RKD STUDIES

11.5 Worlidge’s Approaches to Fame

... Manner of Rembrandt were published in 1768.45 Worlidge himself had published the etchings as individual sheets from 1754, but without any reference to Rembrandt. Paradoxically, the gems had nothing to do with Rembrandt’s art, either in terms of technique or subject matter. The addition in the title, ‘etched after the Manner of Rembrandt’, was intended as an advertisement to attract the attention of potential buyers, but also to reaffirm his connection with Rembrandt. He must have been well known for this during his lifetime, as is also evidenced by a quote from the theorist William Gilpin (1724-1804) in his 1768 Essay on Prints: ‘Among the imitators of Rembrandt, we should not forget our countryman Worlidge; who has very ingeniously followed the manner of that master; and sometimes improved upon him. No man understood the drawing of an head better’.46...

11.2 Thomas Worlidge and his Engagement with Rembrandt’s Oeuvre

... o the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish between Rembrandt’s and Worlidge’s work. Worlidge meticulously imitated Rembrandt’s composition, but above all his etching technique. His approach confirmed his artistic talent and reassured contemporary viewers of Worlidge’s ability to copy Rembrandt convincingly. This was useful in gaining new commissions as Rembrandt’s motifs and techniques became popular.The positive reception that Rembrandt’s work had received in England by this time was beneficial to Worlidge’s aims as an artist, and especially as a portraitist. Worlidge concentrated on Rembrandt’s popular subjects. These were mainly facial representations such as the tronies. Rembrandt’s tronies were apparently well received in England and increasingly appeared on the art market, whether as originals, copies, reproductions or, later, as forgeries. These two factors, Rembrandt’s growing reputation and Worlidge’s choice of subject and skill as an etcher, determined his success as an artist in England....

Bibliography

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9.2 Customer Shopping Patterns

... of those that Van Collema stocked, and it is likely that his customers had a similar retail experience, browsing among a wide range of goods, and choosing those that took their fancy. As Patricia Ferguson has observed, retailers encouraged purchases by presenting their premises as elite interiors, and showcasing new methods of display.52The shopping patterns of the Duchess of Somerset and Mary II support this, indicating that their collecting was impulse-led, prompted by what was on display. They visited frequently, and bought multiple examples of the same type of item, suggesting that they were buying porcelain for decorative rather than practical purposes. The Duchess of Somerset owned many different sets of teaware, and the Queen already possessed a very large collection of porcelain which she had brought to England from the Dutch Republic. They did not need more porcelain, or other India goods: their new acquisitions were principally intended for abundant display. The pattern of their visits also suggests that the retail experience itself – browsing and selecting – was an important aspect of the collecting process. The India merchant’s shop was the location at which supply (merchant) and demand (customer) met, each responding to the other, the mid-point in the oscillation between the court and the marketplace.53...

... Duchess of Somerset’s London mansion, was a four-minute walk from Green Street. It is almost certain that the duchess visited Van Collema’s shop in person, as although purchases of tea are frequently annotated with the name of the household staff member who had visited the shop on her behalf, no such names appear against porcelain or other decorative goods.58 Whitehall Palace, Queen Mary’s principal residence in London, was only a ten-minute walk away [17]. The ease with which his customers could visit his shop encouraged them to visit frequently, contributing to a pattern of collecting and display that was based on quantity, rather than quality....

8.2 Anglo-Dutch Encounters in Cartography and the Spanish Black Legend

... d on John Seller a monopoly on ‘maps, plats, or charts’ for thirty years and made him the official Royal Hydrographer [10]; a year later John Seller produced a chart showing the Atlantic and the Royal African Company’s coat of arms, for the Company's renewed charter book [11].13 John Seller also taught and published on navigation, mathematics, surveying, gunnery and fortification architecture. His career was entwined with Restoration imperial policy, and crucially, late-Stuart interests in surpassing the Dutch in maritime trade and knowledge.John Seller was determined to challenge the Dutch Republic’s dominance of cartography, writing in 1669 that he intended on ‘making a Sea-Waggoner for the Whole World’ ‘for the general benefit of Navigation’ which would rival ‘our neighbours the Hollanders’.14 To do this, John Seller purchased old copper plates by the Dutch cartographers Willem Jansz. Blaeu (1571-1638), Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664), Jan van Loon II (c. 1614-1686) and Nicolaes Visscher, some of them made as many as 50 years earlier. He then reworked the designs, either directly on the old copper plates, or by copying the Dutch designs on paper and then transferring them to new copper plates, sometimes with help from the engravers William Faithorne I (1616/20-1691), James Clark and Francis Lamb (fl. 1667-1701). This method allowed John Seller to combine old and new decorative schemes and geographic information and thus to work quickly. In a short period, Seller printed multiple editions of English atlases, chiefly The English Pilot (1671), The Coasting Pilot (1672) and Atlas Maritimus (1675). The decorative schemes of the 48 maps and charts in Atlas Maritimus (1675) are overwhelmingly copied from Dutch copper plates, a debt that John Seller admits in the preface, ‘we must see no further than their books direct us, nor how to avoid a shelf without a foreign pilot’.15 At the time, London offered a steady supply of Dutch navigational instruments, both directly from the Republic and from the Dutch map shops along the Thames. Indeed, in 1663, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) recorded his visit to ‘look at a Dutch shop or two for some good handsome maps’.16 It was through Anglo-Dutch trade and artisanal exchanges in London that John Seller could (literally) build on and rework the Dutch Republic’s superiority in art and science, even borrowing anti-Spanish propaganda....

6.2 Glowingness in Oil and Water Colours

... adopted it from Van Mander’s Schilder-boeck, which he had already consulted for his first manuscript.25 Besides, Norgate does not mention the term when speaking about Netherlandish art, but relating to another English miniature painter, Peter Oliver (1589-1674), and his commission by King Charles I (1600-1649) to make miniature copies of Italian paintings in the royal collection. He states that in his miniature copy on vellum, Oliver used Indian lake, a dark red pigment gained from resin, to achieve ‘glowing shadows’ of a similar quality as those in the original oil paintings by Titian (1488-1576):‘Peter Oliver […] made such expressions of those deep and glowing shadows in those Histories he copied after Titian, that no oil painting could appear more warm and fleshly then those of his hand’.26...

... w hues of what must have been glowing shadows once, can still be recognised in the visible part of the king’s neck and the shaded part of his chin [8].The British accounts of glowingness were mainly concerned with mixtures of pigments that were needed to achieve the effect. To apply glowing colours in oil painting, however, requires technical insight: the hue and tone of the brown-grey ground layer of the dead colour are relevant, and from there semi-transparent mixtures of mainly warm colours have to be applied layer by layer.29 Netherlandish painters would have learned these techniques as part of their training, and apparently did not see any need to write about them. In Britain, however, this knowledge must have been sought after by painters and virtuosi alike....

5.2 The Physical Space of the Studio

... ection of Royal Museums Greenwich measures 3.94 m x 5.64 m – only a handful of rooms would have been ‘convenient’ for such a task. These include the two ‘Presence Chambers’ – the King’s on the east side and the Queen’s on the west – facing the Thames on the north side of the house, and two ‘Privy Chambers’, rooms that bridged the public road.37 Certainly, if the Van de Veldes had already set up their studio in the house, as discussed below, that space alone would not have been large enough to undertake the task at hand....

... ing’s Clerk of Works ten months later in his entry recording work undertaken by carp...

... , conceived and probably brought close to completion in the Queen’s House studio, illustrates the issue: although our original intention had been to display this work within the exhibition as part of the studio evocation, its sheer size (measuring 3.3m wide unframed) greatly limited both the number and arrangement of other objects in the space. The difficulty of accommodating this vast work within the studio space might lend some weight to an anecdote conveyed by antiquarian George Vertue in 1715. Vertue described how two visitors from the Admiralty had been so impressed by the painting that they requested it be cut in two, so they could each have half. We are told that Van de Velde the Younger rolled up the canvas and vowed that neither could have it. With its echoes of the Judgment of Solomon, this anecdote conveys a sense of the painting’s unusual monumentality: to the Admiralty visitors, the painting was twice the size it needed to be; Van de Velde was forced to remove it from its stretcher in order to remove it from view.44...

... t walls - a further feature of this space that was out of keeping with typical studio spaces, which favoured a single light source.54 Finally, the installation of shutters in the Van de Veldes’ Queen’s House studio also attests to an idea of a studio space that was not static in its layout but surely shifted periodically according to different commissions, and different seasons - something Sandrart also advocated.55 Shutters would have enabled the Van de Veldes to respond as best they could to the varying levels and angles of sunlight in the space throughout the day and the year. The arrangement of easels, furniture and studio assets within the space would also have varied, depending on the artists’ need to use the fireplace and the number of artists at work together in the space at any one time....

... amers’ such as that kept by Rembrandt, intended to showcase a collection, to more private ‘cantoor’ (office) spaces where important items were secured.58 We can imagine that the Van de Veldes’ drawing library - a business-critical asset - fell more into the latter category.59 Other artists must have found solutions to the storage of drawings, prints and other reference material such as illustrated books. When Lely’s print and drawings collection was organised for sale, for example, the Executor Roger North (1653-1734) recorded ‘neer 10,000’ of these items present in Lely’s house at Kew.60 Some of these were organised in ‘Portfolios’, but it is unknown whether these were simple rigid covers containing a bundle of prints, or albums containing blank leaves with items attached to them.61 It is also unknown whether they were stored with Lely’s extensive book collection in his Library, as a room in the house was known, or elsewhere.62...

... ional image of the artist-courtier that those such as the Van de Veldes’ predecessors at the English court, Van Dyck and Rubens, had pursued.65 Even before their time as court painters in England, the Van de Veldes were not strangers to princely visitors to their studio – Cosimo III de’ Medici had visited them at their Amsterdam studio on 26 December 1667 – but it is interesting to speculate to what extent the need to stage themselves as court painters was magnified by virtue of the location of their studio within a royal building.66...

3.3 Case Study II: Apollo and Diana

... sque-like painting and the well-known Masque of Blackness, performed in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall in 1605, during the reign of Charles’s father James I (r. 1603-1625)25Honthorst’s command of dynamic, Caravaggesque chiaroscuro is synthesised in Apollo and Diana with a classical sensibility in the subject and arrangement of figures, a new type of international style that was particularly well suited to the work’s placement and context. Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), a student of Honthorst’s that accompanied him as an assistant, claimed that Honthorst had been called to England specifically to paint Apollo and Diana, which hangs today at Hampton Court Palace.26 The 3,000 guilders that Sandrart states Honthorst received upon his departure from London demonstrated his success and has sometimes been interpreted as payment for the Apollo and Diana, but this could also be due to the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628.27 It is probable that Buckingham was the patron or original designer of the picture, and that Charles paid for it in light of his friend’s death rather than as part of a planned commission. Given the prominent place that gifts held in the uses of paintings at Charles’s court, as well as the major role played by Buckingham in the painting itself, Apollo and Diana was likely a gift from Buckingham to Charles and thus evokes the close friendship between the two men and the court culture in which it was produced....

... are equally present in Honthorst’s painting, which features portraits of court members.31 While the masque overlapped the real and fictional by spatially dissolving the boundary between the two through the use of illusionistic stage sets, it also collapsed the two temporally by including recognizable figures in historic guise.32...

... utilised the masque’s own language to codify the visual program of Caroline dramatic allegory. At the...

... ajor set-piece as ‘an Artificiall Rock, whose top was neere as high as the hall it selfe’, from which some participants appear.33 At the end of the first song, ‘the vpper part of the Rock was sodainly turn’d to a Cloude, discouering a rich and refulgent Mine of golde; in which the twelue Maskers vvere triumphantly seated: their Torch-bearers attending before them’, causing their costumes to ‘spangle or spark’.34...

... a floating island—a large set that actually moved about the hall—in reference to the mythology of the Island of Delos, where the twins Apollo and Diana were born.35 A strong secondary theme of Stuart masq...

... early modern Europe. As the God of the sun, music, poetry, art, medicine, and the keeper of laws, Apollo was a potent identification figure for early modern rulers, most spectacularly in Louis XIV’s (r. 1643-1715) incarnation as Le Roi Soleil....

... storage at Whitehall Palace. Some art historians have interpreted this as evidence of the work’s inferiority, reading it as a marker of ...

... m, as well as another horizontal band of losses whose close proximity indicates that the painting was probably rolled or folded.Whatever the condition of the painting around the time of Van der Doort’s inventory, it is clear that its location in storage does not necessitate the dismissal of its importance in Charles’s picture collection and the culture of the Stuart court. Indeed, it both expanded the potential of the royal image and codified Honthorst’s place as a transnational court painter. Taken together, it is my hope that these two case studies of Honthorst’s court paintings prompt new questions about the role of his smooth, colorful, more international works, and begin to reframe our understanding of Honthorst’s pictorial strategies, output, and evolving style over the course of his career. Moving away from a focus on the Caravaggesque toward a broader picture of Honthorst’s oeuvre in the context of his patrons, this study situates this Dutch artist within the international, Anglo-Dutch context in which he lived, worked, and gained immense success....

2.3 Professional Relations between the Stone and De Keyser Families

... ar’ was at work on a fountain at Kilkenny Castle for the Duke of Ormonde33 and it has been supposed that this, too was Willem or his son Hendrick Willemsz de Keyser.34Artistic influences between the Stone and De Keyser workshopsWe know, then that the Stone and De Keyser families had a close personal and commercial relationship. The exact nature of their relationship as artists and architects, however, remains unresolved. It is quite clear that De Keyser’s work exerted a strong influence on the Elder Nicholas Stone and that this influence continued after De Keyser’s death. De Keyser’s most famous work of sculpture, the monument of William the Silent (Prince William I of Orange) in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, commissioned by the States General of Holland in 1614 [8] can be seen reflected in one of Stone’s finest early works, the monument to Elizabeth, Lady Carey at Church Stowe in Northamptonshire, which dates from the end of the decade [9].35 The influence is apparent in the easy naturalism of the two effigies [10-11] which marks a break for Stone with the stiff and formal Elizabethan tradition. As far as architecture is concerned, we should note the impact of the treatise Architectura Moderna which was published in Amsterdam in 1631 and is illustrated largely by the work the De Keyser family. It contains an engraving of the Haarlemmerpoort in Amsterdam [12] and it has been pointed out that this was the major source for Stone’s main gateway to the Botanical Gardens in Oxford which was erected two years later to his own design [13]. 36...

2.2 Stone’s Career in England

... nger Cure was Master Mason in the Office of the King’s Works, the royal building department. He also styled himself the King’s Master Sculptor, though there is no evidence that he was ever appointed to a post carrying that title.16 Fortunately for Stone, the younger Cure was an unsatisfactory royal official. His superior officer, the famous architect Inigo Jones, complained of his negligence and Stone was able effectively to supplant him.17 When in 1619 a new Banqueting House was begun at Whitehall Palace for royal entertainments and diplomatic receptions, it was Stone and not Cure who was put in charge of the building works, executing Jones’s designs [7].18 Stone did other work for the king, too, all delegated by Jones with whom he formed a close professional relationship.19 This meant that when Cure died in 1632, Stone was perfectly placed to succeed him, which he duly did, and he held the office for the rest of his life....

... 24 Stone acted as a witness at the baptism of Hendrick’s grandson Gerrit, the child of his daughter Machtelt (Margreet) de Keyser and her husband Lenart Geens, in Amsterdam’s O...