Front matter & introduction
[ii]
MUSEUMS OF HOLLAND
AMSTERDAM
and
THE HAGUE
[iii]
In this publication I write the names of Dutch artists, which are usually disfigured in all French publications, following Dutch spelling and as the artists themselves sign their works.1
This onomatographic2 correction is useful, not only to facilitate historical research, but also to establish the authenticity of paintings. Surely a lover of Dutch painting who has always seen written Cuyp, Dow, Metzu, etc. should not be confused for paintings signed Cuijp, Dov, Metsu, etc., and think that these signatures are apocryphal?
Why distort first names? Why should someone signing with W, the initial of William, be called Guillaume?
This reform can hardly be applied to Italians naturalized as French citizens, but it is quite possible with the artists of the northern schools of painting.
Paris. – Imprimerie de P.– A. Bourdier et Cie, 30, rue Mazarine.
[iv]
MUSEUMS OF HOLLAND
AMSTERDAM
AND
THE HAGUE
STUDIES ON THE DUTCH SCHOOL
BY
W. BURGER
PARIS
VE JULES RENOUARD, LIBRAIRE-ÉDITEUR
6, RUE DE TOURNON
IN BRUSSELS, WITH FERDINAND CLAASSEN
88, RUE DE LA MADELEINE
1858
All rights reserved
[v] INTRODUCTION.
The art history of Italy is rather well known. The Italian school of painting attracted the attention, admiration and even imitation of all of Europe. For three centuries it has been studied by historians, critics, travelers, and writers of survey works.3 Italy is the mother – the alma mater – of all nations with Latin civilization, and of France in particular. To Italy the south and west of Europe owe not only their art, but also their literature, their science, their philosophy, their religion and even their politics.4 The origins of all these fields are in Italy; both if we rely on our feelings and our minds, we must delve into this brilliant and fertile society, a society that still lives on, barely transformed, in modern European countries.
Thus, it came about, strangely enough! that, until recently, every people, even those of Germanic origin, were much better informed about the ...
vi INTRODUCTION.
... Italian than of their own tradition.5 In France we know the Italian xvith century by heart, we know names and dates, biographies, and iconography, but we would have problems if we wanted to write the history of the artists and masterpieces of the French Renaissance.6
In France recently, admittedly, there are people with a passion for old papers. They are collecting, classifying, comparing, and interpreting all the documents that can help recover an almost lost history. Which they will find. And after these pickers will come the florists.7
In the North, we see the same studious tendency. Everyday Hollanders and Belgians discover interesting traces of the past in archives and libraries!8
Germany was the first country where this pious and patient way of digging out precursors was exemplarily practiced. When the Boisserée brothers9 had brought the old northern schools back into the limelight with their collection, Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe himself, and most German scholars, in spite of the then general enthusiasm in Germany for the Greek and Roman traditions, began to restore their great native artists, who had fallen into oblivion.10 And now, after the successive efforts of two generations of scholars,11 it seems that the origin of the art of the North ...
vii INTRODUCTION.
... has been clearly mapped out, as far as is now possible.
Until the xvith century Holland, like Flanders, merged into the northern family; there were no differences both when we consider fine art and culture in general. The primitive artists of Holland, like the primitive artists of Flanders, belonged to that Rhenish group of whom Wilhelm (1380) and Stephan (1410) in Cologne were the first masters;12 the Van Eycks in Bruges the artistic zenith;13 and Lucas Jacobsz. in Leiden and Quentin Massys in Antwerp the last representatives.
This is the western branch of the great Germanic school of painting.
Therefore, the authors who have reconstructed the history of ancient German art have also included in the same framework, in addition to the painters from the Upper Rhine to Basel, the painters from the Lower Rhine to Leiden, those from Utrecht and Haarlem, those from Antwerp and Bruges; in short, they deal with all the painters from the entire Hollando-Flemish country (the old Seventeen Provinces) bordering the North Sea.
Those curious about this beginning of Dutch art can browse studies by Germans, some Belgians, some ...
viii INTRODUCTION.
... Hollanders and a few Frenchmen. In them we find names and dates, about which there is hardly any difference of opinion, from Dirk Stuerbout, of Haarlem (1410-1470),14 to Cornelis Engelbrechtsen, of Leiden (1468-1533), who was the master of Lucas;15 and to Jan van Schoorl, or Schoorel, born at Schoorl near Alkmaar in 1495, who was a pupil of Willem Cornelisz, at Haarlem, of Jacob Cornelisz, at Amsterdam, of Jan Gossaert of Mabuse, at Utrecht, of Albrecht Dürer at Nuremberg; Schoorl studied antique sculptures and works by Raphael, Michelangelo and other famous artists in Italy, visited the Orient, was curator of the Belvedere at Rome, returned to Utrecht, had many pupils, including Martin Heemskerk and Antonie Mor, and died in 1562.16
This Van Schoorl, who was so mobile and adventurous, painter, musician, poet, litterateur and linguist all in one, marks rather well the transition between the first period, when the Hollanders rallied around the Van Eycks, and the second period, when they crossed the Alps where they will deform themselves.17
When the emigration to the south became widespread, art in Holland, Flanders and Germany all disappeared together in a banal pastiche of the Italians. There ...
ix INTRODUCTION.
... were certainly still capable masters, considered in each of these countries as their national Raphaels or Michelangelos, but they no longer count in their own art history.18
The essence of man is to invent, to be himself and no one else.
The third period of Dutch art coincides with the religious and political emancipation that gave birth in Holland, at the beginning of the xviith century, to a new, strange society, different even from the societies renewed elsewhere in the North by Lutheranism,19 and absolutely incomparable to the rest of Europe, as the young American society, Protestant and democratic, is today.
The topographical conditions of Holland help shed light on this extraordinary phenomenon. In these low countries, – 20 hol land, the word says it all, – composed of islands and peninsulas, polders and marshes, almost floating on the sea or incessantly undercut by the sea, barely attached to the continent, – people felt at ease, once all religious and political authorities had been driven away, to do as they pleased, with their feet in the water or sitting on the tip of a boat.
When in the physical world everything had to be ...
x INTRODUCTION.
... created and recreated anew over and over again, even the ground, – then in the moral and intellectual world everything also had to be made new, for everything had just been shattered. Everything was recreated by a spontaneous outbreak of national genius.
In the midst of this 'genesis' crisis, the Dutch people performed miracles. Free in thought and action, as inventive as they were courageous, they had their moment of fortune, power, and glory. While their sailors stood their ground against Spain, England and France, while they traded riches around the world, the Dutch built at the same time their dikes, docks, bridges, shipyards, arsenals, town halls, churches, schools, stock exchanges, markets, hospices for orphans and the aged, and a thousand buildings for its militia, its scientific societies and its guilds. Everything dates from that time, not only its great sailors and citizens, but also its great poets and painters.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Dutch school of painting of the xviith century, which suddenly emerged in such exceptional circumstances, no longer shows any kinship with the schools of painting of the South, which remained Catholic ...
xi INTRODUCTION.
... and princely, nor that this school of painting then separated itself from the Flemish, with which it had previously formed a unity.21
What makes it original, and ingenious, in the sense of the Latin word genius, is precisely that it is the product of its isolated spontaneity. Prolem sine matre creatam.22 A special potency, which the other Protestant countries did not possess when they broke with their fifteen centuries of religious tradition. Germany had, shortly after the Reformation, no more art. England had no national painters until the xviiith century.
Perhaps because of this exceptional situation, the Dutch art of the xviith century was not studied by the peoples of the South with the same sympathy as art with mythological, Christian, or pagan content. And above all, this art was hardly understood. The lovers of Antiquity, of the Middle Ages, or of the Italian Renaissance, these three great forms of art up to that time, where some form of traditional orthodoxy was adhered to, were bound to oppose Dutch originality; sometimes they argued that the Dutch were ignorant or did not know the rules, sometimes their art was called of a low level and even immoral, sometimes of a senseless fantasy, sometimes of a crude naturalism; some did so in the name of Apollo, others in the name of Christ, others ...
xii INTRODUCTION.
... in the name of a mystical ideal, which is undoubtedly very different from nature and humanity (1).
Therefore, no attempt has been made in France to write the history of this triple-cursed art. The biographies of these naturalists and minor masters, whose works nevertheless fetch quite a lot of money, are not known. Search libraries, consult book experts, in French there is nothing, or as good as nothing, about the Hollanders of the xviith century:23 as far as old books are concerned, we have Descamps' publication, which copied the erroneous dates and ridiculous stories of Houbraken and Weyerman;24 some poor compilations copied from Descamps; among recent publications, one can hardly cite anything but the modest notes in a Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (2), and the Catalogue of the Museum of Paris (3), ...
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(1) History, biography, criticism, and above all noble aesthetics, agree in almost all French publications that this Dutch school of painting, to which Italian rules are foreign, and which has the audacity to interpret nature with a certain feeling, should be characterized with sovereign contempt. Fortoul in particular has beautifully articulated this mystagouric antipathy to the very human naturalism of the Dutch school.25
(2) Paris, Ve J. Renouard, 240 episodes.26
(3) Michiels, in his Histoire de la peinture flamande et hollandaise, stops after his study of the early schools: ...
Interleaved page
I completely forgot Houssaye: Histoire de la Peinture flamande et hollandaise, Paris 1848.27 Because this book which has some fine editions, doesn’t count. By chance I happened to have just re-read it. And see that he took for his epigraph “Als ik kan”28 – it is a translation from Descamps,29 some stories ‘to sleep standing’!30 Not one line of interest to history! – the appreciation of Rembrandt is fairly appropriate.
On Stuerbout, see Antwerp catalogue31 and Van Even, on the two pictures at Louvain, formerly attributed to Memling.32
xiii INTRODUCTION.
... skillfully compiled from the writings of Immerzeel, Smith, Mr. Waagen and other foreigners.33
For at least some books exist in Dutch, German and English that give fairly complete information about the works of art of the Dutch school. In reality most biographies of Dutch artists are still shrouded in obscurity. Archivists and other foragers can add a great deal.
Therefore, writing a history of Dutch art today would undoubtedly ...
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... "About the great Dutch masters, from the year 1600, I cannot even say a word. They are so numerous that their history would require four or five volumes."34
Viardot, who has visited almost all the museums of Europe and reported on them in detail in a series of excellent booklets, stopped for what he calls "the Moerdyk brook, a new invention on current maps." This "Moerdyk stream" (the mouth of the Meuse, near the village of Moerdijk), "which separates Holland from Belgium," and which is simply an estuary, where three-masters float, was Viardot's Rubicon.35 But he did not cross it. However, he did write some pages about the museums of Holland based on Lamme's notes, Lamme, brother-in-law of Messrs. Ary and Hendrik Scheffer, is I believe curator of the museum of Rotterdam.36
Maxime Ducamp, in his Letters from Holland, published by the Revue de Paris (October 1857), also commented very briefly on the museums of Amsterdam and The Hague.37 In the course of this publication I will quote some of his remarks.
xiv INTRODUCTION.
... be very difficult, if not almost impossible. But by studying publications in northern languages, especially by seeing the works of these original artists in the middle of their own country and studying the customs they declare on the spot, I might be able to gather building blocks for such a history. Certainly a new light would be shed that would help us see these very frank artists in their true light, several of whom are geniuses, some great, some humorous, some graceful, some have an inexhaustible gaiety, others a very poetic melancholy, all have a great use of color and an incomparable technique.
Such studies cannot be made according to a regular and well-proportioned plan. They must emphasize what precisely little is known, and ignore what is better known, by doing almost the opposite of what historians do, who lay down the material that has already been carved and chiseled, leaving the formless blocks and obscure details in the shadows.38
We must focus on masters whose biography or talent needs new elucidation, such as Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Paul Potter, Metsu and others; on masters whose character we cannot guess because we have never seen their ...
xv INTRODUCTION.
... great historical paintings, such as Ravestein, Frans Hals, Van der Helst, Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Jacob Backer and others; on rare masters, such as Adriaan Brouwer, Hobbema, Pieter de Hooch and others; to the masters whose names are hardly known, such as de Konincks, de Keijsers, Jan Hackaert,39 Nicolaas Koedijk and others;40 but also the works of all the first-rate masters, from the Cuijp family, the Van Ostades, the Van de Veldes, the Ruijsdaels, the Wouwermans, and G. Dov, Terburg, Frans van Mieris, etc.41
Unfortunately, the main museums of Holland, – the Amsterdam Museum (1), the Van der Hoop Museum (also in Amsterdam), the Hague Museum, the Rotterdam Museum, – have extremely insignificant and even very poor catalogs. Private collections have none; nor do city halls (2), palaces, churches, and other public buildings, ...
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(1) See further, p. 3.
(2) The Amsterdam Town Hall, to which even 6 of the most important paintings exhibited in the museum belong,42 has about 300 paintings! most of them hidden in attics or behind furniture and piles of chairs. There are Van der Helsts, Govert Flincks, Jacob Backers, Frans Hals, and the whole great school of the xviith century, with historical and civic representations. J. van Dijk had once published….
xvi INTRODUCTION.
... and certainly not the institutions founded by philanthropic, patriotic, scientific, and other associations. What is in them no one knows, not even in Holland. And perhaps, to inventory them, today we have no means other than oral tradition.
In the midst of this darkness which, – in the absence of written documents, is radiantly broken by the masterpieces of painters, – I ventured à l'improviste, with the plan of simply moving from the known to the unknown, and with as my epigraph that of Jan van Eyck: "Als ik kan" (As best I can).43
So, I studied museums and private collections, public monuments, and civic foundations whose walls still testify so beautifully to the great art of the past. I wanted to get to know the country itself, the customs of the people, its history and present life; for art cannot be understood without nature and people.
Now I am publishing the two most important museums; ...
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… a description of them when they adorned the old City Hall, now the Palace, on Dam Square.44 The indefatigable Amsterdam archivist, Mr. Scheltema, I believe, has just made a kind of catalog of them, which has remained manuscript.45
xvii INTRODUCTION.
... I have tried to correct attributions, note dates, add information and, above all, appreciate the original masters of the xviith century's heyday so that others can appreciate them as well.
Perhaps this volume on the museums of Amsterdam and The Hague will be followed by similar publications on the museum of Rotterdam, on the Van der Hoop museum in Amsterdam, on the splendid private collections, such as those of Messrs. Six of Hillegom,46 and Van Loon,47 Baron van Brienen, Baron Steingracht48 and others, on the town halls and various public buildings that are also so rich in paintings and works of art.
Notes
1 The same happens in the RKD artists database; there, too, the starting point is the spelling most commonly used by the painter in question himself. Before the introduction of civil registration in the Netherlands in 1811 – when the Netherlands was part of the French Empire – surnames were not yet mandatory, and their spelling was not fixed. Initially, children were named after (the profession of) their father, sometimes after their mother, after their place of residence or home. All these types of names could be written in very varied ways. Incidentally, in his catalogue of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, P. L. Dubourcq also left the names of foreign artists untranslated for the same reason as Thoré-Bürger (Amsterdam 1858, p. vii-viii). Here the main text uses Thoré-Bürger's spelling to show what he knew; the links to the artists' names show the current spelling.
2 Literally: the art of writing names (properly).
3 Dutch artists and other travelers on their Grand Tour went to Italy in considerable numbers, but before the twentieth century this did not lead to many Dutch writings on Italian art. For Dutch artists who traveled to Italy, see Gerson/Van Leeuwen/Van der Sman 2019. For Dutch travelers on the Grand Tour, see Verhoeven 2015 and Frank-van Westrienen 1983.
4 This is not generally true for countries in western Europe. For the Netherlands, at least, it was different: from the end of the seventeenth century, cultural inspiration came mainly from France, and in the nineteenth century inspiration in the field of science came, for example, from Germany.
5 In the Netherlands there were generally very few art historians in the nineteenth century, let alone that there were people who had knowledge of the Italian Renaissance.
6 Perhaps Michelet's seventh volume on the Renaissance in France of 1855, as part of his seventeen-volume Histoire de France, was too historical and literary, or simply published too late to be processed by Thoré-Bürger? See: Michelet 1855 and on Michelet: Haskell 1993, p. 253-277.
7 Thoré-Bürger means something like 'And building on these loose facts, new coherent histories will follow'.
8 The exclamation mark has been crossed out and replaced in the margin by a period.
9 The collection of the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée, consisting mainly of northern paintings then labeled 'primitive', was purchased by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1827 and housed in the Pinakothek (later Alte Pinakothek) in Munich, where it remains.
10 In this connection, on Friedrich Schlegel and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, see: Grijzenhout/Van Veen 1999, p. 114-116.
11 Thoré-Bürger could mean Waagen, Hotho and Schnaase here: Gustav Friedrich Waagen published the first art historical monograph on the Van Eyck brothers in 1822 (Waagen 1822). Heinrich Gustav Hotho became Waagen's assistant at the Berlin Königliche Gemäldegalerie in 1833; in 1855 Hotho published on Hubert van Eyck in German context (Hotho 1855). Karl Schnaase published his Niederländische Briefe in 1834. However, they belong to the same generation. It is not clear which two generations Thoré-Bürger is referring to. On the early study of the Flemish primitives, see: Ridderbos/Van Veen 1995, p. 218-251.
12 Wilhelm von Herle [Heerlen], or Wilhelm von Köln, also Master Wilhelm, is a painter in Cologne who is considered the head of the older Lower Rhenish or Cologne school of painting, but no works can be attributed to him with certainty. He died in 1378. It is likely that by 'Stephan' Thoré-Bürger means Stefan Lochner. If Lochner was indeed born only in 1400, Thoré-Bürger's year 1410 cannot be explained. Or does Thoré-Bürger mean a different Stephan?
13 These are Hubert and Jan van Eyck.
14 The 0 of 1470 has been crossed out and replaced in the margin by a 9, thus '1479'. See also the notes of Thoré-Bürger opp. p. xii.
15 Stuerbout, known today as Dieric Bouts, was born and raised in Haarlem, but left for Leuven about 1445/47. Nowadays, the dates of Dieric Bouts are c. 1410/1420-1475; he settled in Louvain in ca. 1445/1447. The Leiden artist Cornelis Engebrechtsz. was not the teacher of Lucas van Leyden, that was his father, Huygh Jacobsz.
16 Jan van Scorel was a pupil of Cornelis Willemsz. in Haarlem, not of Willem Cornelisz.
17 Thoré-Bürger means: where they will deform their original Dutch art under the influence of Italian art.
18 The vilification of sixteenth-century art in the Netherlands and Germany (often also called Romanism) that Thoré-Bürger articulates here would persist well into the twentieth century. His modernist vision of art and art history clashed with the old-fashioned, static view espoused in Dutch museums at the time. It was not until the twentieth century that Thoré-Bürger's views penetrated the Netherlands, but once they did, it was not until well after World War II that Italianate landscapes and history painting, for example, would be appreciated again.
19 In the Northern Netherlands, it was not so much Martin Luther as John Calvin who was influential. Lutheranism is found mainly in the Scandinavian countries.
20 The margin reads 'neder land,' which is indeed a better translation of 'pays bas' than 'hol land'.
21 Originally, artists from the Northern and Southern Netherlands were treated together in, for example, seventeenth- to nineteenth-century biographical surveys. This is what Thoré-Bürger is turning against. Recently, more and more emphasis is being placed on what the Northern and Southern Netherlands did have in common in the seventeenth century, after long emphasizing, à la Thoré-Bürger, the differences. See: De Clippel/Vermeylen 2015, De Jong 2004, and Blankert 1995.
22 Literally: a child created without a mother.
23 Thoré-Bürger later realised in his annotations opp. p. xii, that he had forgotten Arsène Houssaye's publication, Houssaye 1848.
24 Descamps 1753-1764, Houbraken 1718-1721, Weyerman 1729-1769.
25 Fortoul 1841-1842, vol. 2, p. 163-179. In his discussion of art in Germany and the development of European painting, Fortoul also discusses the Dutch school, based on what he had seen in the museums of Cologne, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Munich, Dresden, and Berlin. In the later edition, there are hardly any differences: capital letters have become lower case and vice versa; the Ruysdaëls lost their tremas, see: Fortoul 1844, vol. 2, p. 186-195.
26 Blanc 1849-1876. Individual installments appeared from 1849 and were later compiled into books. Up to 1858, 240 episodes were apparently published. See also: Vicaire 1894, p. 798. With thanks to Ellis Dullaart.
27 Houssaye 1848. The first edition was published in 1846: Houssaye 1846.
28 ‘As best I can’; just as Thoré-Bürger himself did, see p. xvi above.
30 Thoré-Bürger means: boring or tall stories.
31 Antwerp 1857, p. 71-72, there the name Bouts is used, instead of Stuerbout. Also see p. viii above and Bürger 1862, p. 98-99.
32 Edward van Even is mentioned in Antwerp 1857, p. 72. Also see: Molanus/Van Even 1585/1858, p. 14, for a discussion of the two paintings Dieric Bouts made for the City Hall of Louvain. In 1827, they were bought by King William I for the collection of King William II. Today, they are in Brussels (Dieric Bouts and workshop, Justice of Emperor Otto III: the Beheading of the Innocent, 1468-1482, Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. no. 1447; Dieric Bouts, Justice of Emperor Otto III: the Trial by Fire, 1468-1482, Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. no. 1448).
33 Immerzeel 1842-1843. By 'Smith', Thoré-Bürger means John Smith and his nine-volume series of oeuvre catalogues of Dutch, Flemish and French painters (Smith 1829-1842). Which Waagen publication Thoré-Bürger is referring to here is not clear, as he already had several publications to his name before 1858. Waagen and Thoré-Bürger would collaborate on the publication about the Suermondt collection (Aachen): Bürger/Waagen 1860.
34 Michiels 1845-1849, vol. 4 (1849), p. 44.
35 Viardot 1855, p. 254: 'le ruisseau de Moërdyck, inventé sur les cartes actuelles '. This passage about Moerdijk is in the section on the Dutch school of painting in the Hermitage. Moerdijk lies in the middle of the present (and then) Netherlands (and not on the border with Belgium) on the wide Hollands Diep, which is indeed the mouth of the Meuse. The Hollands Diep forms the border between the current provinces of South Holland and North Brabant. Which ancient map did Viardot use? One from the time of Louis the Fourteenth perhaps?
36 It is not known how Thoré-Bürger knew that Viardot had received information from Lamme. In the introduction to the Musées de Hollande he talks about ' friends who know them [the Dutch museums] in all their details (...), it is in a way under their dictation, that I will write’ (Viardot 1855, p. 207). The brothers Ary and Henry Scheffer were artists from Dordrecht who later went to work in Paris; the 'Lamme' who was director of Rotterdam's Boijmans Museum from 1852 to 1870 was named Ary Johannes Lamme. He was not the brother-in-law, but a cousin of Ary and Henry Scheffer.
37 Du Camp 1857, Du Camp 1859.
38 It is not clear which (art?) historians Thoré-Bürger is referring to here.
39 'Jan Hackaert' has been crossed out in the text and replaced in the margin by: 'the Victors, Nicolaas Maas, Van der Meer de Delft'. About the various artists Victor/Fictoor, see: Thoré 1858-1860, vol. 2, p. 29-51.
40 The best-known of the Konincks was Philips Koninck, who was a pupil of his older brother Jacob Koninck I; the best-known of the De Keysers was the architect, sculptor and painter Hendrick de Keyser I; the most important painter of this family was his son Thomas de Keyser.
41 Thoré-Bürger means by 'Cuijps': Aelbert Cuyp and his father Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp. By the Van Ostades he means the brothers Adriaen van Ostade and Isaac van Ostade. The Van de Velde family includes the marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and his sons Willem van de Velde the Younger and landscape painter Adriaen van de Velde. The most important 'Ruijsdael' was Jacob van Ruisdael, who was a pupil of his father Isaack van Ruisdael and of his uncle Salomon van Ruysdael. Philips Wouwerman was the most famous painter of the Wouwerman family, alongside his brothers Pieter Wouwerman II and Jan Wouwerman.
42 Thoré-Bürger is referring here to the seven (rather than six) paintings from municipal holdings that were on loan in Amsterdam first to the Royal Museum in the Royal Palace (formerly City Hall of Amsterdam) and then to 's Rijks Museum in the Trippenhuis: two Rembrandts (The Night Watch & The Syndics), two Van der Helsts (Banquet at the Crossbowmen's Guild in Celebration of the Treaty of Munster & The headmen of the Longbow Civic Guard House, the latter now back in Amsterdam Museum), a Karel du Jardin (Regents of the Spinhuis), a Govert Flinck (Civic Guardsmen of the company of Captain Joan Huydecoper and Lieutenant Frans van Waveren, now back in Amsterdam Museum), and a Willem van de Velde (II) (The Golden Lion on the IJ off Amsterdam, now back in Amsterdam Museum). Not the City Hall, but the City of Amsterdam was and still is the owner of these paintings. At the opening of the newly built Rijksmuseum in 1885, 259 paintings, including the original seven, were presented in the museum as loans from the city (Middelkoop 2001, p. 71). When the Amsterdam Historical Museum in Kalverstraat opened in 1975, three of the original seven artworks were returned to this Amsterdam Museum. For an overview of the paintings withdrawn from loan to the Rijksmuseum after 1975, see Middelkoop 2001, Appendix 1, p. 78-82.
43 Jan van Eyck used ‘As I can’ as an epigraph on his paintings several times, for example on the frame of Mary with Child by a Fountain, 1439, Antwerp, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 411. See also Thoré-Bürger's annotations opp. p. xii.
45 Middelkoop's overview article on the adventures of the Amsterdam paintings (Middelkoop 2001) does not mention a manuscript catalogue by Scheltema, but it does mention his catalogue from 1864: Amsterdam 1864. Pieter Scheltema, Amsterdam's municipal archivist since 1848, had been appointed administrator of the Amsterdam art collection in 1852 (Middelkoop/Reichwein/Van Gent 2008, p. 29-30, 273, notes 124-125). Thoré-Bürger would surely not have been satisfied with Scheltema's catalogue: there are no biographies of the painters, and the dimensions of the paintings are not mentioned. Apparently, Thoré-Bürger had not found Jeronimo de Vries's summary guides that deal with the paintings in the Amsterdam Town Hall: Amsterdam 1841 and Amsterdam 1843.
46 The collection of Jan Pieter Six of Hillegom had been brought together earlier, namely by Pieter van Winter and his daughter Lucretia van Winter. Lucretia married Hendrik Six van Hillegom, who also already owned an important art collection; their son Jan Pieter was the owner of the collection at the time of Thoré-Bürger (see: Priem 1997). Apparently, Thoré-Bürger was planning a separate publication on this collection, because on the paper cover of volume 2 of the Musées de la Hollande (1860), it reads, ‘En préparation Galerie Six van Hillegom’. In 1858, Thoré-Bürger did publish an article on the Rembrandts in the Amsterdam private collections of Six van Hillegom, Van Loon, and Baron van Brienen. In it, the section on the Six collection takes up half of the article: Burger 1858b.
47 Willem van Loon was married to Lucretia van Winter's sister (see above), Anna Louisa Agatha. Together with Lucretia, she inherited the paintings of their father, Pieter van Winter (see above note). Like Six of Hillegom, Van Loon also already owned an important collection.
48 The most important collectors of the Steengracht family in the nineteenth century were: Johan Steengracht van Oostcapelle, who was also, unpaid, director of the Mauritshuis (1816-1840) (see also: Bleyerveld et al. 2025). His collection was inherited by his son Hendrik Steengracht van Oosterland and then inherited to his nephew Hendricus Adolphus Steengracht van Duivenvoorde. Museum Steengracht was housed in the residence on Lange Vijverberg 3, The Hague, where Thoré-Bürger must have seen her. After Hendricus Adolphus' death, the collection was sold at auction in several sessions in 1913 (Paris, 9 June 1913, Amsterdam (Lugt 72901); 13 May 1913 (Lugt 72742)). The letter 'i' in 'Steingracht' has been crossed out in pencil and corrected in the margin with the letter 'e', thus 'Steengracht'.