Tax Collectors at Their Ledgers, after Marinus van Reymerswaele
Two collectors surrounded by ledgers, tallies and coin, painted in the first half of the seventeenth century after a composition by Marinus van Reymerswaele. Pictures of this kind were satires on avarice; the cameralists took the same desk entirely seriously.
Cameralism was the German answer to a question every prince faced after the Thirty Years' War: how do you raise reliable revenue from a ruined country. Its answer was administrative rather than fiscal — survey the land, count the population, register the trades, train the officials, and teach the whole thing at university as a subject. Chairs in Kameralwissenschaft were founded at Halle and Frankfurt an der Oder in 1727. The painting is in the National Museum in Warsaw. See how Prussia invented modern economic administration.
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