10 things to know about the salt cellars by celebrated silversmith Johannes Lutma

Johannes Lutma (1584-1669) was already famous in his lifetime as a silversmith. He was born in the then Dutch town of Embden (now in Germany) and moved to Amsterdam in around 1620. No other silversmith appeared in as many portraits as he did, and no other artist was celebrated in poetry so often and at such length.

One of the artists who made a portrait of Lutma was Rembrandt van Rijn. This etching shows him at the age of 70 and almost blind, holding a drinking cup in one hand. Rembrandt painted him in this way to highlight the contrast between the man and his art – the man was old and frail, but his art would be forever young.

The drinking cup in Rembrandt’s portrait is one of the early highlights of Lutma’s career – he made it in 1620. With this work, he presented his own baroque variant on the kwab, or auricular, style, in which organic motifs were used to invoke mortality and the uncertainty of existence.

As is often the case with art made of silver, little has survived of Lutma’s body of work. So it is very fortunate that these salt cellars have been preserved, because they are absolute masterpieces. This was the first time Lutma blended the auricular style with a classical visual idiom.

The design of the salt cellars and the way they were made reveals that they may have been produced in series, and that Lutma used objects of the same model to make other art works, such as glass holders. This method made it possible to create ensembles with matching components.

It is likely that Lutma himself regarded the salt cellars as an artistic breakthrough, given that he appears in a portrait by the Amsterdam painter Jacob Adriaensz Backer with a salt cellar that closely resembles the pair in the Rijksmuseum collection.

The salt cellars were owned before the Second World War by Emma Budge (1852-1937) and Henry Budge (1840-1928), a married couple living in Hamburg. When Emma died, all her belongings were auctioned off in Berlin. The proceeds did not go to her heirs, however, because they were confiscated by the NSDAP, the German Nazi Party.

At some point after the war, the salt cellars became part of the collection of W. J. R. Dreesmann in Amsterdam. At the auction of his estate in 1960, the City of Amsterdam and the Dutch state bought them. Two of the salt cellars entered the collection of the Amsterdam Museum and two the collection of the Rijksmuseum.

In 2013, the Amsterdam Museum established that the two salt cellars in its collection were of suspect origin. This prompted the Rijksmuseum to start an investigation into the two salt cellars in its own collection. A year later, they too were designated as being of suspect origin.

On 12 May 2023, all four salt cellars in the national collection of the Netherlands were restituted to the heirs of Emma Budge. The heirs decided to sell all four objects to the Rijksmuseum. The presence of these masterpieces in the collection will enable the museum to continue its efforts to draw attention to both the object themselves and to the story of their origin, provenance and restitution.