Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (15 page)

Paulus Bisschop, whose art collection was auctioned by his widow in 1620, was born in London to parents from the south Netherlands, and lived there until at least 1601, when he was betrothed to Elizabeth van der Moer. After Elizabeth’s death he remarried, and moved back to the Low Countries, where he built up a significant collection of paintings by northern artists. Bisschop’s second wife was Petronella van Baerle, the sister of David van Baerle. Another sister of David’s, Susanna, married Sir Constantijn Huygens. At the auction of Paulus Bisschop’s art collection, David van Baerle bought four Dutch paintings, while another brother, Johan van Baerle II, bought four further paintings and ‘an atlas with horn bound in gold’.
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All but one of the paintings – including several landscapes and a ‘painting of a market with fruit’ – cost them between nine and fifty-six guilders; the most expensive of the works acquired was a landscape by Gillis van Coninckloo, for which Jan paid 120 guilders. When David himself died, his 1671 inventory still contained a number of the paintings he had acquired more than fifty years earlier.

Auctions, however, introduced a further element of risk into the acquisition of works of art. Private dealers could be asked to vouch for the authenticity of a work attributed to a particular artist, and buyers could – and did – complain to the supplier of a painting if it failed to comply with the description provided by them. Sir Dudley Carleton, for instance, protested to Rubens that paintings offered to him as by the hand of the artist himself were in fact largely the work of his studio. Rubens was quick to replace them with works he could vouch for as being entirely his own – it would not do to acquire a reputation for passing off inferior work as original. In a market in which legitimate copies of rare works and works by prestigious artists circulated freely, a bidder at auction might find himself with a copy when he had believed himself to be bidding on an original.

Jan Meurs, an Antwerp city councillor, died in January 1652. He left an impressive collection of paintings, largely by artists from the region, and the sale of his effects in May caused a considerable stir. A number of items were carefully identified in the sale catalogue as copies (mostly of rare works which Meurs knew he was unlikely ever to get the chance to purchase as originals). Several further items, however, were listed as originals, but had had questions raised about them by the auctioneer, Hendrik Tessers, who was knowledgeable about paintings. One of these was a
Cattle Market
by Jan I Brueghel, which Tessers was unsure was genuine. At the auction itself, Tessers began the bidding on the Brueghels with a landscape, which was bought by the painter and art dealer Jan Siebrechts for 204 guilders. The next lot was the
Cattle Market
, presented as an authentic original, and after lively bidding this went to Peter van Halen, painter and dean of the Guild of Saint Luke, for 160 guilders.

Once van Halen had got home and taken a close look at it, he decided that the painting he had bought was not an original but a copy. Furious at what he considered a deliberate deception, he rushed off to the Meurs family home, where Siebrechts, delighted with the landscape he had bought, was chatting to one of Meurs’s sons. Van Halen stood in the street and loudly demanded compensation, on the grounds that he had been sold a copy, and not an original (’
gheen principael
’). Finally Meurs’s son replied: ‘I cannot help you there – my father bought it as an original so we sold it as one.’ Van Halen retorted that the family had better get hold of the person who sold it to them to vouch for the painting, because he was going to go to law. After three years of lawsuits, van Halen managed to establish that the painting was indeed a copy: ‘his expertise overrode the picture’s supposed provenance, and he recovered his money as a buyer and his honour as dean of the painters’ guild’.
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There is, fortunately, a wealth of surviving documentary evidence, on the basis of which it is possible to take a closer look at some of the ways in which the initially separate trends in taste, stylistic appreciation and acquisition on the part of art-purchasers, patrons and connoisseurs in England and the United Provinces began to converge during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.

In the half-century before the 1650s dip in the fortunes of the houses of Stuart and Orange, the ground had already been thoroughly prepared for the effortless and easy transmission of art connoisseurship, artists and works of arts in both directions across the Narrow Sea. At the centre of the expanding network created by this developing, shared pool of taste and artistic enthusiasm we find, again and again, the figure of Sir Constantijn Huygens. In the
previous chapter
I described the process whereby his taste in art was shaped by his three trips to England between 1618 and 1624 – a process which, intriguingly, included close involvement in high-level dealing in contemporary art in English court circles. Now we need to look at his experiences of fine art in a Dutch context, between 1625, when he assumed the position of secretary to the new Dutch Stadholder, Frederik Hendrik, and the late 1660s, when the house of Orange resumed its pivotal position in Dutch politics and culture.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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