The export of massive quantities of Dutch and Flemish painting in the seventeenth century, to cities extending from Stockholm to Cuzco, depended not only on highly organized artists’ workshops but also on networks of dealers, collectors, and connoisseurs. These middlemen (and in many cases, middlewomen) have received greater academic attention in recent years, as scholarship in the field has begun to shift its focus from the monographic study of elite artists to broader questions of the marketplace, network theory, and globalization. The work of economic historians John Michael Montias, Hans Van Miegroet, Neil de Marchi, and Filip Vermeylen has provided a broad panorama of early modern art markets, increasingly supplemented by accounts of individual market actors. A 2011 anthology edited by Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus offered an important series of case studies of early modern “cultural brokerage.” Individual dealers have now received their own monographic treatments, such as Christina Marie Anderson's 2015 study of the Venice-based merchant Daniel Nijs. The work under consideration here, Alison Stoesser's study of Lucas and Cornelis de Wael—Flemish brothers who combined the roles of artists and dealers in Antwerp, Genoa, and Rome—contributes an impressive amount of archival research to this ongoing trend.

The De Wael brothers owe what little attention they have received in the past to their immortalization in one of Anthony van Dyck's most celebrated portraits, painted as a testament of gratitude to his Genoese hosts. Here the stout, mustachioed siblings appear in poses of winning nonchalance, mingling raffishness and affection. Stoesser's choice of title reveals the ineluctability of Van Dyck's portrait in any discussion of the De Waels, even as she devotes more than a thousand pages of text, images, and appendixes to establishing the brothers’ independent significance. Born in Antwerp, the brothers relocated to Genoa (Lucas in 1619, Cornelis by 1621), where they were active as both painters and dealers. By 1627, Lucas was back in Antwerp, which would serve as the home base for his artistic dealings until his death in 1661. Cornelis remained in Genoa, eventually attaining citizenship in 1642, before moving to Rome toward the end of his life. Over the decades, Lucas supplied his Italian-based brother with both paintings and books from their hometown to be distributed in Italy.

Stoesser's book is based on her dissertation at the University of Utrecht and largely retains the structure of a graduate thesis, moving from introductory chapters on Genoa and Antwerp, and the De Waels’ biographies, to extensive overviews of their dealing and artistic activities. The second volume is devoted to a catalogue of both brothers’ surviving work, as well as illustrations. Stoesser's text is aimed at serious scholars, with citations in foreign languages left untranslated, and contains extensive excursions into such issues as the history of Genoa or the logistics of shipping books from Antwerp to Italy in the seventeenth century. Even for a specialist reader, the dense mustering of dates, proper names, and archival documents, with little narrative or interpretive leavening, can prove heavy going. Nonetheless, Stoesser's account contains many fascinating nuggets of historical detail regarding the movement of both people and artworks between Italy and the Low Countries. As Stoesser aptly notes, “Both old and recently discovered sources used here reveal the fascinating picture of the international workings of a family network in 17th-century Europe” (17). The appendixes provide transcriptions of many archival sources that should prove useful to future scholars.

A further major goal of Stoesser's study is to catalogue and clarify the oeuvres of both Lucas and Cornelis, Lucas's being by far the smaller and more problematic of the two. The extensive catalogue of both brothers’ accepted and rejected works will prove useful for modern-day dealers and connoisseurs, although the poor quality of the few color reproductions is to be lamented. In addition to mapping trade networks, Stoesser provides a thorough overview of Cornelis's achievement as both a painter and printmaker, clarifying his contribution to Italian genre imagery. Of particular interest is Cornelis's status as “the first and only artist to devote a print series wholly to the activities of slaves in port” (199). These unsettling images of enslaved laborers receiving their rations, having teeth pulled, or laboring on the docks merit further investigation as depictions of the brutal side of globalization, mobility, and trade in the early modern world.