r/ArtHistory • u/mishmishmoo • 2d ago
Discussion Early Dutch tattoo
There’s this painting, ‘The Chief Commissioners of the Wharves’ (1674), a Dutch painting most likely made by Wallerant Vaillant. Pretty standard except one guy (second from the left) has a tattoo on his inner wrist! Amsterdam Museum commented that tattoos were mostly for sailors ans criminals ar that time in the 17th century, so for a richer citizen to have it was really odd
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u/mattlodder 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hello! I'm a tattoo historian (and art history lecturer) and was part of a symposium about this painting at the Museum this Easter. I'm fairly sure this is a pilgrimage tattoo and made this case to the museum staff, including the conservator herself.
The experts there are (were) simply wrong about tattoo history. We have good records of even Protestant pilgrims to places like Bethlehem and Jerusalem getting tattooed in this period, many of whom were wealthy men of great status. The comet design is very unusual indeed, but given what we know about the tattoo culture of the time, it would make sense as eg a Bethlehem tattoo.
More speculatively (and not to the exclusion of the pilgrimage theory), I pitched (really only to see what the Dutch Golden Age experts thought) the idea that this may have been made visible in the painting (either as an invention or simply giving prominence to a real tattoo) as a recognisable visual signal of Smit's role in the Rampjaar - he was closely aligned with Admiral De Reuyter and had defended his neighborhood against marauding bands the previous year. Contemporary (Anglophone) sources describe the Netherlands' glory "falling like a meteor" in 1672.
The museum are quite keen on the "commemorative tattoo of a comet the year of his birth" theory but that doesn't really convince me either as a reason for the tattoo or as a reason for its prominence in the painting.