape or genre painting or history painting, incapable of arousing the same emotions as in its original location.

One of the most original paintings ever made for a Dutch charity is that painted by Jan de Bray in 1663 for the Haarlem orphanage (cat.nr.29). The burghers working in the institution are shown as figures in a living parable, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked before our eyes. What makes the scene all the more unusual is that a Calvinist minister stands beside the woman volunteer, who looks towards heaven as she does her work. The church tower in the left background adds to the ecclesiastical flavour of the scene. In fact, the Haarlem orphanage was exceptional in that it was run by the Calvinist church. De Bray's painting shows us what charity looked like through Calvinist eyes: a purely religious act, to be performed with one's gaze directed at God and a minister at one's elbow. What a contrast it forms with the depiction of the Amsterdam almoners, which, even though it contains some symbolic references to the divine inspiration behind charity, is a picture of civic, if moral, virtue. If we think of charity as a significant indicator of the way people think about and act towards each other, we recognize in these two fascinating works a fundamental dichotomy in Dutch life, between the humanist tradition and the Calvinist one.

An appeal to heaven is also made by one of the figures in the only known group portrait of the inmates of a Dutch institution. The third figure from the left in Jan van Bijlert's Inmates of St. Job's Hospital soliciting donations (cat.nr.28) raises a finger to the sky while addressing the man next to him, who is holding a collecting box. This unprecedented and unimitated work shows some of the nineteen old men who lived at St. Job's, dressed in their institutional white doublets. (The outpatients were syphilitics – St. Job's was the first hospital in the country for syphilis patients.) Only the two men on the right – the housemaster and beadle – are dressed as burghers. The regents who ordered the painting left themselves out of it altogether.

Recent research by the Utrecht historian Marten Jan Bok suggests a reason why the regents of St. Job's may have chosen to hang up this remarkable composition.² Until 1634, the institution enjoyed the privilege of conducting two annual collections: they would send the old men from the home out to bring in money to pay for the care of the outpatients. However', this form of legalized begging was being eliminated all through the country, and in August 1634 the Utrecht city council annulled the historical right of St. Job's to the two annual drives. The regents protested mightily, and in the end, after May 1635, were able to negotiate a settlement in the form of financial compensation. If van Bijlert's painting was made in the course of the struggle (the stylistic evidence does not rule out the possibility), it can be seen as a painted plea on the part of the regents: how can you refuse these poor old men the pittance they ask of you for the sake of their suffering fellows? Do they call in vain on God, and on you?

One of those regents was, from November 1634 on, the painter himself. It took the coincidence of a talented and original painter being on the board of a charitable institution to make possible the creation of this completely unconventional work. And even then, the painter would need the sympathetic collusion of his colleagues. But that was less of a problem in St. Job's than anywhere else: among the regents there must have been more art lovers than only Jan van Bijlert. Between 1622 and 1642, the institution served as a kind of showroom for the work of Utrecht artists, before they had a permanent exhibition space of their own. In that period thirty-five Utrecht painters gave examples of their work to the hospital, which kept them until the early nineteenth century. Seven of the specialists in history painting (among them van Bijlert, in 1628) chose subjects from the book of Job, but the majority of the paintings had nothing at all to do with the hospital. There were still-lifes of fruit, fish and fowl, landscapes with and without animals, ruins and mountains, genre paintings, heads, and a Sleeping Venus. (Although the latter may be less inappropriate than it seems, in view of the medical specialty of St. Job's.)

The Utrecht hospital of St. Job stood alone in Holland as the recipient of a small collection of paintings by local masters. But even in the absence of such exceptional circumstances, the board room of many a Dutch institution of charity echoed with discussions of the merits of paintings, the morality of spending money on them, and the political expediency of displaying them. We are no longer surprised that an English visitor to the Netherlands in 1688, William Carr, commenting on the Dutch love of pictures, should have noted in passing that even the alms-houses were 'richly adorned' with them.³ Two hundred years later, the same could no longer be said. There was hardly an institution in the country which could afford to hold on to its valuables, or cared to. The fate of the collection of St. Job's, this time, is unfortunately typical rather than exceptional: in 1811 the paintings they had received from the painters of Utrecht were sold at auction for sixty-two guilders.

1. Muller 1985. Much of the information for the present chapter was derived from this very interesting book, which is a revised version of a dissertation for the University of California, Berkeley, 1982.
2. Bok 1984.
3. Quoted in Boxer 1965, p. 171, from W. Carr, A description of Holland, ed. 1691, p.27.