Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (13 page)

The suggestion was a timely and attractive one to Rubens. He had just finished overseeing substantial modifications to his grand new house on the Wapper canal in Antwerp. A fine collection of antique statuary ‘as large as life’ would create an imposing classical presence in the grand Italianate wing which Rubens had had added to house his studio, ‘museum’ of antiquities and receiving rooms. These were the rooms in which prospective buyers would wait for an audience with the great man himself. Their sumptuous decoration with antiques and costly furnishings would publicly demonstrate his status as an internationally renowned and much sought-after artist. Rubens was also engaged in creating sensational outdoor spaces around his new home (his courtyard was hung with
trompe-l’oeil
paintings of his own of classical statues and friezes), and a large classically-inspired garden, which included architectural features and statuary as well as exotic plants and birds. Here too, genuine antiquities, strategically placed as the focal point in walks and alleyways, would confirm Rubens’s taste and discernment.

On 1 November 1617, George Gage wrote to Carleton from Antwerp that he had ‘delivered to Sigr Rubens what yr L. wrights to mee concerning yr heades and statuaes’. The proposition, as eventually negotiated, was that in exchange for the complete collection of antiquities, Rubens should supply four thousand florins’ worth of his own paintings, plus two thousand florins’ worth of fine tapestries. Rubens hoped to come to The Hague with Gage to inspect the collection, but in the event was unable to do so. In March 1618 he wrote (in Italian) to Carleton himself, confirming his enthusiasm for the proposed exchange: ‘Y.E. having expressed to Mr. Gage that you would determine on making some exchange with me of those marbles for pictures by my hand, I, as being fond of antiques, would readily be disposed to accept any reasonable offer, should Y.E. continue in the same mind.’ He would, he wrote, send a list of paintings for Carleton to choose from.
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A month later the list arrived, including the dimensions of each work. They included an oversized crucifixion scene (twelve feet by six feet) of a kind that a collector of Protestant persuasion could not comfortably have hanging on the walls of his gallery, and an even larger Last Judgement. Carleton declined these, and Rubens agreed to substitute more suitable items. After further negotiations, since no tapestries could be found that met Carleton’s high standard of design and execution, it was decided by further negotiation that Rubens would pay Carleton the sum of two thousand florins in cash in their place.

In late May, Rubens wrote to Carleton to tell him that he had agreed the final list of paintings and their measurements with ‘that Man of Your Excellency’s who came to take them’, and had come to an agreement to have gilt frames supplied for them at his own expense. He assured Carleton that the pictures would all be his own work, rather than studio productions, and promised that they would be dispatched to him as soon as possible:

I cannot, however, affirm so precisely as I could wish, the exact day when all these pictures will be dry, and to speak the truth, it appears to me better that they should go away together, because the first are newly retouched; still, with the aid of the sun, if it shines serene and without wind (the which stirring up the dust is injurious to newly painted pictures) will be in a fit state to be rolled up with five or six days of fine weather.
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A note among Carleton’s papers records that the final list of paintings was brought to him in The Hague, from Antwerp, by ‘Mr Hugins’ – doubtless the same ‘Mr Huygens’ (Constantijn senior) who was about to set off with Carleton on his diplomatic voyage to London.
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On 1 June 1618 Rubens confirmed in writing that he had taken delivery of his statues.
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They included allegories of Peace, Justice and Abundance, a Diana and a Jupiter, busts of Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Drusus, Germanicus, Trajan, Nero and Domitian, as well as Augustus and Julius Caesar, and burial urns, tablets and inscriptions, putti and dolphins. Ten days after the deal had been settled, and knowing that he would eventually recoup his outlay of money for them in the desirable form of artworks by the great Dutch painter Pieter Paul Rubens, Carleton and his ambassadorial party (including the young Constantijn Huygens) arrived in London. He could now concentrate on recovering cash, or goods in lieu, for the Italian paintings which the Earl of Arundel had taken off his hands with alacrity two years earlier. (In the end, apparently, Danvers’s interest had waned, and Arundel took almost the entire collection.)

The deal struck between Carleton and Rubens to ‘unload’ the consignment of antique statuary was the beginning of an extremely fruitful relationship between the two men as artist and backer, and led to Rubens acquiring a string of prominent patrons at the English court. Carleton claimed that his successful exporting back to the Continent of the Venetian antiquities, and their replacement by a collection of outstanding works of art by Rubens, had caused a radical change in fashions for collecting in England, replacing antiquities with modern Netherlandish paintings. Carleton having publicly preferred the paintings to antiquities, the vogue in court collecting had followed suit, to the annoyance of English artists: ‘I am blamed by the painters of this country who make ydoles of these heads and statuas, but all others commend the change.’
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It is likely that the Earl of Arundel – one of England’s most prominent connoisseurs of paintings and statuary – had already played some part in the acquisition of Carleton’s consignment of artworks. Having eventually found himself the proud owner, he paid Carleton most of the sum owing, but procrastinated over supplying him with selected artworks in lieu of the remaining indebtedness.

It was this outstanding debt that Carleton spent much of his time pursuing during his 1618 trip to London. When he paid visits to the Earl of Arundel to talk business, he was still trying to sort out the unhappy affair of the Venice artworks. And when he visited to talk art business, Constantijn Huygens senior and Jacob de Gheyn went too. De Gheyn was well-qualified to draw attention to the most remarkable acquisitions in these aristocratic collections, and to explain their felicities in composition and style to his companion. These visits were precious opportunities for Constantijn to be instructed in the finer points of artistic taste, in the presence of some of the most magnificent examples of Italianate art to be encountered anywhere in Europe.

So Huygens reported to his father that he had seen the Earl of Arundel’s collection of paintings and classical statues in their elegantly classical, purpose-built gallery at Arundel House on the Thames. He judged the recently acquired ‘Arundel marbles’ ‘
choses admirables en vérité
’. He also told him that he had been given a guided tour of Prince Henry’s fabulous collection of Italian paintings at St James’s Palace, down the road from Whitehall. The charismatic Crown Prince Henry, regarded by many as the golden prospect of the Stuarts, had died tragically young in 1612, and among his cultural legacies was his carefully compiled art collection. The private tour was in all likelihood conducted by Henry’s Dutch keeper of his collection, Abraham Van der Doort, soon to be appointed keeper of the future Charles I’s collection (a deathbed promise of Charles to Henry).

The Earl and Countess of Arundel already knew the Huygens family, from Princess Elizabeth’s progress through The Hague on her way to Heidelberg in 1613.
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Arundel (accompanied by Inigo Jones, Toby Matthew and George Gage) had left the royal party at Strasbourg, and travelled on to Italy in search of art treasures for his collection. In autumn 1613 he was entertained in Venice by Carleton, who went along on a series of guided tours of galleries, churches and monuments with the visitors. ‘Such activity was clearly unusual for the ambassador since, when he gave formal thanks on the Earl’s behalf for the hospitality the Arundels had received, he admitted that “I who have been here three years, may say that until now I had not seen Venice.”’
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When Carleton arrived in The Hague in 1615, Christiaan Huygens senior had already been recommended to him by Arundel as an expert guide to Dutch art, and besides, the two were neighbours on the Voorhout – one of The Hague’s smartest streets. On Huygens’s recommendation, Carleton visited Rubens’s Antwerp studio (or at least his agent George Gage did) during his first year in the United Provinces. By 1617 he was trying to buy a hunting scene by Rubens.
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According to Constantijn senior’s letters home, he and Jacob de Gheyn spent a considerable amount of time at Arundel House, where de Gheyn drew some of Arundel’s antique statues. In fact, the two men’s continued presence in the Arundel galleries marked the end of Carleton’s attempt to strike a deal with Arundel to give him works of art in place of the money owing. Huygens told his father that he and de Gheyn were particularly impressed by the Dutch artist Daniel Mytens’s newly painted companion portraits of the Earl of Arundel and his wife Althea seated in front of their artistic treasures. It seems Carleton had tried unsuccessfully to acquire these two works from Arundel just before he left England. We have the following letter from Mytens himself to Carleton in August 1618, written just after Carleton’s departure for The Hague:

I send you by this bearer that picture or portrait of the Ld. Of Arundel and his Lady, together in a small forme, it is covered up in a small case. I have donne my indeavor to perswaide his Lordship to send your honor those great picteures, butt he is not willing to parte from them, by reason theye doe leyke his honnor so well, that he will kepe them, and hee willed me to make these in a smaller forme, wch I trust your Honor will accept and esteeme as a small presente donne for my Lo. Of Arundel, and for my paynes and care I have donne therein to the most of my power. I leave the judgement to your Lordships good discretion.
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Two years later, when Carleton’s relationship with Rubens had been cemented by the acquisition of further significant paintings by the Flemish artist on his own behalf, it was he who arranged that when the Countess was travelling through Antwerp, she sat for Rubens herself. Rubens portrayed Lady Arundel as the important collector she undoubtedly was, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of the wealthy and culturally influential English aristocrat: her coat of arms, her fool, her elegantly dressed dwarf Robin, her falcon and a hunting dog. Behind her chair hovers the satisfied deal-maker, Sir Dudley Carleton, the man knowledgeable about art, responsible for bringing Rubens and the Arundels together.

During his stay in London, Carleton had apparently also commissioned a portrait of Charles, Prince of Wales (the future Charles I), by Mytens. In the letter accompanying the work ‘in small forme’ of the Arundels, Mytens writes:

I have binne at Sharckney [Hackney] to see wether I cold fynde occasion to draw the Princes Highnes picture; but the Prince being a hunting and suddainly to departe further in progress, I am returned to London, so that I must waiyte for a better opportunity at his Retorne back.

And the curious story which began with the ‘mischance’ of Carleton acquiring a significant collection of antiquities, and involved the young Sir Constantijn Huygens on his first visit to London, participating at first hand in the strenuous art-related dealings between Carleton and the Arundels, does not end here.

In 1626, Pieter Paul Rubens’s wife Isabella Brant died, and (as was customary) her grieving husband had to return her dowry to her family. The obvious source of the significant sum required was the fine collection of antiquities on display throughout his house and garden. Ever the pragmatist, Rubens made plaster casts of the collection, then sold the originals, as an intact collection, to the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s favourite. The agent who brokered the deal on behalf of Buckingham – who was in the process of establishing himself as a leading power in the land by competing with the King himself for the prestige and ostentation of his art collection – was Michel le Blon. Le Blon probably negotiated (with Huygens) the
Alexander Crowning Roxane
for Amalia van Solms at the same time, while he was at the house on the Wapper canal on a daily basis, seeing to the acquisition of Buckingham’s ‘marbles’ – a collection of antiquities to rival that of the Earl of Arundel himself.

So the collection of antique statuary which Carleton had first acquired in Venice and transported to London, returned to London once more – only to be returned to the United Provinces again following Buckingham’s assassination. In 1648, the whole of the Duke of Buckingham’s great art collection was sent to Antwerp for auction.
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By the time he eventually made his way home to The Hague, Constantijn Huygens senior had been entirely captivated by England’s courtly milieu. Fortunately, his now-fluent English made him invaluable as a diplomatic emissary, and he was able to return to soak up more of the art and culture of London in 1621, when he made two trips, one as an official member of a States General delegation, the second an extended visit, lasting almost a year, in the entourage of the powerful Dutch diplomat François van Aerssen.

Three years after that third visit, Sir Constantijn succeeded his father as personal secretary and artistic adviser to the Dutch Stadholder Frederik Hendrik. His early encounters were a fundamental influence on him when he set about the task of acquiring artworks and exotica for Frederik Hendrik for his palaces in and near The Hague, as part of a conscious effort to raise the profile of the Orange Stadholders to something like ‘royal’ status on the international scene.
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Among the substantial numbers of Dutch paintings included in the important collection of paintings Huygens assembled were significant works by Rubens.
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