A Business Partner and a Pupil: Two Conjectural Essays on Rembrandt's Entourage
John Michael Montias
" ous n'irons plus au bois, Les lauriers sont coupes," goes the French nursery song. At various times during the last 130 years, A. B. de Vries, Nicolaas de Roever, Abraham Bredius, Isabella van Eeghen, and S. A. C. Dudok van Heel, to cite only the most persistent and su ccessful longtime researchers, have combed the archives for contemporary mentions of Rembrandt and other famous seventeenth-century Dutch artists. The harvest has now been gathered, and the chances of finding any more documents specifically mentioning Rembrandt or any of his distinguished contemporaries are slim. 1 Yet there are lots more laurels left uncut in these archival woods. But, in order to exploit the available material successfully, research strategies must be adapted to cope with the near exhaustion of documents bearing prestigious names. Turning the folios of notarial acts at random is unlikely to be effective. Given a set of relevant questions (about the life of an artist, his oeuvre, or his milieu), a better approach is to begin with a complete list of available, relevant documents and to use these reference points as springboards for the investigation. All the information available in an archive on any name cited in one of these documents, including the witnesses to notarial acts,2 needs to be carefully studied for the light they may shed on the documents themselves and, more generally, on the investigation at hand. All available wills and postmortem inventories of the individuals belonging to an artist's milieu should be mined for any relevant information they may contain, including the names of the family members who may have been portrayed. 3 By accumulating data about the individuals with ties to targeted artists (family members, clients, patrons, business acquaintances, creditors), the researcher may be able to build bridges between and among the islands of knowledge that are already in his compass. In developing his hypotheses, however, he may have to be satisfied <
D etail of fig. 78.
with strong circumstantial evidence in the absence of documents specifi129