Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [66]
It was inevitably paintings appealing to developed Dutch courtly taste that William and Mary moved to their palaces in The Hague and elsewhere in the northern Netherlands – particularly large numbers of works of art from the English Royal Collection found their way to the walls of their favourite palace at Het Loo. These were the paintings that remained in the Netherlands when the English Crown passed back to the Stuarts (in the reign of Queen Anne) and then to the house of Hanover.
At The Hague, by contrast, the mingled and interwoven fortunes of Anglo–Dutch art continue to be represented today in the Mauritshuis collection and the Rijksmuseum, which retain the traces of the shared tastes of the houses of Stuart and Orange, from 1660 down to the invasion of 1688 and beyond.
6
Double Portraits: Mixed and Companionate Marriages
Throughout his long life, Sir Constantijn Huygens showed a weakness for attractive, talented, intelligent women. He cultivated intellectual friendships (seriously, and sometimes flirtatiously) with well-educated ladies across northern Europe who were renowned for their strong character and scholarly, musical and poetic aptitudes. He left rhetorically highly-wrought tributes to them scattered throughout his poems and correspondence.
These included outpourings of emotion and admiration for the artist and linguistic prodigy Anna Maria van Schurman (daughter of a Dutch father and a German mother),1 the poet Maria Tesselschade Visscher (with whom he exchanged particularly passionate poems when she converted to Catholicism), her sister Anna Roemers Visscher (who engraved verses on glass for Huygens) and the English poet and philosopher Margaret Cavendish, who lived in exile in Antwerp during the English Commonwealth period.2 He was master of the well-turned piece of flattery. In a characteristic letter written in middle age, complimenting the musician and singer Utricia Ogle and her friend, his erudite neighbour Dorothea van Dorp, together in a single missive, Huygens writes:
Yesterday I received from Mademoiselle Dorp the two beautiful tunes which it has pleased you [Utricia Ogle] to have copied for me. Never has so beautiful a package in so beautiful a hand been delivered to me by [another] so beautiful a hand. I leave you to imagine whether I am able fully to grasp the glory let alone to put the extent of the favour into words.3
Comparatively little, though, is known about the woman Huygens chose to spend his life with – his beloved wife, Susanna van Baerle. The glimpses we get of her, mostly through his letters and poems, are tantalising and shadowy, but do suggest that theirs was indeed an equal, companionate partnership.
A glass rummer engraved with verses to Huygens by Anna Roemers Visscher, responding to a poem of his addressed to ‘the diamond-tipped pen of Miss Anna Roemers’.
Susanna was the eldest of six children born to an affluent and influential Amsterdam family. Her father, Gaspar van Baerle, was a wealthy businessman and the cousin of Huygens’s mother. Like many with extensive commercial interests, he and his family had migrated north from Antwerp when access to the city was blocked during hostilities between the Spanish and the Dutch Republic. He died when Susanna was only six years old. When she was eighteen, her mother also died, leaving Susanna wealthy and free to make her own decisions concerning marriage. Her wealth and social status made her an enviable catch, and she was soon being widely courted. In 1622 the entire Huygens family appears to have tried enthusiastically but unsuccessfully to persuade her to marry Constantijn’s older brother Maurits. Eventually she asked them to desist, informing Constantijn’s sister Constantia that she had no intention of ever getting married.4
The families, however, kept in touch. In June 1624, Dorothea van Dorp, daughter of Constantijn’s immediate neighbours in