In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias (review)

The thirty-two contributors to the John Michael Montias Festschrift knew the economic historian turned historian of seventeenth-century Dutch art over the course of his second career, active from his first publication in 1982 until his death in 2005. All scholars of Dutch art, including those who did not have that good fortune, remain greatly in his debt. Montias made a life study of Dutch archives, markets, social networks, and collecting practices that revolutionized the field and proved archives to be far more productive than previously realized. It was his work in the Delft municipal archives that give us what historical knowledge we have of the painter Johannes Vermeer.

The present volume demonstrates that Montias’s bountiful contribution to Dutch art history is matched by an ongoing legacy. Individually and as a group, the Festschrift authors continue, amplify, or challenge different aspects of his research findings and methods. Without exception the essays are direct, finely-written, and eminently useful, a fitting tribute to the clarity and applicability of Montias’s own work.

A few of the essays (by Franits, Kavaler, Kuretsky, Roodenberg) relate indirectly to some aspect of Montias’s research interests and one, by Kobayashi-Sato, addresses Vermeer’s construction methods. The vast majority, however, fall into the following rough categories (the volume’s contributors are organized in alphabetical rather than thematic order): economics of the art market, collecting practices, and trade (Boers-Goosens, De Marchi-Van Miegroet, Dickey, Goldgar, North, Silver, Wood, Zell); a monographic approach, often with appendices, to an artist’s oeuvre or to a single painting (Adams, Blankert, Bok-Dudok van Heel, Chong, Golahny, Liedtke, Loughman, Lowenthal, Sluijter, Sluijter-Seijffert, Szanto); and archival research amplified, reconsidered, or interpreted (Crenshaw, Logan, Mochizuki, Orenstein, Plomp, Peeters-Martens, Ruby, Schwartz).

I single out a few of the contributions in the interest of demonstrating the breadth of the offerings, their scholarly reach, and their connection to Montias’s work. The most instrumental one, by Louisa Wood Ruby, offers the history and application of another of Montias’s productive legacies: his creation of a searchable database of seventeenth-century archival material from the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam housed at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York; Mia M. Mochizuki’s contribution made direct use of the Database. Natasja Peeters and Maximilaan P. J. Martens fashion a Montias case study in miniature of an Antwerp burgomaster’s art collection using his estate’s extensive inventory; they include that inventory along with biographical information, a distribution of art throughout the house, and a comparison of that collection with other contemporary ones. Anne Goldgar’s article recasts virtually all of Montias’s research tools — markets, social networks, and archives — in the study of Holland’s Tulipmania and, with the help of the Montias Database, shows the overlap between flower speculators and art collectors.

The dependence on inventories, the basis of much of Montias-inflected study, however, has its own problematics. Gary Schwartz provides a useful corrective about the unreliability of inventories, warning that distortions were inevitable and varied depending upon whose behalf an inventory was taken. He points out inconsistencies in Montias’s methods and calls for a “third wave” of archival research that would critique accepted models, question the relationship of documents to presumptions of history, and account for the fragmentary nature of knowledge.

In two very different applications of archival research, Nadine M. Orenstein does painstaking work of explicating the history and granting of privileges (protections against unauthorized copying) and provides an extensive chart of privileges granted, while Paul Crenshaw spins a persuasive tale of a Rembrandt visit to London based on an eighteenth-century journal entry and judicious analysis of circumstantial evidence, bringing interpretive detective work to bear on archival material.

Two authors treat images as archival materials. Christopher Wood charts the change in taste of collecting practices of...