Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory

by Lisa Jardine

  We are fortunate in having a detailed account by Constantijn Huygens himself of the artists he considered the leading lights of their generation, including precious critical comments on works of art we can still identify, and to which we can refer.

  In an early fragment of autobiography written in the late 1620s and made public around 1630, Huygens, commenting on the state of contemporary Dutch art, selected for particular mention two young artists from Leiden for whom he predicted stellar careers: Jan Lievens and Rembrandt van Rijn. Here were two ‘moderns’ – contemporary young artists (both were under twenty-five at the time) – from modest backgrounds, whose virtuosity entitled them to consideration as outclassing in artistic terms more long-established names among Dutch painters. Demonstrating his command of the Dutch art world, Huygens conceded that Hendrik Goltzius and Michiel van Mierevelt were artists of distinction, but believed that Cornelis van Haarlem was old-fashioned. Although he criticised Hendrik Hondius for technical shortcomings as a painter of landscapes, he expressed the belief that a whole school of Dutch landscape painters, including Poelenburg, Uytenbroek, van Goyen, Jan Wildens, Paul Bril and Esaias van de Velde, were exceptionally accomplished, to the point of being able to show ‘the warmth of the sun and the movement caused by cool breezes’, and a match for artists from anywhere else in Europe.10

  Dutch narrative history painters also meet with Huygens’s warm approval. He judges them a match for any of the Italians (hugely in vogue with the royal courts of England, Spain and Italy). Pieter Paul Rubens is, in Huygens’s view, undoubtedly the greatest of them, but he also names Honthorst, Terbrugghen, van Dyck and Janssens. He singles out a Medusa by Rubens for special approval – it ‘combines charm and horror’, especially because it is hidden behind a curtain, which is drawn back to create ‘terror’.

  But above all, he expresses the view that the future of Dutch fine art lies with the younger generation of painters, from among whom he singles out Lievens and Rembrandt. Rembrandt is, Huygens thinks, superior to Lievens in judgement and in the representation of lively emotional expression. Lievens, however, depicts ‘that which is magnificent and lofty’, ‘larger than life’. Rembrandt, by contrast, ‘loves to devote himself to a small painting and present an effect of concentration’, as in his Judas Returning the Pieces of Silver. What impresses Huygens about this painting is Rembrandt’s ability ‘to depict expression, appropriate gestures and movement, particularly in the central figure of Judas, whose face is full of horror, whose hair is in wild disorder and whose clothes are torn, his limbs twisted, his hands clenched bloodlessly tight’. The whole body of the kneeling Judas ‘seems ravaged and contorted by his hideous despair’.

  From this remarkable fragment we discover those characteristically modern and Dutch features of contemporary painting which drew the eye and the approval of Sir Constantijn: concentration, precision and detail in depiction, and above all, the capacity to convey intensity of personality and feeling by way of the painted image.

  We gain further insight into Huygens senior’s taste through the surviving portrait Lievens painted of him, some time around 1625, concerning which we also have Huygens’s own critical comments.11 As Huygens describes it, once having met him (and been praised by him), Lievens badly wanted to paint him, and having obtained permission, arrived only a couple of days later, saying that he had been unable to sleep because of his excitement at the prospect.12

  Huygens later described the sombre Lievens portrait as one of his ‘dearest belongings’. In spite of what others have said about the painting, Lievens has, he says, painted him as he was at the time. He goes on:

  Still, some deem it necessary to point out that my pensive stare overshadows the natural cheer of my mind. To them, I’d like to say that I have myself to blame for this, because at the time I was seriously involved in very grave family matters, and, as things are wont to go, the concern that I tried to hide inside was not completely left without its trace in the expression on my face.13

  Lievens’s portrait is broodingly dark and melancholy. As far as critical appreciation goes, we have a number of helpful comments by Huygens himself upon it. Portraitists, he tells us in that early autobiography, strive to represent the inward soul of their sitter, not simply his outward appearance. Nor is this as difficult as it sounds. ‘After all,’ he writes, ‘the expression on our face offers a highly reliable indication of the status of our soul.’ ‘In case someone would want to argue against this’, he goes on, he himself has learned it ‘not so much by the lessons given to me by others, but through personal experience and great attention to the matter’.14

  In his 1629–30 appreciation of Lievens’s and Rembrandt’s pre-eminence as Dutch artists, Huygens senior urged the two of them (they were sharing a studio at the time) to go to Italy to further improve their technique. In fact, the career paths of the two men parted at this point, and Lievens took another route to international recognition. Some time in 1631 or early 1632 Sir Constantijn Huygens seems to have introduced him to Anton van Dyck, who was visiting The Hague, and who sketched Huygens for inclusion in his print series known as the Iconographia during his stay.15 Lievens had already formed a plan to travel to England in 1629: in April of that year he petitioned the city guard of Leiden to release him from his obligation to serve on the night watch there for a period of three months, so that he could finish a painting commissioned by the Stadholder. He promised then to fulfil his obligation, unless he carried out his plan to travel to England. Now, a year and a half later, van Dyck seems to have persuaded him to try his luck with him at the English court.

  Before he left, however, Lievens painted several fashionable ‘story portraits’ for the court of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms at The Hague, thereby smoothing his way into Stuart circles across the water in London. The most ambitious of these – a large Soothsayer – hung over the fireplace in the Stadholder’s own quarters: ‘Een stuck schilderei daer een waerseghster off een heyen in de handt goeder geluck seght’ (’A painting of a soothsayer telling fortunes by reading palms’). ‘The painting shows an old woman with a child on her back who has put down a basket and kneels, holding the palm of a richly clad young woman in a chair. Behind is a girl in white and to her right an African woman in silhouette.’16

  Lievens’s reputation preceded him at the court of Charles I – Robert Carr had presented the King with a Lievens painting acquired by the Dutch Stadholder, while Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, had commissioned a portrait of her eldest son by him. We can be sure that Huygens, who was a trusted adviser both to the household of Frederik Hendrik and to that of Elizabeth, and who knew the English Stuart court well from his three visits there, facilitated Lievens’s entry into patronage circles at Whitehall.

  The transition was a success. Lievens’s biographer Orlers tells us that in London he, ‘thanks to his artful works immediately became famous, even to His Majesty the King, who he portrayed with his wife the Queen, the Prince of Wales his son and the Princess his daughter, together with many great Lords. He was richly paid by the King of Great-Britain for these.’17

  Van Dyck’s dramatically successful career at the Stuart court in London is well documented. He had gone to England for the first time in 1620–21 at the invitation of the Earl of Arundel, who had made enquiries concerning his availability while he was still working for Rubens in Antwerp in 1620. Van Dyck travelled in Italy and France between 1621 and 1627, returning to Antwerp, and then visiting The Hague in 1631, at exactly the time that Lievens was at work there. Van Dyck moved to London via Brussels in 1632, arriving there by the beginning of April, and was named court painter to Charles I shortly after his arrival. The last evidence of Lievens’s presence in Holland is his signature on a document dated 6 February 1632, and his most recent biographer maintains that he and van Dyck must have arrived in London almost simultaneously.18

  By the time Lievens arrived with van Dyck, Dutch and Flemish artists were already well established at the English cour
t. Rubens, van Dyck and Gerrit van Honthorst had all had major commissions.

  The Utrecht artist Honthorst had already travelled extensively in Italy before he was brought to the attention of Charles I by the English Resident Sir Dudley Carleton, who sent a sample of his work in 1621. It was in fact Balthasar Gerbier, acting as agent for the Duke of Buckingham, who in 1628 brought Honthorst to England, where he stayed for eight months, until the assassination of his patron sent him hurrying back to Holland, though not without substantial signs of recognition from Charles I: English citizenship, a £100-per-annum pension, a silver service and a horse. Honthorst settled at The Hague, where he became enormously successful as a portrait painter. His work for Elizabeth of Bohemia included a family portrait commissioned as a gift for the English King, Charles I.

  Many major court commissions by van Dyck survive today in the Royal Collection in London, and further examples are distributed across Europe. By contrast, deceptively few works by Lievens from this period are to be found, in spite of the fact that according to Huygens he was known for his ‘indefatigable application to diligent labour’. In part, this is simply an accident of history (and his most recent biographer has suggested that works attributed to other artists are in fact Lievens’s). In part also, it may be a direct result of the way that Charles I’s collection was dispersed after his execution (by way of the auction, the viewing for which, as we saw, was attended by interested Dutch art connoisseurs, including Lodewijk Huygens), and also the way it was reassembled at the Restoration. While some works bought by overseas buyers were returned in 1660, many more remained in mainland Europe.

  Lievens returned from England to the Netherlands in 1635 and settled in the second centre of art activity after The Hague, the Flemish trading city of Antwerp, shortly after van Dyck’s arrival there (though van Dyck, unlike Lievens, was to return for a further period to work in London). After a brief return to Leiden, he settled in Antwerp for the next nine years.

  We have no comments by Sir Constantijn Huygens himself on the execution or critical success of a second immediately recognisable and frequently reproduced portrait, which hangs today in the Mauritshuis at The Hague. Constantijn Huygens senior was painted around 1640 by another artist who shuttled between patrons, clients and milieux in England and the United Provinces, Adriaen Hanneman. This is a family portrait, showing Huygens and his five children, their portraits placed symmetrically in roundels around the central portrait of their father, with the roundel at the bottom replaced by a cartouche, which contains an inscription. The work is probably a silent tribute to his wife Susanna (a portrait of whom might have sat in a sixth, completing roundel), who had died in 1637.

  Portrait of William III as a child by Hanneman (1654).

  Adriaen Hanneman had trained in The Hague with the portraitist Anton van Ravestijn, with whom Lievens had also worked during his period there.19 In 1626 Hanneman moved to London, where he may have worked as assistant to Daniël Mitjens (another Dutch artist who had worked first for the Earl of Arundel, and then for Charles I). In 1630 he married an English wife, Elizabeth Wilson, having first unsuccessfully courted the daughter of goldsmith Nicasius Russell. Although she may have died by 1635, it is clear that Hanneman was well integrated into London life, and a competent English-speaker.

  Some time between 1638 and 1640 Hanneman returned to the United Provinces, settling in The Hague, where he married for a second time, the niece of his old master, Maria van Ravestijn. Thereafter he built a thriving portrait-painting business in The Hague, benefiting particularly from the arrival of a steady flow of privileged exiles from England, fleeing the Civil Wars. By 1645 he had gained the patronage of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms, and also that of Princess Mary Stuart (the ‘Princess Royal’). There can be no doubt that this patronage was secured through the efforts of Sir Constantijn Huygens, whose efforts to develop a sophisticated artistic style and iconography on behalf of both courts at The Hague were at their most successful and energetic at this time. In 1646, Hanneman painted the portrait of the fourteen-year-old Princess Mary, in a ‘jauntily feathered cap with a sheaf of arrows slung upon her back, a costume which imitates the “huntress” fashion employed several years before by her exiled Palatine cousins at the Hague’. In January 1650, we have a record of a payment made to Hanneman for ‘several likenesses executed by him in the service of the Princess Royal’.20

  Hanneman also painted portraits of Charles II himself (1648), Charles’s sister, Henriette, Duchess of Orléans, his cousin Louise Hollandine (daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia), as well as prominent officials of the English court in exile, like Sir Edward Nicholas (1652 or 1653). The Princess Royal was an important and influential patron of Hanneman. ‘The close family ties between Dutch and English royal families continued to produce commissions for Hanneman even after the Royalists had all returned home. In 1664 he executed two copies of a portrait of William of Orange (both Royal Collection), for which he was paid 500 guilders. He also found patrons among wealthy residents of The Hague, including Cornelia van Wouw, whose portrait he painted in 1662 (van Wouw almshouse, The Hague). For these sitters he combined the glamorous style of van Dyck with the more sober Dutch tradition of portrait painting.’21

  So when Hanneman painted the portraits of Sir Constantijn Huygens and his children in 1640, we may consider this picture as a monument to more than a family which had recently lost a mother. It is also a memorial to a fascinating moment in Anglo–Dutch art history, when the English Channel was no obstacle at all between artists and clients who confidently shared the same taste in the styles and execution of expensive portraiture. In The Hague, Princess Mary Stuart liked to sit for Adriaen Hanneman because he could converse with her in English during their sittings. Perhaps Sir Constantijn Huygens indulged his personal love of the English language by doing likewise.

  While Hanneman took advantage of the turbulent times to build a flourishing business in portraits of Orange and Stuart princely sitters and English exiles associated with them at the courts in The Hague, another Dutch painter was doing the same for those in and around the milieu of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians in England. Pieter Lely’s family came from The Hague, and he received his training in Haarlem as a pupil of the artist Frans Pieter de Grebber. By 1643 he was in London, where the Civil Wars interrupted his career as a promising portrait-painter, perhaps hoping to take the place of Anton van Dyck (who had died in 1641). During the Commonwealth years Lely seems to have continued to work for important former court patrons in London, while maintaining links with The Hague (he was there in 1656 on family property business), at the same time building up a clientele among influential Parliamentary and Commonwealth figures.

  In 1653, three established Dutch portraitists resident in London – Pieter Lely, George Geldorp and Sir Balthasar Gerbier – petitioned Parliament for a commission to decorate Whitehall Palace with a series of paintings celebrating Parliament’s victories in the Civil Wars, including individual portraits of its most important generals and commanders. They proposed a large group portrait commemorating ‘the whole Assemblie’ of Parliament to decorate one wall of ‘the great Room, formerly called the Banqueting House’. On the opposite wall there was to be a group portrait of members of the Council of State.22 Although the proposal was not acted upon, the following year Lely painted the portrait of Oliver Cromwell. By 1658 Lely was described by the seventeenth-century historian William Sanderson as one of the seven notable ‘Modern Masters’ of English portrait painting.

  At the Restoration in 1660, Lely had sufficiently hedged his bets, established a high enough reputation as a portraitist, and gained enough influential supporters in the King’s party, to be sworn in to the post of Charles II’s principal painter (George Geldorp also managed to survive the change of regime, and was appointed picture-mender and cleaner to Charles II). The first instalment of his annual pension of £200 ‘during pleasure as formerly to Sr A. Vandyke’ was made in October 1661, and he was granted natural
isation by Parliament on 16 May 1662 and exempted from paying local taxes.

  Lely’s career continued to flourish, as the returning Royalists celebrated their return with family paintings proclaiming the new English royal order. His most important royal patrons were James, Duke of York (later James II), and his first wife, Anne Hyde. His first portraits of them were the pair of pendant paintings commemorating their wedding in 1660. These were commissioned by Anne’s father, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. Lely seems to have met the Hyde family in exile in The Hague, in that other cultivated courtly circle, with its shared Anglo–Dutch tastes and artistic preferences. Over a four-to-five-year period beginning in the early 1660s, the Duchess of York commissioned him to paint a group of three-quarter-length portraits, known as the ‘Windsor Beauties’, of the most good-looking women at her own and Queen Catherine of Braganza’s courts. Samuel Pepys records that he saw a full-length portrait of Anne, in a white satin dress, seated on a chair of state, in Lely’s studio on 18 June 1662, and a few years later Lely painted a seated full-length portrait in which Anne holds a tress of hair in her right hand.23

  When Lely died in 1680 he was an extremely wealthy man, with a fashionable house on the piazza in Covent Garden, another house at Kew and further properties at Greetwell and Willingham in Lincolnshire and in The Hague. He was also the proud possessor of an impressive art collection of his own, containing no fewer than 575 paintings, although over half (about 320) were works either by himself or his studio. Of the rest the largest proportion were by Dutch and Flemish artists. Lely was an unusual and early example of a painter who also collected, and his interest in acquiring other artists’ work was probably triggered by that very sale of ‘the Late King’s Good’s’ in the early 1650s whose low prices and lack of orderliness had so shocked the young Lodewijk Huygens. Lely purchased eight paintings there, all of which were returned in 1661 to the ‘Committee for the Restoration of the Royal Collection’. The Dutch artist turned art dealer Gerrit van Uylenburgh, who worked briefly in Lely’s studio, valued the collection at approximately £10,000.