In this chapter

• Portrait of a man Frans Hals
• The maid of Leiden receiving the maid of the cloth trade Abraham van den Tempel
• A weaver's workshop Cornelis Decker
• The courtyard of the Amsterdam stock exchange, after 1668 Job Adriaensz. Berckheyde
• The Amsterdam merchant Daniel Bernard Bartholomeus van der Helst
• The Amsterdam stock exchange before its demolition in 1837 Kaspar Karsen

Fig. 6

Jacob van Ruisdael
Bleaching fields outside Haarlem, seen from the dunes at Overveen. After 1660. Canvas, 55.5 × 62 cm. The Hague, Mauritshuis.

Craft and commerce

'For witt, they seeme a very simple people,... but howsoever they seeme, no doubt the men are indeede most Crafty espetially in traffique, eating up all nations therein, by frugallity, industry, and subtilety,... and are indeede most witty in all meanes to grow rich, as the experience of our age hath taught us.'¹

Another stereotype, like that of the disapproving Dutch Calvinists. But this one is harder to discredit. It was written by an Englishman, Fynes Morrison, in 1614, and the 'experience' he mentioned was all too real. 'In 1606,' notes the historian of Amsterdam capitalism Violet Barbour, 'a member of the House of Commons maintained that the Dutch could sell English cloth dressed in the Netherlands and re-exported thence, more cheaply than the English trading companies could do.'² And Barbour says he was right. Today, not even the most vociferous opponent of Japanese underselling in the United States Senate could cite trade exploits as stunning as that.

The secret of this particular kind of success is the wit, if you want to call it that, to offer better credit terms and lower interest to your suppliers and customers than anyone else. The banks and traders of Amsterdam could do that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because they had more capital than they needed for their own businesses, or than they could invest at a good return in their own country. How they accumulated this capital is actually not a very pretty story. It came largely from the enormous profits that they made selling Baltic grain to the Mediterranean during a lengthy drought. As the only merchant shipping power in the world capable of handling the immense volumes involved, the Dutch could dictate favourable terms both to the seller and the buyer, and they did. Their position was enhanced by some concurrent military developments: the Spanish armada was defeated, half of the Antwerp business establishment fled to Amsterdam, and the half that stayed behind was paralyzed by a Dutch blockade.

Not all capital was plowed frugally back into business. Most merchants and traders liked to keep enough of it at home in order to build comfortable houses and buy nice things, like paintings. The Baltic traders were good customers, van Mander tells us, for portraits. But so were many others. For this section of the exhibition we are in search of paintings that take trade itself as their subject or paintings of merchants in their mercantile capacity. And these we do not find in the grain trade. People in that line of business tend to keep a low profile. A merchant who cornered wheat in Gdansk in expectation of a poor harvest in the Po valley was not likely to hang up paintings divulging the size and whereabouts of his silos. If he did wish to glorify his work in art, he might have done so symbolically, for example with a painting of the biblical hero Joseph distributing grain to the Egyptians when their seven fat years were followed by seven lean ones. When the wealthiest of the Dutch traders in the Baltic, the Trips, commissioned paintings commemorating their operations in northern Europe, it was not their speculation in the staff of life that they depicted, but their role as merchants of death: arms manufacture, at a well-guarded plant protected by Swedish guarantees. Allaert van Everdingen painted vistas of their plant, while their house in Amsterdam was adorned with sculptures of cannon.³

One of the branches of business that did turn to art to advertise itself was, as Linda Stone has shown in a fascinating study, the textile trade.⁴ In contrast to grain and shipping, which were dominated by the Dutch, textile was a highly competitive international industry. This is well illustrated by the above quotation from the Parliamentary speech of 1606: Dutch merchants bought English cloth to sell to the English, rather than the product they could have bought in Holland.

The main textile product of Holland in the first decade of the seventeenth century was Leiden say, a light wool manufactured by the 'new drapery,' which had eclipsed the traditional heavy Leiden woolens. The growing market for say was a function of changing fashion and price competition, but the rise of Leiden as a manufacturing centre was a planned move that took place overnight. When the Spanish made life impossible for the Protestant say workers of the Flemish city of Hondschoote, the town council of Leiden passed a special ordinance, in December 1582, to facilitate their resettlement in their city. Within two years, say accounted for eight out often bolts of cloth produced in Leiden.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the guild of the say drapers was the only textile guild in Leiden with a building of its own. For that guildhall, between 1594 and 1612, a series of six large paintings was made by Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh depicting and allegorizing the industry and its place in Leiden. In 1602, the artist was commissioned by the town government (of which he was an important member) to design eleven stained-glass panels with the same theme, as a tribute to the legendary city father Jan van Hout, 'who was largely responsible for encouraging the large influx of Flemish and Brabant émigrés to Leiden.'⁵ These works were as unprecedented in their composition as in their conception, and one cannot help wondering to what extent their existence and originality were due to Isaac Claesz. 's ability to influence events in the town council.

One painting in the series combines four distinct operations – the spinning, reeling, warping and weaving of the wool - in a single scene (fig.2). The well-dressed workers perform their job in a bright, airy space looking out onto the Oosterlingplaats in Leiden, the square where the cloth market for 'Easterners,' i.e. Baltic merchants, was held. As Stone points out, this idealized vision of saymaking is a far cry from the reality. The town of Leiden was quick enough to bring the Flemings to their city, but once they had been registered as citizens and guild members and put to work, the town showed itself unwilling to invest in decent living and work accomodations for them. Only when the workers threatened desertion did the town come across, in 1596, by converting an old convent into 'sixty-three small weavers' homes measuring only 6.91 by 3.53 meters each. A home comprised two rooms: one for the loom, and one for cooking and sleeping.'6 Van Swanenburgh's paintings, then, for all their technical accuracy and suggested realism, are not so much pictures of Leiden labourers at their work as evocations of an employer's dream.

The ascendancy of the new drapery in Leiden did not last long. By 1620 the production of say peaked, and in the decades to come it lost ground dramatically to its old rival, pure wool cloth. In part, this was a case of big fish eating little ones. The production of wool cloth demanded more capital than the new drapery, and the heavy investors it attracted found it relatively easy, in a period of decline, to buy out the smaller operators in say and put them to work as supervisors in their own much larger businesses. Their guild put up its hall, the Lakenhal, in the 1630s. In 1648, the founding year of the Leiden painters' guild, the township voted to give the Lakenhal two hundred guilders a year to order paintings and other artistic adornments for the building, which today is the town museum.

The first such commission was for three allegorical paintings of Leiden and the drapery trade (cat.nr.32). The artist chosen for the honour was Abraham van den Tempel, who was a cloth merchant himself, and one of the founding members of the painters' guild. In 1652 he was paid a thousand guilders for the series, painted in 1650 and 1651. The painting in the exhibition shows the maid of Leiden welcoming an allegorical figure of the Cloth Trade. Freedom kneels before the throne of Leiden, while Minerva the goddess of wisdom (and the emblem of Leiden University) and Mercury the god of trade look on approvingly. The painting and its two companions breathe the spirit of'48, the year of the triumphant Peace of Minister, ending the Eighty Years War. The country resounded -with rhetoric that was music to the ears of the Leiden wool merchants. The grandiloquence of van den Tempel's series has no measurable distance at all to the work even of the bosses.

In Haarlem, where the textile industry had a different structure, we find it depicted in another kind of art. Instead of the highly centralized woolen trade of Leiden, Haarlem had a linen industry -with a form of its own. There were weavers - once again Flemish immigrants - who owned one or two looms which they operated themselves. The flax cloth they wove – world-famous, especially in the costly variety of damast - was then laid out to bleach in fields on the outskirts of the city belonging to wealthy landowners. The paintings of the Haarlem textile industry show both kinds of work: the weavers in their ateliers (cat.nr.33), and the bleaching fields (fig. 6), both equally picturesque.

The paintings of Haarlem textile manufacture are more down to earth than those of Leiden, and seem to be more purely descriptive. But they too idealize existing conditions and serve commercial purposes. The small weavers of Haarlem were actually so dissatisfied with their livelihoods that many of them sold their looms eagerly in order to speculate in tulip bulbs, during the great boom of 1636. The crash of 1637 left many of them penniless, and forced them to begin weaving again as hired hands or junior partners. The image of the independent craftsman whose time is his own, as in Cornelis Decker's painting, was a flattered one. And so were Jacob van Ruisdael's views of the bleaching fields. He always shows the most expensive fields, those closest to the city, with the Haarlem skyline serving as a kind of visual tradename for the product in the foreground. (Decker, by the way, also made forest landscapes in the style of Jacob van Ruisdael. They must have had the same customers.) There was a brief flourishing of Haarlem textile paintings in the mid-seventeenth century, with dozens of local masters producing very similar subjects, and then it was over. One is hard put to name another group of Dutch paintings of trade and commerce showing such a concentration of time, place and motif. Not even in nearby Amsterdam, where the thousands who lived from the textile trade included many art lovers, do we find an equivalent.

The works we have discussed are exceptional in that they betray the existence of formal business organizations with an interest in the creation of paintings of particular kinds. The more general ties between art and trade are so vast and so pervasive that we could not begin to illustrate them here. Suffice it to say that even if one does not want to think of artists as commercial traders when they sell their work, the painters of Holland were still participants in the world of commerce. Most of them, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at least, had sources of income aside from their art, in activities which may not be all that far removed from their work as artists. Such as trading in real estate, like the landscape painter Jan van Goyen, or running a brewery, like the painter of good drunken fun Jan Steen, or skippering, like Barend Cornelisz. Kleenknecht, specialist in seascapes. With these few examples, I wish to suggest that motives of a commercial nature sometimes played a role in a painter's choice of specialty. Such connections, I know from personal experience, can sometimes bring the art of the past closer than any amount of aestheticizing 'art appreciation.'

If painters could be business-like, patrons and collectors could be sentimental. In 1814, the Amsterdam banker Adriaan van der Hoop was on the welcoming committee when the Tsar of Russia, Alexander I, honoured the venerable stock exchange with a visit. Twenty-two years later, when that landmark of seventeenth-century civic architecture was about to be demolished, van der Hoop paid the young Kaspar Karsen seven hundred guilders to paint the courtyard of the building, from a point of view which showed the plaque commemorating the Tsar's visit (cat.nr.36). That van der Hoop, of all those who had worked in the stock exchange, thought of having it immortalized in this way had to do with the fact that he had since become one of the foremost art collectors in the city. This gave him the impulse and a second, special reason to want to own a painting of the old exchange. Since 1822, the Academy of Drawing (where Karsen himself had been trained) was located in the upper story of the building.

That which the nineteenth century commemorated in its decline was celebrated by the seventeenth in its rise. When the stock exchange was sixty years old, in 1668, it was expanded on the south. The new situation was recorded by Job Berckheyde (cat.nr. 34), perhaps for some Amsterdam banker of his own time. Or was it a textile merchant? From 1660 through the mid-eighteenth century, the city salesroom for woolen cloth was housed in the upper story of the stock exchange.

As a collector of paintings, van der Hoop was able to enjoy the best of both worlds: he owned Berckheyde's view of the stock exchange as well as Karsen's. In the normal course of events, the two paintings, which gain so much when we see them through the eyes of van der Hoop, would have been dispersed on the market to end up in different collections, as haphazard examples of 'topographical art.' However, van der Hoop bequeathed his collection as a whole to the city of Amsterdam, which has found a place for these two paintings in the Amsterdam Historical Museum. In that endlessly fascinating presentation, they serve a function at least as rich as they once did on the walls of Adriaan van der Hoop's cabinet.

1. Jacobsen Jensen 1918, p.288.
2. Barbour 1950, p.95.
3. Meischke and Reeser 1983.
4. Stone-Ferrier 1985, from which I have derived much of the material for this section of the catalogue.
5. Stone-Ferrier, p.2.
6. Stone-Ferrier, pp.28-29.