Every artwork in our collection has a special meaning to us. Some discoveries were unexpected encounters, while other paintings were on our radar for years before they found their place. Behind almost every painting lies a beautiful story, a memory, or a special anecdote. Let us take you through the fascinating story behind the acquisition of Gerrit van Honthorst’s ‘Greed‘ or “Avarice”, in which almost every facet of collecting comes together.
TEFAF Maastricht is the world’s leading art fair for old masters and antiques. Ilone and I have enjoyed visiting this fair since 1995. There’s an intimate atmosphere, and it’s always a feast of recognition and new discoveries for us.
In 2001, we unfortunately had to miss a year and couldn’t attend TEFAF. We did, however, have several enjoyable exhibitions to visit. For example, our Gerrit Dou was in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. As we walked around there, we couldn’t help but feel that our little Dou might well be one of this master’s most beautiful works. Around the same time, our two paintings by Abraham Bloemaert “A cottage with peasants milking goats” and “Boy with Rumbling pot” were part of an exhibition in Florida. The latter work immediately went on to the Centraal Museum in Utrecht for another exhibition.
That exhibition, “Caravaggists and Italians in Dutch Collections,” focused on a development in Dutch art that is of particular interest to us: showing the influence of the Italian master Caravaggio and Italy on Dutch artists. Besides the Bloemaert, we had another painting in the show; the “Avaritia” by Matthias Stom.
While admiring the paintings on the wall, we noticed that the Bloemaert hung beautifully, but that the Stom was in poor condition. The painting had a bumpy surface, a glossy varnish, and an ugly frame. This is no way to display a painting, I thought. I would have loved to take it down immediately, but of course, that wasn’t possible.
“In the 17th century, it was believed that greed increased with age”
Anonymous
Two paintings further down hung another “Avaritia”, this one by Gerrit van Honthorst, an important Utrecht master. A truly beautiful work! It depicts an old woman examining a coin by lantern light. The scene is a variation on a popular subject: greed, one of the seven deadly sins. In the 17th century, it was believed that greed increased with age. This Van Honthorst, just like our paintings, came from a private collection, but was loaned anonymously.
Immediately after the exhibition, I took the Stom to Martin Bijl for restoration, who cleaned and restored it. I also ordered a new black frame. I also kept thinking about the Gerrit van Honthorst we so admired. For years, I tried to find out who the owner was. To no avail.
Waiting for an opportunity
In an ideal world, you could look at your collection and say: I need a work by this or that artist to fill a gap in my collection. The problem with this approach is that you’re largely dependent on what the market offers. However, there are certain works in other private collections that we find attractive and that might come up for sale. Perhaps the owner will one day decide to sell such a work. If you know it’s the right artist, the right school, and that it has the right context, and it’s a beautiful painting that would fit perfectly in the collection, then you keep an eye on such a painting. And you wait for the opportunity to buy.
Sometimes you can make things happen by being proactive—not just looking at what the market offers—and by always keeping your eyes and ears open. During conversations about art, you pick up on signals. Sometimes you put them aside to think about them further, and sometimes you act immediately.
Not for sale
An art historian friend of ours knew the owners of this Honthorst. I asked him to inquire with the owners if the painting was for sale. He did, but the answer was negative. For the next four or five years, I regularly asked him to contact the owners again. The answer was always negative. Until one day I called again, and my art friend called me back to say that the owners had decided to sell the work!
They were finally willing to part with it, but they wouldn’t contact me. They had given it to an art dealer with the instruction to sell it. My art friend felt very sorry for me, but of course, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He did tell me which art dealer was contracted to sell the work. Fortunately, I knew the dealer and called him right away. I told him I’d been eyeing the painting for years and was still interested in buying it. He told me the painting had returned from the restorers yesterday and was in his gallery. We agreed he would send the painting to a mutual acquaintance in Amsterdam and meet me there to view it and discuss the price. I hadn’t seen it in five years, and now it had been restored. I couldn’t wait…
Painting in the bathroom
The acquaintance in Amsterdam was a friend and an advisor, whose opinion I would take very seriously when deciding on a potential purchase. After the work arrived in Amsterdam, the advisor and I viewed the painting in his living room, examining every detail. We both loved the work, but we still needed to check its condition. Typically, you view a painting under a blue light in a completely dark room to determine its condition; this light reveals any retouches or previous damage that has been repaired. This story unfolded during the day, so we resorted to the only immediate solution: we took the painting into the bathroom, turned off the light, and looked at it under the blue lamp.
The painting turned out to be in good condition. In the upper left corner, we saw the remains of the original signature. Someone had tried to erase it in the past, presumably to sell the painting under a different name. The last digit of the date had been partially erased, leaving 162. Restorers believe it should have read 1623, which would make it one of Van Honthorst’s earliest works.
“To this day, I don’t know who the owner was”
All the way
I knew I would do everything in my power to try and buy the painting. There I was, sitting across from the dealer, this beautiful framed painting before us, propped up against a chair. I wanted to know what the owners wanted for it. After some heated negotiation, during which he emphasized that there were several potential buyers and I gave my own ideas, based on the prices of comparable paintings, I said, “I think you should consult with the owners to see if they’ll accept my price.” The dealer excused himself to make a phone call.
To this day, I don’t know who the owner was. And if I had approached them directly, they might not have accepted my offer. That’s also the strength of a good dealer: they immediately bring credibility to the transaction because they have experience and guarantee it.
After a tense fifteen minutes of waiting, he returned with a smile on his face, and I was offered a handshake: the deal was done! The painting I had been pursuing for five years after that exhibition in Utrecht was ours and came as a wonderful addition to the collection!
“Although Van Honthorst never knew him personally, he certainly studied Caravaggio’s works in Italy”
Art Historical Importance
This work is of great art historical importance. Artists, even the greatest, don’t create works in a vacuum. They are guided by their predecessors and develop and improve from there, incorporating new ideas, perceptions, and knowledge into their art to create (sometimes) magnificent masterpieces. Although Van Honthorst never knew Caravaggio personally—he died in 1610, a few years before Van Honthorst arrived in Italy—he certainly studied and knew Caravaggio’s works in Italy. And although other Dutch painters also spent time in Italy and became followers of Caravaggio, Van Honthorst became the most influential of these “Caravaggisti.” Upon his return to Utrecht in 1620, he served as the primary role model for many artists in the Dutch Republic.
New and Exciting Art
Rembrandt did not travel to Italy to study the great masters of the Renaissance and Caravaggio in person. Yet, when examining his early work, we find clear influences that trace back to Van Honthorst. For example, Rembrandt’s The parable of the rich fool from 1627 in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, displays the same characteristics as our Van Honthorst. The same subject, the same (even stronger) emphasis on light, almost the same posture, and the way the man holds a coin to look at it by candlelight. There are also differences: Rembrandt depicts a man in a crowded (study?) room, and his panel is much smaller.
It is therefore more than likely that Rembrandt took Van Honthorst’s ‘Avaritia‘ as an example, when he painted his 1627 ‘Avaritia‘ version in Leiden just four years later. It also seems obvious that young and competitive artists like Rembrandt and his friend Jan Lievens would have known and studied this new and exciting art being produced in Utrecht. The closest connection between Rembrandt and Caravaggio that we can find today is through this painting by Gerrit van Honthorst.
