How to Identify Women as Buyers of Art
At the study day of the Stichting Het Nederlandse Interieur (SHNI), Piet Bakker spoke about our research into women as consumers of paintings. Not only female, but also male art buyers are difficult to identify in archival records. In estate inventories, ownership of paintings is always attributed to “the household” rather than “the man” or “the woman.” How, then, can we distinguish between the two? In his talk, Bakker tried to demonstrate that a socio-cultural approach—focusing on potential purchase motives such as decoration, representation, religious devotion, and love of art—might be more effective for studying women’s consumer behavior through estate inventories, than the socio-economic approach, which has traditionally been used to investigate the demand side of the art market.
The SHNI study day was dedicated to ‘Het interieur en de vrouw’ and included speakers such as Els Kloek, Pieter Vlaadingerboek and Rozemarijn Moes. For the full program, please click here.
