Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [68]
If Madame de Zulichem [Susanna Huygens] would like also to add her own corrections, I would consider that an inestimable favour on her part. I would value her judgement, which is naturally excellent, far higher than that of many of the Philosophers, whose judgement art [formal training] has rendered extremely defective.10
In his next letter, responding to Huygens’s effusive praise for as much of the Discours as he has read already, Descartes sends the remainder, and once again requests that Susanna, this time together with Huygens’s sister Constantia, might be persuaded to read it:
And because these Ladies understand better than men, I recommend the two enclosed [works] to them, with your permission, the one for Madame Zulichem and the other for Madame de Willelm [Constantia]. They [the works] were born at almost the same time as your newborn daughter [Susanna junior], and therefore share the same Horoscope, which means that I could not possibly have a poor opinion of the fortunes of my works, and I wish long life and happiness to all who are born under that constellation, as also to their parents.11
Alas, Descartes’ astrological compliments were to no avail. Only a few months after this second letter reached Constantijn, his wife Susanna died, perhaps from post-natal complications. Towards the end of her final pregnancy, she may indeed have discussed the finer points of Descartes’ hot-off-the-press publication with her husband, as ‘the sharer and guide of [his] pen’. But we shall never know what contribution Susanna Huygens might have made to reshaping and polishing Descartes’ most famous and widely known work.
This little vignette reminds us how, in spite of the fact that they have left little trace in the historical records, educated women in Dutch families like the Huygenses participated fully and on equal terms in the cultural lives of their menfolk and the circles they frequented. The influence they could thereby exert within the family extended to the particular cultural and social background from which they came. Well-matched couples brought their shared interests to the joint household. In the case of an alliance between a Dutch man and an English wife – or vice-versa – both Dutch and English language, habits and culture would inform the ménage. It is to such ‘mixed’ seventeenth-century marriages that I now turn, but before I do so, here is one further story connected with the Constantijn Huygens–Susanna van Baerle marriage, to remind us how easily the women in my present story slide into historical oblivion, and how much work is required to retrieve them.
Some years ago, the eminent historian of seventeenth-century Dutch art Julius Held published an article in which he identified a double portrait in a private collection in England as ‘a hitherto unknown portrait’ of Constantijn and Susanna Huygens.12 When the painting was put up for auction in April 1992, it was purchased by an anonymous Dutch benefactor and returned to the Netherlands.13 Today, that painting hangs in the Mauritshuis at The Hague, and is so confidently identified as indeed a portrait of the couple by Jacob van Campen, dating from around 1635, that it needs no justification. It graces the cover of several books on Huygens, and is frequently reproduced in articles about him. Yet until its discovery, less than twenty years ago, there was no known surviving likeness of Susanna Huygens, although a 1785 inventory of Huygens family portraits included three of her.14 Since her death she had simply disappeared from sight.
Huygens’s relationship with Jacob van Campen dates from the early 1630s. In December 1632, a friend of Huygens’s wrote to him from Leiden, asking him, in his official capacity in the administration of the Stadholder, to obtain a passport to travel for the artist van Campen. As a ‘sweetener’, perhaps, the letter concluded:
He is a good architect and a good painter: à propos which, he would like to make you a gift of one of his paintings, asking you with affection to take the offer in good part.15