Introduction. Going Dutch: Anglo-Dutch Exchange & Painting in the 17th Century

Origins 

“What other people has written its history in its art?” (Theophile Thoré).[1]

In 1597 the Protestant Seven Provinces declared their independence from Philip II of Spain who had inherited the region, though independence would only be won through long and bitter struggle: the Dutch Revolt or “Eighty Years War” (1566-1648).[2] The southern Catholic regions originally joined in the revolt, but capitulated to Spain. Out of this turmoil the Dutch Republic emerged led by William of Orange (see below) which led to one of the first modern European republics. With the Peace of Munster in 1648, hostilities ceased. This momentous event in which the oath of ratification is sworn, is celebrated in a number of pictures painted by Terborch and Van der Helst.  

Bartholomeus van der Helst, The Celebration of the Peace of Münster, 1648, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Gerard Terborch, The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648, Oil on copper, 46 x 60 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Every country has its own myth of origin and the Netherlands is no exception. One of the most enduring is that of the revolt of the Batavians, ancestors of the Dutch who rebelled against their Roman masters in 69 AD. The most famous example of this in art is Rembrandt’s magnificently bizarre Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, the one-eyed Batavian leader who swears a conspiratorial oath with a motley group of confederates. In a gentler vein, Aelbert Cuyp’s pastoral landscape the Valkhof at Nijmegen pleasingly blends the Batavian myth (the castle was Civilis’s ancestral seat) with an idyllic Dutch scene of cows, herders, water, windmills[3] all bathed in an Italianate glow betraying Cuyp’s influences.[4]

Rembrandt van Rhyn, The Conspiracy of the Bataves, 1661-62, Oil on canvas, 196 x 309 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Aelbert Cuyp, The Valkhof at Nijmegen, 1652-54, Oil on wood, 49 x 74 cm, Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

 

 Another “liberation narrative” is the Hebraic one. In his cultural history of the Dutch nation, Simon Schama demonstrated how the story of Exodus was used as a metaphor for the Dutch’s republic ambitions. In the modern era the Exodus story is generally used as “a reference point for godly nationalism,” but in the 17th century, Calvinist writers like Cromwell and Milton could “invoke the Exodus in justification of radical separation from idolatry and the making of a covenant of free people.” These ideas inspired the Dutch who had left the “fleshpots of the South” and moved north over water and, land, to reach a “land of abundance.” To them, the Exodus narrative was rooted in reality rather than myth.”[5] Defying the latter day Herod of Philip II, the Netherlanders are led out of Spanish captivity by their “Lion of Judah,” William of Orange. This Biblical link is confirmed by consulting Goltzius’s portrait of William the Silent which is supplemented with scenes from Exodus. We also see the theme of the salvation of the Jews in such dramatic pictures as Jan Steen's Esther & Ahasuerus. However, it should be stressed that extending the Exodus concept to the whole of 17^th century Holland can lead to distortion of the facts, given the complex religious situation in cities such as Amsterdam.[6] 

Hendrick Goltzius, William the Silent, 1581, print, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

Jan Steen, Esther before Ahasuerus, 1668, oil on canvas, 70 x 93 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art.

Stadhouders & Artists

For the Dutch the most significant dynasty was the House of Orange- Nassau which produced the nobleman William I, also known as William the Silent. Originally William served the Habsburgs, but grew increasingly unhappy with the baleful treatment of the Dutch Protestants by the Spanish. Faced with this persecution, he turned against his former masters and led the Dutch uprising. Portrayed by many artists, including Adriaen Thomasz Key and Hendrik Goltzius, William the Silent is one of the Netherlands’ prominent nationalist symbols. And the same can be said for his tomb in the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft which was designed, though not finished, by the Utrecht artist Hendrick de Keyser. It became a favourite motif of many Dutch artists including Emanuel de Witte from Alkmaar who became famous for his austere and views of the interior of Protestant churches as well as Jewish synagogues.[7] From 1572, William I also held the title of “Stadhouder,” usually translated as placeholder, a form of stewardship. At a time when civil society was taking form, tensions existed between the ruling dynasties and the city councils that enjoyed growing political power. 

Adriaen Thomasz Key, William I, Prince of Orange, called William the Silent, c. 1579, Oil on panel, 48 x 35 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Emanuele de Witte, View of the Tomb of William the Silent in the New Church in Delft, 1656, Oil on canvas, 97 x 85 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

One of the most famous Stadhouders was the youngest son of William the Silent and Louise de Coligny, Fredrick Henry (1625-1647) who was born just six months before his father’s assassination in 1584. His stewardship occurred during what is considered to be the “Golden Age” of the Dutch Republic.[8] His secretary Constantine Huygens (1597- 1687)  was a patron of Rembrandt, but that timeless master was never suited to royal portraiture; so the Stadhouder was painted by less familiar artists like Honthorst and Mierevelt, an unjustly neglected artist who portrayed members of the British nobility like Baron Vere of Tilbury. 

Gherard Honthorst, Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange, with His Wife Amalia van Solms and Their Three Youngest Daughters, 1647, Oil on canvas, 264 cm x 348 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Michiel Jansz. Van Mierevelt, Portrait of Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange-Nassau, c. 1610, Oil on panel, 110 x 84 cm, Gemeente Musea, Delft.

Michiel Jansz. Van Mierevelt, Horace Vere, Baron Vere of Tilbury, 1629, Oil on panel, 87 x 65 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London. 

Fredrick Henry also built Huis ten Bosch (“House in the Woods”) at the Hague which contained the Orange hall, a room full of allegories by Catholic painters like Jacob van Campen and Jan Lievens (Rembrandt’s studio-mate in Leyden) executed in a flamboyant baroque style. Such aristocratic projects were extremely rare in Holland but they remind us of the strains on the Dutch body politic which were at their most intense during the reign of his successor, William II. Though his legal powers were severely curtailed, the stadhoulder William II tried to exert his authority much like the English Stuarts and rode on Amsterdam with the intention of putting the burghers in their place. Though Amsterdam was put on a war footing, William’s army got lost and dispersed in the fog giving the city time to lock its gates. Perhaps the Stadhouder had been alarmed at the symbolic importance of the New Amsterdam Town Hall. Planned since 1643 this huge structure was at the time the largest building in Northern Europe and its size seemed to “advertise the disproportionate power exercised by the city and its regents in the affairs of the Republic.”[9]

View of the Oranjezaal, c. 1650, Huis ten Bosch, The Hague

Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyder, The Dam with the Town Hall, oil on canvas, 52 cm (20.5 in). Width: 63 cm (24.8 in), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

 Anglo- Dutch Exchange

If there is a figure that could symbolise the “Anglo-Dutch” exchange, the traffic in intellectual culture between the two nations, that person could be Constantine Huygens. His taste in art and music as well as his curiosity in scientific matters have been connected with his visit to England in 1622.[10] In that year he was knighted by James I, and as one scholar has said, “Sir Constantine…was one of the few equally at home in the two worlds in which England and Holland respectively excelled- the world of music and poetry and the world of painting.”[11] A section of his Autobiography is allocated to his artistic education including an inventory of Netherlandish artists, though he considered Rubens the most outstanding. Boasting a large library, Huygens was interested in the philosophy of Francis Bacon as well as the eccentric inventor Cornelis Drebbel who was known to Rubens who met him in London in 1629.[12] Scientifically inclined, Huygens brought a camera obscura back from England and sponsored Dutch scientists for membership of the Royal Society.[13] Some years after his diplomatic visit he married Suzanna van Baerle with whom he had five children including Constantine Jnr (1629) and Christiaan (1631), and Suzanna (1637).  Christiaan inherited his father’s interest in science; he later became a member of the Royal Society. Amongst his achievements were telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan.

Adriaen Hanneman, Portrait of Constantijn Huygens and His Five Children (with the sons Constantijn, Christiaan, Lodewijk and Philips and the daughter Susanna), 1640, oil on canvas, 204.2 x 173.9 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Thomas de Keyser, Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk, 1627, Oil on wood, 92,4 x 69,3 cm, National Gallery, London.

  n addition to artistic and scientific interaction between England and Holland, religious ideas travelled across the North Sea. There were, in fact, links already in place: due to Amsterdam’s tolerant attitude there were a handful of English exiled churches (Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, Anglican, Congregationist, Brownist, Baptist).  There were also many Jews, a faith that had been barred from England by Edward I in 1290.[14] Seeking to reverse the situation, the Jewish rabbi. Menassah ben Israel (1604-1657), who lived on the same street as Rembrandt, went to England in 1651 in order to petition Parliament.[15] Menasseh even secured an audience with Cromwell in 1655 with the aim of asking the Protector to let the Jews settle in England.[16] Millenarian prophecies fed into this time of civil war and political unrest, and some scholars have read the apocalyptic message of Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast in terms of millenarian prophecy and seen the inscription as proof of the artist’s familiarity with the rabbi’s writings.[17]

Rembrandt, Belshazzar’s Feast, c. 1635, oil on canvas, 167 x 209 cm, London, National Gallery.

Rembrandt, Menasseh ben Israel, 1636, etching, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet.

Sir Peter Lely, Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, Oil on canvas, 73 x 61 cm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

 A Military and Artistic Invasion. 

One of the most intriguing mysteries of 17^th century Europe is the virtual disappearance of the invasion of Prince William of Orange (the future William III) of the British Isles on 1^st November 1688 from the historical record.[18] Armed with an invasion force of five hundred ships and twenty thousand troops, he embarked upon his venture which was to be stage-managed as liberation. Sailing past Dover, the Dutch fleet’s progress was recorded by the eager pen of Constantine Huygens Jnr (1628-1697) who was in fact Secretary to William of Orange, following in his father’s footsteps. From Constantine Jnr we get a vivid and favourable account of life in England as seen through the eyes of a member of the Amsterdam elite. Their first port of call was a village named Braxton where he and the Stadhouder bivouacked for the night. 

Jan Wyck, William III Landing at Brixham, Torbay, 1688, Oil on canvas, 158 x 132 cm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

Jan Wyck, A Boating Scene, Oil on canvas, 60 x 92 cm, Private collection.

 In addition to the written record we also have paintings of the Prince of Orange by such artists as Jan Wyck who had arrived in England twenty years before William of Orange. Wyck and other Dutch artists like Willem van der Velde served as catalysts for the genre of marine painting in England.[19]Van der Velde marks the first significant impact on the English school of art with his pictures of sea battles emulated by artists such as Samuel Scott. And we have such Dutch masters as Caspar Netscher who painted Mary Stuart, King James II’s eldest daughter and wife of Prince William. Together, in the form of coregency, they would reign as William and Mary, the orchestrators of the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the culmination of Williams’s invasion that never was.

British School, (17^th century), William III (1650-1702) and Mary II (1662-1694), watercolour on vellum, 2.5 x 2.2 cm, Royal Collection Trust.

Willem van der Velde, the Younger, The Gust, c. 1680, Oil on canvas, 77 x 64 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

 

Slides.

1)      Jacob Isaackszon van Ruisdael, The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, c. 1670, Oil on canvas, 83 x 101 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

2)      Montage of Dutch Icons (Wikipedia).

3)      Hendrik Pot, Flora's Wagon of Fools, 1637, oil on canvas, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.[20]

4)      Map of the Low Countries, 1477.

5)      Claes Jansz. Visscher (II) Leo Belgicus, map of the Low Countries in the shape of a lion, 1609.[21]  

6)      Johannes Vermeer, The Art of Painting, 1665-67, Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

7)      Gerard Terborch, The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648, Oil on copper, 46 x 60 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

8)      Map of Europe in 1648.

9)      Bartholomeus van der Helst, The Celebration of the Peace of Münster, 1648, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

10)   Rembrandt van Rhyn, The Conspiracy of the Bataves, 1661-62, Oil on canvas, 196 x 309 cm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

11)   Aelbert Cuyp, The Valkhof at Nijmegen, 1652-54, Oil on wood, 49 x 74 cm, Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

12)   Jan Steen, Esther before Ahasuerus, 1668, oil on canvas, 70 x 93 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art.

13)   Hendrick Goltzius, William the Silent, 1581, print, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

14)   Adriaen Thomasz Key, William I, Prince of Orange, called William the Silent, c. 1579, Oil on panel, 48 x 35 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

15)   Bartholomeus van Bassen, The Tomb of William the Silent in an Imaginary Church, 1620, Oil on canvas, 112 x 151 cm, Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest

16)   Emanuele de Witte, View of the Tomb of William the Silent in the New Church in Delft, 1656, Oil on canvas, 97 x 85 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

17)   Emanuele de Witte, Interior of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, 1680, Oil on canvas, 110 x 99 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

18)   Gherard Honthorst, Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange, with His Wife Amalia van Solms and Their Three Youngest Daughters, 1647, Oil on canvas, 264 cm x 348 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

19)   Michiel Jansz. Van Mierevelt, Portrait of Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange-Nassau, c. 1610, Oil on panel, 110 x 84 cm, Gemeente Musea, Delft.

20)   Michiel Jansz. Van Miereveld, Horace Vere, Baron Vere of Tilbury, 1629, Oil on panel, 87 x 65 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

21)   Cesar Everdingen, View of the Oranjezaal, c. 1650, Huis ten Bosch, The Hague

22)   Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyder, The Dam with the Town Hall, oil on canvas, 52 x 63 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

23)   Cesar Everdingen, Count Willem II of Holland Granting Privileges, 1655, Oil on canvas, 218 x 212 cm, Gemeenlandshuis, Leiden.

24)   Thomas de Keyser, Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk, 1627, Oil on wood, 92,4 x 69,3 cm, National Gallery, London.[22]

25)   Adriaen Hanneman, Portrait of Constantijn Huygens and His Five Children (with the sons Constantijn, Christiaan, Lodewijk and Philips and the daughter Susanna), 1640, oil on canvas, 204.2 x 173.9 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

26)   Caspar Netscher, Portrait of Suzanna Huygens, 1667-69, Oil on oak panel, 45 x 35 cm, Private collection.

27)   Rembrandt, Belshazzar’s Feast, c. 1635, oil on canvas, 167 x 209 cm, London, National Gallery.

28)   Rembrandt, Menasseh ben Israel, 1636, etching, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet.

29)   Sir Peter Lely, Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, Oil on canvas, 73 x 61 cm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

30)   Attributed to Willem Droost, Daniel’s Vision, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 119 cm, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.[23]

31)   Jan Wyck, William III Landing at Brixham, Torbay, 1688, Oil on canvas, 158 x 132 cm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

32)   Caspar Netscher, Portrait of Mary Stuart II, 1683, Oil on canvas, 81 x 64 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

33)   British School, (17^th century), William III (1650-1702) and Mary II (1662-1694), watercolour on vellum, 2.5 x 2.2 cm, Royal Collection Trust.[24]

34)   Jan Wyck, A Boating Scene, Oil on canvas, 60 x 92 cm, Private collection.

35)   Willem van der Velde, the Younger, The Gust, c. 1680, Oil on canvas, 77 x 64 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

36)   Samuel Scott, Departure from England of Francis, Duke of Lorraine, 1731, Oil on canvas, 124 x 186 cm, Private collection.



 

---

[1] Cited in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age ((1987), 9.

[2] There are several historical surveys of the Dutch Republic. The Most extensive is Jonathan Israel’s thousand page The Dutch Republic: Its Greatness, Rise, and Fall, (Clarendon Press, 1998). A more manageable account is Maarten Prak’s The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Golden Age, trans. Diane Webb, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 

[3] For a comparison between Cuyp’s painting Ruisdael’s, Windmill at Wijk, see Mariët Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, (Everyman, 1996), 104-5.

[4] Provenance: Dukes of Saxe-Coburg- Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein, since at least 1826 (known as the Herzogliches Museum or Museum zu Gotha, and since 2004 as the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha); sold in April 1937 by the museum director to the art historian/dealer Eduard Plietzsch as a "van Strij". With (Cassirer, Amsterdam) by July 1937, probably via (Galerie St. Lucas, Vienna); With (Arnold Seligmann, Rey, and Co., Inc., New York) circa 1939, possibly in conjunction with (Rudolf Heinemann [1901-1975], New York); purchased by Caroline Marmon Fesler, Indianapolis, for the John Herron Art Institute, now the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in 1943.

[5] Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 104.

[6] As Schama says “…the Exodus epic became for the Dutch what it had been for the Biblical Jews: the legitimation of a great historical rupture, a cut with the past which had made possible the retrospective invention of a collective identity.” (Embarrassment of Riches, 113). But note the unifying “Hebraic bond” that Schama proposes did not extend to “formulating a temple/church appropriate for the “New Jerusalem” of Amsterdam. Only dissension and factionalism prevailed in efforts to achieve this goal.” (Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, Penn State Uni Press, 2009, 4).

[7] The Esnoga, the Portuguese synagogue completed in 1675 featured “fashionable Dutch Christians in the foreground observing services.” (P &S, Rembrandt’s Faith, 55). It was visited by Frederik Henry, his son William II and Henrietta Maria in 1642 where they heard Menasseh ben Israel deliver an oration celebrating the “Dutch Republic as the Land of Freedom.” (P & S, Rembrandt’s Faith, 54).  In 1866 the novelist George Eliot visited Amsterdam as part of her research for her novel Daniel Deronda. But Eliot couldn’t find the actual Synagogue (where Spinoza was nearly assassinated) but instead found “three large and handsome Portuguese synagogues.” She observed “No women present, but “many devout men”. Eliot was particularly impressed with “the chanting and swaying of bodies” which moved the author to tears as a “faint symbolism of a religion of sublime far-off memories.” (Cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, 64).

[8] But the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga was not overtly fond of this term “Golden Age;” for him, it smacked too much of the aurea aetas and the mythological age of Ovid. See Willem Otterspeer, Reading Huizinga, (Amsterdam Uni Press, 2010), 153.

[9] Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 117.

[10] For Huygen’s knowledge of English culture, see Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, (Harper Collins, 2009), 91f.

[11] G.H. Bachrach, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain: 1596-1687 (Leiden Uni Press, 1962; London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 7. This passage cited in Svetlana Alpers: The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth-Century, (Penguin, 1983), 10.  

[12] On Huygens and Drebbel, Alpers, The Art of Describing, 4f. Amongst other scientific things, Huygens learned about the camera obscura (which he was ambivalent about) from Drebbel, (Ibid. 239, n. 20).

[13] Alpers, The Art of Describing, 11.

[14] First Portuguese Marannos arrived in Amsterdam in 1593; the first synagogue opened in Amsterdam in 1598. According to the economist Werner Sombart, at the beginning of the 18th century, the estimated number of Jews in Amsterdam was 2,400. The Jews called Amsterdam “their grand New Jerusalem.” (Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben. Leipzig: Duncker. Translated into English: The Jews and Modern Capitalism, Batoche Books, Kitchener, 2001), 15. In 1672, three years before the opening of the great synagogue, there were 7,500 Jews in Amsterdam, a city of nearly 20,000, or just 3.75 % of the population (Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 591). As Schama also notes: "It is less accurate, then, to speak of the Jews in Holland as wholly absorbed within domestic Dutch culture than of an independent Dutch Jewish world evolving over the course of the century. This social synthesis was not just the product of Dutch reticence and uncertainty, it was also the choice of the Jews themselves, concerned not to be swallowed up by their host society," (Embarrassment of Riches 593).

[15] In addition to his preaching, Menasseh was also a teacher of Hebrew to non-Jewish scholars as well as “a leading promoter of a climate of religious convergence rooted in millenarianism.” (Perlove and Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith, 58). He was clearly connected to Rembrandt; some scholars believe that this is evidence of the artist’s pro-Jewish sympathies, though there was a tradition of Rembrandt criticism that detected a negative treatment of the Jews by Rembrandt, (Rembrandt’s Faith, 5f).

[16] An English translation of Manasseh’s Esperanza de Israel Hope of Israel (1650) had the aim of persuading Oliver Cromwell to let the Jews settle in that country, (Perlove and Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith, 59). George Eliot in her Daniel Deronda notebooks says that a synagogue was built in King’s St, Duke’s St, London (1656) but “the Jews were so maltreated by the mob that they entreated protection from Charles II & received it.” (Daniel Deronda Notebooks, 85).

[17] Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, Pieter van Thiel, Rembrandt: the Master and his Workshop, (Yale, National Gallery, London, 1992), no. 22. According to Perlove and Silver: “While the artist may have been advised by a Christian Hebraist, the most likely candidate is Menassah, who first published his adopted interpretation in De termino vitae (On the limit of Life), a book on life expectancy under Divine Providence (requested by Protestant theologians), printed by his own press in Amsterdam in 1639…It is worth noting that Rembrandt chose to adopt the Talmudic interpretation over Calvin’s own explanation for Belshazzar’s incomprehension. Recorded in his commentary on Daniel, Calvin credits a divine plan, namely, that “God had stupefied all his senses and, as it were, weakened his eyes.”” (Rembrandt’s Faith, 134). There have been attempts to separate Menasseh from Rembrandt, largely unsuccessful. Paul Crenshaw argues Bonus (Ephraim Bueno) would be a more likely source of information on Jewish matters, but he stresses, not unreasonably, that “many learned men in Holland knew Hebrew (Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy, Cambridge University Press, 123 n. 60)

[18] See the account in Jardine, Going Dutch, 1f.

[19] Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain 1530-1790, (Pelican History of Art, Yale University Press, 1953, rep. 1994), 152f.

[20] From Wikipedia: “Followed by Haarlem weavers who have abandoned their looms, blown by the wind and flying a flag emblazoned with tulips, Flora, goddess of flowers, her arms laden with tulips, rides to destruction to the sea along with tipplers, money changers and the two-faced goddess Fortuna.”

[21] From Wikipedia: “The earliest Leo Belgicus was drawn by the Austrian cartographer Michael Aitzinger in 1583, when the Netherlands were fighting the Eighty Years' War for independence. The motif was inspired by the heraldic figure of the lion, occurring in the coats of arms of several of the Netherlands, namely: Brabant, Flanders, Frisia, Guelders, Hainout, Holland, Limburg, Luxembourg and Zeeland, as well as in those of William of Orange. Although the name "Belgica" is now reserved for the Southern Netherlands ("Belgium"), before the division of the Low Countries into a southern and a northern half in the 16th century, the name referred to the entire Low Countries, and was the usual Latin translation of "the Netherlands" (which name then covered the current territory of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and a small part of northern France). For example, several contemporary maps of the Dutch Republic, which consisted of the Northern Netherlands, and therefore has almost no intersection with the country of Belgium, show the Latin title Belgium Foederatum.

Aitzinger's map was the first of many. There were three different designs. In the most common one, the lion's head was located in the northeast of the country and the tail in the southeast. The most famous version is that of Claes Janszoon Visscher, which was published in 1609 on the occasion of the Twelve Years' Truce.”

[22] This portrait may have been painted just before Huygen’s marriage in 1625. Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals, (London, 2007, no. 34). 

[23] Rembrandt: the Master and his Workshop, no. 82.

[24] From the RC website: “This double-portrait in miniature of William III and Mary II was given by Queen Mary to George V on 3 June 1916, his fifty-first birthday, and formed part of the collection of objects with Stuart associations which they assembled. Although the double-portrait format is unusual on this scale, it is not unique; posthumous double- portraits of William III and Mary II such as an example in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, have been assigned to Peter Hoadley, who worked in the early eighteenth century. The present miniature appears to be of higher quality than those works and cannot therefore be attributed to the same hand.” Link.