Life expectancy of artists in the Low Countries from the fifteenth to the twentieth century

Abstract

We investigated the role that urbanization and plague may have played in changes in life expectancy amongst artists in the Low Countries who were born between 1450 and 1909. Artists can be considered to be representative of a middle-class population living mostly in urban areas. The dataset was constructed using biographical information collected by the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague, the Netherlands. As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, life expectancy at age 20 amongst the artists had reached 40 years. After a substantial decline in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, when plague hit the region, life expectancy at age 20 began to rise again, and this upward trend accelerated after 1850. The life expectancy of female artists commonly exceeded that of males, and sculptors had better survival prospects than painters. In comparison with elite groups in the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe, life expectancy amongst the artists was rather high.

Keywords:

• Low Countries
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Golden Age
• historical demography
• life expectancy
• survival of middle classes
• Gompertz curve
• art history
• painters and sculptors

Notes

1. Frans van Poppel, Dirk J. van de Kaa, and Govert E. Bijwaard are all at Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), PO Box 11650, 2502 AR The Hague, the Netherlands. Frans van Poppel is also at the Department of Sociology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

2. The authors are grateful to the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD, The Hague) for supplying the data used in this paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments on earlier versions of the paper given by (art) historians Maarten Prak (Utrecht University), Charles Dumas, Rudi Ekkart, and Erik Löffler (RKD), as well as Marten Jan Bok (Amsterdam University). Tischa van der Cammen (Geriatric Medicine, Erasmus University) provided helpful references to the literature. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and especially to the reviewer who suggested the use of the Turnbull method.