The distinguished American art historian Svetlana Alpers (b. 1936), daughter of the economist and Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, made a bold attempt in this work, published in English in 1988, to look at Rembrandt, the genius of Dutch Golden Age painting, as an artist-entrepreneur who, in the 17th century, when the Republic of the United Provinces was not only one of the centers of Western European art but also the cradle of the market economy, created a model for the production and marketing of works of art—in this case, paintings and etchings—that was innovative for its time and remarkably effective. This model, which in many ways anticipated the strategies of the modern art market, was groundbreaking for Rembrandt studies and gave impetus to the study of the artist's practice using the tools of social and economic history.