Accountability portrayed: documents on regents’ group portraits in the Dutch Golden Age

In 1617/1618, Cornelis van der Voort painted the regents of three institutions in Amsterdam. Nearly all of them have documents, either in their hands or within hand’s reach. On the table are registers, charters, and other archival documents. This new way of depicting regents emphasized the efficiency and effectiveness of their handling the business of the charitable institutions. The new
format became very popular: thirty-three portraits of regents’ boards of charitable institutions in Amsterdam have been preserved from the 70 years between 1617 and 1686. The popularity of the genre decreases in Amsterdam during the last quarter of the seventeenth century and increases again some 50 years later. I argue that this was because of changing notions about accountability and governance. Van der Voort’s format was followed in Haarlem, but there the documents on the regents’ group portraits served as mere props, reflecting a culture of accountability that was different from that in Amsterdam in the first decades of the seventeenth century.