How can you maintain fame if people can’t say your name? This is one question that might have occurred to the 16th-century Dutch artist Joachim Wtewael if he had cared about lasting fame, which, apparently, he only sometimes did. Over the span of his well-cushioned life in Utrecht, Wtewael — pronounced, approximately, oo-tuh-vawl (even the Dutch have a hard time with it) — seems to have paid more attention to selling flax and buying stocks than he did to making art, even though art was his first calling and did bring him local renown.
