Ad Blankestijn: The Procuress by Van Honthorst (1625)

The Procuress by Gerard van Honthorst depicts a young woman with a provocative neckline smiling seductively. She is accompanied by a man with a money bag and an older woman with a tooth protruding from her closed mouth, pointing a finger at the young woman. They are all in a shallow space. The light from the candle on the table accentuates the view of the young woman's cleavage and her colorful, feathered dress. She is holding a lute. The young woman is clearly the focal point of the painting.

[Gerard van Honthorst, The Procuress (1625)]

What are we seeing?

The Procuress (or Matchmaker) of the title was an agent for prostitutes who collected a portion of their earnings. Her job was to arrange love for money by putting men in touch with women of questionable repute. In this painting, the procuress is depicted as an old woman standing on the left and pointing to the right. A young man is giving money to a young woman: the feathers in her hair, her colorful clothing, and her cleavage indicate that she is a prostitute and not an ordinary citizen (the lute she holds at the neck is a sexual reference to female genitalia - note that the shadows of the client's hand and the prostitute's hand meet on the instrument). The feathers are a reference to her wanton nature.

The painting is a good example of Utrecht Caravaggism (a group of Dutch artists from the city of Utrecht who were influenced by the art of Caravaggio). Scenes illuminated by a single candle were the specialty of 'Gherardo della Notte', as the Italians admiringly called Gerard van Honthorst. The only source of light is the candle on the table. Perhaps the fact that the woman's client is shrouded in shadow with his back to us is a moral comment by the artist on his character - or simply a humorous way of preserving the anonymity of the brothel client.

Gerard van Honthorst's The Procuress is in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

[Gerard van Honthorst]

Prostitution in Amsterdam in the 17th c.

In the following, I quote extensively from the interesting article "The Whore, the Bawd and the Artist: the Reality and Imagery of Seventeenth Century Dutch Prostitution" by Lotte C. van der Pol in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (https://jhna.org/articles/whore-bawd-artist-reality-imagery-seventeenth-century-dutch-prostitution/). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License.

"Brothel scenes are a familiar type of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. But who bought these paintings? In a country where prostitution, procuring, and adultery were criminal offenses, and where religious piety was deeply felt not only by Calvinists but also by people of other denominations, there was apparently still a market for pictures of half-naked, lascivious women whose charms were obviously for sale. So where were these pictures hung? In the bedrooms and "art rooms" of the homes of respectable people!

The brothel scenes mostly depict young and beautiful girls, sometimes accomplished musicians, who always appear eager and happy. But the pictures also include harlots of the common type, who are lazy and impertinent, drink too much, and cheat their customers in every way possible. Food and music accompany the business of prostitution. The proceedings are always presided over by a procuress (in Dutch: koppelaarster), a mercenary, ugly, often hideously grinning old woman - as in our painting. The women are usually the most active figures in the scenes. The client is often a well-dressed young man from a good family, or a farmer or peasant of advanced age, and the men are portrayed as fools who neither notice the deception nor the robbery.

[The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen]

Reformation writers railed against any toleration of prostitution, in part because a fierce epidemic of a new and deadly venereal disease, syphilis, swept across Europe in the sixteenth century, bringing with it a new fear of sex and a hatred of prostitutes. The policy toward prostitution in Protestant Europe shifted from regulation to prohibition, and the Netherlands was no exception. Whenever a city was taken over by the Calvinists during the Dutch Rebellion, one of the first acts of the new city government was to close the municipal brothels and suppress prostitution. This happened in Amsterdam in 1578. All forms of illicit sex became criminal offenses to be dealt with by the criminal courts. "Public whores," their procurers, and brothel keepers were given special punishments in municipal and provincial ordinances; brothels were to be "disturbed" and closed.

On the other hand, suppressing prostitution as a trade was an almost impossible task for the authorities: urbanized, maritime, and wealthy Holland had too many characteristics that favored widespread prostitution. This was especially true in Amsterdam, the third largest European city after Paris and London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first half of the seventeenth century, it grew rapidly to 200,000 inhabitants, most of whom were born outside its walls. It was the place where every year thousands of sailors signed on and even more were paid off. From the second half of the seventeenth century, at least a thousand prostitutes lived in the city at any one time, along with hundreds of brothel-keepers. They mostly operated out of brothels, which often contained no more than one or two rooms where a bawd lived with one, two, or at most three harlots. Disreputable inns also employed waitresses who might be willing to prostitute themselves, and from the last quarter of the seventeenth century, prostitutes could be found in music halls. Amsterdam was famous for the latter, with their live music and dancing, and their prostitutes ready to pick up customers. Due to the lack of separate rooms in these establishments, the prostitutes usually took the men to the brothels, where they lived with their bawd. As one of Amsterdam's main tourist attractions, the music hall served to reinforce the city's reputation for immorality. The city government would have preferred to run the harlots out of town, but with a police force (consisting of the bailiff, his deputies, and their constables) of only thirty men (!), this was hardly feasible. Nevertheless, prostitution was actively prosecuted: in Amsterdam, prostitution and brothel keeping accounted for more than one-fifth of all convicted crimes between 1650 and 1750.

[Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image, 1625]

While prostitutes were almost all single, and if married, their husbands were at sea or otherwise absent, half of the brothel keepers were married or living with a man. They often had family members involved in brothels or other forms of crime. But the most important difference was their financial situation: the bawds had money or credit; the whores did not. The bawd's strongest hold over the prostitute was tied to the debt the girl owed her. Debts were incurred primarily for clothing. Clothes were expensive: A woman of the lower classes only owned few garments, usually of coarse material and drab colors, and would never earn enough money to buy the silks and satins she saw worn by rich women in wealthy Amsterdam. A girl embarking on a career as a prostitute needed nice clothes, and a bawd could provide her with a fine outfit on credit. In fact, the bawd would induce the girl to become a prostitute by showing her beautiful clothes and "dangling before her a life of leisure, gaiety and dancing, with plenty to eat and drink."

The above is a much shortened and edited version of the article by Lotte C. van der Pol in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art.

[The Prodigal Son by Gerard van Honthorst]

Gerard Van Honthorst

The Dutch Golden Age master Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656) was born in Utrecht, the son of a tapestry painter. He was first trained by Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht and later went to Rome. Strongly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, Honthorst soon became much in demand in Rome. He was patronized by the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani and Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who later became the patron of the sculptor Bernini. After his return to Utrecht in 1620, Honthorst played a leading role in the city's civic life, serving as dean of the painters' guild four times between 1625 and 1629. In 1628 he spent six busy and profitable months in England at the invitation of Charles I. After his return to Utrecht, he remained an internationally admired figure. Honthorst died in Utrecht in 1656, still a successful artist.

[Incorporates some information from the English and Dutch Wikipedia]