Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (25 page)

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Masters of All They Survey: Anglo–Dutch Passion for Gardens and Gardening

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n the course of the seventeenth century, English and Dutch townscapes and landscapes were transformed by an unprecedented surge of activity in house-building and garden design on the part of the newly prosperous business and merchant classes, eager to show themselves
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with the very latest in styles and fashions. And just as consumer goods and luxury items were traded with growing enthusiasm in both directions across the English Channel or Narrow Sea, so specialist services in architecture and horticulture were freely interchanged, threading styles in building and garden design to and fro, weaving reciprocal influence increasingly tightly into the fabric of both territories.
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In architecture, in the early decades of the century, the families of de Keyser and Stone serve as characteristic examples of the easy social and professional exchange between the two countries. In 1607 the Amsterdam master mason Hendrick de Keyser arrived in London to study Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange in preparation for designing and building a similar centre for commercial activity in Amsterdam. While there he met Nicholas Stone, a mason and sculptor, who returned with him to Amsterdam, where he completed his training (he had just finished his apprenticeship when he and de Keyser first met). Stone spent six years or so in Holland, and married de Keyser’s only daughter. He and his wife then returned to England, where he established himself as a leading sculptor and architect.

The de Keysers became a dynasty of master masons – three sons and a grandson of Hendrick’s subsequently held the position. As well as being responsible for a large number of important buildings, both private and public, in Amsterdam, Hendrick de Keyser designed the tomb of William the Silent at Delft, for which the young Sir Constantijn Huygens provided the Latin inscription in the 1620s. Hendrick’s son Thomas painted the portrait of Sir Constantijn and his clerk, associated with his marriage to Susanna van Baerle in 1627. This means that all three of the best-known surviving portraits of Huygens were painted by artists with experience of patrons and studios on both sides of the Narrow Sea – we might argue that Huygens chose them on purpose, as part of his agenda of taste-formation in common to the English and Dutch art-appreciating communities.
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The Stones and the de Keysers moved regularly and easily between England and the Dutch Republic, placing their considerable talents in art and design at the service of the cities of London and Amsterdam. Willem de Keyser, Hendrick’s eldest son, was in England in the 1620s, probably shortly after his father’s death, and married an Englishwoman. By 1640 he was back in Amsterdam, and became a member of the Stonemason’s Guild there.
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The de Keysers and the Stones maintained close family contacts, corresponded regularly, and acted as agents for each other in the shipment of building materials between the two countries. They also provided training for each other’s children: Nicholas Stone’s son Henry studied paintings for several years in Amsterdam under his uncle, Thomas de Keyser. In return, two of Hendrik de Keyser’s sons appear to have been apprenticed to Stone in London.

Willem’s younger brother Hendrick joined Nicholas Stone’s workshop around 1634, and a few years later was carrying out alterations on behalf of Stone at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. There he married a local girl in 1639, remaining in Nottingham until at least 1643. He was in Holland in 1646–47, and as far as we know, never returned to England. However, Willem was back in 1658, and lived and worked there with his family for the next twenty years. When Charles II returned to London, and embarked on rebuilding his palace at Greenwich in 1661, he was keen to emulate the Dutch neoclassical architecture that he had encountered during his years of exile. It was Willem de Keyser who drew elevations of a proposed new scheme for the new King. In January 1661 Charles discussed de Keyser’s ideas with John Evelyn, although the scheme was never built. Members of the de Keyser family were active in England and in Ireland until as late as the 1680s.

This kind of migration of artists and skilled craftsmen from one side of the Narrow Sea to the other was clearly market-led. Architects and masons went where the clients were. The ostentatious expenditure of the English nobility under Charles I contrasted with the well-documented ‘embarrassment’ at too obvious a show of wealth in the Dutch Republic. The fact that members of skilled dynasties like the de Keysers married local women during their visits to England meant that they raised bilingual families of children who could work easily in either country. So the interchange in masons and architects became amplified in each successive generation. Whether we should call the buildings and carvings the de Keysers were responsible for ‘Dutch’ or ‘Anglo–Dutch’ is perhaps a moot point: local styles and guild skills had become intertwined to the point at which it is probably unhelpful to try to separate them.

Huygens’s negotiations with Rubens for the acquisition of works of art for Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms during the 1630s meant frequent exchanges on behalf of the Stadholder with the artist, by letter and via trusted intermediaries. They most likely involved one or more visits in person to the studio on the first floor of the new wing of the Rubens House in Antwerp, though a late letter suggests that Huygens and Rubens had never actually met face to face. Huygens certainly knew the house from its magnificent exterior, since he was in Antwerp regularly, and he was aware of Rubens’s scrupulously antique-influenced plans for a neoclassical house befitting his status as Antwerp’s most successful painter. An enthusiast for architecture, Huygens was evidently almost as impressed by Rubens’s Antwerp house, and by the artist’s expertise in ancient and modern architectural theory, as he was by his talent as a painter.

In 1633 Frederik Hendrik presented two lots of land he had recently acquired, in a prime location in The Hague, to Constantijn Huygens.
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When Huygens set about building a substantial family home there under the direction of Jacob van Campen, next door to his uncle’s much-admired Mauritshuis, he wrote to Rubens requesting his opinion on the design:

Sir, I am building a house at The Hague, and it would give me great pleasure to hear your advice on my plans, even though they are almost completed – there remaining just two small galleries to be completed, which are intended to enclose a courtyard [bassecour] 70 feet in length, and to be attached to a main façade [front de logis] of approximately 90 feet. You would not be disappointed to learn that in my building I intend to revive in some part the architecture of antiquity, for which I nourish a passion.

This was to be no palace, Huygens hastened to add:

It will only be on a small scale, and to the extent that the climate and my coffers will allow. But the fact remains that, in the heat of these considerations, I hardly need tell you how eager I am to steer you in my direction here, since you excel in the knowledge of this illustrious field of study, as you do in everything else, and could give me many lessons in it. But the fates intend otherwise … If I manage to realise my plans successfully, I will in any case inform you further, on paper or in person.
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Huygens was true to his word. On 2 July 1639 (a year before the artist’s death), he sent Rubens a set of engravings of his completed house: ‘Here as I promised is the bit of brick that I have built at The Hague.’
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His pride in the gracious home he has created is palpable, as is his respect for Rubens as a connoisseur of antique and modern buildings. At the end of the letter, almost as an afterthought, Huygens added the real business of his communication – a commission from Frederik Hendrik for a painting to be placed above the hearth in his palace, the subject to be of Rubens’s choosing, but with three, ‘at most four’, figures, ‘the beauty of whom should be elaborated con amore, studio e diligenza’.
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So when, in the 1650s, on his frequent visits to Antwerp, Sir Constantijn Huygens attended musical soirées at the home of William and Margaret Cavendish, or spent the afternoon with Margaret in her chemistry laboratory, he was able to take a particularly keen pleasure in frequenting the very house about which he and Rubens had corresponded – the home created by a kindred architectural spirit in his heyday. And the Cavendishes and Sir Constantijn undoubtedly carried back with them, upon their return to England and the United Provinces, an enhanced and deepened understanding of Rubens’s carefully reconstructed architectural neoclassicism, to feed into future projects of their own.

Huygens took a connoisseur’s interest in architecture throughout his life. The country house he designed for himself at Hofwijk, completed in 1642, was his pride and joy, and he loved to invite close friends there to enjoy the beauty of the location, and to savour the elegance and congeniality of the building.
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He worked tirelessly advising Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms on their extensive and ambitious building works at the Dutch royal palaces – Frederik Hendrik had a reputation as a knowledgeable amateur of architecture himself, and involved himself closely in the design process.
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It was Huygens, too, who, in consultation with van Campen, completed the careful integrated programme of architecture and painting for the Oranjezaal of the Huis ten Bosch on the outskirts of The Hague (designed by Pieter Post), where an elaborate cycle of paintings and decoration commemorated and glorified the achievements of Frederik Hendrik for his widow Amalia van Solms, following Frederik Hendrik’s death in 1647 (the project was completed in 1652).
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The Cavendishes, once back in England after the Restoration, retired from public life and devoted themselves almost entirely to architectural projects for William’s hereditary seats at his main Nottinghamshire home, Welbeck Abbey, and at Bolsover.
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The story of the interchange of talent and expertise in architecture between England and the Dutch Republic has been told a number of times. That of the close relationship between horticulture and garden design in the two countries, less often. In the case of Dutch and English gardens it is also possible to see that the similarities in practice are overlaid on a subtly different set of assumptions about the meaning and function of a pleasure garden. For the élites in the two countries with time and money to indulge their passion for plants and parterres, gardens represent different kinds of attitudes towards the labour needed to create a garden, and the leisure required to enjoy it.

Early in February 1642, Sir Constantijn Huygens invited a select company of close family and friends to a small celebratory gathering at his country house, Hofwijk, at Voorburg, just outside The Hague. His career was at its peak. He was secretary and chief adviser on all types of cultural and artistic matters to the Dutch Stadholder, Frederik Hendrik, consulted and deferred to whenever a matter of taste or aesthetic judgement was required.

The occasion was the completion of the garden design project that had comforted and consoled him in his leisure hours since the sudden death of his beloved wife Susanna less than two months after the birth, on 13 March 1637, of their only daughter (also named Susanna). That was the very year in which Huygens completed the imposing neoclassical house to whose detailed design he had given so much personal attention, alongside his architect van Campen, and he and his family moved in next door to the Mauritshuis on Het Plein. The loss of his wife had spoiled his pleasure at the completion of this ambitious architectural project, which had been intended to crown his glittering career at court.

Constantijn’s beloved partner was gone, and for more than a year his poems – in Latin and Dutch – reveal him as mentally tormented by his loss, and virtually inconsolable. Instead of enjoying the family home he and Susanna had planned together, he had turned his mind to a country retreat – a place where he could recover, reflect upon his loss and begin to rebuild his personal life.
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The small gathering in early 1642 marked the end of this painful phase in his life, and the celebration was a muted and reflective one.

The party of visitors consisted of his older brother Maurits, his sisters Gertruyd and Constantia, their husbands, Philips Doublet (or Doubleth) and David de Wilhem, and an unnamed ‘friend from The Hague’. There was a tour of the modest, classically inspired country house (whose designer, Pieter Post, was to become the Stadholder’s official court architect in 1645, on Huygens’s recommendation), and a much more extensive exploration of the garden, with its tree-lined avenues and canal-side walks, freshly planted ornamental flowerbeds and geometrically laid-out areas of what would one day be shady groves of trees. Over a generous meal, Huygens extolled the virtues of his garden as a source of emotional solace and a refuge from the cares of office.

Huygens’s little garden launch-party was a small event in the studied programme of activities he had begun to orchestrate for Frederik Hendrik and his circle since 1625 – the year Frederik Henrik became Stadholder of the seven provinces, and the year of his marriage to Amalia van Solms. Huygens’s efforts were designed to set the tone for a Dutch courtly culture which would earn the respect and attention of the royal houses of Europe.