Small but Mighty

Next time a package lands on your doorstep, imagine how it got there: the distant source, the giant cargo ship, the noisy dock, the bustling warehouse.

This intercontinental system may sound modern, but it has a lot in common with the 17th-century global trade practices of the Netherlands.

At the time, two multinational corporations based in Amsterdam had a stronghold on global trade: the Dutch East India and Dutch West India Companies. While their sturdy ships carried prized textiles, spices, and other luxury goods to Europe from Asia, India, and the Americas, damaging practices of commodification, violence, and enslavement accompanied this expansion.

“The Netherlands really pioneered new economic modes of production, mercantilism, and capitalism,” said Diva Zumaya, paintings curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) who recently worked with Getty paintings curator Anne Woollett to bring a selection of Dutch paintings to Getty.

The paintings, from the Mr. and Mrs. Edward W. Carter Collection at LACMA, feature delicate tulips, delicious cheeses, and busy landscapes. Displayed in the Museum’s galleries of Dutch paintings, these beautiful and complex works demonstrate the remarkable holdings of 17th-century Dutch paintings in Los Angeles. Their subjects and details also reveal the impact of global expansion charging through Dutch culture in the 1600s.

Zumaya and Woollett recently sat down to talk about three of the paintings, and what they tell a contemporary viewer about the past.

Here’s their edited conversation:

Coveted Shells, Delicate Flowers

Anne Woollett: I love this ideal bouquet of flowers from two seasons—spring and summer—represented with the absolute precision of an artist who specialized in this kind of subject. It’s a collector’s dream because it captures the perfect state of these flowers for eternity. We can see each bloom individually and they’re artfully arranged so that their forms and colors complement one another. The shells are not from the Netherlands but are spectacular imported objects that were part of collections at the time.

Diva Zumaya: The shells come from the East Indies and the waters off present-day Indonesia, which at the time was a Dutch East India Company colony named Batavia. They extracted a lot of seashells from the Indian Ocean, often with the help of indigenous people who showed them what shells to get and where, and were collaborators in that process.

The shells were tremendously popular. The Dutch collected seashells in great numbers, and they were transported all around Europe. Specifically, the East India Company shells were very valued imports for collectors, alongside flowers and insects.

AW: Ambrosius Bosschaert worked in Middleburg, one of the main ports for the Dutch East India Company ships. There was a vigorous effort to source very specialized objects that represented the global reach of the Netherlands.

DZ: It’s also important to remember that many commodities on that ship were not procured with innocent means. For example, spices and other commodities have histories of violence and even massacres. So, anything coming on East India Company ships is going to be mixed in with things obtained through ill-begotten means.

What Is Dutch Culture?

AW: Through an incredibly subtle and muted palette, Hendrick Avercamp conveys the cold, icy atmosphere of winter when, in the 17th century, there was a tradition of festive activities on the ice.

Avercamp revels in showing various members of Dutch society in the same place at the same time. Everyone is experiencing winter: playing and socializing, hunting and eating, on the ice. There isn’t really a focal point to this composition. Our eye wanders between groups of people and their narratives. The scene suggests an ideal time when everyone mingled together, which the Dutch considered to be one of their salient features.

DZ: Avercamp is probably also picking and choosing things that he was interested in or that work well next to each other so it’s a little bit of a collage in a sense. It’s definitely not a snapshot of Dutch society per se, but rather he has compiled a group of highlights from his drawings.

I think it's also fascinating how the mingling of social classes we see here is, increasingly in this time period, a cultural characteristic the Dutch want people to know they have. It’s something they’re trying to image about themselves. Avercamp represents many things that also signal Dutchness. You always find the tricolor flag; you always find a windmill. So there are these things that are distinctly local and Dutch. This is a nation with a burgeoning sense of identity and it’s wrestling with its own self-image. So all these things are part of, I think, what Avercamp wants to project. The mingling of people is just one of those. There were issues of intolerance and strife between different groups and social classes, but that’s of course not what Avercamp would represent for us.

AW: In the central left foreground there is a hunter with his musket over his shoulder and the birds that he shot on his belt. He’s adjacent to two people, a Dutch woman and a Romani woman, who are meeting. It’s interesting to think about what a contemporary Dutch person might have thought of this adjacency.

DZ: The Romani people are particularly fascinating and Avercamp drew them and included them several times throughout his compositions. You can see that the Romani woman is holding that woman’s palm and she’s reading her fortune. The Romani presence in the Netherlands is something I would really like to look more into and research further. From what I understand, they experienced some degree of discrimination increasingly as their presence grew. But again, Avercamp is not interested in any of these things for the purposes of his views.

Dutch Colonial Brazil