Rembrandt’s Rivals

The Mass Market for History Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam, 2020

Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we know and see in museums today constitute only the tip of the iceberg — the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies, is usually linked to high prices, famous painters, and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers, and consumers active in this segment to gain insight into this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price, and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?

Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 2015

The inventories of three seventeenth-century art dealers in Amsterdam containing hundreds of paintings with an average value of less than 4 guilders show a high concentration of history painting. This essay explores the mass market for history painting in Amsterdam in the Golden Age by analyzing the stocks-in-trade of three art dealers: what did the art dealers sell, and how did they manage to sell history painting at such low prices? As an example, works by Barend Jansz. Slordt, who produced history painting in large numbers for one of the art dealers, will be studied closely to acquire insight into production costs: what materials did Slordt use and what methods did he apply to paint as economically as possible?

Amsterdam University Press, 2020

Download the Introduction here! Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we know and see in museums today constitute only the tip of the iceberg — the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies, is usually linked to high prices, famous painters, and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers, and consumers active in this segment to gain insight into this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price, and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?

Exh.cat. Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges, (Agnes Ethering Art Centre, Kingston ON; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton AB; MacKenzie Gallery, Regina SK; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton ON; , 2019

Accompanying the related exhibition, Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges illuminates the early career of Rembrandt and his peers. Essays explore the artists in broader contexts, including Leiden’s historical and cultural profile, process and novelty in printmaking, the city’s art market and the history of collecting paintings by the master in Canada. The four essays, accompanied by entries on the works featured in the exhibition, offer profound insight into the motivations, aspirations and achievements of an extraordinary group of artists.

Wissenschaftliche Beibände zum Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, Vol. 32 - Part I, 385-389, 2013

Art History versus Cultural History in Museum Presentations, in: The Challenge of the Object/ Die Herausfordering des Objekts: 33d Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art/ 33. Internationaler Kunsthistoriker-Kongress/ CIHA 2012, Nuremberg, 15th-20th July 2012, red.: G. Ulrich Groβmann u. Petra Krutisch, ed. by Almuth Klein.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

We analyze the evolution of the price of paintings in the XVII century Amsterdam art market to test a hypothesis of endogenous entry: higher profitability should attract more entry of painters, which in turn should lead to artistic innovations and more intense competition. We build a price index for the representative painting inventoried in Dutch houses through hedonic regressions controlling for characteristics of the paintings (size, genre, placement in the house), the owners (job, religion, value of the collection, size of the house) and the painters. After a peak at the beginning of the century, the real price of paintings decreases until the end of the century: we provide anecdotal evidence for which high initial prices attracted entry of innovators, and econometric evidence on the causal relation between price movements and entry of painters. The time series analysis supports the idea for which increasing prices attracted entry of innovative painters. "Art likes to be near wealth so as to be maintained with rich rewards," Karel van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters (1604)

Contemporary Culture, 2013

When the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research invited me in 2006 to develop an art-science project about the commercialization of culture, I had no concrete idea what form such a collaborative project would possibly take, except that I wanted us to critically investigate the market ideology that over the last decades has infiltrated almost all aspects of everyday life in the Netherlands. From the 1990s onwards, large sectors of the welfare state system -notably health-care insurance, communication services and public transport -have been privatized. Education has yet been spared, but most schools and universities are nevertheless managed as a business and marketed as high-performance cars for top-talented students. Culture itself is increasingly supplied by (semi)private firms and appropriated by corporate capital, produced for a profit under the conditions of market exchange. In the arts, which have benefited from extensive government support since the 1950s, the Dutch have witnessed a remarkably rapid shift towards commercial practices and a discourse of cultural entrepreneurship. Artists are encouraged to turn themselves into brands in order to increase their revenue-earning capacity. Museums sell these brand names to cultural consumers and advertise the attendance figures of blockbuster shows ("over 50,000 visitors in the opening month") as if they were movie theatres operating within a Hollywood-controlled distribution system. What interests me as a social historian in this ongoing process of commercialization is its political economy. What are the underlying social dynamics and power struggles that restructure the transformation of the cultural field in the Netherlands? Does the "new order" of market economics in the non-for-profit sector challenge existing social hierarchies and power relations or does commercialization reinforce the position of the vested cultural elites? Before discussing the insights gained by our art-science exploration, which offers only the beginnings of a systemic understanding of the complex dynamics at work, let me explicate the central concerns of my research by giving a rough draft of the commercial tendencies in the not-for-profit segment of the cultural field, taking as an

Arts

This study presents a data driven comparative analysis of the painting industries in sixteenth and seventeenth century Antwerp and Amsterdam. The popular view of the development of these two artistic centers still holds that Antwerp flourished in the sixteenth century and was succeeded by Amsterdam after the former’s recapturing by the Spanish in 1585. However, a demographic analysis of the number of painters active in Antwerp and Amsterdam shows that Antwerp recovered relatively quickly after 1585 and that it remained the leading artistic center in the Low Countries, only to be surpassed by Amsterdam in the 1650’s. An analysis of migration patterns and social networks shows that painters in Antwerp formed a more cohesive group than painters in Amsterdam. As a result, the two cities responded quite differently to internal and external market shocks. Data for this study are taken from ECARTICO, a database and a linked data web resource containing structured biographical data on over ...

Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries, 2008

Collection of essays on the art market and connoisseurship in the Netherlands of the 17th century, edited by Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere