RKD STUDIES

During the Gerson Digital : Britain project, the data already present in RKDartists were supplemented and honed.¹ The starting point was research into the artists mentioned in Horst Gerson's Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Dispersal and Legacy of Dutch Painting of the 17th Century in Britain) from 1942, the publication that for the first time gave an overview of Northern Netherlandish painters and draughtsmen in Britain in the (long) 17th century.² The most frequently used sources for the early modern artists from the Low Countries in RKDartists until then were German-language lexicons, such as those by Von Wurzbach, Thieme/Becker and Saur.³ For the project, biographies of Northern and Southern Netherlandish artists in Britain were compared and supplemented with information from British lexicons, such as those of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), Ellis Waterhouse (1905-1985) and the most recent lemmata of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.⁴ For each piece of data, the earliest source was cited wherever possible. If relevant, points of difference or contradictory information were explained.

The aim was to generate a very comprehensive, high-quality dataset of Northern and Southern Netherlandish artists who visited Britain before 1800.⁵ To this end, relevant publications with biographical information were excerpted, allowing the addition of many artists not found in the general lexicons. One was Stefanie Kollmann's survey of artists from the Low Countries in London (2000), which includes 339 short biographies of artists active between about 1550 and 1750.⁶ These data were supplemented by those from Hope Walker's Netherlandish painters in Tudor London, 1560-1580 and information of the Dutch from Edward Town’s Biographical Dictionary of London Painters, 1547-1625, both from 2014.⁷ The data on Dutch gold and silversmiths active in London are largely based on the research of Antwerp archival researcher Godelieve van Hemeldonck (2005).⁸ The data on Netherlandish sculptors in Britain have been enriched with the information from Adam White's 1999 Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors c. 1560 - c. 1660,⁹ while those of tapestry weavers were supplemented by Wendy Hefford's 2002 publication Flemish Tapestry Weavers in England: 1550-1775.¹⁰

Naturally, the sources used were not limited to the above. Tracking literature, going through new publications with the aim of incorporating relevant data into RKDartists, is an ongoing process. After the completion of the project, the data will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace. As a result, it is also possible that the picture provided by the data will gradually shift, especially if hitherto underexposed areas of research such as tapestry art, sculpture and artists from the 18th century come into greater focus in the future. Needless to say, the data are (and will remain) incomplete and imperfect, and we have to make do with 'as good as possible' data.

Most of the new profiles created for the project concern unknown, minor artists. Many have been mentioned only in archives (or in publications of archival records), in which the Dutch names are confused. The names were often written differently by the various authors. In RKDartists, a preferred name was chosen and the other spellings were added as name variants. In some cases, this led to the merging of identities. Sometimes, on the contrary, identities were split, for instance in the case of eponymous artists who were related to each other. Research by Rica Jones shows that there were not two painters called Jan Griffier, as previously thought, but three: Jan Griffier I (c. 1652-1718), Jan Griffier II (1672-1750) and Jan Griffier III (1698-1770) of whom both father and grandson were born in the Republic. Also, there were apparently three painters named Robert Griffier (father, son and grandson), and not one as hitherto assumed.¹¹ Similar confusion also existed in the Verelst family of still-life and portrait painters,¹² and it has been suggested that not two but three painters by the name Egbert van Heemskerck were active in London, but so far no archival records have been found to support this theory.¹³

Research into the life years of the draughtsman and printmaker John Faber I (1670-1721) has revealed that he was not born in Amsterdam around 1650, as previously thought, but was baptised there on 1 July 1670, 20 years later.¹⁴ Sometime between 1695 and 1698, he emigrated to London. However, his son John Faber II (1694-1756), who was believed to have been born around 1684, was found to have been baptised at the Lutheran church in Amsterdam on 28 Oct 1694.¹⁵ As a small child, he went with his parents to London, where he grew into one of Britain's leading mezzotint artists.

In the case of artists who travelled back and forth between the Netherlands and Britain more frequently, the literature usually does not reveal when exactly they were in Britian and when in the Netherlands, as, for example, in the case of the Hague portrait painter Richard van Bleeck (1670-na 1748) [2], who worked in London for extended periods from about 1697 onwards. However, this could be reconstructed from the descriptions of Jan van Gool (1785-1763) and Jacob Weyerman (1677-1747), combined with what could be inferred from Van Bleeck's oeuvre and the Bredius Notes from The Hague Municipal Archives.¹⁶ It took years before the painter finally had his family come over to England, by his own admission because life in London was so expensive.¹⁷ It was not until the summer of 1718 that he settled there permanently, taking his family with him.¹⁸ The reason why Van Bleeck commuted so much between The Hague and London was presumably because he worked wherever he could get portrait commissions and thus wanted to spread his chances. When Van Gool met him in London in 1727, he told him that he would rather paint history pieces, but there was no demand for them in either England or the Republic.¹⁹ According to Walpole, his son Pieter van Bleeck (1697-1765) would not have come to London until 1723, but it is more likely that he moved with the family in 1718.²⁰

2
Pieter van Bleeck after Richard van Bleeck
Portrait of Richard van Bleeck (1669/70-in or after 1748), dated 1735
The Hague, RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History