ABSTRACT
Michael Montias, having exhausted the Delft archives and become fully ensconced in a study of seventeenth-century Amsterdam auctions and patronage, once commented that the chance of finding a new document with Rembrandt’s name on it in the Amsterdam archive was staggeringly small. This amounted to a sobering assessment for me, as I had just embarked on a doctoral thesis investigating Rembrandt’s bankruptcy. Montias’ advice, and his practice, was to approach an archive in an expansive manner, rather than searching for specific items. This had worked well for him in his sweeping economic analysis of artists and artisans in Delft, and it allowed him to find unexpected new material related to Johannes Vermeer. The broad assessment allowed him to understand the new and previously known Vermeer material in fresh ways, illuminating his “milieu.” It is fair to say that this approach revitalized Vermeer studies. With respect to Rembrandt, Montias remarked to me a few years ago, “It is more likely that one will find a new document somewhere other than Amsterdam.”
