So says the character Pistol to Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare’s comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The phrase is particularly resonant for a moment in history when the fortunes of colonial expansion and enterprise were about to descend upon the nations of Europe, including the playwright’s native England.

 

William Shakespeare’s comedy was hastily published in an abbreviated version in 1602, only two years after Queen Elizabeth 1 had signed a Royal Charter granting a trade monopoly to the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies (later consolidated as the East India Company). The power granted to this company to seize control of the trade routes throughout the East Indies speaks to the currency of ownership and possession in the seventeenth century; and indeed, the East India Company did pursue its monopoly of the trade routes with great determination. Like Pistol, who threatens to pry open this worldly ‘oyster’ with his sword, the East India Company took control of its riches by force. History records, for instance, that the tensions between the British and Dutch traders in the Banda Islands broke into outright violence in 1615 when armed men representing the rival nations launched a series of attacks on one another resulting in the slaughter of British defenders and Bandanese civilians on the Island of Ai in 1616.1 Further violent behavior was exhibited in 1623, when twenty men affiliated with the British East India Company were beheaded under charges of leading a conspiracy to assassinate Herman van Speult, the governor of the rival Dutch company based on the island of Ambon.2

 

The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC (Dutch United East India Company) had been chartered only two years after the British Company but its successful incursion in the South Seas ensured that it would have considerable control over the spice trade throughout the Baroque age. From its fortified posts in Indonesia and the Banda Islands the VOC exercised a virtual monopoly over the trade of nutmeg, mace, cloves, pepper and other exotic spices. Like its rival British Company the VOC resorted to extreme measures to secure its presence along the trade routes, often exacerbating tensions between England and the Dutch States-General. Conflicts with other merchant companies and indigenous peoples also prompted further acts of aggression as witnessed by the by the disastrous circumstances of the VOC refreshment post at the Cape of Good Hope. Established in 1652 by Jan van Riebeek the South African post was quickly transformed from a rest station into a full-blown colony when the Dutch administrator brought in slave workers from Indonesia and began to subjugate the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples with force.

 

As we reflect upon this deeply-troubled and often disturbing chapter in history we may well wonder how it was that the citizens of these predominantly Christian European nations were able to reconcile their avarice and the brutality of their trade practices with the moral and intellectual imperatives of their time? Certainly the behavior of greedy individuals could be censured through ridicule as we witness in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives, a play in which the gluttonous and salacious character of Falstaff and his followers leads them into evermore compromising and comical situations. But acquisition, possession and gain were essential to general business practice and justification for the pursuit of wealth and ownership required subtle reasoning, particularly in the face of the Bible’s censure of greed.

 

An especially cogent argument in defense of material acquisition was made by Martin Luther, the German Augustinian monk whose famous 95 Theses had helped to ignite the Protestant Reformation in 1517. In his sermon On Trading and Usury of 1524 he carefully noted that in business:

 

It is not to be denied that buying and selling are necessary. They cannot be dispensed with and can be practiced in a Christian manner, especially when the articles of trade serve a necessary and honorable purpose.3

 

Of importance here is the final phrase by which Luther carefully directs attention to the use-value of material goods. If the “articles of trade” prove essential and offer something of greater purpose to the owner or society at large, the individual may then pursue the acquisition of goods and the spoils of trade with a clear conscience.

 

When we turn our attention to the works of art and the objects collected by the growing merchant class of the Baroque age we can see how justification for possession and ownership was expressed in visual terms with equal nuance. A painting such as the Still Life with Oysters (Unknown, Flemish, 1630s, oil on panel), featured in this exhibition, is characteristic of the type of popular image which was eagerly pursued by collectors in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. At once desirable for its beauty, a painting such as this offered itself as precious, material object and a moralizing commentary on desire and indulgence, reminding the viewer of the importance of moderation. The dish, so tantalizingly set before our eyes, invites us to ‘taste’ the oysters, a symbol associated with gustatory and sexual indulgence, yet simultaneously denies access to the viewer, offering only illusion instead.4 Both pleasurable and didactic, a picture of this order could validate the very idea of ownership by offering itself as a necessary aid to the intellectual and moral betterment of the self.

 

The objects presented in this exhibition each speak to the idea of possession. This is immediately evident by virtue of the fact that they have been collected and arranged for display in the rarefied environment of the museum proper. They are here to be studied and admired and as we pause to reflect upon this matter we may well recognize how akin we are to the seventeenth-century collectors who gave rise to the practice of assembling works of art and precious objects. Like the collectors of the Baroque we value these works for their beauty and their didactic import. By studying them, individually and comparatively, we expect to learn not only more about the past but ourselves, in turn.

 

The visual material featured in Worldly Possessions is broad-ranging and encompasses world maps, topographical views, landscapes, portraits and character studies, genre scenes, still life paintings, natural history studies and specimens. Like the seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammern, discussed by Mira Qamar in her essay, Art Possessing Nature, the objects displayed here have been arranged to address universal themes. The viewer is invited to ‘read’ the objects comparatively and consider the various ways by which they construct meaning when brought together. As Anna Wisniowski notes in her discussion of Baroque maps, the world was ‘pictured’ not only in a general way but also through close description of its smaller, “constituent parts”. Turning from the spiders and insects rendered so precisely by Rochus van Veen in the latter 1600s to Aert van der Neer’s vista of A Frozen Waterway (17th century, oil on panel) we can see that the visual culture of the age was centered upon an interest in complete possession of the macro and micro universe.

 

Gregory Davies

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1 Vincent C. Loth, “Armed Incidents and Unpaid Bills: Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Banda Islands in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 29 (1995): 712-714.

 

2 For a full discussion of the incident, see David K. Bassett, “The ‘Amboyna Massacre’ of 1623,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 1 (1960): 1-19.

 

3 Martin Luther, “On Trading and Usury, 1524”, in Works of Martin Luther, vol. 4, (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1915), accessed July 31, 2013, http://www.lutherdansk.dk/Martin%20Luther%20-%20On%20trading%20and%20usury%201524/ON%20TRADING%20AND%20USURY%20-%20backup%20020306.htm#_Toc129069586.

 

4 For a more detailed discussion of the symbolism of the oyster in seventeenth-century Dutch art, see Liana De Girolami Cheney, “The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings: Moral or Erotic Symbolism,” Artibus et Historiae 8 (1987): 135-158.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Bassett, David K. “The ‘Amboyna Massacre’ of 1623.” Journal of Southeast Asian History 1 (1960): 1-19.

 

De Girolami Cheney, Liana. “The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings: Moral or Erotic Symbolism.” Artibus et Historiae 8 (1987): 135-158.

 

Loth, Vincent C. “Armed Incidents and Unpaid Bills: Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Banda Islands in the Seventeenth Century.” Modern Asian Studies 29 (1995): 705-740.

 

Luther, Martin. “On Trading and Usury, 1524”, in Works of Martin Luther, vol. 4. Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1915. Accessed July 31, 2013, http://www.lutherdansk.dk/Martin%20Luther%20-%20On%20trading%20and%20usury%201524/ON%20TRADING%20AND%20USURY%20-%20backup%20020306.htm#_Toc129069586.