Translation of: De de kelder van Rembrandt (Ons Amsterdam, maart 2022)
Around 1631, Rembrandt van Rijn moved in with the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburg, on the corner of Zwanenburgwal and Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam. In 1639, Rembrandt bought the large house next door – now the Rembrandt House. At the time the neighbourhood was the centre of the Amsterdam art market; the painters Pieter Lastman, Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy, Pieter Codde and Cornelis van der Voort had their workshops nearby. The Jodenbreestraat – already very multicultural at the time – was also a centre of the tobacco trade. Several mainly Portuguese tobacco traders lived in the neighbourhood, importing the addictive leaves from North and South America. In the little streets of Vlooienburg several small tobacco factories could be found where the leaves were ‘spun’ into useful pipe tobacco. Many poor migrants, men and women, found work here. Rembrandt himself would earn an extra penny by renting out his cellar as a tobacco warehouse.
A well-known merchant in tobacco and other colonial goods, such as sugar and indigo, was Daniel Pinto (Lisbon, c. 1611 – Amsterdam 1681), who had been active in Amsterdam since the 1630s. In 1645, he bought the house on the corner of Jodenbreestraat, where Uylenburgh’s art dealership had been located before, for 9000 guilders. This was also the studio where Rembrandt worked between 1631 and 1635 and where he must have painted Marten and Oopjen. In 1638, Uylenburgh had moved and sold the building and his studio to Nicolaes Pickenoy. A year later, Rembrandt bought the house next door, Jodenbreestraat 4.
Daniel Pinto moved into the corner house with his young family, his daughter Sara was a girl of two or three, his son Moses was to be born there. Pinto used the cellar to store tobacco, and for that purpose he also rented part of the cellar from the famous painter. The other part of Rembrandt’s cellar was rented by the brothers Jacob and Samuel Pereira, who lived across the street.
Various notarial deeds about these two tobacco cellars have been preserved. Despite the lease, Rembrandt was apparently not on too good a terms with his Portuguese Jewish neighbour. In the 1930s, the legendary A.M. Vas Dias unearthed a payment dispute between the burnt protocols of notary Benedict Baddel (1594-1658). The shared wall between the houses of Rembrandt and Pinto needed to be raised, and Rembrandt was not in the mood to help pay. Moreover, the ‘rumbling’ of the noisy work must have disturbed the peace in the studios of the Rembrandt House for months.
Historian Bas Dudok van Heel described a series of deeds from February 1654, in which several rolls of tobacco were reported stolen from Rembrandt’s cellar by Eleaser alias ‘Lenart’ Swaeb and Hartog Abrahams, assisted by Eleaser’s wife Judick Salomons. With the help of a false key they had gained access to the cellars from the Zwanenburgwal. They are said to have stolen some sixty rolls of tobacco in a month and a half.
Persians and Portuguese
On Friday 2 July 1655 at 11 a.m. three or four ‘Persians’ (Armenian merchants) entered the cellar on the corner of Jodenbreestraat to buy tobacco. Daniel de Chavis from Livorno was working in Pinto’s cellar at the time. The four Armenians asked De Chavis to go to another warehouse to see if he could find what they were looking for. The Chavis has no time for this, or does not feel like it. There are words. The Persians call De Chavis outside, where he is seized by the throat, according to the two witnesses Abraham de Bruin and Christoffel Dias, who at De Chavis’ request make a statement a few days later before the notary Adriaan Lock. If Isaac and Abraham Cotinho had not ‘come to his aid and delivered him from the hands of the said Persians, they would have treated him very badly’.
After De Chavis had been rescued and had re-entered De Pinto’s cellar, De Bruin and Dias saw that the Persians ‘returned to the aforementioned cellar three times in succession to attack [De Chavis]’. The two witnesses, who apparently were also inside, had slammed the door, after which ’the Parsians violently attacked the door of the cellar’.
At least, that was the story of Daniel de Chavis and his witnesses, but in the meantime it was not the ‘Persians’, but De Chavis himself who was arrested for the violence in the street and put in irons under the town hall. On 9 July, after interrogating ‘Daniel de Chavis, 21 years old, an Italian Jew’, the sheriff wrote that he confessed ’to have been in league with the Persians, whereas he denies having shat him with a knife in his face or hit him with clubs’. Only for the first case was he sentenced to ‘2 months’ rasping’ or a fine of 100 guilders. Apparently, the pulling of knives was not considered proven.
Mark Ponte, 2022
See also