Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (18 page)

After the 1688 invasion, when William and Mary took advantage of their newfound access to the riches of the English Royal Collection to enhance their own, the trusted member of William’s household charged with selecting and transporting these works of art was none other than Sir Constantijn Huygens’s son Constantijn junior, William III’s personal secretary.

On the very day on which William was proclaimed King of England – 23 February 1689 – William and Constantijn Huygens junior appraised the art in a number of rooms at Whitehall Palace (which Mary had decided the couple could not live in, because the central London air exacerbated William’s asthma). These, according to Constantijn, ‘also contained fine and admirable works; one of them contained many miniatures by [Isaac] Oliver, some of them after Italian originals’. William arranged for van Dyck’s great equestrian portrait of Charles I to be removed from the gallery at Hampton Court so that it could be hung where he could admire it. Over the next nine months, Huygens records numerous occasions on which the new King had him draw up lists of paintings in one or other of the royal palaces (Whitehall, Hampton Court, Windsor and Kensington), and have some or all of them moved from one to another. After the death of Queen Mary in 1695, William had Huygens move the best paintings from her apartments at Windsor and Hampton Court, to be hung in the refurbished rooms at Kensington Palace. The King instructed Huygens ‘that I should sort the small paintings from the large ones to some extent’. They were to be hung on strings ‘so that they can be arranged and rearranged’.
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It was inevitably paintings appealing to developed Dutch courtly taste that William and Mary moved to their palaces in The Hague and elsewhere in the northern Netherlands – particularly large numbers of works of art from the English Royal Collection found their way to the walls of their favourite palace at Het Loo. These were the paintings that remained in the Netherlands when the English Crown passed back to the Stuarts (in the reign of Queen Anne) and then to the house of Hanover.

At The Hague, by contrast, the mingled and interwoven fortunes of Anglo–Dutch art continue to be represented today in the Mauritshuis collection and the Rijksmuseum, which retain the traces of the shared tastes of the houses of Stuart and Orange, from 1660 down to the invasion of 1688 and beyond.

6
Double Portraits: Mixed and Companionate Marriages

T
hroughout his long life, Sir Constantijn Huygens showed a weakness for attractive, talented, intelligent women. He cultivated intellectual friendships (seriously, and sometimes flirtatiously) with well-educated ladies across northern Europe who were renowned for their strong character and scholarly, musical and poetic aptitudes. He left rhetorically highly-wrought tributes to them scattered throughout his poems and correspondence.

These included outpourings of emotion and admiration for the artist and linguistic prodigy Anna Maria van Schurman (daughter of a Dutch father and a German mother),
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the poet Maria Tesselschade Visscher (with whom he exchanged particularly passionate poems when she converted to Catholicism), her sister Anna Roemers Visscher (who engraved verses on glass for Huygens) and the English poet and philosopher Margaret Cavendish, who lived in exile in Antwerp during the English Commonwealth period.
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He was master of the well-turned piece of flattery. In a characteristic letter written in middle age, complimenting the musician and singer Utricia Ogle and her friend, his erudite neighbour Dorothea van Dorp, together in a single missive, Huygens writes:

Yesterday I received from Mademoiselle Dorp the two beautiful tunes which it has pleased you [Utricia Ogle] to have copied for me. Never has so beautiful a package in so beautiful a hand been delivered to me by [another] so beautiful a hand. I leave you to imagine whether I am able fully to grasp the glory let alone to put the extent of the favour into words.
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Comparatively little, though, is known about the woman Huygens chose to spend his life with – his beloved wife, Susanna van Baerle. The glimpses we get of her, mostly through his letters and poems, are tantalising and shadowy, but do suggest that theirs was indeed an equal, companionate partnership.

A glass rummer engraved with verses to Huygens by Anna Roemers Visscher, responding to a poem of his addressed to ‘the diamond-tipped pen of Miss Anna Roemers’.

Susanna was the eldest of six children born to an affluent and influential Amsterdam family. Her father, Gaspar van Baerle, was a wealthy businessman and the cousin of Huygens’s mother. Like many with extensive commercial interests, he and his family had migrated north from Antwerp when access to the city was blocked during hostilities between the Spanish and the Dutch Republic. He died when Susanna was only six years old. When she was eighteen, her mother also died, leaving Susanna wealthy and free to make her own decisions concerning marriage. Her wealth and social status made her an enviable catch, and she was soon being widely courted. In 1622 the entire Huygens family appears to have tried enthusiastically but unsuccessfully to persuade her to marry Constantijn’s older brother Maurits. Eventually she asked them to desist, informing Constantijn’s sister Constantia that she had no intention of ever getting married.
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The families, however, kept in touch. In June 1624, Dorothea van Dorp, daughter of Constantijn’s immediate neighbours in The Hague, told him in a letter that ‘the only nice thing’ about an otherwise dull trip to Amsterdam had been ‘the Baerle girl: together we often drank your health’. Two years later, Susanna van Baerle succumbed to the considerable charms of Constantijn and consented to marry him. Letters and poems written around that time show Huygens to have been head over heels in romantic love. The marriage took place on 6 April 1627, to the delight of the Huygens family as a whole (though not that of Dorothea van Dorp, who had rather hoped that Constantijn might marry her).

In 1637, after less than ten years of contented marriage, Susanna Huygens died, leaving Huygens a widower with four small sons and a newborn daughter. Three stark entries in his diary for that year capture his grief:

10 May: She [Susanna] rendered her spirit to God 30 minutes after the fifth evening hour. Woe! My bliss. Woe my soul.

16 May: Her body has been committed to the earth with a huge crowd in attendance.

17 May: Moved into the new house. Alas! Without my turtle dove.
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Perhaps it was just as well that the demands of the court allowed Huygens little time for private grief: two days later his diary records him back on secretarial duty at the side of Frederik Hendrik. He never remarried. Shortly after Susanna’s death, her sister’s unmarried daughter, Catherina Sweerts, moved into the new house to take care of the five motherless children. Huygens never liked her, but tolerated her for the children’s sake. When she died in 1680 he could find nothing better to say about her contribution to his household than that ‘she hawked and harped and meddled and died’.
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After Susanna’s death, Huygens referred to her as his precious companion, his equal and his helpmate (from early on in their courtship he referred to her affectionately as ‘Stella’, his ‘star’), whose loss had cast a permanent shadow across his life. In his most famous poem, ‘Daghwerck’ (The Day’s Work), begun during Susanna’s lifetime as a celebration of their domestic life together, and broken off unfinished when she died, Huygens characterises their relationship as one of harmonious reasonableness: ‘Stella, by that reason guided/Which I always see in you’; ‘If I find my burden easy,/So light, that had Stella wished it,/It could well have been avoided/Or by reason overcome.’
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Their life together was, he writes, one of shared intellectual activity:

How shall I stand my trial in the court of the world,
Without you, Stella, the sharer and guide of my pen?
Without you my quill is no wing, wing wet with salt of my tears
Which flew the empyrean before, and followed your train in the skies.
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He and his wife were, he writes in another poem, ‘two minds joined in a single mind’ (‘
una mens mentes duae
’). In spite of their emotional intensity as elegies for and reminiscences of a lost love, though, these poetic glimpses are bound to seem to us largely conventional, and offer few real clues as to the woman behind her bereaved husband’s lasting regret.
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The real-life Susanna can be glimpsed in Huygens’s correspondence with the French philosopher and long-term resident of the United Provinces, René Descartes, just a few months before her death in May 1637. Susanna was, it seems, understood by those close to her and her family circle to be both highly intelligent and capable of independent discernment in intellectual matters. The letters concern the printing and publication of Descartes’ recently completed
Discours de la méthode
.

Writing to Huygens in early March 1637, Descartes asks him if he will kindly read the proof sheets of the
Discours
carefully, as he had promised when last they were last together, and annotate them with his own corrections. For the time being he is sending the two preliminary sections of the
Discours
(the ‘Dioptrique’ and ‘Meteores’):

You would oblige me enormously, if you were prepared to take the trouble to read them, to mark or have marked in the margin your corrections, and then to let me see them.

He expressly asks that Susanna should be included in this scrutiny of his work:

If Madame de Zulichem [Susanna Huygens] would like also to add her own corrections, I would consider that an inestimable favour on her part. I would value her judgement, which is naturally excellent, far higher than that of many of the Philosophers, whose judgement art [formal training] has rendered extremely defective.
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In his next letter, responding to Huygens’s effusive praise for as much of the
Discours
as he has read already, Descartes sends the remainder, and once again requests that Susanna, this time together with Huygens’s sister Constantia, might be persuaded to read it:

And because these Ladies understand better than men, I recommend the two enclosed [works] to them, with your permission, the one for Madame Zulichem and the other for Madame de Willelm [Constantia]. They [the works] were born at almost the same time as your newborn daughter [Susanna junior], and therefore share the same Horoscope, which means that I could not possibly have a poor opinion of the fortunes of my works, and I wish long life and happiness to all who are born under that constellation, as also to their parents.
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Alas, Descartes’ astrological compliments were to no avail. Only a few months after this second letter reached Constantijn, his wife Susanna died, perhaps from post-natal complications. Towards the end of her final pregnancy, she may indeed have discussed the finer points of Descartes’ hot-off-the-press publication with her husband, as ‘the sharer and guide of [his] pen’. But we shall never know what contribution Susanna Huygens might have made to reshaping and polishing Descartes’ most famous and widely known work.

This little vignette reminds us how, in spite of the fact that they have left little trace in the historical records, educated women in Dutch families like the Huygenses participated fully and on equal terms in the cultural lives of their menfolk and the circles they frequented. The influence they could thereby exert within the family extended to the particular cultural and social background from which they came. Well-matched couples brought their shared interests to the joint household. In the case of an alliance between a Dutch man and an English wife – or vice-versa – both Dutch and English language, habits and culture would inform the ménage. It is to such ‘mixed’ seventeenth-century marriages that I now turn, but before I do so, here is one further story connected with the Constantijn Huygens–Susanna van Baerle marriage, to remind us how easily the women in my present story slide into historical oblivion, and how much work is required to retrieve them.

Some years ago, the eminent historian of seventeenth-century Dutch art Julius Held published an article in which he identified a double portrait in a private collection in England as ‘a hitherto unknown portrait’ of Constantijn and Susanna Huygens.
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When the painting was put up for auction in April 1992, it was purchased by an anonymous Dutch benefactor and returned to the Netherlands.
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Today, that painting hangs in the Mauritshuis at The Hague, and is so confidently identified as indeed a portrait of the couple by Jacob van Campen, dating from around 1635, that it needs no justification. It graces the cover of several books on Huygens, and is frequently reproduced in articles about him. Yet until its discovery, less than twenty years ago, there was no known surviving likeness of Susanna Huygens, although a 1785 inventory of Huygens family portraits included three of her.
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Since her death she had simply disappeared from sight.

Huygens’s relationship with Jacob van Campen dates from the early 1630s. In December 1632, a friend of Huygens’s wrote to him from Leiden, asking him, in his official capacity in the administration of the Stadholder, to obtain a passport to travel for the artist van Campen. As a ‘sweetener’, perhaps, the letter concluded:

He is a good architect and a good painter: à propos which, he would like to make you a gift of one of his paintings, asking you with affection to take the offer in good part.
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Six months later, van Campen’s offer had been taken up, and the artist was proposing a portrait of Huygens to complement an existing one in Huygens’s possession, by Jan Lievens:

Master van Campen is very eager to paint a light one for your Honour, to match the dark one by Lievens, and requests to have that picture sent together with its frame and all, in order for him to see the size and the expression of the face and the pose.
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It is not hard to identify the Lievens portrait as the one associated with Huygens’s earliest public praise for Lievens in his autobiographical fragment of 1631.
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Huygens’s friend and intermediary suggested that the Lievens portrait should be shipped to a broker in Amsterdam, where he would supervise its forwarding to van Campen. A ‘light one’ suggests a painting whose mood is less sombre than that of the darkly melancholic Lievens portrait. It was another ten months before the van Campen portrait (now lost) was finished and shipped, with a note from Huygens’s friendly intermediary:

Here is the long-awaited painting by van Campen; the long delay he blames entirely on his innate negligence … he hopes nevertheless that Your Honour will be somewhat pleased with it.
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The painting was evidently a success, and marks the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between Huygens and van Campen, culminating in van Campen’s designing and building Huygens’s house in Het Plein in 1637. Along the way, he painted the double portrait of Constantijn and Susanna. At the end of 1635, Huygens penned three epigrams ‘On the profile portrait of myself and my wife, on a sheet of paper, by J. van Campen’. The third reads:

Brother and sister may differ
as much as peace and friendship can stand:
Man and Wife no more than here,
Not the thickness of the paper.
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