Bust of Pieter Spiering (1595-1652), Silfvercrona till Norsholm

Entry

This pair of marble bust portraits was sculpted by the Southern Netherlandish sculptor François Dieussart (c. 1600-1661) during his first years of activity in The Hague. Depicted are husband and wife Pieter Spiering (shown here) and Johanna Doré (BK-1971-115-B).³ Spiering (also Spierinck) was from a well-known family of tapestry weavers in Delft. In 1635, he was named as the Swedish ambassador to the Dutch Republic, an appointment largely arising from his numerous business transactions with the Swedish royal house.⁴ Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) even made him her treasurer. Spiering himself was also a major collector of art and one of the first in the Republic to install a special art cabinet. In 1683, Pieter inherited a large collection of engravings by Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and others from his father, François Spiering, an Antwerp/Delft tapestry weaver. He also possessed a late medieval prayer nut described as a miniature wooden apple, that ‘opens in two pieces and opens again inside with four doors, made very artfully’.⁵ arising from a viewing of Spiering’s collection around 1638: ‘2 apples carved from wood having the size of a fairly large apple; in the one, the life of Christ was very skilfully carved, in the other the passion of Christ; opened with small doors, so that one could see deep within; are worth many hundreds’.⁶

Spiering likely came into contact with Dieussart in his capacity as an art agent acting on the behalf of the Swedish crown. This Flemish-Walloon sculptor began his career in Rome.⁷ At the request of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Dieussart departed for London in 1636, charged with the task of restoring the classical sculptures in the earl’s collection.⁸ Thereafter, he went on to build his reputation as a portrait sculptor working at the princely courts of England, Denmark and the Netherlands.

In July 1641, Dieussart arrived in the Netherlands from London accompanied by a letter of recommendation from the painter Gerrit van Honthorst.⁹ Through the intermediation of Constantijn Huygens, the secretary of stadholder in The Hague, Dieussart first carved a portrait bust of Prince Frederick Henry, followed by portrait busts of Count Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen and the four Orange stadholders, all destined for the reception hall of the Mauritshuis in The Hague. In 1646, he was commissioned to carve life-size, full-length portraits of the same four stadholders. Upon its completion, this dynastic series was displayed in the main hall of Huis ten Bosch Palace, also in The Hague. Through Huygens, Dieussart was chosen to design a large tomb monument for Charles Morgan, the English commander of the stronghold Bergen-op-Zoom. This work was to become the first purely classicist tomb monument in the Dutch Republic.¹⁰ These projects in and around the stadholder’s court ultimately paved the way to additional commissions for the sculptor. For instance, Lodewijk Huygens’s diary from 1652, made during a visit to Spiering’s residence in London, also mentions a ‘countenance of the Queen of Sweden in white marble by Francisquo kept in The Hague’.¹¹ This purportedly ‘lost’ portrait of Christina can be perhaps be identified as the unsigned bust – long erroneously interpreted as a portrait of Anne of Austria – previously preserved at Castle Howard until its sale in 2015.¹²

Up to now, the portrait busts of Spiering and his wife have typically been dated to the years just preceding Dieussart’s departure for London in 1650. An annotation made by Ernst Brinck (1582-1649), mayor of Harderwijk and archaeologist, circa 1642 (and certainly before 1644), nevertheless confirms that at least the bust of Spiering himself would have been sculpted during the sculptor’s first years in the Republic: ‘Presently residing in The Hague is a Polish [native], being a highly skilled sculptor in alabaster; he has sculpted this Prince of Orange very skilfully in alabaster, pectore tenus, and for this he has been paid 2000 guilders. He has also sculpted the Resident Spiering in [the same material], very skilfully’. ¹³ Here Brinck refers to Dieussart’s half-length (pectore tenus) portrait bust of Prince Frederick Henry from 1641 (Schloss Wörlitz), while mentioning Spiering’s bust in passing.

The portraits of Spiering and his wife are rendered in the sculptor’s characteristically austere, rather dry classicist style. Dieussart based the male portrait on a now lost imperial Roman bust – the so-called ‘Vitellius’ – held in the Amsterdam Reynst collection since 1646 (RP-P-2016-591-53-1), from which lead casts were also made in the Republic.¹⁴ A lively cohesion between the two busts was achieved by having the faces of husband and wife turn towards one another. Dieussart’s application of this Italian stylistic motif, picked up during the period of his apprenticeship in Rome, is one reason why he was a much-sought sculptor north of the Alps. Joachim von Sandrart, who perhaps knew the sculptor himself even as far back as his days in Rome, was familiar with the present portraits, having seen them while in the Netherlands. The busts of Spiering and Doré are explicitly mentioned in Sandrart’s biography of Dieussart, published in his Teutsche Akademie of 1675: ‘also the countenance of the art collector Herrn von Spirings [sic] next to his wife / who is indeed equally worthy / to be depicted in hard marble stone in eternal commemoration / because of noble mind / great virtue / and proven to be an exceptional lover of the free and noble arts.’¹⁵ Sandrart also portrayed the art-loving Spierings himself, told in similar words as imparted in his autobiography.¹⁶

Frits Scholten, 2025