Dejima was just one node in the intercontinental empire of the Dutch, a profoundly different entity from the empire the Spanish had created in the Americas. Unlike the Spanish, the Dutch were a people little interested in religious conversion of non-Europeans, and they largely kept their Protestant faith to themselves. Although they travelled the world heavily armed, and could be utterly ruthless if the need arose, they were only keen on conquest if it could be done at a profit. Fundamentally this was an empire of traders, not Conquistadores. Their watchwords were profit, stability and toleration, a reflection of the pragmatism that remains a feature of the Dutch national character to this day.
Here were a people who, in a literal sense, had built their nation, reclaiming great swathes of land by waging a ceaseless, inter-generational battle against the sea. Their weapons in that conflict were dykes, levees and the thousands of windmills that drained Dutch fields: machines that became the unofficial symbol of the country. Dutch pragmatism was hard-headed and hard-nosed, focused on the bottom line, when it was not forced to focus on war. This was a nation committed to the art of making money, seizing from the Italians the mantle of being Europe’s great financial innovators. For money was not just spent in the Dutch Republic; it was recycled. The Dutch effectively invented the modern stock exchange, the engine that has helped propel capitalism ever since. Amsterdam’s exchange, the Bourse, enabled the Dutch to buy and sell shares and bonds in the Republic’s global trading companies, making Amsterdam the Wall Street of seventeenth-century Europe. Although the Dutch did succumb to bubbles and speculation – as the legendary tulip mania of the 1630s revealed – at heart they remained merchants, committed to the real-world business of buying and selling.
Dutch traders grew rich by providing their European neighbours with essential goods: grain, fish and finished cloth were the core commodities fuelling the Dutch economy. But greater riches and greater excitement came through long-distance trade. As we have seen, much of that wealth was earned by playing the role of middlemen and shippers in the trade between Asian nations. But the Dutch seaborne empire also introduced the citizens of the Dutch Republic to a large number of new and exotic foreign goods. The VOC and the republic’s other trading companies enabled a tiny nation – only 1½ million citizens packed into just 60 square miles of territory – to become briefly the great global trading nation.1
Historians have spent the past 300 years trying to work out how they did it. Again and again they point to the Dutch talent for co-operation and capacity for pragmatism. These virtues were not, perhaps, an innate feature of the Dutch national character, which was itself not fully formed even at the creation of the Dutch Republic. For the Dutch, whose nation was born from the fires of religious conflict, pragmatism was a trait willingly acquired and perfected. The Eighty Years War (1568–1648), fought by the provinces of the Netherlands – at first for religious toleration but eventually for independence from Catholic Spain – consumed most of the first half of the ‘golden’ seventeenth century, with only a short truce between 1609 and 1621. The Spanish were able to afford such expensive and devastating military campaigns against the Netherlands, in part because of the vast bullion wealth that flowed into their realm from the silver mines of Zacatecas in Mexico and Potosí in Peru (now Bolivia). The conquest and domination of the New World and the religious wars that ravaged the old were, in this way, intimately interconnected.
The seven northern provinces – Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Groningen and Overijssel – emerged from the Spanish conflict and joined together to form the Dutch Republic.2 While these provinces had much in common, their path towards nationhood had been neither obvious nor irresistible, and forms of provinciality and urban patriotism lingered on throughout the seventeenth century. Yet with so much blood having been spilt and treasure spent, the new state was strong on toleration and desperate for stability. A third of the population had remained dedicated to the old Catholic faith, and the same tendency towards pragmatism that had led the Dutch merchants to throw in their lot with the VOC encouraged each province to tolerate the disparate faiths in its midst. The Dutch Republic thus became a land of ‘hidden’ Catholic churches as well as counting houses and merchants’ chambers.
At the centre of this apparently fragile nation – an oddity whose structure and form of government bemused both contemporaries and later historians – lay the city of Amsterdam. It was upon that metropolis that the great network of trading bases and web of shipping routes converged, allowing the city to usurp Antwerp as northern Europe’s most important trading port. The Amsterdam of the Golden Age was a city of warehouses, a place of import and export in which anything and everything could be bought. The philosopher René Descartes – a Frenchman who lived much of his adult life in the Dutch Republic and served in a Dutch army – described the Amsterdam of 1631 as ‘an inventory of the possible’.3 ‘What place on earth,’ he wondered, ‘could one choose, where all the commodities and all the curiosities one could wish for were as easy to find as in this city?’4 Whereas the Tokugawa rulers of Japan attempted to finely calibrate their nation’s exposure to the wider world, the Dutch embraced their new-found globalism wholeheartedly, revelling in the excitement and novelty of it all. The merchants of the Dutch Republic may have built their grand canal-side villas in the restrained and sombre styles of the Dutch Baroque, but they filled them with the lavish and exotic fruits of global trade – blue and white Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquer ware shipped from Dejima, silk from Persia, spices from the East Indies, pepper from Africa and Turkish carpets from the Ottoman Empire. The silverware on the tables of these merchant dynasties was exquisitely crafted by local craftsmen, but the metal itself came from Peru or Mexico. And to serve their fine wines the Dutch trafficked enslaved African boys, who became one of the great ‘fashions’ of the age among the rich. Their forlorn faces stare back at us from the margins of numerous Dutch portraits of the period. For, like the British, the Dutch liked to celebrate their own unique freedoms while growing fat on the unfreedom of Africans.
24. Among the commodities traded by the Dutch were enslaved Africans, some of whom were brought to the Netherlands to work as exotic servants, as depicted here in this family parlour scene.
The frenzy of trade, money-making and almost conspicuous consumption that characterised the Golden Age was reflected in Dutch art. The economic booms of what has been called the ‘Dutch miracle’ created the necessary conditions for a surge in artistic production and expenditure. It can be argued that the modern art market was invented, or at least given its first trial run, in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century. The accumulated wealth acted as the flame that drew artists from other regions of Europe, and in particular from the southern Flemish provinces that had remained under the control of the Spanish Habsburgs. It was the urban merchant class, rather than the rural aristocrats, who had the money, and it was they who became the principal patrons. What they wanted was a new kind of art – free from the flamboyance of the Catholic faith. They sought paintings that offered a reflection of themselves: proud republican Calvinists who had worked hard for the wealth they now enjoyed. Dutch art of the seventeenth century reflects their character and that of the new nation they dominated.
From out of the shadows of Rembrandt van Rijn’s famous Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (often known as The Night Watch of 1642) emerge the faces of the men who commissioned that gargantuan canvas; the citizen militia of Captain Banninck Cocq who stood ready to defend their city. In Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Banquet at the Crossbowmen’s Guild of 1648 we see the men of the guild celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Münster, which brought to an end eighty years of war with Spain and proffered the possibility of retirement from active service. In Rembrandt’s nearmiraculous portraits of the Dordrecht merchant Jacob Tripp and his wife, Margaretha de Geer, from around 1661, we are presented with the thin, pallid faces of the oligarchs who helped make the Dutch so wealthy.
25. The art of the Dutch Golden Age was created for the proud and wealthy citizens of the Republic. Its patrons were also its subjects, as here, in Rembrandt’s celebrated The Night Watch, which depicts the men of an Amsterdam citizen’s militia.
26. The abundance of exotic foreign goods and luxury foods (available to the wealthy) is here celebrated in a flamboyant still-life painting by Adriaen van Utrecht.
Less familiar, but just as eloquent, are the many still-life paintings from the period, a favourite among Dutch patrons and a speciality of Dutch and Flemish artists. At one end of the spectrum were the reserved banketjestukken (breakfast pieces), depictions of simple Dutch food, artfully composed into paintings of austere beauty.5 At the opposite end were the pronkstilleven, often translated as ostentatious still-lifes. These paintings of sumptuous consumption, produced by artistic pioneers such as Jan Davidszoon de Heem, Adriaen van Utrecht, Willem Kalf and Frans Snyders, present the viewer with the many wonders and luxuries that had entered the lives of the Dutch merchant classes, thanks to their nation’s seaborne empire. Arrayed on linen-covered tables are rich cuts of meat and bounteous mountains of fruits, casually arranged in bowls of blue and white porcelain. Among the luxurious foods were scattered ornate silver platters and examples of Venetian glassware. The true stars of the pronkstilleven, though, were the nautilus cups, made from the pearly inner shells of the chambered nautilus, which had been plucked from the beaches of the Pacific and Indian oceans and transformed by local goldsmiths into flamboyant drinking vessels.6
A still-life of 1644 by Adriaen van Utrecht, who worked not in the Protestant Dutch Republic but in Catholic Antwerp, to the south, shows a series of small tables each of which literally overflows with luxurious fruits, meats and pastries. Nearby are scattered a selection of musical instruments and books, symbols of the leisure that prosperity enabled. A South American parrot eyes up the fruits, and a pet monkey picks a berry. The whole scene is rendered hyper-real by the application of multiple layers of glaze.
In the seventeenth century pronkstilleven sat uncomfortably with the sombre Calvinism of the urban merchant class and spoke of a tension that ran through the Golden Age. One-time English consul in Amsterdam William Carr, the author of a guidebook to the Dutch Republic, was of the opinion that the Dutch character had been radically altered by the nation’s new-found prosperity:
The old severe and frugal way of living is now almost quite out of date in Holland … there is very little to be seen of that sober modesty in apparel, diet and habitations as formally. Instead of convenient dwellings the Hollanders now build stately palaces, have their delightful gardens, and houses of pleasure, keep coaches, wagons and sleighs, have very rich furniture for their houses, with trappings adorned with silver bells.7
The moral hazard of increasing wealth and rampant consumption could – at least in the case of the pronkstilleven – be managed through a subtle form of double-think. The wealth displayed on the canvases of van Utrecht, de Heem, Kalf and Snyder could be interpreted as the rewards of hard work and thrift, rather than the trappings of sinful ostentation. The pronkstilleven also carried within them elements of the symbolic and allegorical language of the Vanitas painting, a genre that reminded patrons of the fragility of personal fortune and the transience of life. The fruits in the expensive Chinese bowls were in the process of decay, and the arrangements of flowers – always a favourite motif – would eventually wither, just as human beauty fades and human life comes to an end. This rationale enabled the Dutch elite to celebrate their wealth and enjoy the excitements and novelties of global consumption while showing obeisance to the strictures of their faith, allowing them to have their Calvinist cake and eat it.
The new products that flooded into Amsterdam changed Dutch tastes and fashions, and not just for the wealthy. Yet another instantly recognisable symbol of Dutch culture is the blue and white glazed Delftware pottery that can even now be found on the walls of thousands of Dutch homes. Some of the original seventeenth-century Delftware manufacturers are still in business producing plates and crockery. Cheap imitations of their work are on sale in every tourist trap in the modern Netherlands.
Although the origins of this tradition stretch back beyond the seventeenth century, Delftware was inspired by Chinese Kraak porcelain, made especially for export and shipped to the Dutch Republic in vast quantities by the merchant fleet of the VOC, often carried as ballast. Some of the earliest Chinese porcelain to reach the Dutch market arrived in the holds of two Portuguese ships, the São Tiago and the Santa Catarina, that were captured in 1602 and 1603 respectively, the latter in Nagasaki harbour.8 Indeed, the term Kraak is believed to be a Dutch corruption of the word ‘caracas’ – after the Portuguese ships captured. Delftware, produced by the potters of the city of Delft, was a cheap, earthenware imitation of the Chinese Kraak porcelain, which remained an expensive luxury only within the reach of the very wealthy, and a feature in many pronkstilleven. Affordable and fashionable Delftware was an invention of an age that was increasingly about the interaction between cultures, not merely borrowings between them. The patterns that came to adorn Delftware plates and bowls reflect this growing synthesis. Evolving over time, they incorporated both Chinese and Japanese motifs as well as scenes of Dutch life; trading ships of the VOC in full sail, arrangements of tulips and the omnipresent windmill.
27. Delft tiles depicting the trading ships that helped make the Netherlands so wealthy. Delft pottery was a domestic imitation of the blue and white Kraak pottery that was one of the most popular global imports.
The food that was consumed from Delftware plates and bowls in the seventeenth century was also changed by long-distance trade. New tropical ingredients – pepper, cloves and nutmeg, all available in increasing quantities – became important flavours in a changing national cuisine, at least temporarily.
Behind the confident facades of the Baroque buildings and the broad, well-fed faces of the men in Rembrandt’s group portraits was another reality of the period. While it is true that the Dutch were the great innovators and risk-takers of the seventeenth century, what is often forgotten is that they had little choice in the matter. Theirs was a nation in which everything appeared to hang by a thread. Its conflicts with Spain, Portugal and Britain (there were three Anglo-Dutch wars in the seventeenth century) were relentless, and the Dutch trading empire that was the source of so much wealth was forged against the backdrop of ceaseless war. This meant that the nation could lose trading bases and trading partners just as easily as it could create them. The Dutch grip on its empire and her fortune at times appeared tenuous; factories were besieged and bombarded, invaded and traded away at the negotiating table. In 1664 the Dutch famously lost their settlement of New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan island to the British, who renamed it New York after James, Duke of York, the future King James II. The coat of arms that had been designed and proposed for New Amsterdam included two beavers, as the economic viability of this North American colony rested so heavily on the fur trade.
The number of Dutch paintings from the Golden Age that depict shipwrecks and losses at sea hint at another aspect of national fragility. Personal fortunes and the prosperity of companies could be wrecked in an instant. Long-distance trade was always high-risk trade. Tropical storms, interceptions at sea by the ships of rival powers or pirates could ruin families as easily as trade could make them. Even the principle of risk-sharing, which was one of the central functions of the joint stock company, could not save the over-exposed from bankruptcy. And even Rembrandt, the artistic star of his day, lost his home and much else when his creditors called time on his debts in 1656, during the depression that cast a shadow over the 1650s.
In multiple ways, the seaborne empire changed the material aspects of life in the Netherlands; what is difficult to ascertain, however, is the extent to which ordinary Dutch citizens felt connected to and invested in the imperial project. The strongest links were familial. It has been estimated that over the course of the Dutch Republic’s existence around a million men and women set sail for Asia and Africa on the ships of Dutch trading companies. Disease ensured that the majority never returned, and their graves can be found in abandoned cemeteries everywhere from Kolkata to Guyana. This extraordinary level of global mobility reflected the marked increase in the scale of trade and the level of contact between Europeans and the people of Asia, Africa and the Americas in the seventeenth century. The mode the Portuguese had pioneered in the latter decades of the fifteenth century had been enormously expanded by the Dutch, yet, for all this, many Dutchmen never left their native soil. One of those who stayed, even when family members departed to find their fortunes in the empire, was Johannes Vermeer.
Vermeer was born and died in the little city of Delft, where the producers of Delftware had established their factories. As far as we know, he never left the Netherlands. Most of the surviving documents that tell us anything about the life of Vermeer are records of his life in that one small town. Johannes Vermeer is an enigma; a man about whom art historians know just enough for the gaps in their knowledge to be acutely frustrating. His output as a painter was modest – there are only about thirty-five surviving paintings – and most are famously intimate; simple scenes set within the neat, ordered, almost claustrophobic world of the Dutch interior. He is not known for wide horizons or panoramic vistas; indeed, his celebrated View of Delft (1660–61) is one of only two known landscapes. What Vermeer mastered, perhaps more than any other artist, was capturing on canvas the fleeting moments of everyday life and the seemingly inconsequential: a girl laughing as an officer leans towards her (Officer and Laughing Girl (1660s)); a music teacher and his student standing together at a virginal, at the far end of a formal room (Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (c. 1662–4)); a young woman alone with her thoughts as she reads a letter (Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657–9)). Each depicts an enclosed room that is bathed in delicate light from a side window. We are reminded that the rest of the world is just out of sight. However, within the details of these famously internal scenes, among the objects on the tables and the maps on the walls, are the signs that Vermeer’s domestic world was infused with the globalism of the Dutch Golden Age and the interactions that typified the seventeenth century.
28. Although apparently insular and domestic, many of Vermeer's paintings hint at the new globalism of the Dutch Golden Age: the map on the wall, the hat made from North American Beaver fur, reveal the impact of trade on Dutch life in the seventeenth century.
29. In Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window Vermeer leaves the interpretation open. But an era marked by long-distance trade was inevitably one of long absences and separations. Is the writer of the letter her lover in a faraway land?
In Officer and Laughing Girl the officer wears a broad felt hat, made from the fur of beavers trapped in the Great Lakes region of North America, where, at the time, European traders – with the French in the lead – were engaged in an often violent struggle against the elements, and with one another, for access to beaver pelts.9 The indigenous native American nations were happy to trap beavers and trade their pelts in return for European goods, especially firearms, but those weapons were often used against them. When the French missed out on an opportunity to extend their activities into the area around Lake Superior, the English stepped in and established the Hudson Bay Company, with a string of trade forts. It was the struggles over the fur trade that led to the Dutch loss of New Amsterdam at the end of the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664. Conflicts between Englishmen, Dutchmen, Frenchmen and federations of Native Americans all lay behind the fashionable hat worn by Vermeer’s officer.
Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window is set in the same room. Its subject is the same woman, very possibly Vermeer’s wife, Catharina Bolnes.10 Again this apparently inward-looking, domestic scene carries the imprint of seventeenth-century global trade. On the table a Turkish rug is draped, an object far too valuable to be placed on the floor. Resting on the rug is a Chinese Kraak porcelain dish, in which an arrangement of fruit is jumbled, echoing the many pronkstilleven that were produced in the same years. The young woman’s expression leads us to imagine that the letter is from a lover far away, perhaps in a Dutch trading factory in Asia or the Americas. Vermeer is exploring the emotional phenomenon of relationships fractured by great distance.
Like most artists of his age, Vermeer remained in Europe, where his skills were valued, although in the end not enough to stave off penury. One of his late-life contemporaries, a very different type of artist, did travel abroad, and did so on the ships of the Dutch East India and West India Companies, though she was not Dutch by birth. The astounding rise of the Dutch Republic was partly made possible by the freedoms it offered its citizens, a breed of men and women who refused to bow to monarchs and were disdainful of those who did. There was freedom of religion and the freedom to trade and to travel. In 1610 the Dutch became the first people in Europe to end prosecutions for witchcraft. Accordingly the Dutch Republic thus attracted the freedom-loving and the persecuted from other states – branches of English Protestantism, Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal and their Ashkenazim co-religionists from Eastern Europe (although a great number of restrictions remained in force to limit the freedoms of Dutch Jews). The long lists of immigrants from disparate backgrounds, faiths and nations goes some way to explaining why the seventeenth century was a golden age for Dutch science and philosophy, as well as the arts.11 For women, doors that remained resolutely shut in other parts of Europe were opened, just a little, in the Dutch Republic. The belief that a woman’s sphere was the home prevailed, but Dutch women enjoyed rights their sisters elsewhere were denied. The right to inherit property was key and, as Vermeer’s paintings wonderfully demonstrate, the courtship that led to marriage had become a form of flirtatious negotiation between prospective partners, rather than a financial transaction between prospective fathers-inlaw.
One of those drawn to such new freedoms was the German-born artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, who settled in Amsterdam in 1691 with her two daughters. Merian had previously been living in a religious commune in the north of the country, part of a pious, utopian sect known as the Labadists. The commune had supported Merian as she sought to bring an unhappy marriage to an end. They also supported her work, studying the life-cycles of caterpillars and butterflies – an unusual pastime for a woman of the time. She had inherited her passion for insect life from her father, Matthäeus Merian, and acquired a love of painting from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel. While still a child growing up in Frankfurt, she learned to draw and paint in watercolours, specifically choosing that medium as women were prevented from selling paintings executed in oils in many German cities.
30. Maria Sibylla Merian's watercolour of the lifecycle and metamorphosis of the Carolina Sphinx Moth. The insect is depicted alongside the plant upon which it relies, the Peacock Flower.
Her ambition was to produce paintings and books that were simultaneously works of both science and art, and her great innovation was to paint caterpillars and butterflies alongside the plants on which their life-cycles depended, showing the symbiotic relationships in nature. Through empirical study she was one of the first to confirm that insects emerge from pupae rather than through some form of spontaneous generation, as had been previously presumed.
In Amsterdam, Maria Sibylla Merian had the freedom to run her own business, publish her books and expand her studies. She executed paintings for collectors and researchers and was granted access to Amsterdam’s scholarly elite. In those circles she was able to view the preserved animals and insects held within the cabinets of curiosities that were a feature of the homes of the wealthy and educated across Europe. Many of these creatures had been trapped in the Dutch colonies and shipped home by men working on the ships of the VOC and the Dutch West India Company. After eight years in Amsterdam, and tantalised by the prospect of studying these creatures in their natural habitat, Merian and her youngest daughter, Dorothea Maria, set sail for South America. The two women headed for the Dutch colony of Suriname on the tropical Caribbean coast, settling at a plantation on a tributary of the River Commewijne, where they began their work.
Suriname was dominated by Dutch-owned sugar plantations, and enslaved Africans from the plantations assisted the Merians in their work. To some extent they were complicit in the great sin of the Dutch Republic, but Merian learned the local creole, Negerengels (Black English), learning of their customs and traditions in the process. In the annotation to her beautiful watercolour of the peacock flower of Suriname (Poinciana pulcherrima) Merian explained that the enslaved African women of the colony used the plant to induce abortions, refusing to give birth to children destined to lives of slavery, in an act of defiance and resistance.12 Knowledge of the plants’ properties may well have been passed on to the enslaved women by women from the indigenous Amerindian peoples. Later the naturalist Hans Sloane, while working as a physician in Jamaica, learned that the enslaved women of that British slave colony used the same plant for identical reasons.
On her return to the Netherlands, Merian began to collate her research into a book, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname), which was published in 1705 to rapturous acclaim across Europe. Her reputation blossomed. In the nineteenth century, however, her work was disparaged, and her research discredited, due in part to the fact that it had been based to some extent on information gleaned from interviews with Amerindians and enslaved Africans, people deemed by nineteenth-century snobberies to be unreliable and uncivilised. It is only latterly that her place in the histories of art and science has been rediscovered and her reputation rehabilitated. In Germany, the land of her birth, Merian has appeared on postage stamps and formerly on the reverse of the 500 Deutschmark note. Her scientific work has recently been translated into multiple languages and made the subject of symposia. Her paintings have been republished in book form as well as being gathered together for exhibitions. Perhaps most significantly of all, Merian's enormously influential role in entomology and the development of scientific illustration has been posthumously recognised and celebrated.
