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Six months later, van Campen’s offer had been taken up, and the artist was proposing a portrait of Huygens to complement an existing one in Huygens’s possession, by Jan Lievens:

Master van Campen is very eager to paint a light one for your Honour, to match the dark one by Lievens, and requests to have that picture sent together with its frame and all, in order for him to see the size and the expression of the face and the pose.16

It is not hard to identify the Lievens portrait as the one associated with Huygens’s earliest public praise for Lievens in his autobiographical fragment of 1631.17 Huygens’s friend and intermediary suggested that the Lievens portrait should be shipped to a broker in Amsterdam, where he would supervise its forwarding to van Campen. A ‘light one’ suggests a painting whose mood is less sombre than that of the darkly melancholic Lievens portrait. It was another ten months before the van Campen portrait (now lost) was finished and shipped, with a note from Huygens’s friendly intermediary:

Here is the long-awaited painting by van Campen; the long delay he blames entirely on his innate negligence … he hopes nevertheless that Your Honour will be somewhat pleased with it.18

The painting was evidently a success, and marks the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between Huygens and van Campen, culminating in van Campen’s designing and building Huygens’s house in Het Plein in 1637. Along the way, he painted the double portrait of Constantijn and Susanna. At the end of 1635, Huygens penned three epigrams ‘On the profile portrait of myself and my wife, on a sheet of paper, by J. van Campen’. The third reads:

Brother and sister may differ

as much as peace and friendship can stand:

Man and Wife no more than here,

Not the thickness of the paper.19

Here, thinks Held, we have the preliminary drawings for the double portrait he has re-identified.

In the course of 1635 Huygens and van Campen met regularly to discuss the plans and construction of Huygens’s fashionable new neoclassical house in Het Plein, their shared interests in both architecture and painting bringing them increasingly close. While his neighbour Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen was abroad serving as Dutch Governor in Brazil, Huygens oversaw the completion of his house – adjacent to his own – also under construction by van Campen and Pieter Post. Although Huygens’s house was demolished in the nineteenth century, we may consider the Mauritshuis as a memorial to the Huygens–van Campen architectural partnership.

Huygens later described how actively Susanna too had been involved in planning the layout and functions of rooms for their new family home. It was natural, then, that when plague broke out in The Hague in 1635, and Susanna had taken two of their four sons to stay with her brother-in-law in Arnhem, and needed temporary accommodation for herself and the other two boys, Constantijn junior and Lodewijk, she should seek refuge with the van Campen family on their estate near Amersfoort. They in their turn were only too happy to extend their hospitality to the Huygenses. It was while they were there that van Campen made a delightful drawing of the six-year-old Constantijn in a straw hat, in red chalk – one of the few surviving examples of his artistic prowess which can be securely assigned to him. On the back Constantijn Huygens junior has written (in later life): ‘My portrait aged six or seven, drawn by Mr. van Campen’.

The sheet of manuscript music Susanna and her husband hold together in van Campen’s double portrait is the basso continuo (the running instrumental accompaniment) to an unidentified song. Of course, a couple holding a piece of music in a Dutch painting may readily be taken simply to symbolise the harmonious relationship between them.20 The painting’s subject, one historian of music writes, ‘is not that of domestic music making but the treatment of music as a mirror of matrimonial harmony’.21

LEFT: Drawing showing the Huygenshuis and Mauritshuis adjacent to one another in the fashionable district of