Conchylomania: the passion for collecting shells and their depiction in still lives in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

The beauty and exotic appearance of sea shells have fascinated man since Antiquity, and they have always been collected by him. For centuries they have been mounted as precious objects and jewellery, used in decoration, ritual and garden design, and often as currency. Pliny included them in his Natural History and the famous orator Cicero, in his De Oratore, even advocated shell-collecting as a means to achieve serenity in the midst of political turmoil. The Renaissance, with its revival of the ancient world, saw a renewal of this interest, and the first specialised collections of exotic shells had already begun to be formed in the sixteenth century. Alongside them the earliest scholarly works on shells such as Guillaume Rondelet’s Universae aquatilium historiae pars altera (1555) also appeared from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. It was the advent of the seventeenth century, however, that saw the most dramatic increase in the interest in and demand for exotic shells as prized collectors’ items from foreign lands, and in its wake their growing appearance as subjects in their own right in the paintings of the period.

The founding of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602 and later is a hugely significant moment in this process. The colonial exploitation of the Far East resulted in a huge increase in the importation of large and colourful shells (and a far greater variety of specimens), collected and brought back to Holland from shores stretching all the way from the Cape of Good Hope to the Indonesian archipelago and other sites of Dutch eastern colonial trade. Others came from Brazil, the West Indies and the Caribbean in the ships of the Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621. Dutch primacy in this trade meant that Amsterdam was by far the most important point for the trade of shells and the Dutch the most passionate collectors, but the fashion for collecting and admiring them was commonplace among European social elites. In the seventeenth century and particularly so in the eighteenth, Conchylomania was a truly European phenomenon. Among the most famous collections of the former period, for example, were those of Gaston D’Orléans (1608–1660) and Queen Marie de’ Medici in France, and among the Italians those of Cosimo III de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1642–1723) in Florence and Ferdinando Cospi (1606–1686) in Bologna. Among the most celebrated enthusiasts in the later era were Catherine the Great of Russia (1729–1796) and Franz I, the consort of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. One of the most renowned collections of all was that of Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Portland (1715–1785), whose collection (including the famous antique Portland Vase) was sold at auction over thirty-eight days in Whitehall in London in 1786, thirty of which were devoted to shells.

The motivation for these enthusiasts (or liefhebbers in Dutch) varied; for some exotic shells or painted representations of them were simply a form of decoration or simple curiosities, the finest of which would bear witness to their wealth and social standing. For others, such as the German-born naturalist Georgius Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702) their importance was in terms of Natural History, a reflection of the growing contemporary interest from 1600 onwards in the classification of plant and animal species. For many other patrons the importance of the shells was one of natural theology – an appreciation and interest in nature as a reflection and proof of the Divine Creation. Levinus Vincent (1658–1727), one of the greatest Dutch collectors of naturalia of his day, justified his collection because of its ability to convey ‘the magnificence and almightiness of the Creator of the Universe’. Many of these collections were very large indeed. In his notes De Conchis marinis (‘Of Sea shells’) the Dutch humanist Ernst Brinck (1582–1649) noted that the collection of Bernadus Paludanus (1550–1633) in Enkhuizen numbered some four thousand shells. Hendrick Goltzius’s portrait of the Leiden-born shell collector and merchant Jan Govertsz. Van der Aar (1544/5–before 1615) painted around 1603 (fig. 1), provides us with a compelling likeness of one of these men, seated with his shells on a table before him and proudly holding up an exotic Turbo marmoratus for our admiration.

Underlying all of this was, of course, the small matter of value. Some of these nacreous curiosities were very valuable indeed, as were the profits to be made from them. Enthusiasm was greatest for the rarest and most spectacular shells, and for items that were marbled, speckled or striped; luminosity of sheen and colour were also very important. According to the Dutch diplomat Ernst Brinck (1582–1649), the Duke of Buckingham apparently paid five thousand guilders for a single very large shell from the Paludanus collection. In 1608 the shell collection of the Dutch humanist Abraham Gorlaeus (c. 1549–1623) was bought for 9,000 guilders by the Dutch government for presentation to the French court. The Amsterdam merchant Jan van Wely (d. 1616) made his fortune selling shells to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), whose Kunstkammer in Prague was the greatest of the age.¹ Not everybody shared this costly new infatuation. As early as 1614 Roemer Visscher, famously mocked the growing fashion for buying shells in his emblem book Sinnepoppen of 1614 (fig. 2) with the remark Tis misselijck waer een geck zijn gelt aen leijt (‘it is sickening what an idiot will spend his money on’). His words were not heeded by the buyers; like tulip bulbs, the finest shells became the objects of financial speculation. Those who indulged were mocked as schelpenzotten or ‘shell-fools’. The most valuable shell was for many years probably the Conus gloriamaris, a very rare sea cone from the Philippines discovered in 1777, only ten specimens of which were known to exist in Europe, one of which was reportedly sold in Amsterdam in the late eighteenth century for a price greater than that paid for Vermeer’s Woman in blue reading a letter in the same year.

The emergence of still life paintings incorporating or solely depicting shells followed naturally from the burgeoning interest in the shells themselves. Although shells had featured from the fifteenth century onwards in a symbolic or emblematic sense in both Books of Hours and in the foregrounds and margins of paintings, the explosion of demand for the exotic shells themselves from the later sixteenth century onwards coincided with (and quite probably contributed to) the beginnings of still-life painting in the northern Netherlands. The greatest early pioneer of still-life painting Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573–1621), who worked principally in Middelburg and later Utrecht, included individual shells in the foreground of several of his paintings. The mood of the moment is beautifully captured in the exquisite small copper cabinet painting illustrated here, for example, which combines shells with other precious commodities such as tulips and another expensive import from the east, a Wan-Li porcelain vessel (fig. 3). This composition was later repeated by his pupil and son-in-law Balthasar van der Ast (1593/4–1657), who went on to become perhaps the greatest of the Dutch painters of shells in the seventeenth century. Van der Ast frequently combined the shells with selected flowers, offsetting their colours and forms with those of the blooms themselves. His remarkable paintings, whose highly refined technique suggests he had acquired an expert knowledge of tropical shells, found an eager market among a wealthy, educated clientele, and became highly collectable items in their own right (fig. 4). For less specialised painters, mythological subjects provided sufficient reason for bravura displays of shell painting; in Cornelis van Haarlem’s Neptune and Amphitrite of 1616–17 (Stichting P. & N. de Boer, Amsterdam) – a picture surely intended for a shell collector – the god himself proudly displays an array of exotic specimens from his realm, and holds up a Turbo marmoratus in the same way as Jan van der Aar. In France, the first still-life painter to specialise in pure shell still-lives was Jacques Linard (1597–1645), whose position in the Royal Household in Paris would have allowed him to encounter such collections at first-hand. An exceptional example of his work in this vein is offered as lot 21 in this sale (illustrated above).

Most shell still lives were conceived, and should primarily be seen, as displays of precious collectors’ items. Both coral and the shells themselves were kept in the curiosity cabinets and Kunstkammers of the wealthy elite, and a number of still lives attest to the manner of their display. Some of the finest of these were produced by Frans Francken II (1581–1642) in Antwerp and by the North German painter Georg Hinz (1630–1700), who produced in the 1660s a series of exceptional illusionistic Kunstschranken for patrons such as the Emperor Leopold I (fig. 5). For most collectors the shells carried no deeper symbolism than their reflection of the beauty and diversity of God’s creation (and for the Dutch emblems of their newfound colonial might). However, as the values of shells soared ever higher, so the still lives depicting themselves became emblems of vanitas, alerting the unwary viewer to the sins of greed and avarice and admonishing them against coveting worldly possessions. Away from the hysteria, many studies of individual shells also provided important classificatory records of the various species and their appearance. Important groups of individual studies of shells include, for example, those by Balthasar van der Ast preserved in the Fondation Custodia (Frits Lugt Collection) in Paris, and those by the German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) from Frankfurt, drawn around 1701–2 and preserved today in the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. Other painters displayed more purely artistic concerns. Rembrandt’s only known etching of a still-life subject, for example, was of a single conus marmoreus made in 1650, a simple but compelling (and strikingly modern) image (fig. 6).

With an austere mood not unlike those of Linard before him in Paris, the shells in the hauntingly beautiful paintings by the last great Dutch painter of shells of the Golden Age, the Middelburg painter Adriaen Coorte (fl. 1683–1707), are set in downlit isolation against a dark background (fig. 7). In contrast to Van der Ast’s meticulous finish, here the painter’s concerns are concentrated on the tonal values and formal relationship of the shape of the shells, producing some of the most unforgettable images of their kind in art.

¹ For these and other transactions see C. Swan, ‘The Nature of exotic shells’, in M.A. Bass, A. Goldgar, H. Grootenboer and C. Swan, Conchophilia. Shells, Art and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe, Princeton and Oxford 2021, pp. 27–40 et passim, to which volume this essay is greatly indebted.