A Taste for Fish: Paintings of Aquatic Animals in the Low Countries (1560–1729)

This chapter discusses paintings of aquatic animals in the early modern Low Countries, including still lifes, market scenes, scenes of fishing and fishery, and biblical scenes with fish. Based upon evidence from probate inventories, the ownership of ‘fish paintings’ in seventeenth-century Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Haarlem is investigated and compared. Inventories reveal how the language to describe paintings changed over time and how more or less fixed genres only slowly developed. Through the example of fish paintings, this chapter reflects upon early modern genres of images and their meanings. The rise and popularity of fish paintings in the early modern Low Countries is related to the local importance of fishery, the culture of collecting, and the (up and coming) natural knowledge about fish. Fish was an important part of the local economy and diet, whilst aquatic collectables (e.g. dried fish, shells, corals, turtle shells) were keenly collected. The interest in natural history among relatively large parts of the population may have been one factor that explains the popularity of fish motifs in painting. It probably also worked the other way around: fish motifs in painting may have further spurred the interest in nature.