Portrait Medallion of Prince William III of Orange (1650-1702)

Entry

This portrait medallion of the youthful Prince William III of Orange is attributed to Joachim Henne (active c. 1662-1707) on stylistic grounds.³ He was an ivory-carver, probably from northern Germany, whose known works include a number of very closely related portrait medallions executed around 1663 in Hamburg.⁴ Both the variety of gestures made by Henne’s models and their settings of ornate interiors with balustrades and columns point to the influence of contemporary Dutch portrait painting. The Hamburg portraits also suggest a knowledge of Quellinus’s marble busts of Amsterdam burgomasters.⁵ It therefore seems very likely that Henne visited the Netherlands shortly before 1663. Prince William was approximately twelve-years old at this time, which indeed corresponds to the age he is portrayed here. If indeed Henne is the maker, he may have carved the relief while still in the Netherlands but possibly earlier in Hamburg. For this ivory portrait, he consulted Pieter Phillippe’s engraving of Adriaen Ragineau’s painted portrait of the prince (RP-P-OB-102.052),⁶ which also shows William holding a military baton, leaning on a plumed helmet, with the chain of the Order of the Garter, the highest English knightly order, worn about the neck. Henne also turned the upper torso slightly and modified the background.

By emphasizing the prince’s military status with the prominent commander’s baton, helmet and cuirass, this portrait ivory refers directly to Dieussart’s series of marble statues of the Orange stadholders in Huis ten Bosch Palace.⁷ The portrait implicitly underscores William’s rightful claim to the position of stadholder, a role denied to him until 1672.

In the late eighteenth century, the relief formed part of the Braunschweig ducal collection, where it was described in the inventory as: ‘Portrait of a Prince of Nassau in half-figure. He supports himself with the left arm on a helmet and holds the military baton with both hands. In a black, wooden frame decorated with ivory and boxwood’.⁸ The ivory perhaps entered the Braunschweig collection via Duchess Sophie Amalie (1670-1710), spouse of Duke August Wilhelm von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel: she was the daughter of Christian Albrecht, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp (1641-1695), for whom Joachim Henne probably worked as a court artist for a period of time.⁹ For reasons and circumstances unknown, the relief left the expansive Braunschweig collection, eventually entering the possession of the Dutch collector Daniel Franken, who is likely to have encased the relief in the current, nineteenth-century frame.

Frits Scholten, 2025
An earlier version of this entry was published in F. Scholten, Gebeeldhouwde portretten/Portrait Sculptures, coll. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1995, no. 21