Bust of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619)

Entry

Grand Pensionary Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (shown here) and his political ally, the highly esteemed jurist Hugo Grotius (see NG-761), were proponents of a more tolerant Protestantism who sought to turn the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621) with the Spanish into an enduring peace. Their moderate stance on religion and republican, anti-Orangist political sentiment brought them into conflict with the Orangist faction. Led by their military commander, Stadholder Prince Maurits, the latter group was more aggressive in its opposition to Spain and favoured a stricter adherence to the tenets of the Calvinist faith. On 29 August 1618, the stadholder’s troops arrested both Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius on suspicion of high treason. In a mock trial held on 12 May 1619, Oldenbarnevelt was sentenced to death and beheaded one day later. Grotius received a lifelong prison sentence but managed to escape from Loevestein Castle – then the official state prison – on 22 March 1621, hiding inside a book chest. As a consequence of their shared history, the two men are more commonly depicted as a pair. Both present terracotta busts have an unknown provenance. Although Leeuwenberg catalogued them as pendants,² there are in fact strong indications they have a different origin: they were modeled by two distinct hands and are finished in dissimilar ways. Whereas the surface of the Hugo de Groot bust was left bare, the one representing Oldenbarnevelt, which is modeled with far greater skill, is coated with a finishing layer.

That said, the present terracotta busts are roughly the same size and can both be traced back to engravings by Willem Jacobsz van Delff (RP-P-OB-50.076 and RP-P-OB-77.368) made after paintings by his father-in-law, Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt (SK-A-257 and SK-A-581). The frontal, armless busts generally follow a scheme developed by Hendrick de Keyser I in the early years of the seventeenth century (cf. BK-NM-4191) and thereafter continued by his sons through the 1630s (cf. BK-NM-2865). Portrait busts produced in the De Keyser workshop are characterized by elements such as grotesque mascarons and auricular ornament at the lower termination.³ Given the rather stiff and slavish manner in which the present portraits adhere to Willem Jacobsz van Delff’s print models – including the busts’ termination – one may reasonably conclude that both were probably executed at a later date in a historicizing style, with no direct relation to the era of the two sitters or any connection to the De Keyser workshop. Conceivable moments are the two so-called ‘Stadholderless Periods’ (1650-1672 and 1702-1747), but even more so the Patriottentijd (Time of the Patriots, 1780-1795): periods when the veneration of historically renowned republican, anti-Orangist figures experienced a revival.⁴ Around 1779, for example, the Amsterdam burgomaster Egbert de Vrij Temminck – sympathetic to the Patriot’s cause – commissioned the English porcelain factory Wedgwood to make a series of almost life-size busts of seminal Dutch historical figures, including Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius (NG-2011-96) executed in black basalt ware.⁵ Later, in the 1780s, the pair were entered in a pantheon of States heroes, a series of small busts introduced on the art market, cast in Loosdrecht porcelain (cf. BK-NM-5844 and -5846) and mounted on neoclassical pedestals in the form of fluted columns.⁶ The republican climate of the late eighteenth century emerges as the best conceivable context for the present busts. Although their modelling is slightly softer, especially that of Oldenbarnevelt's bust, they share a variety of details in the attire, a similar termination, and the rather staid facial expressions with both the black basalt ware and porcelain portraits, which are all clearly based on seventeen-century print models.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025