The World of a Seventeenth-Century Book Collector: The Atlas Blaeu-van der Hem (review)

This review of Erlend de Groot's meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated account of the seventeenth-century Amsterdam collector Laurens van der Hem also marks the passing in December 2006 of one of our own most noteworthy collectors, Dr. Bent Juel-Jensen. Collectors have always been a curious lot, and although the Danish bibliophile and physician took a decidedly more scholarly approach to his collection than most, he still had much in common with his early-modern Dutch predecessor, van der Hem. Each man had a singular obsession when it came to collecting: for Juel-Jensen it was the works of the poet Michael Drayton, more than 340 of which were donated to the Bodleian Library at Oxford; for van der Hem it was the fifty-volume Atlas Blaeu–van der Hem, which "is generally considered the most beautiful atlas ever composed" (7).

Although much celebrated in its own time, van der Hem's atlas was largely forgotten after being bought at auction by Eugene of Savoy in 1730. In fact, it was not until 1992 that the Dutch public was permitted to view only a few volumes of the atlas. Even when the sixth and final volume of a descriptive catalog of the entire atlas was finally made available last year, its "world on paper" continued to be viewed in splendid isolation. This volume is intended as both a continuation and an addition to previous studies of van der Hem and his atlas. In this proposed seventh volume to the series, the reader is at last permitted a fitting context for appreciating both the collector and his collection.

The first four chapters of the book are concerned with van der Hem's life and collecting practices. Perhaps surprisingly for a member of one of Amsterdam's most prominent merchant families, van der Hem himself cuts a rather enigmatic figure. Born in 1621 into a close-knit Catholic community, van der Hem chose to study law at the Catholic University in Leuven. He then followed those studies with the obligatory Grand Tour through France and Italy, with a visit to Rome as his ultimate goal. On his return to the Netherlands he, like his father and uncle before him, turned financier and investor, and though Rome's "Missio Hollandica" only served to exacerbate Amsterdam's already tense religious relations, van der Hem still managed to become one of the two hundred richest men in the city. This rise in prosperity and status would continue until the French and Münsterite invasion that precipitated the Rampjaar, or "year of calamity," 1672. After that date van der Hem almost vanished from the historical record until his death six years later.

The origins of the van der Hem collection are also something of a mystery. In the next four chapters Groot makes a convincing argument for the atlas's foundation having been laid during the five-year period 1664–69; however, because of the loss of the travel diary he kept as a youth, it is impossible to say with any certainty what prompted van der Hem's interest in collecting. It is clear that he possessed the same curiositas that many wealthy burghers affected, and, like many of his contemporaries, he "was no scholar, but a layman with wide-ranging interests who happened to have a taste for beautiful editions and richly illustrated books" (75). His library was, in many respects, a typical seventeenth-century collector's library. Although having certain pretensions toward universality, it was of average size, having some fourteen hundred titles, and was far more concerned with appearance than substance, which perhaps explains the exceptionally large collection of folios and art books that account for almost half the library. Indeed, van der Hem's apparent desire for finding visual accompaniment for his books eventually led him to become one of...