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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.23

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.24

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