Portrait of Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647), Prince of Orange

Entry

Frederik Hendrik was the third son of William the Silent, by his fourth wife, Louise de Coligny. In 1625, he married Amalia van Solms-Braunfels. In the same year, upon the death of his half-brother Maurits, Frederik Hendrik became Prince of Orange and Stadholder of Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland and Overijssel. He was a highly successful army commander, seizing cities such as ’s-Hertogenbosch (1629), Maastricht (1632), Breda (1636), and Hulst (1645). A year after his death in 1647, the United Provinces negotiated peace with Spain, ending the Eighty Years’ War.

Tiethoff-Spliethoff has shown in her reconstructions of the portraits of Frederik Hendrik that Van Mierevelt portrayed the prince on at least four occasions, beginning in circa 1610.⁴ None of Van Mierevelt’s primary versions are known today, and their dating has been based on the prints made after them. The engraving by Willem Jacobsz Delff after the prototype of the present painting, Van Mierevelt’s last portrait of the stadholder, was published in 1632.⁵ After 1632, Van Mierevelt’s role as painter of Frederik Hendrik’s official portraits was taken over by Honthorst, whose earliest portraits of Frederik Hendrik are from 1631.⁶

The composition of Van Mierevelt’s 1632 portrait, showing the armour-clad prince diagonally in front of a curtain and with his plumed helmet on a table beside him, is more or less identical to the versions from c. 1610, and was first used by the Delft artist for his 1607 Portrait of Prince Maurits.⁷ There is good reason to believe, however, that Van Mierevelt’s conservative composition would have been valued by his patrons. Van Dyck employed the same composition around 1631, albeit with a rough-hewn wall in place of the curtain, for his portrait of the stadholder.⁸ While the composition of the 1632 version is the same as that from c. 1610, the costume is different, and Frederik Hendrik is shown wearing the badge of the Order of the Garter, which Charles I conferred on him in 1627.

The version of Van Mierevelt’s 1632 portrait now in the Haags Historisch Museum has a pendant showing Amalia van Solms.⁹ The Rijksmuseum version, on the other hand, was recorded in 1800 as one of four stadholder portraits hanging in the Charter Room of the Admiralty of the Maas in Rotterdam, the others representing William the Silent, Maurits and Willem II.¹⁰ In May 1800, they were transferred to the Nationale Konst-Gallery in The Hague.¹¹ Three of the portraits, William the Silent, Maurits and Frederik Hendrik, were executed by Van Mierevelt and his studio. As Van Thiel has shown, the Portrait of Prince Maurits was left behind in The Hague when the Nationale Konst-Gallery was moved to Amsterdam and rechristened the Koninklijk Museum in 1808; that portrait eventually found its way to Delft.¹² The present portrait and the Portrait of William the Silent are still part of the Rijksmuseum collection (SK-A-253). Although such a commission is not documented, it seems likely that the three Van Mierevelt portraits were executed as a series for the Admiralty of the Maas in Rotterdam in, or shortly after, 1632, the year in which the prototype of the present portrait was painted. Moes and Van Biema identified the fourth stadholder portrait transferred to the Nationale Konst-Gallery from the Admiralty of the Maas, as the Portrait of Willem II attributed to Gerard van Honthorst in Apostool’s 1809 catalogue of the collection of the Koninklijk Museum. That portrait is most likely the 1651 painting by Honthorst’s studio in the collection of the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-177) which has almost the same dimensions as Van Mierevelt’s three portraits (110.5 x 86 cm).

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

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This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 201.