Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (16 page)

By the time Lievens arrived with van Dyck, Dutch and Flemish artists were already well established at the English court. 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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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 naturalisation 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.
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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.

In 1631, Rembrandt and Lievens both painted different versions of the Crucifixion, perhaps as an official competition staged by Huygens. Immediately afterwards, Rembrandt was awarded the commission for a series illustrating Christ’s Passion for the Stadholder. In 1639, with the series still incomplete, Rembrandt wrote to Huygens to tell him that two paintings, ‘being the one where the dead body of Christ is laid in the grave and the other one where Christ rises up from the dead to the great shock of the guards’, were now complete:

I therefore would request if my lord could please tell his Highness of this and if my lord could please have the two pieces first delivered to your house as happened before. I will wait first for a short note to this effect.

And since my lord will be bothered with this business for the second time in recognition a piece 10 feet long and 8 feet high will be included as well which will do honor to my lord in his house.
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Like those dealing in art for the top end of the market today, Sir Constantijn Huygens became the possessor of a large work by Rembrandt of his own, as recompense for the time and trouble he had taken in securing the deal and seeing it through to completion.

Huygens retained his commitment to the talents of Lievens and van Dyck throughout his life. In 1633 he penned a commendatory distich on a sketch by Rembrandt of his old friend Jacob de Gheyn III (Huygens’s companion on that memorable first tour of the major private art collections of England):

Rembrandtis est manus ista, Gheinij vultus:
Mirare, lectore, es ista Gheinius non est.
[Rembrandt’s is the hand here, the face is de Gheyn’s:
Marvel, dear onlooker, that this is not de Gheyn in person.]

In the end, though, he (unlike us) preferred a more intense, painterly representation of human feeling, and greater attention to detail than that developed by Rembrandt in his maturity. Rembrandt’s name was not among those selected by Huygens senior to decorate the memorial room at the Huis ten Bosch following Frederik Hendrik’s death in 1647.

Sir Constantijn Huygens’s influence as an artistic facilitator, adding lustre to the reputations of the princely courts at The Hague by astute encouragement of talent and acquisition, was by no means limited to painting. An enthusiast for classical architecture, he also encouraged a generation of classical sculptors, whose work adorned houses like his own in The Hague. One of these was François Dieussart, with whom Huygens was closely involved for the ten years during which he lived and worked in The Hague (Dieussart arrived in 1641 bearing a letter of recommendation for Huygens from Gerrit van Honthorst). Through Huygens, Dieussart received a number of important commissions. The year of his arrival he executed an Italian marble bust of Elizabeth of Bohemia, followed by marble busts for the large reception room in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s newly completed Mauritshuis, and a bust of the Elector of Brandenburg for an overdoor niche in the bedchamber. In 1646, Dieussart produced a dynastic series of full-length figures of the Princes of Orange for the Huis ten Bosch. For this last commission, Huygens was responsible for negotiating the conditions of delivery and the cost, as well as keeping an eye on the sculptor’s progress. In April 1646, Huygens wrote to Frederik Hendrik assuring him that he expected to get the price of the four statues reduced: