Pieter Teyler van der Hulst built a career in business at a period when the rules of commerce were themselves changing.
The record lists Pieter Teyler van der Hulst as Dutch Mennonite cloth merchant and art collector (1702-1778).
Pieter Teyler van der Hulst was born at Haarlem in 1702. His recorded nationality is Netherlands.
This was the age of chartered companies and long-distance trade, when a single voyage could make or ruin a house.
He worked as merchant, banker and patron of the arts.
Enterprises outlive their founders or they do not, and that is the whole test.
That the business was built from Netherlands shaped it: capital, regulation and market size differ by country, and they decide what is even attemptable.
Pieter Teyler van der Hulst died in 1778, aged 76. What remains is the enterprise and its consequences, which is the only durable measure of a commercial life.
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