John Michael Montias, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJohn Michael Montias
Art historian and founder of the Montias database of Dutch art inventories
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Paris, Île-de-France, France
About John Michael Montias
- John Michael Montias (3 October 1928 – 26 July 2005) was an economist and art historian, well known for his contributions to the economic history of Dutch Golden Age painting.
- Born in Paris, he studied at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D in Soviet bloc economics in 1958.
- He subsequently taught economics at Yale University.
- He published studies on Polish and Romanian economics, and, in 1977, the book Structure of Economic Systems. In the mid-1970s his interest shifted to the economics of art in seventeenth-century Netherlands, a subject that had interested him since his time as a postgraduate student.
- His first article on this subject, "Painters in Delft, 1613–1680" published in the 1978–1979 volume of Simiolus, is credited with helping invigorate the study of the economies of art.
- This line of research culminated in his book Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (1982).
- The book demonstrates convincingly how economic history may contribute to a better understanding of cultural developments. Montias's contributions to Vermeer studies have been widely acknowledged.
- In 1989 he published Vermeer and His Milieu, in which he mentions many new documents on Pieter van Ruijven, Jacobus Dissius, his son-in-law and Hendrick van Buijten, the principal collectors of Vermeer's paintings.
- He concentrated on Maria Thins, Vermeer's mother-in-law, when he discovered Vermeer had moved into her house.
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