ABSTRACT
One imagines a collector like Michael Montias describing the Amsterdam painter Emanuel Murant (1622-1700) as a poor man’s Jan van der Heyden. This would not have diminished Murant’s interest for Montias the historian, in which capacity he would have turned up every scrap of evidence available on the artist in publications and archives. The author of Vermeer and his Milieu was not the sort of scholar who introduces unfamiliar figures to the reader by observing that “very little is known” about them, or words to that effect, which are invariably followed by one, or two sentences demonstrating that the first statement was unnecessary. In the case of Murant, it would also be inaccurate.
