The merchants who bought Rembrandts instead of coats of arms

Seventeenth-century Holland produced, by most estimates, several million paintings, an output unmatched by any other European country in a comparable period, and the reason has less to do with an unusual abundance of talent than with an unusual customer base. Most European art before this period was commissioned by the Catholic Church or by royal and aristocratic patrons, for churches, palaces and family chapels. The newly independent Dutch Republic had, after breaking from Spanish Habsburg rule and adopting Calvinism as its dominant faith, comparatively little of either: Calvinist churches were plain by conviction, discouraging religious imagery, and the republic itself had no royal court in the conventional European sense. What it had instead was a large, prosperous merchant class, grown rich on trade through the Dutch East India Company and the wider commerce that ran through Amsterdam's harbour, and that class wanted paintings for an entirely different kind of wall.

Buying art the way other cities bought silver

Wealthy Dutch merchants bought paintings the way merchants elsewhere might buy plate or jewellery: as decoration, as an investment and, not infrequently, as a fairly direct display of what they could afford. Genre scenes of domestic life, still lifes of fruit and tableware, portraits of the family and, especially in a maritime republic that had built its fortune on the sea, marine paintings of ships and harbours, all found a ready market among people who wanted art for their own narrow canal-house parlours rather than a cathedral nave. A comparatively broad and prosperous middle class of buyers, rather than a small circle of aristocratic patrons, meant painters could specialise and compete in an open market, producing work in volume and selling it, in many cases, through dealers and even lotteries rather than by direct commission alone.

Rembrandt, and a fortune that came and went with fashion

Rembrandt van Rijn built his early career in Amsterdam squarely within this market, painting portraits of the city's merchant elite and group portraits for civic militia companies, the most famous of them The Night Watch, commissioned by an Amsterdam militia guild for the substantial sum its members paid collectively. Rembrandt's later years told a less comfortable story about the same market's fickleness: as fashion moved towards a smoother, more polished style than his increasingly loose and expressive late brushwork offered, commissions dried up, and he was declared insolvent in 1656, his house and much of his considerable art collection auctioned to cover his debts. He died in relative poverty in 1669, a reminder that a market built on private taste rather than institutional patronage could reward an artist generously in one decade and abandon him in the next.

Vermeer, painting almost nobody could see

Johannes Vermeer, working a generation later in Delft, occupied the opposite end of the same market: he produced perhaps thirty-five surviving paintings across his career, worked slowly, and sold much of his output to a small number of wealthy local patrons rather than to the open market Rembrandt had depended on. His interior scenes, quiet domestic moments lit by a single window, are now among the most recognisable paintings in the world, though during his own lifetime Vermeer remained a relatively minor, locally known figure; broader recognition came only in the nineteenth century, when critics rediscovered his work and elevated him to the reputation he holds today.

Seeing the collections

Amsterdam's museums hold the largest concentration of this period's painting anywhere in the world, a legacy directly traceable to the merchant wealth that commissioned it in the first place. Ambassador's Weekend Escape to Holland & Belgium, four nights from London Tilbury, and the Netherlands & Belgium Bank Holiday Getaway both allow a full day in the city, enough for a considered visit to its major collections alongside the canal ring itself.

The Autumn Escape to Holland & Belgium, three nights, offers a shorter version of the same itinerary once the summer crowds have thinned.

The paintings are, in the end, the most direct evidence left of who this city's wealth actually belonged to: not a king who never lived there, but the merchants whose narrow canal-house walls still, in a sense, define what the Dutch Golden Age looked like.