Group Portrait of the Four Brothers of Willem I, Prince of Orange: Jan (1535-1606), Hendrik (1550-74), Adolf (1540-68) and Lodewijk (1538-74), Counts of Nassau

Entry

This monumental group portrait shows the four brothers of Willem I of Orange, better known as William the Silent. From left to right they are Lodewijk (1538-74), Jan the Elder (1536-1606), Adolf (1540-68) and Hendrik (1550-74). All four brothers played an important part in the Dutch Revolt, and three of them fell in battle. Only Jan the Elder died a natural death, and he had numerous descendants, among them the Nassaus of Friesland.

He was the second son of Willem the Rich and Juliana, Countess of Stolberg-Wernigerode. He gave William the Silent considerable financial and political support during the Dutch Revolt. In 1578 he became Stadholder of Gelderland, where he set himself the task of introducing Calvinism. He also devoted his efforts to the realization of the Union of Utrecht. Family and political conflicts forced him to relinquish the stadholdership in 1580, whereupon he returned to Dillenburg, remaining loyal to William. He married three times and had 24 children, among them Willem Lodewijk, the later Stadholder of Friesland.⁵ For biographical information about the other three brothers see the entries on SK-A-522, SK-A-523 and SK-A-524.

Lunsingh Scheurleer used archival material to make a reconstruction of the painted hall decoration in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, to which he thought this group portrait belonged.⁶ The problem with that hypothetical provenance from the Mauritshuis is that it renders the traditional and plausible attribution to the workshop of Wybrand de Geest improbable, while the dimensions of the various paintings do not fit the proposed locations. A provenance from the Stadholder’s Court in Leeuwarden is more compelling, for this group portrait is described in an inventory of the court ballroom of c. 1800: ‘The overmantel depicts Jan of Nassau, Adolf of Nassau, Hendrik of Nassau, Lodewijk of Nassau, fallen near Mookerheide in the year 1574’.⁷ A schematic drawing with a note of the dimensions shows that the painting still had an arched top at the time, and measured some 212 x 141 cm.⁸ This means that the top was later cut off, which appears to be confirmed by the fact that it is only at the top that there is no visible cusping.⁹

As De Vries has argued, the group portrait once formed an ensemble with two others depicting other members of the House of Nassau (figs. a-b).¹⁰ These can also be attributed to De Geest’s workshop, and are now in the collection of the Fries Museum. This ensemble of three group portraits is probably described in an account of the ballroom of the Frisian Stadholder’s Court written in 1786 as ‘the portraits of the Princely Family, very precisely by leading masters’.¹¹ The ballroom was built in 1734 as an extension to the Court, so it can be assumed that the three group portraits were transferred from an older part of the Court in that year.¹² That the three paintings cannot be found in earlier inventories of the Court can be explained by assuming that they were let into the walls.

The three portrait groups thus formed an ancestral gallery which, given the military dress and attributes of the sitters, emphasized the military and political importance of the Nassau family in the Dutch Revolt. De Vries has pointed out that the selection of the sitters in the ensemble amounts to a markedly Frisian programme, and he argues persuasively that the ensemble was probably commissioned by Ernst Casimir, who was Stadholder of Friesland from 1620 to 1632.¹³ This would explain why Ernst Casimir is one of the few living individuals depicted in the ensemble, while his successor, Hendrik Casimir, is not. In the light of the political situation around 1630, when Ernst Casimir was trying to match himself against the increasingly powerful Frederik Hendrik, it would be logical to place the date of the commission around that year.

One possible prototype for the portrait of Lodewijk is the engraving in J. Orlers’s Geslacht-boom der Graven van Nassav (Family tree of the counts of Nassau), which was published in Leiden in 1616. There are several painted busts of Jan the Elder, such as the one in the Katzenelnbogen series, which could have served as the model (SK-A-538).

The attribution to De Geest was rarely called into question,¹⁴ but Wassenbergh’s classification of this as a workshop piece has invariably, and rightly, been followed in the later literature.¹⁵ The scale of the full ensemble suggests the participation of studio assistants. The smooth and rather harsh execution of the Rijksmuseum group, particularly in the faces, confirms this suspicion. A preliminary study on paper, possibly autograph, for part of the ensemble is in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin.¹⁶

The verses by Joost van den Vondel, ‘O spirit who, in the Frisian Court, gives life to ash and dust’, could allude to the ensemble.¹⁷ It is not unlikely that the ensemble acquired a certain celebrity, since as far as is known the decoration of a room with monumental group portraits was unique in the Netherlands. Versions of the Rijksmuseum group portrait were made for other residences of the Nassau family, such as the copy in Schloss Dessau.¹⁸ In addition, Jan van Teylingen, a painter in Hoorn, copied the four counts as busts for his series of portraits of members of the House of Nassau and of captains of the North Holland Regiment, for which he was awarded a contract by the Delegated Council in 1638.¹⁹

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. 86.