Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 154.5 cm × width 191 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
Frederick V (1596-1632), Elector of the Palatinate, King of Bohemia, and his Wife Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662) on Horseback
1626 - 1628
Inscriptions
- signature and date, bottom centre (A and D ligated): ADri: van Venne. 1626[8]
Technical notes
The support is a plain-weave canvas and has been lined. Cusping is present at the bottom, left and top. The ground layer is not visible. There are several pentimenti. Infrared reflectography revealed no underdrawing, but did show several changes during the painting process, as in the collars of Elizabeth and Frederick and the hats of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia. Despite the large format, the painting is meticulously executed with visible brushstrokes only in the white highlights. Examination with the stereomicroscope established that the ‘8’ in the date was painted on top of the ‘6’.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 5 August 2002
- infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 6 August 2002
Condition
Fair. The varnish has discoloured and is irregular.
Conservation
- W.A. Hopman, 1895: canvas lined with wax and revarnished
- H. Kat, 1996: dirt, grime and a wax layer removed; retouched and revarnished
Provenance
...; presented to the museum by the Municipality of Heusden, 1879
Object number: SK-A-958
Credit line: Gift of the Heusden Council
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)
According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.
Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447) and two summer and winter pendants.1 On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.2 He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.
Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp, 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354
Entry
This monumental cavalcade with Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart as the main protagonists and Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms in the middleground, was originally dated 1626, but that was later altered to 1628. There is a virtually identical composition in gouache in Van de Venne’s album, ’tLants Sterckte (The land’s fortress and strength), which also dates from 1626 (fig. a),3 and was probably commissioned by Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart as a sort of album amicorum for Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms. The two cavalcades, which are totally different in size, medium and colouring, have a connection with the town of Heusden. The album opens with a view of Heusden in allusion to the military and strategic role it played in the war against the Spanish,4 while the grisaille in the Rijksmuseum comes from Heusden Town Hall. The connection between the two was reinforced by examination with infrared reflectography, which revealed that changes in the painting are closely comparable to the pentimenti in the gouache.5 The main changes are in the costumes, among them Elizabeth’s, who initially had a flat, fan-shaped collar. It can be assumed that the changes were made to both the grisaille and the gouache in 1628, probably by Van de Venne himself, and that the date on the grisaille was then adjusted.
In addition to the similarities there are differences between the painting and the gouache. The former has been given the air of a royal hunting party through the addition of a page with the shot game in the right foreground. In the painting a male figure was also added to the right of Amalia van Solms, and is possibly meant to be Christian of Braunschweig, who died in 1626.6 His presence can be explained by his loyalty to Frederick and Elizabeth during their exile.7 They are also known to have gone out hunting with him.8 The final difference concerns the arrangement of the portraits of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia, who are in the customary positions in the grisaille with the man on the heraldic left. In the gouache they are reversed, possibly in reference to their betrothal in 1625, for the album also alludes to political events of that year.
The portraits were not done from life but are based on earlier models. Those of Elizabeth and Frederick V were probably taken from the engraved portraits by Willem Jacobsz Delff after Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt.9
The grisaille reflects the political situation of the royal couple in exile, although without referring to a specific event or occasion. Riding behind Frederick V and Elizabeth are those who supported them in their political conflict with the Catholics. The tower of the St Jacobskerk in the left background places the scene on the outskirts of The Hague, where the couple continued their struggle. Elizabeth’s gown reflects this with its stylized motif of a pollarded tree-trunk with young shoots (leaf, flower and fruit), which may symbolize moments of hope during their exile. This iconography, specifically oriented towards Frederick and Elizabeth, suggests that they commissioned the painting. The unusual form of a monumental cavalcade in the northern Netherlands10 could then be explained by the contribution of the two foreign patrons, who very probably ordered the album from Van de Venne as well. The monochrome cavalcade is also exceptional within Van de Venne’s oeuvre. Only one other equestrian portrait of Frederik Hendrik is comparable in technique and size.11 The cavalcade may have hung with another grisaille with an episode from the life of Boudewijn van Heusden in the town hall in Heusden.12
Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 302.
Literature
Dumas in Leeuwarden etc. 1979, p. 119, no. 276; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 166-67; Bol 1989, p. 72
Collection catalogues
1887, p. 177, no. 1524 (as dated 1627); 1903, p. 278, no. 2499; 1934, p. 296, no. 2499; 1976, p. 566, no. A 958 (as dated 1628); 1992, p. 89, no. A 958 (as dated 1626); 2007, no. 302
Citation
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Frederick V (1596-1632), Elector of the Palatinate, King of Bohemia, and his Wife Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662) on Horseback, 1626 - 1628', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6393
(accessed 15 November 2024 05:29:49).