Gerrit Braamcamp

Gerrit Braamcamp was born in Amsterdam. He was a successful Catholic banker and merchant who made his fortune in timber. The name of his timber company was ’t Klaverblad. He also ran a shipyard at the end of Hoogte Kadijk, opposite the VOC shipyards on Oostenburg in Amsterdam. Braancamp collected art, accumulating more than 380 paintings by seventeenth century Dutch Old Masters.

Braancamp married Elisabeth Klumper in 1727. They had two children. The family moved to the Nieuwe Plantage, a lush green area that encompassed the botanical gardens of the Horticus Botanicus (1682). After the death of his wife in 1742 he moved to another part of the city close to his ships. From 1748 he expanded his business activities to banking.

Braancamp displayed his art collection at his residence, “Trippenhuis,” on Kloveniersburgwal. One of his many distinguished visitors was Frederick the Great (1712-1786), who came in 1758 to admire his collection while traveling through Holland on a shopping spree to build up his own collection of Old Master paintings. Other visitors included William V (1748-1806) and his wife, as well as the Duke of Brunswick (1735-1806) who came to Trippenhuis in 1768.

Braancamp sold part of his collection in 1766. The catalogue listed 228 paintings. One of these paintings was Rembrandt’s Christ in the storm on the Sea of Galilee. His collection of drawings was auctioned in 1768. After falling ill, he decided to sell the rest of the collection. He died before the actual auction, which was held on 31 July 1771. On 6 August 1771, his silverware, Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquerware were offered for sale. The Russian Tsarina Catherine the Great (1729-1796) purchased paintings at the auction – they were lost during the return voyage to Russia.

Rubens’s Résurrection de Lazare (Schloss German no. 187/ French no. 222) was in Braamcamp’s collection until it was auctioned in 1771. He bought the painting at the sale of Jeronimus Tonneman in 1754 – together with another painting by Rubens, a pendant depicting The Last Supper. Adolphe Schloss acquired the painting on 5 November 1908 from art dealer Franz Kleinberger for 30,000 francs.

Links: [about:blank https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/artists/Braamcamp%2C%20Gerret] [about:blank http://tacotichelaar.nl/wordpress/nl/schilders-en-schilderijen/gerrit-braamcamp/] Accessed 4 June 2021.