Portrait of Jan Harmensz de Marre (1696-1763). Seaman, Poet and Director of the Amsterdam Theater 1732 - 1771

Jan Maurits Quinkhard painted this miniature portrait of Jan Harmensz de Marre, the Amsterdam theatre director, some time in the 1700s. Quinkhard presents de Marre, a man of the theater, as a man of letters, a poet holding a script. But the most striking thing about this intimate painting is that a working man of the theater is portrayed at all. In 18th-century Amsterdam, the institutions of art were gradually beginning to accommodate a wider range of social classes. The golden frame, however, reminds us of the economic structures that still underpinned Dutch society. To understand more fully the social conditions that made this painting possible, we might turn to archival sources such as theater records, guild records, or household inventories. Only then can we better understand the cultural forces that shaped the creation and reception of this portrait.