Prince Maurits Accompanied by his Two Brothers, Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, and Some Counts of Nassau on Horseback

c. 1625

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 172 cm × width 283 cm
outer size: depth 7.5 cm (support incl. frame)
overall: weight 48 kg

Technical notes

The support is a plain-weave canvas that has been lined. There is one original seam, and cusping is visible along the top edge. A strip approximately 2.5 cm wide was added at the bottom. The ground appears to be light grey. There is a pentimento in the noseband of the white horse on the right. The painting is relatively broadly executed with visible brushstrokes and with impasto for highlights.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 13 January 2003

Condition

Fair. There is a right-angled tear at lower centre, and the paint layers are abraded, revealing the weave pattern of the canvas. The retouched areas and the varnish have discoloured.

Provenance

...; estate inventory, Stadholder’s Court, The Hague, 1763-64, blue antechamber (‘Een groot stuk verbeeldende de famillie van prins Willem den Eersten met zijn hoogheits drie zoonen, gevolgt door eenige officieren, alle rijdende te paert ter jagt uit, de portraiten door Mierevelt, de paerden en verder bijwerk door een ander, in dito [zwarte lijst en vergulde binnenkant] lijst. Hoogte 5 v. 4 d. Breete 9 v. 3 d. [152 x 263 cm]’);¹...; first recorded in the museum in January 1800;² on loan to the Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, 1949-65

Object number: SK-A-445

The artist

Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)

According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.

Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447) and two summer and winter pendants.³ On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.⁴ He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.

Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp, 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354

Entry

This monumental cavalcade of Nassau princes and counts is a variant of a print by Willem Jacobsz Delff after a design by Adriaen van de Venne, which was published in Middelburg by Jan van de Venne in 1621 (RP-P-OB-76.729, see fig. a). On 26 June 1621 the States-General awarded Jan a six-year patent ‘to be allowed to print or have printed, with the art of painting and engraving, and to publish the representation of the house of the heroes of Nassau on horseback’.⁵ om met de schilderconste ende plaetsneede te moegen drucken ofte doen drukken en uuytgeven, de verthooning van ’t huys der helden van Nassau te peerde’.] It is not only orders placed for the print by the States-General and the city of Middelburg that testify to its success,⁶ but also the surviving painted copies and variants of the composition, such as this one in the Rijksmuseum.⁷ Van de Venne had painted a similar cavalcade on copper, which may have been the prototype of the composition.⁸

The riders in the front row of the Rijksmuseum cavalcade are, from left to right, Prince Maurits, Frederick V (the Elector Palatine), Philips Willem and Frederik Hendrik, while behind them are Ernst Casimir, Willem Lodewijk and Johan Ernst. It was recently suggested that the two sumptuously attired boys in the left foreground are probably Maurits’s sons Willem and Lodewijk.⁹

A few changes were made relative to the engraved cavalcade, such as the addition of Frederick V, who had been living in The Hague in exile since 1621. His portrait is probably based on the print of 1622 by Willem Jacobsz Delff after Van Mierevelt, given the similarities of the facial expression, hairstyle, collar and clothing.¹⁰ The portrait of Frederick V was inserted in a rather unoriginal way with his horse in a pose almost identical to that of Philips Willem’s white horse beside it. A second change concerns the figure to the left behind Maurits, who is wearing the same headgear but is another individual altogether. It has been suggested that this might be the portrait of the person who commissioned the painting,¹¹ but that remains speculative. All the men in the print are wearing tall hats, but some of them have been replaced in the Rijksmuseum painting by lower hats with broad brims, which did not make their appearance in Van de Venne’s oeuvre until 1625, so the painting should be dated around then.

The unnatural proportions of the bodies, which are already evident in the print, take on odd forms in the painting. This is seen, among other things, in the implausibly small feet and short legs of Maurits, Philips Willem and Frederik Hendrik, the proportionally over-large heads, and the contorted way in which Ernst Casimir is depicted on his horse on the far left. Combined with the expressionless portraits and the rigid poses of the horses, it is difficult to square this painting with Van de Venne’s autograph monumental cavalcades (cf. SK-A-958, among others) so this painting must be allocated to a follower of his.

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

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. 307.

Literature

Franken 1878, pp. 42-43, no. 9 (as Van de Venne); Knuttel 1917, p. 60, no. 7, copy 3 (as Anonymous); Stevens in Amsterdam 2000a, pp. 295-96, no. 146 (as studio of Van de Venne)

Collection catalogues

1801, p. 52, no. 202 (as Van de Venne); 1809, pp. 76-77, no. 325 (as Van de Venne); 1843, p. 65, no. 332 (as Van de Venne; ‘a fold across the canvas and a filled tear’); 1858, p. 151, no. 337 (as Van de Venne); 1880, p. 319, no. 373 (as Van de Venne); 1887, p. 177, no. 1520 (as Van de Venne); 1903, p. 278, no. 2489 (as Van de Venne); 1934, p. 295, no. 2489 (as Van de Venne); 1976, p. 567, no. A 445 (as studio of Van de Venne); 2007, no. 307

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'follower of Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Prince Maurits Accompanied by his Two Brothers, Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, and Some Counts of Nassau on Horseback, c. 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6812

(accessed 20 September 2024 23:27:09).

Figures

afb. Willem Jacobsz Delff after Adriaen van de Venne, *Cavalcade of Eleven Princes of the House of Nassau-Orange*, 1621. Engraving, 436 x 592 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-OB-76.729.