Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic

By Claudia Swan

A vivid account of Dutch seventeenth-century art and material culture against the backdrop of the geopolitics of the early modern world

The seventeenth century witnessed a great flourishing of Dutch trade and culture. Over the course of the first half of the century, the northern Netherlands secured independence from the Spanish crown, and the nascent republic sought to establish its might in global trade, often by way of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim powers. Central to the political and cultural identity of the Dutch Republic were curious foreign goods the Dutch called "rarities."

Rarities of These Lands explores how these rarities were obtained, exchanged, stolen, valued, and collected, tracing their global trajectories and considering their role within the politics of the new state. Claudia Swan’s insightful, engaging analysis offers a novel and compelling account of how the Dutch Republic turned foreign objects into expressions of its national self-conception.

Rarities of These Lands traces key elements of the formation of the Dutch Republic—artistic and colonialist ventures alike—offering new perspectives on this momentous period in the history of the Netherlands and its material culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691213521

Book preview

RARITIES

OF

THESE

LANDS

Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic

Claudia Swan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Publication is made possible in part by a gift from Elizabeth Warnock to the Department of Art History at Northwestern University.

COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket illustrations: (front) Christoffel van den Berghe, Still Life with Flowers in a Vase (detail), 1617. Oil on copper, 37.6 × 29.5 cm. Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917; and (back) Emanuel de Witte, Courtyard of the Exchange in Amsterdam (detail), 1653. Oil on panel, 47.5 × 49 cm. Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Illustrations in front matter: p. i, fig. 74; p. ii (left), fig. 31; p. ii (right), fig. 76; p. iii (left), fig. 102; p. iii (right), detail of fig. 135; pp. iv–v, fig. 51

Chapter opening illustrations: p. xxi, detail of fig. 7; p. xxii, detail of fig. 3; p. 30, detail of fig. 29; p. 58, detail of fig. 64; p. 90, detail of fig. 77; p. 118, detail of fig. 88; p. 138, detail of fig. 104; p. 162, detail of fig. 114; p. 184, detail of fig. 123; p. 212, detail of fig. 128; p. 236, detail of fig. 137

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Swan, Claudia, author.

Title: Rarities of these lands : art, trade, and diplomacy in the Dutch Republic / Claudia Swan.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020014156 | ISBN 9780691207964 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Art and society—Netherlands—History—17th century. | Art objects—Economic aspects—Netherlands—History—17th century. | Netherlands—Commerce—History—17th century. | Netherlands—Civilization.

Classification: LCC N72.S6 S93 2021 | DDC 701/.030949209032—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014156

ISBN (e-book) 9780691213521

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Designed by Jeff Wincapaw

This book has been composed in Minion Pro

for Zora, Alexander, and David,

rarities beyond compare

CONTENTS

Preface  XI

Acknowledgments  XVII

INTRODUCTION  1

1    RENOWNED EMPORIUM  31

A Farre and a Faire Prospect

Amsterdam Emporium

Allegorical Bounty

Renowned Emporia and the Stakes of Trade

2    EXOTIC FINERIES AND PRECIOUS WARES  59

Peppercorns in the Closet

The East India House

The Beurs

Various Wares

3    RARITIES  91

Goodly Dutch Cabinets and Gardens

Forms of Attention

Brinck’s Cabinet

Princely Collections

The Uses of Wonder

4    RARITIES OF THESE LANDS  119

Foreign Exchanges

Turckse Tronies

5    DIPLOMATIC ENCOUNTERS  139

The Social Lives of Diplomatic Things

Strategic Alliances

Trading in Gifts

Gifts of Rarities

Might and Value

6    BIRDS OF PARADISE FOR THE SULTAN  163

The Habsburg Record

Gifts for the Sultan

Goods and Presents

Encounter Objects

Remains of the Gift

Wonders for All the World to See

7    FOOTLESS WONDERS  185

Footless Wonders

The Golden Birds That Ever Sail the Skies

Gifts

Specimens

Emblems

Manucodiates Apodes Non Sunt

In the Kunstkammer

8    PRIZED POSSESSIONS  213

Porcelain in Paint

Trade and Taste

A Daily Increase in the Abundance of Porcelains

Fortune at Sea

Prized Possessions

CONCLUSION: SPOILS OF WAR  237

Notes  249

Bibliography  282

Index  303

Photography and Copyright Credits  314

PREFACE

This book began in wonder. Many years ago, in the reference stacks in Special Collections at the University of Amsterdam Library, I happened on an article in an early volume of the journal Oud Holland, founded in the final decades of the nineteenth century by Dutch archivists. The article Een Vorstelijk Geschenk (A princely gift) by the chief archivist of Amsterdam Nicolaas de Roever is a lively account of the Dutch state gift presented to the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I in Constantinople in 1612–1613. The array of goods included in that gift, purchased and commissioned in Amsterdam and Haarlem by the Dutch, is astonishing.

But wealth was not the wonder. After all, when the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) was established in 1602, nearly 6.5 million guilders were invested in the six chambers, or municipal headquarters: Amsterdam, Middelburg, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn, and Rotterdam. Given the ample capital in circulation at the time in the northern Netherlands, it was not surprising to read that the States General—the governing body of the United Provinces—had invested between 20,000 and 30,000 guilders in thanking the sultan for trade privileges in Ottoman ports around the Mediterranean and at Istanbul. Many of the goods, so bounteous they filled an entire cargo ship, were fine Dutch products: textiles, tapestries, prints, and cheese. The presence of Edam cheese (more than 3,000 pounds of it) alongside the costly wares seemed peculiar, but plausible in the context of a grand gesture of self-representation on the part of the nascent state. Stuffed birds of paradise from the Spice Islands, porcelain from China, and Asian lacquerware were also transported to Constantinople in substantial quantities, in a Dutch twist on bringing coals to Newcastle. Why, I wondered, provide precious goods from the East to the Ottoman sultan? Who did the Dutch think they were? At least against the backdrop of modern conceptions of Dutchness, most of them the product of nineteenth-century nationalistic historiography, the image of the nascent republic being deeply invested in foreign wares other than porcelain struck no chord—not to mention how odd it seemed to me then that Dutch statesmen at the dawn of the seventeenth century were negotiating with the Ottoman court.

The research that had taken me to the reference stacks had little to do with trade and geopolitics in the Dutch Republic, let alone engagement with worldly goods and powers. A decade ago, I set out to write about collections in early modern Holland. From the outset, however, I found myself returning to the Dutch state gift to the sultan, which I construed as a sort of Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, a stunning accumulation of worldly wonders, set sail for political use. In the Nationaal Archief in The Hague I examined receipts for payments to shopkeepers, merchants, jewelers, and craftswomen and men, compelled to follow the line of inquiry inspired by my initial encounter with de Roever’s article: What was the significance of the Dutch state representing itself in the early modern geopolitical sphere as source and master of foreign goods? What was the status of such wares, referred to as rarities? What were the stakes of trade in rarities? The Dutch were latecomers to trade in the East Indies, where they competed with the Iberian Union, their primary European enemy. How did the Dutch engage with Islamic rulers in and around the Indonesian archipelago and in the Ottoman world? How exotic was the Dutch Republic? These questions—about artists and rarities, about piracy and statecraft, about the status of birds of paradise as an exemplary rarity, about taste and consumption of foreign luxury goods such as porcelain—structured my research and inspired me to write this book. Keen readers may already wonder about the term exotic, which is saturated with Orientalist connotations. I use it in the literal sense of foreign (from the Greek, ἐξωτικός, from the outside) as it was used in the early modern era, and explore its meaning over time and numerous instances. A principal aim of this book is to explicate the exotic and associated terms, especially rarities, in the early modern Dutch orbit.

Over the past decades, the study of early modern European art history has shifted in orientation to the global, and recent scholarship offers a bracing wealth of approaches to the cultural and political stakes of the circulation and exchange. So much engaging and expansive work on the processes of mediation, negotiation, entanglement, and intersection that structured the early modern world has offered ongoing inspiration, and the wealth of scholarly resources preserved in archives, libraries, and museums continues to feed my curiosity. Initially, my horizon was limited to collecting and the accumulation of worldly goods in the Netherlands; what emerged, however, was a view of the Dutch in the world that, in its political and conceptual frameworks, does not adhere to conventional notions of taste and consumption, where collections of pictures and goods are seen as commemorating wealth and celebrating individual achievement. In other words, the more I studied the acquisition and exchange of rarities in the Dutch orbit, the more challenging it became to assess the values associated with them in a political vacuum. The traffic of worldly goods by the Dutch along Eurasian trade routes in the formative years of the Dutch Republic became my driving interest, especially where that movement involved scholars, artists, poets, statesmen, pirates, merchants, scribes, sultans, and students of the natural world. The dynamics of acquisition and the efforts involved in exchange were often fraught and sometimes violent: in the early modern Dutch orbit as in many others, taste and consumption were by-products of access and power; they are integrally related, and politically contingent.

Rarities of These Lands is intended to offer a novel, compelling account of the entanglement of material culture and politics in the first half of the seventeenth century by examining the role that rarities of these lands played in the formative years of the Dutch Republic. Drawing on early modern art history, cultural and material history, the history of science, and maritime and diplomatic history, this book excavates and analyzes networks of objects and people as they moved east and west in the first half of the seventeenth century, and it assesses the role of rarities in self-conceptions and international perceptions of the fledgling Dutch Republic. The foreign or, literally, exotic objects the Dutch imported, collected, exchanged, presented, and represented in the early years of the Republic, and modes of response to those objects, played a critical role in the developments in trade, international relations, science, and the arts through which the Dutch Republic made itself known.

This book offers an episodic account of the role that rarities played in the formation of the Dutch Republic; chronologically, it is concerned with the period of time leading up to the official recognition of the United Provinces as a sovereign state in 1648. In describing and analyzing moments of contact between the Dutch and foreign people and things, I show how outlandish wares were obtained, exchanged, and valued, tracing rarities along their global trajectories and considering their role within the politics and the formation of the new state. I rely on a variety of sources, including travelogues and memoranda; contemporary chronicles and private journals; pamphlets and broadsheets; natural history publications and poetry; auction records and inventories; and prints, paintings, doll-houses, and other artifacts. These sources give voice to Dutch pursuit of and interest in foreign wares and shed light on what was far from frictionless cultural exchange.

While readers interested in neat stratagems or streamlined theoretical coordinates to map early modern worldly goods may need to look outside this book, two principal concepts or dynamics animate many of the chapters: compilation and translation. This is a book sprung from wonder and populated by lists: compilations of words that echo or record the accumulations of goods that made Dutch trade; the assemblages of objects that form collections; verbal tabulations of wares on the marketplace; inventories of worldly possessions; and pictures of goods gathered in homes, in gardens, and in bouquets. Compilation, seen as a process of accumulation, requires access and power. It is asymmetrical, and it depends on and generates status. While compilations involve selection and thus imply order, the acquisition of worldly goods was driven not so much by will as by fortune and politics.

Translation is a fascinating process, and important as a lens through which to consider the forms of engagement, exchange, and misprision that animated early modern Dutch encounters. Necessary for any negotiation, linguistic translation was practiced widely in the Netherlands and abroad; Arabic learning at home enabled the Dutch to communicate at home with visitors from the Islamic world—emissaries and travelers and merchants—and also abroad. The first foreign guide to the Malay language was written at the dawn of the seventeenth century by a Dutch merchant voyager. Translation, where based on a desire to understand and be understood, presupposes legibility. But communication or movement from one language or culture or place to another is shot through with interest and, often, preconceptions; it can be fraught and messy.

1. Rembrandt van Rijn, Man in Oriental Clothing, signed and dated Rembrandt f 1635. Oil on panel, 72 × 54.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3340.

The instability of translation and the drive to compile figured prominently in Dutch efforts to make their place in the world in the early modern era. Where they succeeded, they did so by political and often violent means, and mostly at sea, a site of negotiation and mediation where compilation and translation were tested. Dutch fortunes at sea made for a republic of rarities.

In 2013, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam reopened after an epic ten-year renovation, and posters around the city welcomed the public back to the national museum. To make the message global, the posters bore the word welcome, variously translated, printed on excerpts from works of art in the collection. A cropped version of the painting Man in Oriental Clothing by Rembrandt van Rijn bore the Arabic word for welcome (figures 1 and 2).¹ The conceit is clear: the man’s turban makes him a credible intermediary for Arabic-speaking lands. But the face is that of a Dutchman, and the picture is a type known as a Turkish tronie, or head study, that Rembrandt’s contemporaries recognized as the coupling of the indigenous and the exotic. Rembrandt’s Arabic-speaking emissary of the Rijksmuseum embodies the conjunction of the familiar and the unknown in Dutch culture of the first half of the seventeenth century. That entanglement is what initially piqued my curiosity about the Dutch gift to the Ottoman sultan, and it is the subject of what follows.

2. Tram stop, Hobbemastraat, Amsterdam, with The Rijksmuseum in the background, April 2013. Photo by author.

This book examines the conditions under which artists such as Rembrandt responded to foreign images, objects, and media, and the consumption of rarities at a time when trade and political interests were enmeshed. The place of Amsterdam within the global circulation of goods is the subject of chapter 1, Renowned Emporium. In image and text, the Dutch laid claim to (foreign) rarities and to being the merchants of rarities par excellence. Especially in the initial decades of the century, the dynamics of trade were considerably more complex than the topoi that structure so many pictures and so many accounts of the Dutch world would suggest, and the opening chapter explores how those representations paper over the struggle that efforts at dominance in global commerce entailed. Chapter 2 opens by demonstrating that, pictorial evidence of seventeenth-century Dutch art notwithstanding, many Dutch homes contained copious non-domestic goods. Amsterdam became a hub for such fineries, proudly displayed at the East India House and traded at and around the Exchange. This chapter explores the availability of exotic fineries and precious wares in the Netherlands, on the market and to buyers of various stripes, tracing how they were traded and by whom. Chapter 3 follows the vectors of trade by which exotic wares arrived in the Netherlands and were channeled into collections, and it reconstructs where rarities were bought and sold and by whom they were collected and how. This chapter moves from Amsterdam emporium into pharmacists’ cabinets, tracing patterns of commerce and the practices of collecting. Rarities were celebrated and put on display, exchanged as diplomatic gifts, and squirreled away in private cabinets for contemplation and recreation, and this chapter offers a bird’s-eye-view of the Dutch in action providing, procuring, and safeguarding them.

Chapter 4 examines encounters by the Dutch at home and abroad with foreigners in turbans, especially in the context of diplomacy and diplomatic missions, and considers how images of such figures relate to actual, lived experience. Rarities were exchanged between the Dutch and other state powers on numerous occasions in the opening decades of the seventeenth century: the Dutch sent precious wares abroad and when, as happened in 1602, emissaries of the sultan of Aceh traveled to the Netherlands, they brought exotica. This chapter contributes to recent scholarship on early modern Dutch encounters in Asia that demonstrate the complexity of diplomatic practices, and the role of material goods in shaping those encounters. Chapter 5 describes the role of curious, rare, and foreign objects in Dutch diplomatic relations across the map in the first decades of the seventeenth century, when the emergent nation was taking shape. Gifts and trade goods were, I suggest, interchangeable in the early modern negotiations by which the nascent Dutch state made itself known. The example of the 1612–1613 gift to the Ottoman sultan, the subject of chapter 6, demonstrates the usefulness of rarities in negotiating trade relations. This Dutch gift adds valuable data to the history of trade, material culture, art, and power in the Netherlands. It is also a signal instance of the social lives of diplomatic objects. The Dutch gift was many things, and the gesture of self-representation in a political sphere by way of material culture may, chapter 6 suggests by inquiring into the rhetoric of the gift, have been a one-way encounter. One of the rarities presented to Sultan Ahmed I was the stuffed bird of paradise, ornithological specimens transported from their native habitat New Guinea. Taking a deep dive into the early modern natural history, art history, and social history of these extraordinary specimens, chapter 7 assesses how these footless wonders traversed these various domains and forms of attention, and how their value as commodities was related to their value as natural historical specimens.

In the early years of the VOC, commerce was as likely to require diplomacy as to give rise to acts of war. The Dutch captured numerous Portuguese trade vessels, in some cases securing valuable goods by way of looting rather than anything approximating fair trade. The final chapter focuses on porcelain and its value in the early years of the century, as well as on the complex political and legal negotiations concerning piracy and the initial arrival of the sorts of rarities that the Dutch would soon make their own. And finally, in the light of Dutch trade, war, and statecraft in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Conclusion offers a reading of iterations of the cultural and political commitment to the spoils of war—especially rarities—at the time of the formation of the Dutch Republic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was written over a period of many years and in many places, in conversation with numerous inspiring colleagues and wonderful friends, and with the generous support of several institutions. I feel especially fortunate to enjoy and to be able to cite so many overlapping friendships and scholarly relations: these acknowledgments only begin to suggest how grateful I am for the support I have received from and the scholarly interest and affection I am honored to share with so many of those named here.

In 2010–2011, as a fellow in residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, I began the research that prompted this study. I remain grateful for the support of and resources at NIAS, where I returned briefly in 2017 as a fellow in The Making of a Knowledge Society research group, and for the inspiration of scholars and friends there, especially Inger Leemans, Ulinka Rublack, and Tommy Wieringa. I spent joyful hours in Holland discussing matters raised here in the summer of 2011 with Anne Goldgar, to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for helping me navigate the worlds of commerce and art at hand, and for introducing me to a fellow traveler and friend, Marika Keblusek. In the Netherlands in 2010–2011 and subsequently, Paul Bakker, Frans Blom, Marten Jan Bok, Stijn Bussels, Lieke van Deinsen, Bas Dudok van Heel, Caroline van Eck, Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Esther van Gelder, Maartje van Gelder, Lia van Gemert, Emilie Gordenker, Anna Grasskamp, Hanneke Grootenboer, Jasper Hillegen, Jan de Hond, Eric Jorink, Elmer Kolfin, Huigen Leeflang, Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, Christoph Lüthy, Hans Mulder, Willemijn van Noord, Merlijn Olnon, Ella Reitsma, Marrigje Rikken, Lissa Roberts, Marijn Schapelhouman, Gary and Loekie Schwartz, Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Eric Jan Sluijter, Paul Smith, Hans Theunissen, Jaap van der Veen, Kees Zandvliet, and Huib Zuidervaart have offered valuable feedback and great kindness, for which I am deeply thankful. I am grateful to the staffs of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Mauritshuis Museum, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, and the National Archive; in The Hague, Marie-Christine Engels, Diederick Kortlang, and Ad Leerintveld offered their assistance at critical junctures. At the Rijksmuseum, the staff of the Prentenkabinet and the library, especially Marja Stijkel and Leon Vosters, have been unfailingly resourceful and supportive. Ongoing conversations with many of the curators and other staff of the museum have enlivened my work, and I am grateful. The Rijksmuseum’s generous policy of providing digital images freely has been a boon to scholarship, and for that I am thankful too. I am also grateful to the staffs of the University of Amsterdam Library, Leiden University Library, and Utrecht University Library. In addition to being a kind friend, Roelof van Gelder has offered his encouragement throughout my research, and I hope not to fall terribly short of the standard he and Ellinoor Bergvelt, Renée Kistemaker, Jaap van der Veen, and the late Jan van der Waals set in their groundbreaking exhibition and essays, De wereld binnen handbereik. To Henk Hovenkamp, my lasting thanks for welcoming me to the Streekarchivariaat Noordwest-Veluwe in Harderwijk and for his good-humored commitment to making the legacy of Ernst Brinck accessible.

With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2011, I traveled to Istanbul in search of traces of Dutch exchanges with the Ottoman court. I was warmly received, encouraged, and inspired by my dear friend, a scholar in his own right, Ömer Koç. My gratitude to him is infinite. Through him, I met Günhan Börekçi, Ilber Ortayli, and Lucienne Thys-Senocak in Istanbul, and Alexander de Groot in Holland; I remain grateful for their time and interest.

It was an honor to spend 2013–2014 as a Senior Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I am grateful to Sven Dupré for welcoming me to the research group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe and extend profound thanks to Lorraine Daston, director emerita of Abteilung II, for her support and her incisive, gracious, and inspiring feedback. The library staff of the MPI went above and beyond the call of duty to assist me in procuring materials, and I thank them for their efforts. In Berlin and beyond, my conversations with Robert Felfe, Mechtild Fend, Nikola Irmer, Stephanie Leitch, Karin Leonhard, Marisa Mandabach, Anna McSweeney, Katharine Park, Claudia Stein, and Fernando Vidal have inspired me, and I thank them all warmly. For the opportunity to present my research to the research group Naturbilder / Images of Nature in the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar at Hamburg, I am grateful to Frank Fehrenbach and to the participants for their rich feedback. In London, where I have spent many fruitful hours in the British Museum and am honored to have lectured on my research at the German Historical Institute, the Department of Art History, University College London, and the Institute for Historical Research, King’s College, London, I have enjoyed especially fruitful exchanges with Arndt Brendecke, Anne Goldgar, Benjamin Kaplan, Mark McDonald, Sheila McTighe, Rose Marie San Juan, Frederic Schwartz, Joanna Woodall, and Zoltán Biedermann. A conference on Global Commodities at Warwick University organized by Giorgio Riello and Anne Gerritsen enabled inspiring discussions with Adam Clulow, Michael North, and Timon Screech. Presenting my research as a Senior Fellow at CRASSH and, subsequently, in the Early Modern World History Seminar at Cambridge University was an honor, and I thank Alexander Marr and Ulinka Rublack for those opportunities and the exchanges they enabled. Discussions there with Sachiko Kusukawa, José Ramon Marcaida, Jean Michel Massing, and David Zagoury are enduring sources of inspiration. Over the past decade, I have benefited from meaningful exchanges with several Swiss colleagues, who have invited me to give talks and to publish my research, including Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Bettina Gockel, Christine Göttler, Axel Langer, Achatz von Muller, and Steffen Zierholz. I am honored and grateful to consider Christine Göttler a friend. Closer to home, the Departments of Art History at Carleton College, Case Western Reserve University, University of Iowa, The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Minnesota, and Tufts University have invited me to present elements of my research, and I have benefited from and am grateful for feedback from those audiences and the generous scholars who hosted me: Jessica Keating, Erin Benay and Catherine Scallen, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Mitch Merback, JB Shank, and Christina Maranci and Andrew McLellan. I have given related talks by invitation at University of California, Riverside; the Getty Museum; the Getty Research Institute; the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Those too were wonderful opportunities to receive feedback, not least from the generous colleagues and friends who welcomed me, Jeannette Kohl, Daniela Bleichmar, Susan Dackerman, Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Meredith Martin, Stephanie Schrader, Maureen Warren, Ronni Baer, and Karina Corrigan.

Along the way, numerous other scholars have supported and inspired me, and I thank them warmly: Anne Applebaum, Jens Baumgarten, Sinem Casale, Huey Copeland, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Carlo Ginzburg, Anthony Grafton, Ann Gunter, Erma Hermens, Angela Ho, Matthew Hunter, Koenraad Jonckheere, Menno Jonker, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Elsje van Kessel, Antien Knaap, Susan Koslow, Victoria Sancho Lobis, Dániel Margóscy, Lia Markey, Gülru Necipoğlu, Steve Nelson, Willemijn van Noord, Joanne Pillsbury, Marlise Rijks, Dawn Odell, Christoph Sander, Larry Silver, Pamela Smith, Ronny Spaans, Angela Vanhaelen, Mariët Westermann, Thijs Weststeijn, Bronwen Wilson, Ria Winters, and Rebecca Zorach.

Throughout the research and writing of this book, the department of Art History at Northwestern University, my institutional home, has been supportive of my efforts in material and immaterial ways. I am grateful for the award of Faculty Research Grants to support travel and research expenses, and to Elizabeth Warnock for her gift to the department that has helped to support the publication of this volume. I thank my colleagues in the department and beyond, especially Ken Alder, Christine Froula, Larry Lipking, Helen Tilley, and the reading group on Early Modern Worlds members Lydia Barnett, Rajeev Kinra, Michelle Molina, Will West, and Rebecca Zorach for offering a sense of local community. Members of the Northwestern University library staff Nicole Finzer, Scott Krafft, and Perry Nigro have been unremittingly helpful; without the support of Mel Keiser and Mary Clare Meyer, I would be lost. For their technical assistance with elements of the manuscript, special thanks to Max Alison, Elliott Hartman, and, again, Perry Nigro. It has been a privilege and a joy to share my research with my students at all levels. I thank by name the graduate students in conversation with whom elements of my work have or should have improved: Olivia Dill, Laurel Garber, Stephanie Glickman, Jessica Keating, Carmen Niekrasz, Catherine Powell, Sandra Racek, Arianna Ray, and Maureen Warren. Many others have contributed to making teaching these materials so rewarding.

I am honored to work with the marvelous Michelle Komie at Princeton University Press, who has made the process of bringing this book to fruition a pleasure at every step, and grateful too to Mark Bellis, Cynthia Buck, Kenneth Guay, Steven Sears, and Blythe Woolston for their excellent assistance.

A number of close friends have witnessed and supported all stages of the production of this book, and my thanks to them here only begin to speak for how grateful I am. They are Annemarie and Jankees Beijderwellen, Edith van Berkel, Frank and the late Margaretha van Beuningen, Bart Daniëls and Annette Sanders, David Freedberg, Thea Goodman and Eric Oliver, Emilie Gordenker and Michiel Scherpenhuijsen-Rom, Eli Gottlieb, Jessica Keating, Nina Joy Lichtenstein, Sarah McPhee, Peter and Linda Parshall, Patrick and Monique de Koster-van Rijckevorsel, Stephanie Schrader, and Andrew Solomon and John Habich. Andrew, whose friendship I cherish beyond words, read every word, lovingly, as did my father, Jon Swan. Together, my parents have supported my efforts at every step, and even contributed a translation to the text. My family near and far has patiently borne with me throughout the process of this book, and I thank my sisters Anna and Izette Swan, my mother Marianne, and my father again, from the bottom of my heart. My Dutch family of Hamakers was not surprised when I encountered a relative in the course of reading Hugo Grotius, because one is bound to run into kin in a country so small. For all the happy encounters with family and friends who are like family too, I am deeply grateful. It is to those closest to me, who have accompanied me near and far, and at breakfast throughout—my husband David and our children Zora and Alexander—to whom this book is dedicated, in loving gratitude.

Portions of this book have appeared in earlier versions, adapted and revised here. These include parts of chapter 2, first published in Lost in Translation: Exoticism in Early Modern Holland, in Art in Iran and Europe in the 17th Century: Exchange and Reception, edited by Axel Langer (Museum Rietberg, Zurich, CH, 2013); chapter 5, which is related to Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyten: Episodes in the History of Material Culture of the Dutch Republic, in Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, eds. Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); chapter 6, an earlier version of which appeared as Exotica on the Move: Birds of Paradise in Early Modern Holland, Art History, vol. 38, 4 (September 2015), Early Modern Objects in Motion, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin; and chapter 8, as Fortunes at Sea. Mediated Goods and Dutch Trade Ca. 1600, in Sites of Mediation, eds. Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2016). I am grateful to Museum Rietberg, Cambridge University Press, the Association of Art History, and Brill for permission to reproduce that material here. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own, as are all shortcomings and errors.

INTRODUCTION

A large picture painted by Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom in 1599, The Return of the Second Expedition to the East Indies, all sky, sail, and harbor, heralded a new era in the Dutch world (figure 3). Against the background of the misty forms of the signature steeples and towers of Amsterdam, four towering three-masted ships are swarmed by a flotilla of smaller vessels. On the day depicted, 19 July 1599, church bells rang out and shots were fired in celebration of the return of the second Dutch fleet to the East, and the first considered a success.¹ In the painting, the weather is glorious, with just enough of a breeze for a show of Dutch colors in the many flags and pennants. Boats fill the harbor, some carrying elegant parties and others bearing drunken onlookers. An inscription on the frame declares that the Mauritius, the Holland, the Overijssel, and the Vriesland, vessels named for the Stadholder Prince Maurits of Nassau (in office 1585–1625) and for three of the northern provinces of the Netherlands, had sailed to Bantam to obtain spices. In the early modern era, Bantam, on Java Island, was the site of one of the principal markets for wares exchanged via robust intra-Asian network trade; to a Dutch audience at the dawn of the seventeenth century, Bantam signaled the East and its wares.

The Portuguese had dominated trade routes to and trade in Southeast Asia from the beginning of the sixteenth century, but the dawn of the seventeenth broke with the Dutch giving the Iberian powers Portugal and Spain, then under a single crown, a run for their money in the pursuit of spices and other valuable goods from the East Indies.² Having planted trade, the inscription on the frame of the Vroom painting states, these vessels returned richly to Amsterdam the nineteenth of July 1599.³ Although it took some time before the Dutch actually established themselves in the East, great numbers of Dutch fleets would return in the course of the subsequent century, many of them richly, from the East and West Indies, and the spoils of Dutch overseas trade would shape the cultural horizon of the provinces on the shores of the North Sea to which they were returned.

During the reign of King Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–1598) and Portugal (ruled 1581–1598), the persecution of Protestants in the southern Spanish Netherlands, also called the obedient provinces, resulted in waves of emigration from the south to the north, which brought along considerable wealth and skill.⁴ The 1581 Act of Abjuration declared independence from Spanish rule on the part of the northern provinces bound by the Union of Utrecht, but the king did not acknowledge it. The northern States General, a governing body of representatives of the provinces established in the fifteenth century, then displaced the monarch, initiating the Dutch Republic. Self-governance enabled mercantile ambitions, especially after 1594, when Philip II closed the port of Lisbon to Dutch merchants, prompting the Dutch to seek direct access to trade goods abroad. Over the course of the Eighty Years’ War, between 1566 and 1648, the provinces of the northern Netherlands fought for their sovereignty, which, though declared in 1581, was not officially recognized by Spain until 1648, in the Treaty of Münster. This book focuses on the first half of the seventeenth century, when the nascent republic took form in the crucible of global trade and politics.⁵

3. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, Return of the Second Voyage to the East Indies, under the Direction of Jacob van Neck, the Mauritius, Hollant, Overijssel en Vrieslant, 1599. Oil on panel, 102.3 × 218.4 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-2858.

Trade in the early years of the struggle for independence was conducted abroad in Asia, the East Indies, India, Africa, North America, and the West Indies and involved fierce competition with the Portuguese and Spanish. Political motivations underwrote trade initiatives, which in turn shaped the nation in formation. The new republic came into being alongside the establishment of its joint-stock companies: the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) and the West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, or WIC).⁶ The ships Vroom depicted in 1599 carried over half a million pounds of pepper and hundreds of thousands of pounds of cloves in addition to mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon; returns on investments in that fleet alone have been estimated to be as high as 265 percent.⁷ As Spain and Portugal were well established abroad by the time the Dutch ventured overseas in pursuit of profit, their encounters with these European powers were often violent. In Vroom’s painting, two principal types of three-masted cargo ships are shown, both of which were essential to the VOC: the East Indiaman (in Dutch, spiegelretourschip, or simply retourschip), with a characteristic flat transom, and the smaller, rounder flute ship (fluitschip, or fluit). The ships that made the return voyage were often heavily armed; it looks as if cannons on the fluit at the right have been fired in celebration (see figure 3; compare figure 104). The dividing line between trade and war was fragile and explosive.⁸ The aim of this book is to show that the formation of the Dutch Republic, recognized as a sovereign state in 1648, was shaped by trade in, consumption of, and profit from those foreign goods known, cherished, and exchanged as rarities, and to show how paintings, prints, and other artworks supported Dutch claims to ascendancy in the commerce of rarities and dominion over them.

Global trade made Dutch merchants rich and Amsterdam, the foremost city in the Netherlands, into the European port of entry for novel commodities. Porcelain was the most voluminous import from the East, but the trade in pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and mace exceeded it in profitability. Surviving records show that when the VOC ship Hollandia returned from Batavia (present-day Jakarta), the VOC’s administrative headquarters, in 1627, as much as 70 percent of its cargo was pepper; it also carried other spices, silk, and miscellanea, including porcelain, precious stones, and musk. These proportions are considered representative for the era. Like most VOC vessels, the East Indiaman Hollandia was loaded for the return voyage with items sourced from a variety of points of origin and markets in the East. Pepper was transported from Borneo Island, Sumatra (one of the Sunda Islands), and present-day Thailand; nutmeg and mace came from the Banda Islands; and cloves were brought to Batavia from Ambon. The Hollandia also transported baled Persian silk, Chinese silk from Taiwan, Japanese copper, saltpeter from the Coromandel Coast, precious stones and musk from Borneo, ginger, and captured porcelain.⁹ To historians of art and material culture, porcelain is the most familiar of an array of trade goods that became available during the first half of the seventeenth century (figure 4; see figures 128–30). Its impact is also written into the establishment of the delftware industry, which continues to this day to produce earthenware in emulation of the foreign forms (figure 5).¹⁰ Current estimates hold that by 1650 the VOC had transported to Europe in excess of three million pieces of Chinese porcelain, a great portion of it captured from the Portuguese, as in the case of the Hollandia.¹¹ The familiarity of porcelain, or of tulips—which would not be imported to western Europe until the later sixteenth century but have since become the stereotypical Dutch flower—makes it easy to overlook how shot through with foreign rarities the Dutch Republic was at the time of its emergence.

The VOC merchant and official Jacques Specx, who established the Dutch trading post at Hirado in 1609 and later served as governor-general of the East Indies, retired from the company in 1632.¹² He settled in Amsterdam and lived out his life in a fine house on the Keizersgracht, serving in the last decade of his life as a member of the board of directors of the West India Company. An inventory drawn up after his death in 1652 attests to his substantial wealth. Specx owned a remarkable number of fine things, from jewels of various kinds and copious silverware to the sorts of geographical and nautical images and objects one might associate with his career in the East: a chest filled with maps and drawings of the Indies, maps of Banda and Ambon, a map of Banda-Neira, globes, telescopes—and lacquerware. The substantial number of paintings he left behind is occasionally noted, but scant attention has been paid to the rest of his worldly goods. No fewer than five of the more than eighty artworks listed in the 1652 inventory were attributed to Rembrandt van Rijn, including paintings since identified as portraits of Specx’s brother-in-law Philips Lucasz (1635, National Gallery, London) and his wife Petronella Buys (1635, Leiden Collection, New York), The Abduction of Europa (1632, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), and Christ on the Sea of Galilee (1633, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). In addition, Specx owned landscapes, portraits, and still life paintings credited to Ambrosius Bosschaert, Gerard ter Borch, Govert Flinck, Hendrick Goltzius, Salomon van Ruysdael, and other illustrious artists of the time. But there was more.

4. Dutch school, Domestic Interior with a Family Receiving Visitors, c. 1630. Oil on panel, 86 × 118 cm. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, Dépôt de la Fondation Lucien Baszanger, Genève, 1967, inv. no. BASZ 0005.

While Specx’s many paintings exemplify the translation of profit earned in overseas trade into local commodities, his taste ran further afield. In addition to works by Dutch artists whose names populate textbook surveys of the era Specx owned three large paintings, Chinese.¹³ Distributed over a number of rooms in the house were no fewer than five hundred pieces of porcelain, including porcelain vessels set in silver, numerous pieces of lacquerware, Japanese and Javanese weapons, Turkish carpets, and at least three Japanese robes. Although it is not difficult to imagine Specx at his ease among his precious Asian furnishings, the image of a retired VOC official in a Japanese robe gazing at a Rembrandt painting such as Christ on the Sea of Galilee is worth lingering over.¹⁴ Wealth derived from foreign trade nourished patterns of consumption familiar to art historians of the era: Specx’s disposable income enabled him to acquire works by some of the most renowned artists of the time. Though overshadowed by conventional conceptions of Dutch aesthetics as focused on local artifacts, the history of investment in the aesthetics of the foreign or exotic and rare is key: in the seventeenth century, trade and taste were patently intertwined.

5. Earthenware cup, c. 1660–1670. Delft faience in imitation of Chinese, with false date of 1581. 15. 5 cm (h). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, BK-NM-11091.

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie was officially established in 1602 with the support of the representative assembly of the provinces and governing body of the nascent republic, the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Stadholder Prince Maurits of Nassau (figure 6), who assumed power when his father, William I, Prince of Orange, was assassinated in 1584. The VOC incorporated private consortiums (voorcompagnieën, or precursor companies) that outfitted individual fleets, such as the one pictured by Vroom, entailing very high risks. The VOC consisted of and was supported by six chambers (Amsterdam, Middelburg, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn, and Rotterdam), each of which delegated members to the oversight committee of seventeen board members known as the Heren XVII (Gentlemen Seventeen). From the time of the initial charter in 1602 through consecutive renewals to the end of the eighteenth century, officers of the VOC were granted diplomatic, military, and judicial powers to operate abroad on behalf of the States General. Their territorial and trade priority was the Indonesian archipelago, the source of spices, the most valuable commodities, and no other Dutch vessel was permitted to sail east of the Cape of Good Hope or through the Strait of Magellan.

From the get-go, printed illustrated accounts describing Dutch expeditions spread the word about these faraway pursuits and the fruits of investment in them. Widespread interest was sparked by the publication in 1596 of Itinerario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert (Itinerary: Voyage or Navigation) by Jan Huygen van Linschoten, also known as the Dutch Magellan.¹⁵ A northern Netherlandish merchant who worked for a time in Spain and served the Archbishop of Goa, Vicente da Fonseca, from 1583 to 1588, van Linschoten authored two accounts of travel and trade in East Asia, the Reys-Gheschrift (1595) and the widely read Itinerario (1596), and a less well known account of trade along the western coast of Africa and in Brazil, the Beschryvinghe (1596), published following his return to the Netherlands in 1592.

6. Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt, Portrait of Maurits, Prince of Orange, c. 1613–1620. Oil on panel, 220.3 × 143.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-255.

The Itinerario was almost immediately translated into English (1598), German (1598–1600), Latin (1599), and French (1610). The text describes coastal terrain from Mozambique to Japan and contains a wealth of information about trade throughout East Asia, including sea charts and nautical data that van Linschoten gathered in the employ of the Portuguese.¹⁶ It holds out the promise of wondrous, valuable goods available in the regions described, even as it delineates the scope and coordinates of the Portuguese hold on local trade. The chapter Of the Iland[s] of Maluco opens with the names of the Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) and the efforts of the Spanish, prior to the Treaty of Tordesillas, to have traffique there; then it describes local produce, the availability of cloves, and birds of paradise.¹⁷ The 1598 English translation of the Itinerario recommends itself as A Worke assuredly very profitable, and commodious for all such as are desirous & curious louers of Nouelties, holding out the promise for the Dutch of outdoing the Portuguese in the Indies, where trade was very fruitfull, and yeelding such treasure and rich Merchandize, as none other place of the whole world can afford.¹⁸ In 1604, the Amsterdam publisher and print seller Cornelis Claesz printed the illustrations to the Itinerario with brief accompanying texts as the Icones, habitus gestusque Indorum ac Lusitanorum per Indiam viventium (Pictures of the clothes and customs of the Indians and Portuguese living in the Indies).¹⁹ While the descriptions and depictions of local populations, customs, costumes, and markets amount to a form of chorography consistent with the example of sixteenth-century atlases issued in Antwerp, it would be an error to overlook the core mission of the van Linschoten’s publications: to promote traffic and trade in pursuit of profit.

Like van Linschoten, the