A life with Old Masters

Jan Six XI in his Amsterdam gallery

Jan Six XI stands before the three great glass windows of his new gallery and points to a view of Amsterdam’s picturesque Herengracht, which has barely changed since the days when its gabled red-brick merchants’ houses were first painted by the artists of the Dutch Golden Age. The gallery occupies the principal floor of one such merchant’s house, built in 1665 on the so-called “silver bend” of the canal. Metres away, and flanking either side of its banks, are the veritable palaces that once housed the city’s great pre-war art dealers, Goudstikker and Houthakker.

It is a revealingly traditional – and romantic – choice of location for a 21st-century gallery specialising in Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings and drawings. For Six, 31, there was never any question of opening a gallery anywhere else. He is bound to this city by deep emotional and historic ties. His ancestor and namesake was a friend and patron of Rembrandt, and the subject of one of the artist’s most celebrated portraits. Remarkably, it still hangs in the 17th-century family house nearby on the Amstel – or, to be more accurate, it will return there once the current restoration of the house is complete.

Growing up in a great museum of a home was, according to Six, a strange but remarkably grounded experience. His parents took the decision to have something akin to a normal life by arranging family rooms on the ground floor of the 58-room mansion, so that no one needed to walk through the great period rooms on a daily basis. Upstairs on the bel-étage was the family collection of some 100,000 works of art – paintings, drawings, prints, tapestries, furniture, books, silver, ceramics – amassed over the centuries by 10 previous generations of Jan Sixes. “Almost nothing left the family,” he explains: “While the family occasionally moved house, everything went with them, including the doors and panelling. There is always a sense when walking into a room that everything has always been together, which is very peculiar.” He pauses: “It is a time capsule, a kind of gesamtkunstwerk [total art work]. Keeping it together is a huge responsibility.”

Rembrandt’s portrait of Jan Six (1654)

It was a responsibility that the family found increasingly challenging. In 1908, they were obliged to begin to sell some masterpieces – Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” among them. In 1926, the Six Collection became the first art foundation in Holland, supported by government funds as long as nothing else was sold. Small groups were able to visit. Of the just 250 or so listed works of art that are not allowed to leave the country, 16 are in the Six Collection.

“As a child, the portraits were just images of my ancestors,“ explains Six, who, incidentally, being tall, dark and slender and without a hint of auburn locks, does not look a bit like his most famous forebear. “As I began to learn about history, about art, these portraits suddenly fell into place. I began to have a relationship with them.” Among them, for instance, is Frans Hals’s portrait of the Dr Nicolaes Tulp whose anatomy class was immortalised by Rembrandt in 1632; Dr Tulp’s daughter married Jan Six I. In the library are all his notes, books and his Bible.

It was in order to understand his heritage that Six enrolled at the University of Amsterdam to study under the great Rembrandt scholar, Professor Ernst van der Wetering, but the art trade was beckoning and he took a part-time job at Sotheby’s Amsterdam. His father, Jan Six X, now 63, had always taken his son to auctions and taught him the importance of handling works of art if one wanted to understand them. After graduating, Sotheby’s offered him a full-time job in London. Latterly he ran the company’s Old Master paintings department in Amsterdam.

Last autumn, Sotheby’s decided to scale back its operation, cutting staff and sales. Six resigned to set up on his own, primarily as an agent and art advisor. He had always imagined he would end up dealing – various ancestors had dabbled in a gentlemanly sort of way – but his move was accelerated by an indignation that Sotheby’s should marginalise the Dutch art market. Holland, after all, was the first country in the world to stage art auctions, and the Dutch – wherever they live – remain the greatest collectors of Dutch art. As for Dutch painting, it is the bread-and-butter of the Old Master market.

Moreover, he did not relish the prospect of having less time for his clients. The thoughtful, impeccably-mannered Six is only too aware of how much time it takes to build up a client’s confidence and trust. “I think many people would rather have someone to act on their behalf who understood where they came from rather than someone who only thinks money, money, money,” he explains. “Disposing of works of art, particularly those that have been in family collections, is an emotional process that I fully understand.”

A long-lost self-portrait discovered in an English saleroom in 2007

Alongside Jan Six Fine Art, he has also formed an association with arguably the most discreet of powerful art dealerships, and the sole London fine art dealer to hold a royal warrant: Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. The firm also offers pro bono advice to institutions around the world. Hazlitt Six will see the two companies working together on major paintings for the international market. While Hazlitts are not known as dealers in northern works of art, over the last five years they have handled some exceptional examples.

Most sensationally, the firm recognised a long-lost, unidentified Rembrandt self-portrait in an English provincial saleroom in 2007. An extraordinarily bravura tour-de-force despite its scale, this little oil-on-copper of the 22-year-old artist laughing was subsequently blessed by The Rembrandt Research Project and exhibited in the Rembrandthuis.

John Morton Morris, managing director of Hazlitts, believes it is a critical moment in the art market. He sees the auction houses aggressively encroaching on the traditional business of the art trade by negotiating more and more private treaty sales – in other words, dealing. “The greatest problem facing us all is the lack of great material that comes to the market. We cannot be in the business of re-marketing auction sales,” he says: “The only way a firm like Hazlitts is going to survive in the 21st century and ensure the quality of the works of art it offers – and discovers – is to expand its geographical and specialist range, and attract great people to work with us.” He pauses: “A gallery is only as good as the people who work in it, and as good as the last picture that it sells.”

As for Jan Six, he is already busy working on their first exhibition.

www.jansix.nl