The Governors of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild

By the middle of the 17th century Amsterdam was one of the great wine markets of Europe. French and Iberian wine arrived in bulk, waited in the city's cellars and was shipped on as far as the Baltic. The men who traded it belonged to the wine merchants' guild, and in 1659 its six governors sat for Ferdinand Bol. The museum points to the servant behind them, who holds a pipette, the tube for drawing wine out of a cask, and a shallow tasting cup, the tools of a trade that lived on judging what was in the barrel. The guild had its own house on the Koestraat, bought in 1630, with a room for the governors at the front and large cellars below, and above its gateway stood Pope Urban the First, patron saint of the wine trade. In 1798 every guild in the Netherlands was dissolved, this one included. Munich bought the canvas in 1930.