Six was helping me to experience the world of 17th-century Amsterdammers in the most tangible way: the minute differences in ways of seeing and feeling that separate one historical epoch from another. But I came to realize that he was also giving me an insight into something else: his lifelong struggle with his family over what it expected of him as heir to the Six Collection. When he was a boy, the greatness of the Western art tradition may have greeted him every day as he marched to breakfast, but it didn’t thrill him with a sense of destiny. Where previous heirs — who were avid collectors, though not art professionals — seem to have accepted the responsibility with equanimity, Six pushed it away. The Sixes are part of Dutch nobility, but as a teenager he “tried not to be an aristocrat,” his close friend David van Ede told me. “He was a little bit embarrassed by it.” Rather than have Rembrandts and Bruegels hanging in his bedroom, he went for posters: Bob Marley and Guns N’ Roses. He hated high school, got a job as a cook in a restaurant and thought for a time that becoming a chef might be his route of rebellion. When his parents were away, he would host parties in the mansion. “We were there practically every weekend,” van Ede said. “We didn’t swing from the chandeliers, but we would smoke, drink Heinekens, go out to a hip-hop club, stop at Burger King, then maybe go back to Jan’s place and sleep. Sometimes we set off the alarms.”
Six knew what was expected of him but bristled. “Nobody wants to be pushed into a corner,” he told me. “You hear all your life that everything you do is in preparation to follow in the Jan Six footsteps. But hey, I’m an individual.”
He came around, however, at least partly, when he started to interact with the people who showed up at the front door, tickets in hand, to take tours of his home. It was these ordinary folk who made Six realize that art was his calling. “Sometimes a tour guide would be sick, and I would help out,” he said. “At first I was scared. Then I saw how happy and interested the people were. And when they learned that I was Jan Six, and they looked from me to Rembrandt’s portrait of the other Jan Six, I saw them getting excited, connecting the past and present. Some of the visitors knew a lot about art, and I listened to them.” He began looking at the paintings in a new way. They went from being flat representations of dead people to aesthetic expressions serving as portals into history. In particular, that Rembrandt portrait of the first Jan Six took hold of him: “I realized that it matters to me that the eyes in that painting are genetically my eyes.”
Six tried to free himself from the burden of his legacy by embracing the art that is the basis of it but engaging with it on his own terms. He studied art history in college, then was hired by Sotheby’s in London as a junior specialist in old masters. He was good at the job and moved easily in the world of international wealth and culture. Over time, it seemed, a family gene kicked in. Geert Mak, a Dutch author who wrote a history of the Six family, told me that some of the earlier Jan Sixes had an extraordinarily acute visual sense, which guided them as they amassed their collection. “This Jan Six has it, too,” he said. “It’s an exceptional talent to see through a painting, to remember a gesture from another painting he saw years earlier, an unbelievable memory for small details.”
As he grew in his profession, Six came to feel he had a right to express himself on the family collection. A series of clashes with his father ensued, many of them about providing greater public access, which has always been a difficulty. Currently, tours of the collection, which are by appointment only, are booked into next year. The picture that the younger Six sketched was of an inward-looking father who is trying to preserve a legacy by keeping the world at bay, who comes to realize over time that he also has to do battle with a gregarious and extroverted son who feels that the way to preserve that legacy is precisely by sharing it with the wider world. The battles left the younger Six progressively more exasperated: “I would cycle home after and think, Jesus, Dad, I’m trying to help you.”
One of these disagreements centered on, of all things, picture frames. Some of the great paintings in the collection, including the “Portrait of Jan Six,” have ornamented gilded frames, which were put on them by 19th-century Sixes when showiness was in fashion. Jan the younger argued for returning them to their 17th-century look, which would have meant the smooth and sober black frames that he believed were the pictures’ natural habitat.
This was the other point of the candlelight demonstration Six gave me. “If you put a gold frame around a Rembrandt, whatever is in the painting goes five meters to the back, and whatever is gold becomes yellowish,” he said. “The painting has to compete with the noise of the frame. Take away the noise, and beauty will emerge.” His father, however, was adamant that the pictures in the collection should stay in the gold frames. The younger Six told me he believed his father feels his duty is to the collection, including the way his ancestors preserved it. “If you live in a house for decades and see it as the core of your existence, you practically live for the house,” he said. Whereas he himself feels an obligation to the art.
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