Collecting contemporary art in Rotterdam between 1870 and 1892: The international taste of Fop Smit Jr (1815-1892)

The extensive international art collection of the now virtually forgotten Rotterdam collector Fop Smit Jr (1815-1892) included as many as 240 contemporary European genre paintings and several works by renowned artists of the Barbizon School. After Smit’s death, his collection was divided among his family. The recent discovery of a two-part album containing photographs of the works of art he owned made it possible to reconstruct his collection for the first time. Based on extensive provenance and archival research, his collection is analysed and placed in the context of collecting contemporary art in Rotterdam and the Netherlands in the 1870s and 1890s. This reveals that Smit’s collection differed from the prevailing Dutch taste at that time. It was distinctly internationally oriented as well as larger than most other Dutch collections. Moreover, Smit did not combine paintings with works on paper or old master art, as was customary. Other Rotterdam collectors exhibit an international orientation similar to Smit’s. This is partly because, like him, they were advised by Rotterdam art dealers such as Jos de Kuyper, Jan van Mastenbroek and Willem Hendrik Köhler. In his collecting pursuits, Fop Smit was guided by his mercantile ethos. He was a shipowner and came from a successful family of shipbuilders. In addition, he owned stocks and bonds at home and abroad worth several million guilders. His collection and motives for collecting dovetailed with the development of the growing international art market, in which Smit can be considered as one of the new, upper-middle-class collectors in a position to compete with other industrialists and for whom money was no object.