Portrait of William of Orange (1533-1584)

Entry

This relief portrait in terracotta of William of Orange (1533-1584), Father of the Dutch Republic, is directly derived from the bronze statue of the prince on his tomb monument in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, designed and built by the Amsterdam municipal sculptor and architect Hendrick de Keyser I (1565-1621) between 1613 and 1622. On the monument, the prince is depicted sitting frontally, dressed as a military commander wearing armour of state. This terracotta portrait is virtually an exact copy of the face on the bronze figure, with the sole deviation being the ruffled collar, which is closed in front and versus a small opening on the bronze original.

De Keyser derived the terracotta directly from the casting model required to produce the bronze cast of the seated prince. The bronze – and accordingly the casting model – would have been produced around the same time, circa 1618-19. For the present bust, De Keyser undoubtedly worked with clay or wax studies of the prince’s face. He was obliged to devise these posthumous studies – made some thirty years after the prince’s death – from painted and drawn portraits, or possibly even a cast of the prince’s death mask. A negative mould of the resultant clay or wax study would then have been used to press-mould and model the final product. The implementation of one or more moulds is confirmed by the portrait’s reverse, which bears the marks typically arising from the process of pressing wet clay into a mould.

In 1995, the restoration of another terracotta portrait of the prince – a bust, also in the Rijksmuseum’s collection (BK-NM-5757) – revealed that the head was formed from the same mould as the present relief portrait. The bust’s head, though modelled entirely in the round, was composed of two separate parts: the face and the back of the head form two halves, firmly held together with plaster. The vertical join, measuring several millimetres across, was filled with plaster and entirely concealed beneath the layer of paint applied to the bust’s surface.⁴ The front half with the face of William of Orange is identical to the present ‘half-relief’ portrait.

The use of moulds enabled De Keyser and his workshop to reproduce and sell these portraits in different versions and various editions. A second version of the above-cited bust, today in the possession of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, provides evidence of this practice,⁵ as do surviving variants of a small, bronze portrait of William of Orange (cf. BK-2018-129) cast directly from the terracotta scale model of the deceased prince, today preserved in the Rijksmuseum (BK-AM-37).⁶ In the testament of the sculptor’s widow, drawn up on 15 November 1621, one entry cites a conterfeytsele van zijn Exc[ellent]ie den prince van Oraignen h[oogloffelijcker] m[emorie] (portrait of his Excellency the Prince of Orange’s highly commendable memory), probably referring to yet another version of the present relief or the larger bust portrait.⁷ Certainly after the completion of the tomb monument in Delft in 1622, a veritable trade in Orange memorabilia very likely flourished.

Frits Scholten, 2024