Object data
oil on panel
support: height 74.6 cm × width 58.8 cm
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
Allegory of the Stadholdership of Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange
1642
Inscriptions
- signature and date, bottom left (A and D ligated): AD [.] Ven[.]e 1642
- inscription, bottom left: VICTORIA
- inscription, bottom right: TRIVMPHALIS FQNI
Technical notes
The oak support consists of three planks with a vertical grain bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1624. The panel could have been ready for use by 1635, but a date in or after 1641 is more likely. The ground layer is off-white. Infrared reflectography did not reveal an underdrawing. There is a pentimento in the leg of the figure on the right. The paint in brownish monochrome tints was applied rapidly and economically.
Scientific examination and reports
- infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 29 May 2001
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 25 February 2002
- technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 29 July 2002
Condition
Fair. There are some discoloured areas of retouching, and the varnish is discoloured and matte.
Provenance
? Commissioned by or for Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms, The Hague;1 ? their daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Stuart, The Hague and from 1661 London;2 ? her son, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, London, 1662;3 purchased by William, 1st Earl of Craven, Combe Abbey, 1682;4 by descent to Cornelia, Countess of Craven, Combe Abbey, Warwickshire; her sale, London (Christie, Manson & Woods), 13 April 1923, no. 146 (‘Victory: a Sibyl Offering a Laurel Wreath to a Warrior, grisaille, 29 x 23 inches [73.7 x 58.4 cm]’), £ 23 2s, to Bollings;...; sale, London (Christie, Manson & Woods), 22 February 1935, no. 55 (signed and dated 1642, An Allegory of Victory), £ 12 12s, to Hicks;5...; dealer J. Leger & Son, London, 1935;6...; dealer Robinson, Fischer & Singer, London;7...; purchased by the dealer P. de Boer, Amsterdam, before 8 June 1939;8 forced sale to W.A. Hofer, Berlin, for Hermann Göring, 19 September 1940;9 exchanged with the dealer A. Miedl, previously J. Goudstikker, Amsterdam, 9 February 1944;10 depot J. Schneller, Bad Tolz;11 war recuperation, SNK, 15 December 1946; 12 on loan to the museum from the Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, through the RBK, since 1948
Object number: SK-C-1343
Credit line: On loan from the Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof
Copyright: Public domain
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.13 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 1625.14 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
In addition to the countless grisailles with ordinary people as the protagonists, Van de Venne made a few allegorical ones in his Hague period after 1625 that glorify a royal personage. In this one in shades of brown, the central figure is Prince Frederik Hendrik in his role as subduer of cities. In the left foreground Victoria is offering him a palm branch and a crown of laurel leaves. Very faint fragments of the signature and the date 1642 can be made out at bottom left, and this date is supported by the dendrochronological evidence. Around 1643 Van de Venne painted a complex grisaille with an Allegory of Christian IV as Mediator for Peace containing comparable elements like allegorical female figures with banderoles, and putti flying in the sky.15 By 1642, Frederik Hendrik had won sufficient victories to warrant an allegorical glorification of this kind.16 The portrait of Willem II, Frederik Hendrik’s eldest son and successor, who is between Victoria and Frederik Hendrik, also confirms the date of 1642, for he was 15 years old that year, and the portrait is of a youth of that age.
Hoogsteder has argued persuasively that the grisaille was once owned by Elizabeth Stuart, given its provenance from the collection of the earls of Craven.17 William, 1st Earl of Craven, was the executor of the will of Elizabeth’s son Rupert, who had inherited her collection of paintings. The earl probably acquired a sizable part of the collection in this way. Given the iconography of the scene, in which Frederik Hendrik is the central figure, it is conceivable that Elizabeth had received the grisaille from Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms. It is possible, then, that they commissioned it from Van de Venne, similar to the commission for the Allegory of Christian IV as Mediator for Peace, which Christian probably ordered from the artist.18
In the present grisaille Frederik Hendrik has dismounted, as has his son, in order to be laurelled. The minuscule but recognizable tower of the St Jacobskerk in the background shows that they had left The Hague. The central position of the horse is a little unexpected but not unusual in scenes of princes as victorious commanders. In an earlier, large grisaille, Van de Venne had also portrayed Frederik Hendrik as a horseman, that time on a rearing mount.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. 305.
Literature
Hoogsteder 1986, I, pp. 215-16; Bol 1989, p. 83
Collection catalogues
1960, p. 323, no. 2501; 1976, p. 567, no. C 1343; 2007, no. 305
Citation
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Allegory of the Stadholdership of Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange, 1642', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.11855
(accessed 21 September 2024 11:23:25).