Artists have always had a living to earn, and where there is a living to earn, there will be found an agent.
The art world as we recognise it had its origins in the 17th century with the beginnings of our modern, secular age. Especially in the fledgling democracy of the United Provinces – the Netherlands – came the first great widening in the patronage of the arts, from prince, church and aristocrat to the well-to-do professional and merchant classes.
And the story told at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in a concise, scholarly exhibition arranged in collaboration with the Rembrandt House at Amsterdam (to which it travels in the autumn), is fascinating and salutary, for it ends in disaster on each side. It is also the only exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth taking place in the UK this year.
In 1631 and already something of a rising star, Rembrandt left his native Leiden for Amsterdam, where he fell in with Hendrick Uylenburgh, an art dealer and agent. Uylenburgh, who had been in service with the Polish king, had set himself up in the mid-1620s and by the time Rembrandt moved there was well established and respected. He ran what seems to have been a combination of artists’ studio, print workshop and dealer’s gallery, and Rembrandt, who had lent Uylenburgh the considerable sum of 1,000 guilders in 1631, was ins-talled as the studio chief, painting, making prints and bringing on the younger artists while Uylenburgh brought in the clients and did the deals. Uylenburgh’s contacts among the Mennonites, a sect of the Anabaptists of which he was a member, and who were as rich as they were zealous, were especially useful.
The upshot for Rembrandt was that portrait commissions soon become a big preoccupation and he developed a highly marketable line, small in scale and of a personal intimacy. Here, in a remarkable curatorial coup, three such paintings, on panels recently found to have been cut from the same block of wood, and all dating from 1632, are brought to-gether for the first time in four centuries. Two friends, Maurits Huygens and Jacob de Gheyn, each commissioned a portrait, and then bequeathed it to the other should he die first. Did Rembrandt paint the smaller self-portrait to show the sort of thing he would do, and so clinch the deal, or simply to make use of an odd left-over piece of wood? Either is a nice thought.
The business prospered, and in 1634 Rembrandt married into it: his wife, Saskia, was Uylenburgh’s cousin. A year on and he felt successful enough to strike out on his own, leaving his sometime studio pupil, Govert Flinck, as master. But he remained close to Uylenburgh for some years be-cause in the flush of his own success through the later 1630s and early 1640s, he was involved in the loans that such a business needs from time to time. One such moment has a certain premonitory poignancy, a hint of the start of Rembrandt’s decline into financial difficulties and ultimate failure.
Perhaps the most beautiful painting in the exhibition is Rembrandt’s portrait of the young Agatha Bas, painted in 1641 and now in the Royal Collection. She was the wife of Nicolas van Bambeeck, whom he also painted. The money enabled Rembrandt to buy the house in which he was living, which is now the Rembrandt House Museum. But the debt he thus fell into proved to be one he was never able to repay.
Rembrandt’s involvement with Uylenburgh supplies the principal substance of the exhibition – as much in material as theme – but the business was never a one-man show. Uylenburgh always cast his net wide. He had had dealings with Van Dyck before Rembrandt’s arrival, for example, and in later years, his son, Gerrit – who became increasingly involved through the 1650s and took over the business on his father’s death in 1661 – brought in such artists as Caspar Netscher and Cornelis van Poelenburch, and Peter Lely was a friend.
The small, exquisite Netscher here, of “A Company of Singers”, may well be the “excellent painting of singers” valued at 500 guilders in the final Uylenburgh inventory of 1675.
Over the years, Flinck had been succeeded as studio master by Jurgen Ovens, Hendrick Fromantiou and Gerard de Lairesse, and it was Fromantiou who was to prove Gerrit Uylenburgh’s undoing. In 1672, some time after leaving the business, Fromantiou came back to Gerrit, accusing him of selling copies rather than originals to a client, the elector of Berlin. As we know, attribution is not an exact science, a copy not necessarily a fake and optimism not necessarily dishonesty. But, though acquitted of any crime, the doubt remained and, with the economic crisis of the 1670s, in 1675 the business fell into bankruptcy. Gerrit Uylenburgh left for London, where Lely, a friend at court, secured him the post of surveyor of the king’s pictures. He died in 1679.
Altogether, it is an intriguing and oddly sad story, well told and, more to the point, beautifully shown.
- The Financial Times
