Stadholder William II (1626-1650), Prince of Orange

Entry

Stadholder William II, Prince of Orange, is depicted as a military commander dressed in a suit of equestrian armour and Rhinegrave breeches and holding a military baton in his right hand. The badge of the Order of the Garter is largely concealed beneath a wide orange riband draped diagonally across the torso, tied above the right shoulder and below the left hip in voluminous bows. Inscribed on the base in raised relief is the stadholder’s name: P[rins] Wilhelmus II. Accompanying the statue is a socle bearing his coat of arms and the motto of the Order of the Garter: honi soit qui mal y pense (shame on him who thinks ill of it).

This life-size wooden statue was probably carved during William II’s three-year rule as stadholder (1647-50), not after his death as Leeuwenberg deemed possible.² William’s premature death in 1650 – eight days prior to the birth of his son, Prince William III – marked the onset of the ‘First Stadholder-less Era’, which ended in 1672. During this period, Orangists employed images of the princes of Orange (in particular William III) for propagandistic means and as political symbols. The present statue was unlikely commissioned for such a purpose, however, in part due to its somewhat pompous size and the deceased stadholder’s relative unpopularity.³

Unlike elsewhere in Europe, the life-size standing portrait of a governing ruler was a sculptural type as yet rarely encountered in the Dutch Republic. In the years 1646-47, François Dieussart (1600-1661) executed a dynastic series of four life-size, full-length standing stadholder portraits destined for the vestibule of Huis ten Bosch – at the time an absolute premiere in the Dutch Republic.⁴

On the basis of similarities determined from a photo of the statue of William II in Dieussart’s lost marble series, Van Luttervelt attributed the present statue as well to Dieussart.⁵ While the maker of the polychromed, wooden statue was unquestionably influenced – either directly or indirectly (at least typologically) – by the series, the execution of this work is inferior to what one might expect from a sculptor of Dieussart’s calibre. After all, he was the most important court portraitist in north-western Europe in the period 1640-60. The statue does reflect the same type of military leader’s portrait and is executed in a comparably dry style. At the same time, however, it misses the subtle detailing that characterizes Dieussart’s sculptures, while the overall impression fails to convey the same level of grandness and elegance. Such disparities are also apparent when comparing the present statue to a half-length portrait in marble, also depicting William II, sculpted by Dieussart around 1647 that today stands in the Gotisches Haus in Wörlitz.⁶

With respect to the commission or the original destination, nothing is known about the Amsterdam statue. In the early nineteenth century, it was in the collection of the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden, which arose in part from the collections of the Orange stadholders and the Dutch government. However, the statue’s comparatively inferior quality does not make it likely it was intended for a stadholder’s palace, and the old inventories of the residencies of members of the House of Orange make no mention of such a work.⁷ A more probable location is perhaps the hall or an important space in the building of a pro-Orange governmental institution. Given the material of the statue – polychromed wood – its placement in an outdoor space seems less likely.

In the existing art historical and maritime literature, the present statue is frequently linked to a larger statue of William II that once adorned the ornamental, relief-carved stern of the Prins Willem, a large sailing ship built in the province of Zeeland for the United East India Company (VOC) in the years 1649-51.⁸ The Prins Willem sank to the bottom of the sea in 1662; a scale model of the ship dated 1651, however, survives today (NG-NM-11911). An observed cursory agreement has led to speculation that the Amsterdam statue initially served as a model for the figure of William II on the ship’s stern and was later converted into a sculpture in its own right. A key, but unascertainable consideration is whether the ship’s model in fact accurately reflects the original, monumental relief adorning the ship’s stern. Regardless, any possible connection between the two works is precluded by major discrepancies in the positioning of the stadholder’s arms and legs when comparing the ship’s model (fig. a) to the Amsterdam statue. By contrast, the figure on the ship’s model – with the military baton clasped in the stadholder’s upraised right hand and pressed to the hip – displays a marked correspondence to painted portraits of William II by or after Gerard van Honthorst (cf. the original SK-A-871 from 1647 or one of the copies, e.g. SK-A-177). The figure on the model is therefore likely to have followed such examples, not the statue discussed here.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025