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classical architecture, he also encouraged a generation of classical sculptors, whose work adorned houses like his own in The Hague. One of these was François Dieussart, with whom Huygens was closely involved for the ten years during which he lived and worked in The Hague (Dieussart arrived in 1641 bearing a letter of recommendation for Huygens from Gerrit van Honthorst). Through Huygens, Dieussart received a number of important commissions. The year of his arrival he executed an Italian marble bust of Elizabeth of Bohemia, followed by marble busts for the large reception room in Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s newly completed Mauritshuis, and a bust of the Elector of Brandenburg for an overdoor niche in the bedchamber. In 1646, Dieussart produced a dynastic series of full-length figures of the Princes of Orange for the Huis ten Bosch. For this last commission, Huygens was responsible for negotiating the conditions of delivery and the cost, as well as keeping an eye on the sculptor’s progress. In April 1646, Huygens wrote to Frederik Hendrik assuring him that he expected to get the price of the four statues reduced:

On Wednesday evening, the sculptor Dieussart will give me four little clay models for Madame’s [Amalia van Solms’s] statues. He is quoting 1000 francs each, not including the marble, which adds about another 200 francs, but I think I can make him see reason.25

Like other artists who had depended heavily on expensive commissions from within the court circle, Dieussart left The Hague in 1650, shortly after the death of William II.

By the Restoration, then, artistic taste and artistic practice on either side of the Narrow Sea were strenuously entwined. And throughout the period 1630–60, Sir Constantijn Huygens advised, facilitated and pressured in England and the United Provinces, establishing a vigorous dialogue between the growing number of connoisseurs both within and beyond court- or pseudo-court-related circles in both places. If developing tastes began to elide during this thirty-year period, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that he was in large part responsible.

So it is no surprise to find him involved in another watershed art ‘moment’ – the hasty assembling of a gift of suitably distinguished paintings by the States of Holland to present to the English King, Charles II, as he returned to his artistically-depleted kingdom in 1660.

In spring 1660, as Charles II gathered his supporters and future ministers around him in the northern Netherlands prior to his return to England to lay claim to the throne, the States of Holland and West Friesland resolved to secure the favour of the new King by making him a fine and memorable diplomatic gift. Its expensive centrepiece was a magnificent, highly decorated carved bed, with bed-furnishings, and there was also the promise of a handsome ship, to be called the Mary. But the ‘Dutch Gift’ also included a carefully selected group of paintings by major, recognised artists, and a number of classically inspired sculptures.

By the late 1660s, Sir Constantijn Huygens was in his seventies, with a career’s worth of experience brokering art and culture for the house of Orange. He occupied an unrivalled position in cultivated circles in the Dutch Republic, as arbiter of taste in all things cultural, from music and poetry to art and architecture. When it came to the delicate task of selecting a few Dutch pieces to include in the ‘Dutch Gift’, he was the obvious expert to consult.

Discreet enquiries had been made, and it had been determined that Charles’s taste, like his father’s, was for Italian art and antique statuary. Accordingly, most of the works presented were by Italian masters, beginning the process of reassembling a major collection for the English monarch to replace that sold off and dispersed by the Commonwealth in 1650. Art connoisseurship at The Hague now tended towards modern, Dutch works – visiting the palace of Rijswijk some years earlier, John Evelyn had commented that there was ‘nothing more remarkable than the delicious walks planted with lime