Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [64]
Gerrit Dou received his training as an artist alongside Jan Lievens, in Rembrandt’s studio at Leiden. He entered Rembrandt’s studio in February 1628, at the age of fourteen, and remained there for three years, until he became ‘an excellent master’. Since Lievens painted Huygens’s portrait at just around this time, we may assume that Huygens also made the acquaintance of Gerrit Dou (though Dou was too young to be included in his autobiographical fragment from this period, which included a celebration of the Rembrandt studio).
In 1669, Pieter Teding van Berckhout, a patrician of The Hague with family connections to both the Huygens and Paets families, visited Delft in the company of Huygens. He noted in his diary that he paid a call on ‘an excellent painter named Vermeer’. On a second visit to the ‘celebrated painter named Vermeer’ van Berckhout saw several ‘curious perspectives’. In assessing the value of Vermeer paintings currently on the market, he and Huygens compared these with prices for comparable works by Gerrit Dou.33 Here is somewhat more circumstantial evidence that Huygens probably played a part in selecting Dou’s work to be included in Charles II’s ‘Dutch Gift’.
The arrival of the Dutch paintings in the Royal Collection made a tremendous impression on the English art-appreciating public, particularly after their public display at Whitehall, and may be credited with helping to consolidate a taste and a flourishing market for contemporary northern Netherlandish art in Britain. Evelyn saw the Dou (and another ‘rustic’ painting) at court, on 6 December 1660, and wrote with approval:
I waited on my Bro: & sister Evelyn to Court: Now were presented to his Majestie those two rare pieces of Drolerie, or rather a Dutch Kitchin, painted by Douce [Dou], so finely as hardly to be at all distinguished from Enamail.34
The King himself is supposed to have been so charmed by the exquisitely detailed painting that he offered Dou the post of court painter (Dou declined).35
And the story of Anglo–Dutch cultural circulation and percolation does not, in fact, end here. When William III came to the throne in 1689, he quickly identified major works by artists Huygens had encouraged his family in the Low Countries to acquire in the English Royal Collection, and selected them to be shipped back to Holland, to be hung in his royal palaces, like Het Loo. There they joined the extensive house of Orange art collections, some of them – like the Dou Young Mother – being given pride of place for their exceptional quality.
The exquisite little Dou painting which had been included in the Dutch Gift to Charles II in 1660 was removed from London by William and Mary and taken to Het Loo, where it hung in pride of place over the fireplace in Queen Mary’s private apartments. An English visitor who had known her toured Queen Mary’s apartments at Het Loo around 1700, and reported on the splendour of the royal closet, or private sitting room, closely hung with exceptionally fine paintings:
In the first closet were several good paintings in bright colours. Through that we passed into a second which was hung with extraordinary fine paintings. There was a small piece of a woman rocking a cradle [the Dou], which was valued at 16,000 guilders.36
After William’s death, the English Crown had to apply to the Dutch government for the return of these paintings – with limited success. In the early-eighteenth-century inventory of paintings which ought to be returned to the Royal Collection in England, drawn up by the English Resident Ambassador Alexander Stanhope, the Dou was prominently listed as needing to be recovered. Today, it still hangs in the Mauritshuis – too beautiful a painting for the Dutch ever to have relinquished to the less appreciative English.37
Here, perhaps, lies the answer