A Brill Calendar: July 3

Few European regions were shaped less by arrogant aristocracy, powerful princes, dominant dukes and capricious counts than the Low Countries.

At the fringe of the Holy Roman Empire, with its collectively elected Head of State, these communities developed a taste for independence; not at the beck and call of palaces and castles. Rather, the cities of the area put their trust in freedom of oppression as the main wellspring of prosperity.

Patronage of learning and the arts, essential in fostering urban self-esteem and civic pride, became a prerogative of regents and patricians, following the example set by cities loosely united in the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages. The surnames have lost little of their fame, even in this millennium: Le Maire, Reaal, Witsen, Six, Hooft, de Geer, Trip, van Eeghen. Another breed, the Van Beuningen, illustrates this patrician legacy to perfection. One of them, Coenraad (1622 – ‘93), Leyden alumnus in Law, served as a diplomat and statesman for the Republic in its prime, (until ceasing to be ‘compos mentis’ round 1685, when Holland’s ‘finest hour’ was slowly sliding away in obsolescence).

To talk of the name Van Beuningen gives a fine example of ‘noblesse oblige’, even if it is mercurial and not of recent origin. Daniël Georg van Beuningen (1877 – 1955) willed his spectacular private collection of paintings to the city of his roots, Rotterdam, while a comparable gesture had been made by the Rotterdam connoisseur Boymans (1767 – 1847) much earlier. The ‘Boymans Museum’ opened its doors July 3, 1849, a Tuesday; well before the building in Amsterdam of a State Museum devoted to the painting in the age of Rembrandt. It is seldom that Europe’s main harbour-city of today is accredited as she should be for unique private cultural initiatives, carried out for for ages without any state-endorsement.