Portrait of Maurits (1567-1625), Prince of Orange

Entry

Prince Maurits was the second son of William the Silent. His mother was Anna of Saxony (1544-77), William the Silent’s second wife. After his father’s assassination in Delft in 1584, Maurits became chairman of the Council of State. The following year, 1585, he was appointed Stadholder of Holland and Zeeland and head of the army. He was granted the title Prince of Orange in 1618, after the death of his half-brother, Philips Willem. Maurits never married and died on 23 April 1625.

Van Mierevelt’s earliest portrait of Prince Maurits is a three-quarter length depiction commissioned by the Delft city fathers in 1607.³ In the same year, Van Mierevelt became court painter to Maurits, and was granted the exclusive right to reproduce the prince’s image in print for a period of six years.⁴ Although the Delft artist and his studio would produce numerous portraits of Maurits, the prince probably posed only the one time in 1607.⁵ Based on the apparent age of the sitter, Ekkart regarded the portrait of Maurits in the collection of the Duke of Grafton⁶ as Van Mierevelt’s first full-length depiction of the prince.⁷ Moore, however, had considered this portrait to be an autograph repetition, with differences, of the Rijksmuseum painting,⁸ and, in the most recent literature, the latter has been called the first full-length portrait of Maurits.⁹ In both pictures, the sitter has been placed diagonally in the composition in more or less the same pose as the 1607 portrait.

The composition of these portraits of Prince Maurits as a military commander is ultimately derived from Titian’s portraits of Charles V and Philip II, and was first exploited in the Netherlands by Antonio Moro.¹⁰ In the Rijksmuseum painting, the position of the table differs from that in the Duke of Grafton’s picture, and curtains cover the entire background, not just the upper right corner. As the latter motif was most probably associated with the Roman imperial baldachin,¹¹ it is probably not coincidental that the curtains form a canopy over Maurits in the Rijksmuseum picture. The Duke of Grafton’s picture also differs from the present work in that a column is shown on the left instead of a shield. This so-called ‘Roman’ shield or targe was designed by Maurits himself and executed by his official shield-maker Jacob Dirckxz de Swart.¹²

In all three portraits of Maurits under discussion here, the prince wears the ceremonial gilt suit of armour decorated with laurel leaves that was presented to him after the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) by the States-General. The prince also wears an orange sash, and in the 1607 painting and the one in the Rijksmuseum a medal of the Order of the Garter. Maurits was awarded this medal by James I in 1613, and it must have been added to his 1607 portrait around that time. The fact that the medal is not present in the Duke of Grafton’s picture supports Ekkart’s argument that that painting was executed before the Rijksmuseum one and is, indeed, the earliest known full-length representation of Prince Maurits. Because of the presence of the medal, the Rijksmuseum painting must date from 1613 or thereafter. The latest possible date suggested by Ekkart, 1620, is acceptable as a terminus ante quem. A dating between 1613 and 1620 is also supported by the dendrochronology.¹³

The dating of this portrait to 1613 or later argues against the traditional notion that it was commissioned by the States-General.¹⁴ Van Mierevelt did donate a portrait of Prince Maurits to the States-General for which he was paid 300 guilders, but that was in 1608.¹⁵ A portrait of Maurits, moreover, was transferred from the States-General to the Senate in the 19th century where it still hangs.¹⁶ The notion, first advanced by Moes and Van Biema, that the present painting entered the Nationale Konst-Gallery in The Hague from the Admiralty of the Maas in 1800 is also incorrect, as Van Thiel has shown.¹⁷ It is unlikely that the painting came from Paleis Het Loo, however, as has been suggested by Van Thiel, for no such portrait is listed in the 1757 estate inventory.¹⁸

Jonathan Bikker, 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. 184.