On 26 September 1665, the following advertisement appeared in the Haarlemsche Courant:

The focus of the exhibition was Gerrit Dou, one of the most revered Dutch artists in the 1660s. The owner of the paintings to be put on display was Johan de Bye, whose reputation as one of the great collectors of Dou's works was known even before this announcement. The French scholar and diplomat Balthasar de Monconys, for instance, wrote of seeing De Bye's vast collection of Dou's pictures when he traveled to Leiden in 1663. In 1665, however, De Bye rented a room in the house of a third party, Johannes Hannot (a painter of portraits and still life) specifically to showcase the paintings by Dou in his possession. De Bye's purpose for mounting a special exhibition in a dedicated space is unclear, although the encouragement to interested viewers to approach the owner has led a number of scholars to surmise that the event served a commercial purpose. Regardless of his intentions, this unique event can shed light on the collecting and display of art, as well as the status of the artist, in a major seventeenth-century Dutch town.

What does the announcement communicate about De Bye, who presumably initiated the project, to the readers of the Haarlemsche Courant? Perhaps most obviously, the collection testified to the owner's wealth. On 18 September, several days before the announcement appeared in the gazette, De Bye had a contract drawn up with Hannot to have the pictures shown in the voorcamer (“front room”) of the latter's house on Breestraat.