ABSTRACT
When in 1935-1936 art historian Wilhelm Martin wrote about the Dutch Republic, ‘Nowhere were there in such a small area so many and such great painters’, he must have been contemplating the situation around the middle of the seventeenth century. 1 Just forty years prior to that time, the great achievements and large-scale production to which Martin refers were still very much in the future. Potential demand for paintings increased under the influence of economic growth and an increased tendency to purchase paintings as decorative items to cover walls. Still, Dutch painters were not yet able to exploit this potential. Fifty years later, hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of paintings had been produced in a variety of genres, styles, sizes, and price categories by thousands of painters. 2
