Portrait of Ursula (1594-1657), Countess of Solms-Braunfels

Entry

A daughter of Johann Albrecht I von Solms-Braunfels and his first wife Agnes von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Ursula was the eldest sister of Amalia van Solms, the wife of Frederik Hendrik. In 1620, she married Christoph, Burgrave and Lord of Dohna-Schlobitten (1583-1637). Christoph served in the council of Frederick V, and when, in the year of their wedding, the ‘Winter King’ was forced off the Bohemian throne, the couple went into exile. From 1626 they lived in Emden and Delft. In October 1630, Ursula’s brother-in-law Frederik Hendrik appointed her husband stadholder of the Principality of Orange, a position she took over upon Christoph’s death in 1637.

Based on the truncated millstone ruff, Groeneweg has quite plausibly suggested that this portrait was executed shortly before Ursula moved with her husband and children to Orange in 1631.² Other elements of Ursula’s very rich dress, such as the slashed puffed sleeves tied with bows at the elbows, also support this dating.

The traditional attribution of the present painting to Moreelse was first rejected by Hofstede de Groot in 1899.³ In 1908, Bredius and Moes reported B.W.F. van Riemsdijk’s discovery that the Rijksmuseum’s three-quarter length Portrait of Ursula van Solms-Braunfels is a version of a full-length painting at Catton Hall in Burton on Trent.⁴ Van Riemsdijk had informed Bredius and Moes of another painting at Catton Hall, a 1625 Portrait of Friedrich Heinrich signed by David Baudringien (c. 1581-1650). Van Riemsdijk believed that the Catton Hall Portrait of Ursula, might also be by this little-known artist.⁵ Unfortunately, the present author has not seen either of the Catton Hall pictures, nor any photographs of the Portrait of Ursula. Judging from the Rijksmuseum’s version and a black-and-white photograph of the Portrait of Friedrich Heinrich, however, Van Riemsdijk’s tentative attribution is an appealing one, as the style of both works seems to fall around midway between Moreelse’s soft treatment of flesh and Honthorst’s hard treatment. The fact that Baudringien painted a portrait of the Winter King’s son, Friedrich Heinrich, places him in the right milieu. On the other hand, Baudringien’s precise whereabouts during the period in which the portraits showing Ursula were executed are not known, and there is a distinct possibility that he was not even in the United Provinces at the time. Mention of a portrait of the Naples merchant Isaack van der Voort by Baudringien in an estate inventory indicates that he was in the Italian city sometime before that sitter’s death in 1629.⁶ For the decade between the 1625 Portrait of Friedrich Heinrich, which would have been painted in the United Provinces, and 1635, when Baudringien is documented in Amsterdam, his whereabouts can only be guessed at. Complicating matters further is the extremely small size of Baudringien’s known oeuvre; besides the Portrait of Friedrich Heinrich the only extant paintings by him are a pair of pendant miniature portraits.⁷

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
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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. 429.