ABSTRACT

In the Spring of 1987, a group of twenty historians and art historians gathered in Santa Monica to discuss Dutch culture in the seventeenth century, at a conference organised by the Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities.1 The Dutch economic historian Ad van der Woude came with a highly speculative and unorthodox paper entitled: 'The Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland at the Time of the Dutch Republic'. On the basis of the long-term development of the number of households and the average number of paintings per household found in a small sample of Delft probate inventories, he arrived at an estimated total production of somewhere between five and ten million over two centuries.2 To the art historians in the audience, unacquainted as they were with the quantitative methods used by economic historians, this was hocus pocus; several of van der Woude's colleagues were critical as well.3