Economic Aspects of Dutch Art

Even if the role of market forces was never fully dismissed in Dutch art history, it was simply beside the point for the better part of the twentieth century. Sources and research questions on economic aspects of Dutch collected in earlier periods were disregarded, as the artworks and their makers were the principal objects of inquiry, rather than the social or economic context in which they functioned. 1 It took until the 1970s for the art-historical field to revisit questions asked by such scholars as Hanns Floerke and Wilhelm Martin as early as 1905–1907: “What was the origin of the hundreds, nay thousands, of pictures which were produced in Holland in the short period from about 1620 to 1700? What motives, what circumstances, occasioned their production? How were the pictures painted, and for what purpose? How did their authors live, and how did they earn their livelihood?