10.5 Conclusion
There is a marked contrast between Cartwright’s inventory of paintings and his notes on prints. In the inventory the subjects are the most important element, and the works are mainly by contemporary artists, who worked in London. In the notes on prints the emphasis is on the artists and/or the inventors of the prints, and many (most?) of them lived in earlier centuries; only three artists were still alive in the 1680s: Nicolaes Berchem (1621/2-1683), David Teniers II and Joachim von Sandrart. The same collector – or dealer? – could use different starting points when assembling paintings and prints.
It appears that prints by canonical masters such as Lucas van Leyden, Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt were not only present in the great London collections of the 17th century but were also available to a more modest collector such as William Cartwright, who probably also dealt in such prints. Moreover, with Cartwright's ‘Italian’ or non-British prints we see a European-wide phenomenon: collectors all over Europe knew who the canonical masters of printmaking were, although they did not yet know what names were hidden behind such mysterious monograms as ‘L’, ‘HG’ and ‘AD’. While Lucas van Leyden, Hendrick Goltzius and Dürer etched or engraved their own inventions, many of the other printmakers on Cartwright’s lists produced reproductions, making the compositions of Italian, French and Northern and Southern Netherlandish painters known internationally.
However, several questions remain unanswered. It is unclear whether Cartwright imported his books and prints from Europe or whether he bought them from other, larger London booksellers. It is also uncertain what exactly the term 'Italian' meant in the London art trade of the second half of the 17th century. It seems that it meant both 'non-British' and 'belonging to the highest genre in painting'. It seems illogical that the names of Northern and Southern Netherlandish artists appear only sporadically in Cartwright's notes on prints (Tables 1 and 2), while Italian names are abundant. Given its proximity to the Low Countries, it is more likely that Dutch and Flemish prints were imported into London, along with the large number of books that came from the Netherlands. The Dutch Republic was the leading producer of printed matter in Europe in the 17th century. Were there very good trade contacts with Italy at the time, or were Carwright's Netherlandish prints included in the four missing volumes of his albums or prints? Further research is needed to answer these questions.
Finally, it remains uncertain whether the copies of prints in Cartwright's collection of paintings and drawings were (partly) the work of amateurs, or — as hitherto assumed — that of professional artists working at the lower end of the London art market. In any case, our image of Cartwright as a collector only of paintings is considerably illuminated by what his written texts tell us about the prints that he must also have owned.