The Departure of a Dignitary from Middelburg

Entry

This painting shows a view of Middelburg seen from the towpath beside the canal leading to the port. In addition to several buildings, such as the long Jan van de Koorkerk and the lower, broad tower on the town hall, it is possible to identify some of the ships. The large one in the middle flying the flag of Zeeland from its foremast and a flag with the arms of Middelburg on the mainmast is probably De Zeehondt, a man-of-war belonging to the Zeeland Admiralty.³ It is on the point of leaving, for the anchor is being weighed, the sails are being unfurled, and the horses are beginning to tow it out of the port. The other vessels are moving in the opposite direction, towards the port. The yacht on the far left belongs to Prince Maurits, for it has his coat of arms on the flag on the bowsprit and the flag with oranges at the stern.⁴ The small private yacht in the foreground has a flag with the arms of Antwerp and the Spanish flag on the bowsprit. Franken wrongly identified the arms on the flag at the stern as those of the Van Tuyl van Serooskerke family.⁵ At present it remains an unidentified yacht from Antwerp. Sailing off beyond De Zeehondt is an English merchantman that was usually identified as the Red Lion, one of the English ships that brought Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart to Vlissingen in 1613.⁶ Kluiver has pointed out that the Red Lion was not only larger than the ship in the painting, but did not sail into Middelburg on that occasion,⁷ so this ship, too, remains unidentified.

In the leading group of riders on the right bank Franken recognized Prince Maurits and his brother-in-law, Emanuel of Portugal, but these figures display too little similarity to known portraits of them.⁸ Kluiver has made some identifications that are better substantiated.⁹ He recognized the nobleman wearing a gold chain at the head of the group as Jacques de Malderée, Maurits’s representative at the States-General in Zeeland, and also his confidant.¹⁰ In addition, Van de Venne depicted himself as a horseman in the escort in the foreground, where he can be seen second from right.¹¹

There has never been any doubt that this painting is a historical record of a visit by an important person, but the identity of that dignitary remains a mystery. Franken thought that it depicted the arrival of Elizabeth Stuart in Middelburg in 1613, when she was travelling to Heidelberg from London after her marriage to Frederick V.¹² Following Franken, the subject was usually regarded as the arrival or departure of the newly-weds.¹³ Kluiver countered this assumption by pointing out that on the one hand Frederick and Elizabeth are nowhere to be seen, and on the other by demonstrating that archival documents show that they never set sail from the port of Middelburg.¹⁴ His persuasive argument that the painting depicts the departure of Robert Sidney, the governor of Vlissingen, from Middelburg in 1616¹⁵ was overturned by the discovery of the date 1615 during conservation by Willem de Ridder in 1999.¹⁶ That discovery also put an end to the discussion about when the painting was made. Franken thought that it was dated 1625.¹⁷ That date was generally accepted until Royalton-Kisch concluded that it should be dated c. 1616 on stylistic evidence.¹⁸ After the rejection of Kluiver’s hypothesis, the visit of Frederick and Elizabeth was once again, and wrongly, put forward as the likeliest subject,¹⁹ but the historical event has still not been identified. That it is a departure and not an arrival is clear from the fact that De Zeehondt is leaving port, and that gifts are being handed out to those remaining behind.²⁰ The theory that the painting was commissioned by Jacques de Malderée still stands.²¹

This painting has a more balanced look than Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447), partly because there are no allegorical elements or inscriptions, and far fewer portraits. The composition may have been inspired by Hans Bol’s gouache with a Panoramic View of Middelburg of 1598, which is a very similar but mirror-image composition.²² What this painting has in common with Fishing for Souls is the frieze-like shape of the support, the high horizon and the ships depicted without overlaps. The page on the right bank with his hand on his hip is a literal repetition of the boy on the right bank in Fishing for Souls, and shows that Van de Venne reused certain figures. The same applies to the group of horsemen in the foreground, which reappears in a slightly different form in the Landscape with Figures and a Village Kermis (SK-A-1767). The unrealistic relationships between the figures have not yet been improved. The man tending to the towing horses and the boy on the bank of the canal are too large relative to the four riders in the water. The towing horses are themselves too large compared to the elegant ones being ridden by the four horsemen. In addition, the rope towing De Zeehondt has clumsily been allowed to pass right through the group of riders. These points aside, though, the combination of a city view with a marine, portraits and genre scenes is remarkably successful. By including the towing horses Van de Venne could place peasants in the foreground, and he did so in a way that makes a wonderful contrast with the dignitaries and their elegant horses. Their presence in the foreground is repeated in The Valkenburg Horse Fair (SK-A-676).

Yvette Bruijnen, 2007

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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. 291.