Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [60]
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.22 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