• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1062 0

to the vexed question of what happened to the Jan Lievens works produced for the court of Charles I during the 1630s. A growing taste in England for Dutch painters of both portraits and landscapes developed from the 1660s, as exiles returning home absorbed tastes they had acquired abroad, which merged seamlessly with tastes established by Dutch artists working in England before the Commonwealth period. Samuel Pepys (to take just a single example) records his admiration for perspective paintings by Samuel van Hoogstraten that he had seen at wealthy city entrepreneur Thomas Povey’s house, and in 1669 himself commissioned his own Dutch ‘landskips’ in ‘distemper’ by Hendrick Danckerts made to measure for his living room: ‘Mr Dancre … took measure of my panels in my dining room where … I intend to have the four houses of the King, White Hall, Hampton Court, Greenwich and Windsor.’ Once these works were complete, Pepys pronounced them to be ‘mighty pretty’. Sir Pieter Lely owned at least three Danckerts landscapes at his death in 1680.

Dutch artists like these, even if they did not reside in England, made it their business to visit regularly during these years – van Hoogstraten was in London at the time of the Great Fire in 1666 (in his treatise on painting he describes the effect of the dense smoke on the sunset).

Yet the English Royal Collection remains today depleted of many of its former Dutch holdings. Some failed to return at the Restoration, when forcible and conscience-based restitution of artworks dispersed in 1651 was most effective inside England, and with aristocratic owners in Italy and France, who had, on the whole, acquired Italianate paintings. Paintings sold under the Commonwealth to overseas buyers – particularly those that did not represent members of the Stuart royal family – remained with the purchaser, and over time passed into galleries and collections worldwide.

The importance of Dutch works of art for the great collections of the Stuart royals and the Orange Stadholders is also lost on us today for a further reason. When Amalia van Solms died in 1675, under the terms of her will the magnificent collection of paintings she and Frederik Hendrik had assembled over their married life together were divided up between her three daughters and her Hohenzollern grandsons (the children of Louise Henriette, Electress of Brandenburg, who had predeceased her). The most distinguished works in the collection, including paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Lievens and Honthorst, were dispersed between the electoral household in Berlin and other court cities in the Empire.38

After the 1688 invasion, when William and Mary took advantage of their newfound access to the riches of the English Royal Collection to enhance their own, the trusted member of William’s household charged with selecting and transporting these works of art was none other than Sir Constantijn Huygens’s son Constantijn junior, William III’s personal secretary.

On the very day on which William was proclaimed King of England – 23 February 1689 – William and Constantijn Huygens junior appraised the art in a number of rooms at Whitehall Palace (which Mary had decided the couple could not live in, because the central London air exacerbated William’s asthma). These, according to Constantijn, ‘also contained fine and admirable works; one of them contained many miniatures by [Isaac] Oliver, some of them after Italian originals’. William arranged for van Dyck’s great equestrian portrait of Charles I to be removed from the gallery at Hampton Court so that it could be hung where he could admire it. Over the next nine months, Huygens records numerous occasions on which the new King had him draw up lists of paintings in one or other of the royal palaces (Whitehall, Hampton Court, Windsor and Kensington), and have some or all of them moved from one to another. After the death of Queen Mary in 1695, William had Huygens move the best paintings from her apartments at Windsor and Hampton Court, to be hung in the refurbished rooms at Kensington Palace. The King instructed