Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [91]
The returning English exiles carried their memories of ten years in the stylish material surroundings of Antwerp and the northern Netherlands home with them in 1660. In 1658–59, the exiled Charles II stayed for some time at Frederik Hendrik’s favourite country palace, at Honselaarsdijk, just outside The Hague, while he helped his widowed sister Mary, the Princess Royal, to organise suitable educational arrangements for her eight-year- old son, William III. Following the announcement of his reinstatement as King of England in March 1660, Charles spent four hectic weeks lodged at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, whose design and construction by van Campen Huygens had supervised just before the building of his own elegantly neoclassical house next door – the one he discussed by correspondence with Rubens in Antwerp. It was these buildings which helped shape the architectural aspirations of Charles II’s court in the second half of the seventeenth century.
In this area of culture as in so many others, the Huygens influence permeated the experience of those returning to rebuild lives interrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Accustomed to the Dutch architectural aesthetic, it is hardly surprising that in so many of the post-Restoration houses William III visited after his arrival in 1688 the new King should have felt perfectly at home.
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Masters of All They Survey: Anglo–Dutch Passion for Gardens and Gardening
In the course of the seventeenth century, English and Dutch townscapes and landscapes were transformed by an unprecedented surge of activity in house-building and garden design on the part of the newly prosperous business and merchant classes, eager to show themselves au fait with the very latest in styles and fashions. And just as consumer goods and luxury items were traded with growing enthusiasm in both directions across the English Channel or Narrow Sea, so specialist services in architecture and horticulture were freely interchanged, threading styles in building and garden design to and fro, weaving reciprocal influence increasingly tightly into the fabric of both territories.1
In architecture, in the early decades of the century, the families of de Keyser and Stone serve as characteristic examples of the easy social and professional exchange between the two countries. In 1607 the Amsterdam master mason Hendrick de Keyser arrived in London to study Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange in preparation for designing and building a similar centre for commercial activity in Amsterdam. While there he met Nicholas Stone, a mason and sculptor, who returned with him to Amsterdam, where he completed his training (he had just finished his apprenticeship when he and de Keyser first met). Stone spent six years or so in Holland, and married de Keyser’s only daughter. He and his wife then returned to England, where he established himself as a leading sculptor and architect.
The de Keysers became a dynasty of master masons – three sons and a grandson of Hendrick’s subsequently held the position. As well as being responsible for a large number of important buildings, both private and public, in Amsterdam, Hendrick de Keyser designed the tomb of William the Silent at Delft, for which the young Sir Constantijn Huygens provided the Latin inscription in the 1620s. Hendrick’s son Thomas painted the portrait of Sir Constantijn and his clerk, associated with his marriage to Susanna van Baerle in 1627. This means that all three of the best-known surviving portraits of Huygens were painted by artists with experience of patrons and studios on both sides of the Narrow Sea – we might argue that Huygens chose them on purpose, as part of his agenda of taste-formation in common to the English and Dutch art-appreciating communities.2
The Stones and the de