The Reynst Collection, probably the most extensive Dutch 17th century collection of art and artefacts, was owned by the Dutch merchants Gerrit Reynst (also known as Gerard Reynst) and Jan Reynst. The collection was put on display in their house at the sign of Hope on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. It consisted of over 200 Italian paintings and over 300 sculptures, most of them ancient Roman. There were other antiquities: ten sepulchral monuments, five votive reliefs, nine cinerary urns, "Etruscan" vases, and Christian objects, as well as engraved gems. The collection was dispersed in the 1660s and 1670s, after both brothers had died, and Gerrit's widow sold parts to various buyers.[1]
Gerrit Reynst was, like his younger brother Jan (1601–1646), a Dutch merchant and art collector from Amsterdam, with his brother owner of the Reynst Collection. He was an alderman and member of the town council, entering it in 1646.
Jan Reynst was a Protestant Dutch merchant in Amsterdam and, with his elder brother Gerrit, an art collector.
Amsterdam is the capital city and most populous municipality of the Netherlands. Its status as the capital is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands, although it is not the seat of the government, which is The Hague. Amsterdam has a population of 854,047 within the city proper, 1,357,675 in the urban area and 2,410,960 in the metropolitan area. The city is located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country but is not its capital, which is Haarlem. The Amsterdam metropolitan area comprises much of the northern part of the Randstad, one of the larger conurbations in Europe, which has a population of approximately 8.1 million.
In 1625 Jan Reynst became the representative of the family in Venice and was known there as Giovanni Reynst. He was impressed by the collections of wealthy Venetians and intended to build one of his own. Because Venice was in decline after trade around the Cape of Good Hope destroyed their monopoly, many merchants there sold their art collections. Jan Reynst, rather than patiently collecting for years, bought the collection of Andrea Vendramin (1556-1629) from Vendramin's widow. Vendramin had meticulously catalogued his collection in 1627. The items bought from Vendramin's widow, some 230 antiquities, about 140 paintings and curiosities of natural history— a true cabinet of curiosity— were shipped to Amsterdam and would remain the core of the Reynst Collection, though Jan Reynst continued to buy art in Venice.
Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is situated on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The islands are located in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay that lies between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers. In 2018, 260,897 people resided in the Comune di Venezia, of whom around 55,000 live in the historical city of Venice. Together with Padua and Treviso, the city is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), which is considered a statistical metropolitan area, with a total population of 2.6 million.
The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa.
Antiquities are objects from antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean: the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Artifacts from earlier periods such as the Mesolithic, and other civilizations from Asia and elsewhere may also be covered by the term. The phenomenon of giving a high value to ancient artifacts is found in other cultures, notably China, where Chinese ritual bronzes, three to two thousand years old, have been avidly collected and imitated for centuries, and the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where in particular the artifacts of the earliest Olmec civilization are found reburied in significant sites of later cultures up to the Spanish Conquest.
Put on display in the family house in Amsterdam, the collection stayed largely together for several decades. A visitors list was kept, which includes famous people such as writer Joost van den Vondel and poet Constantijn Huygens. A statue, supposedly of Cleopatra, was donated to Princess Amalia of Solms-Braunfels after she had shown interest in it when visiting the collection; it was delivered the day before she received a visit from Marie de' Medici, whom it was doubtless intended to impress.[2]
Joost van den Vondel was a Dutch poet, writer and playwright. He is considered the most prominent Dutch poet and playwright of the 17th century. His plays are the ones from that period that are still most frequently performed, and his epic Joannes de Boetgezant (1662), on the life of John the Baptist, has been called the greatest Dutch epic.
Sir Constantijn Huygens, Lord of Zuilichem, was a Dutch Golden Age poet and composer. He was secretary to two Princes of Orange: Frederick Henry and William II, and the father of the scientist Christiaan Huygens.
Cleopatra VII Philopator was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, nominally survived as pharaoh by her son Caesarion. As a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great. After the death of Cleopatra, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, marking the end of the Hellenistic period that had lasted since the reign of Alexander. While her native language was Koine Greek, she was the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language.
After both the Reynst brothers had died the collection dispersed. In 1660 the first sale took place, when the best pieces (24 paintings and 12 sculptures) were bought by the Dutch Republic for the large amount of 80,000 guilders. This part of the collection would become the Dutch Gift, which mostly remains in the English Royal Collection, who have 14 of the paintings, with other works now in museums. Three of the antique sculptures escaped the Whitehall fire (1691) because they were installed in the garden behind the Banqueting House. Other parts of the collection ended up in Germany and with other Dutch collectors. Some antiquities found their way to the Papenbroek Collection, and through there to the collection of the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.
The Dutch Gift of 1660 was a collection of 28 mostly Italian Renaissance paintings and 12 classical sculptures, along with a yacht, the Mary, and furniture, which was presented to King Charles II of England by the States-General of the Netherlands in 1660. The collection was given to Charles II to mark his return to power in the English Restoration, before which Charles had spent many years in exile in Paris, Cologne, and the Spanish Netherlands, during the rule of the English Commonwealth. It was intended to strengthen diplomatic relations between England and the Republic, but only a few years after the gift the two nations would be at war again in the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67.
The Royal Collection of the British Royal family is the largest private art collection in the world.
The Palace of Whitehall at Westminster, Middlesex, was the main residence of the English monarchs from 1530 until 1698, when most of its structures, except for Inigo Jones's Banqueting House of 1622, were destroyed by fire. It had at one time been the largest palace in Europe, with more than 1,500 rooms, overtaking the Vatican, before itself being overtaken by the expanding Palace of Versailles, which was to reach 2,400 rooms. The palace gives its name, Whitehall, to the street on which many of the current administrative buildings of the present-day British government are situated, and hence metonymically to the central government itself. At its most expansive, the palace extended over much of the area bordered by Northumberland Avenue in the north; to Downing Street and nearly to Derby Gate in the south; and from roughly the elevations of the current buildings facing Horse Guards Road in the west, to the then banks of the River Thames in the east —a total of about 23 acres (9.3 ha). It was about 710 yards (650 m) from Westminster Abbey.
Around 1665 to 1670, after the collection was dispersed, engravings of some of the best pieces were finally published, the project having been initiated in 1655.
Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing images on paper as prints or illustrations; these images are also called "engravings". Engraving is one of the oldest and most important techniques in printmaking. Wood engraving is a form of relief printing and is not covered in this article.
Notes
↑ Anne-Marie S. Logan, The 'Cabinet' of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst (Amsterdam: north-Holland Publishing) 1979. Reviewed by F. L. Bastet in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art11. 1 (1980:55-57).
Halbertsma, R. B. (2003), Scholars, Travellers, and Trade: The Pioneer Years of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, 1818-1840, Routledge, p.6-10
Logan, Anne-Marie S., "The 'Cabinet' of the Brothers Gerard and Jan Reynst" (Amsterdam, 1979).
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