Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [56]
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’.9
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