Portrait of Sir John Burroughs (1587-1627)

Entry

In spite of the fact that the name of Sir John Burroughs is inscribed on the painting, the man in this portrait has never been satisfactorily identified until now. In the past, only the 1960 Rijksmuseum collection catalogue gave some information about him, stating that a man of this name was in Dutch service from 1605 to 1627.⁴ This information, however, is incorrect. It has been possible to identify the sitter unequivocally on the basis of the painting’s provenance, which is also reconstructed here for the first time. In his 1657 edition of Sir Francis Vere’s Commentaries, William Dillingham lists the name of ‘S. John Burroughs, Capt.’ together with those of 17 other officers ‘whose effigies do at once both guard and adorn Kirby-hall in Essex, where the truly religious and Honourable the Lady Vere doth still survive’.⁵ Lady Vere was the wife of Sir Horace Vere (1565-1635), one of England’s most famous soldiers and a brother of Sir Francis Vere.⁶ It seems safe to assume that the 18 full-length portraits at Kirby Hall were commissioned either by or for Sir Horace. After the death of his wife, they passed to his daughter Mary, who married Sir Roger Townshend of Raynham. The portraits remained with the Townshend family until they were sold at auction in 1904 by the 6th Marquess Townshend. The Portrait of Sir John Burroughs found its way into the museum’s collection seven years later. Two other portraits in the series, those of Sir Thomas Gates (fig. a) and Sir Robert Carey (fig. b) were sold at Sotheby’s in 1971.⁷ Both portraits carry inscriptions with the sitters’ names in exactly the same lettering and position as that on the Rijksmuseum’s portrait.

Given the portrait’s provenance, the sitter must be the Sir John Burroughs who accompanied Horace Vere to the Palatinate in 1620.⁸ Born in 1587, John Burroughs was a son of Richard Burroughs and Amy Dillington of Stow, near Lincoln.⁹ As sergeant-major, he was in charge of a company of 150 foot in Horace Vere’s regiment of 2,250 men who were dispatched to the Palatinate in 1620 in order to help Frederick V regain the Bohemian throne. On 22 July 1620, the English expeditionary forces arrived in Dordrecht, remaining in the United Provinces for two weeks before continuing on to Germany. After the other English troops had long returned home, Burroughs continued to resist the Spanish Siege of Frankenthal, of which town he was governor. He finally surrendered on 14 April 1623 after receiving orders from home. On 17 May 1623, Burroughs was back in London, where he was knighted by James I for his brave defence of Frankenthal.¹⁰ As a colonel of a foot regiment, Burroughs took part in the attack on Cadiz in 1625. Two years later, he was second-in-command of the 6,000 English soldiers who were dispatched to aid the French Huguenots at La Rochelle. Colonel Burroughs was shot and killed on the Isle of Rhé, near La Rochelle, on 20 September 1627. He was buried with military honours in Westminster Abbey on 23 October.

The attribution of John Burroughs’s portrait to Van Ravesteyn made in previous Rijksmuseum collection catalogues is justified. The soft modelling of the sitter’s face and fluffy appearance of his hair are characteristic features of Van Ravesteyn’s style. Burroughs likely sat for Van Ravesteyn in the summer of 1620, when the English expedition he was part of went through the United Provinces on its way to the Palatinate. Another possibility is that he was portrayed when he passed through the northern Netherlands on his way back to England in 1623. Given the type of ruff he is shown wearing, either date is feasible.

Jonathan Bikker, 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. 254.