Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [52]
Any infringement of this order would result in the ‘forfeit and losse’ of all lands and titles ‘for their respective lives’.
The two calamities did not, however, as we might perhaps have expected, interrupt the activities of Dutch artists, nor slow down the buying and selling of Dutch art in both England and the United Provinces. Rather, they temporarily displaced them from the realm of dynastic ostentation to the domestic sphere. The collapse of court culture on both sides of the Narrow Sea produced an unexpected flurry of movement within the artistic and musical communities in both countries, as courtiers and court hangers-on attempted to continue to make a livelihood, and to promote their cultural interests in the drastically reorganised social landscapes of Commonwealth London and Stadholderless Holland.
On the English side of the Channel, we get a strong sense of this defining period of reorganisation and redistribution of art interests through the well-documented rapid sale and dispersal at the end of the English Civil Wars, as settlement for the King’s huge accumulated debts, of the extensive collections built up by Charles I. Shortly after Charles’s execution, plans were set in motion by the new republican government for the disposal of his personally much-loved and internationally highly-regarded collection of paintings and sculpture. The sale was based on the meticulous inventory drawn up in 1640 by the royal keeper Abraham van der Doort. In the autumn of 1649 some 1,570 paintings were offered for sale, to buyers from England and abroad.2
In terms of its capacity to raise revenue, the sale proved a disappointment. Not only were prices inevitably depressed by the sheer quantity of quality artworks suddenly released onto the market, but other collections, including those of the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Arundel, were put up for sale at almost the same time.
Times were bad and money was in short supply. There were many in England who felt uneasy about profiting from the King’s downfall, and foreign buyers, although encouraged to participate, preferred to buy anonymously, and at one remove, from the speculators who moved in to make a quick profit by buying low and selling on at a much higher price. The most prominent Parliamentary purchaser was Colonel John Hutchinson, who had been a member of the tribunal that pronounced the death sentence on the King. He spent £1,349 acquiring a large number of works, including two voluptuous, oversized nudes by Titian, Pardo Venus and Venus with Organ Player. Colonel William Webb (another prominent figure in the Parliamentary administration) bought a number of van Dyck’s portraits of the Stuart royal family.
Knowledgeable art connoisseurs from abroad were shocked at the low prices for which works of art by great named artists could be acquired in the aftermath of the English King’s execution. Sir Constantijn Huygens’s third son, Lodewijk, was in London in 1651 as part of a delegation from the States General of the United Provinces sent to pursue possible closer links with the new English Commonwealth following the execution of Charles I. On the face of it, the prospects for an alliance between the two Protestant republics looked promising. The delegation, however, was made up of strong supporters of the house of Orange, with an equally strong continuing commitment to the rule of their Stuart cousins in England, and came to nothing. As a dutiful Huygens son, Lodewijk made use of the opportunity for tourism, to visit Somerset House – former home of Queen Henrietta Maria – where the dead Charles I’s art collection was on display, with everything up for sale to the highest bidder:
We went to Somerset House again and saw a number of beautiful things, among them the most costly tapestries I ever saw. One room was valued at £300. In that same room were many antique