To Inform and Delight: The Commodification of Travel Images in Amsterdam

In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, merchants employed visual culture to demonstrate their involvement in overseas trade and show off their wealth. Still lifes from the 1630s and 1640s such as those by Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem Kalf, or Willem Claesz Heda show diverse commodities from the multiple places where the Dutch were then trading: in the East, India, Indonesia, and China; and in the West, Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America. Gold, silver, porcelain, fruits, and spices are tantalizingly displayed in these sumptuous settings, their novelty heightened by the surface sheen of the multiple layers of oil glaze.¹ Each detail is carefully depicted, each different surface texture described, exemplifying an aspect of the “mapping impulse” Svetlana Alpers considers characteristic of seventeenth-century Dutch art.²

Valuable commodities from abroad also make an appearance in merchant portraits. At the height of Dutch wealth and intercontinental trade (the “Golden Age” of the Republic), Daniel Vertangen painted West India Company (WIC) director-general Jan Valckenburgh with the trade items from which the company—and Valckenburgh personally—profited: gold and slaves.

Valckenburgh was stationed at Elmina, on the coast of present-day Ghana, from 1656 to 1659 and again from 1663 until he died there in 1667. In his portrait, a slave offers Valckenburgh a gold medallion, while Valckenburgh stands confidently looking out to the viewer, one hand on his hip, the other firmly holding a baton.³ The slave and the medallion assert Valckenburgh’s social status and position in the WIC by their understood value.

This “explosion” of exotic visual culture in the last part of the century reflects the successes built upon earlier Dutch trading missions.⁴ Paintings such as these catalogue the goods to be bought and sold in the robust consumer society of the Golden Age Dutch Republic.

Figure 1.

Daniël Vertangen, Jan Valckenburgh (1623–1667), Director General of the Coast of Guinea, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 128.3 × 102 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. SK-A-4969 (photograph provided by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

The African servant is here like the gold medallion: an object from the Gold Coast possessed by the Dutch WIC director.⁵ The cataloguing of goods from trade in Dutch visual culture underscored Dutch possession of goods and of the territories from which they came. As the first step in the systematization of knowledge, this pictorial cataloguing augmented the “sense of epistemic superiority” that played a significant role in the complex processes of European imperialism.⁶

The paintings—and the objects they showcase—are obviously products of a successful market economy. Yet before paintings depicted commodities and themselves became commodities for wealthy merchants, prints provided a wide segment of the population with images of foreign flora, fauna, and people.⁷ Amsterdam bookseller Cornelis Claesz capitalized on these demands by creating small, affordable, illustrated books of recent Dutch voyages.⁸ Claesz’s quarto travel books published between 1598 and 1603, particularly that of Pieter de Marees’s voyage to West Africa (Beschryvinge ende historische verhael van’t gout koninkrijk van Gunea, 1602), shed light on the varieties of demands that these illustrated books filled, and how diverse readers constituted a wide and often interconnected market that Claesz exploited with new information legitimated by printed illustrations.

At the turn of the seventeenth century, prints in illustrated books were ubiquitous. Emblem books, along with travel accounts, were some of the most read and most viewed material culture in the Dutch Republic.⁹ Indeed, burghers in the large cities in the Republic had the wealth and the numbers to generate demand for books.¹⁰ As Andrew Pettegree has recently shown, the most popular books consumed in early modern Europe were newsworthy and entertaining.¹¹ Claesz used the relatively new technology of the illustrated book as a vehicle for entertaining as well as disseminating knowledge. The travel books he published are in many ways like the contemporary emblem books meant to “instruct and delight.”¹² Claesz’s illustrated travel accounts and emblem books were produced in similar...