RKD STUDIES

The selection for the dataset for this contribution was made using three search criteria in RKDartists. The first criterion is the content of the 'qualification' field, in which disciplines, specialisms and professions are assigned. From this, painters, draughtsmen, printmakers, gold and silversmiths, sculptors, architects and tapestry weavers are filtered. Indeed, the database also contains art collectors and other individuals with a role in the art world; however, these are not part of this study. The second search entry, 'place of activity', is filled with geographical terms from a hierarchical thesaurus, which allows place names to be traced back to country names, according to current topography.

The third criterion, 'nationality/school', explicitly does not refer to state status. Citizenship did not yet exist in the Netherlands before 1795: naturalisation was a regional matter. Following the best practice standard of classification in schools of the Visual Documentation Collection of the RKD, a distinction has also been made in RKDartists between 'Northern Netherlandish' and 'Southern Netherlandish' for Netherlandish artists born up to and including 1775. I am aware that some historians have legitimate objections to the terms Northern and Southern Netherlands, arguing they reflect a state-nationalist view that regards Dutch and Belgian history as separate histories.¹ Similarly, recent art-historical research highlights the strong correlation in developments in the arts of the Northern and Southern Netherlands, which are seen as an inextricable whole.² Not surprisingly, however, the travel and migration behaviour of Northern and Southern Netherlandish artists, in which religion and socio-economic conditions played an important role, was remarkably different precisely because of the course of historical events.³ Without denying the cultural cohesion of the Northern and Southern Netherlands, the data of mobile artists from both regions are presented separately here to reveal the different patterns in their mobility. In RKDartists, 'Northern Netherlandish' was assigned to artists who were born in what is now the Netherlands, including those who would later settle abroad. The latter were given a 'dual nationality' in the database. This also applied to artists who were born outside the Netherlands and later settled there permanently. The term 'Southern Netherlandish' was assigned to artists who were born in what is now Belgium and/or worked there long-term, extending to places now located in northern France but which were Southern Netherlandish at the time, such as Arras, Calais, Douai, Lille, Saint-Homer and Valenciennes. In this way, the historical territory of the Southern Netherlands is more closely approximated.

In both art-historical literature and contemporary sources, second-generation immigrants from the Low Countries abroad are also often still classified as Netherlandish. As a rule, this is not done in the database, as it would lead to inconsistent data. For example, in RKDartists, Cornelius de Neve III (1594-1678) [3] is exclusively British: he was born in London after his parents fled there from the Southern Netherlands, where they married on 21 August 1593 in the Dutch Church in London. Ties with other artists from his parents' country of origin continued to play a role in his career; his stepfather was John Decritz II (c. 1591/3-c. 1644), whose grandparents came from the Southern Netherlands. Older literature gives incorrect information about De Neve: for instance, he was supposedly born in Antwerp around 1612 and worked in London in the studio of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), for which, however, there is no evidence.⁴

Despite agreements on database entry, in some cases it still remains a matter of interpretation and consideration when assigning terms for 'nationality/school'. For instance, in RKDartists&, Anthony van Dyck is exclusively Southern Netherlandish and not also British, despite being identified as such by many an art historian. He spent several years - though not consecutively - in England, became a court painter there and produced an enormous amount of work, with the help of an army of assistants. Yet the time he spent in England was relatively short. In between, he also spent several years in Italy and visited France, always returning to the Southern Netherlands, which he undoubtedly considered his home.⁵

On the other hand, the totally unknown portrait painter F. van Hees was assigned two 'nationalities', both Northern Netherlandish and British. A few paintings by this artist are known, but his name has not yet surfaced in the archives. We know his Dutch-sounding name because of the clear signatures on portraits from the years between 1655 and 1660 [4], all of which are in British private collections. Van Hees probably travelled from castle to castle in England in search of portrait commissions. The style of his paintings suggests that he came from the Dutch Republic. His work is in keeping with that of Hague painters such as Adriaen Hanneman (c. 1604-1671) and Johannes Mijtens (c. 1614-1670), as can be seen, for example, in the Group Portrait of William Penn (1628-1693) and his wife Sarah Shallcross († 1698) with their Four Children from c. 1660 [5]. The name of F. van Hees was first spotted as a Dutch painter in Horst Gerson's well-known 1942 publication.⁶ The author had seen photographs of two pendant portraits by the artist that the owner wanted to have auctioned at Christie's in London in 1933; incidentally, these remained unsold and thus remained in the family collection.⁷

Of the artists in the dataset, 43 (5.13%) were identified as both Northern Netherlandish and Southern Netherlandish. These are artists who were either born in one area and active and established in the other, or artists whose origins are unknown from which part of the Netherlands they came. These artists figure in the statistics under both categories, which inevitably creates a slight bias in the data.

3
Cornelius de Neve (III)
Self portrait of Cornelis de Neve (1594-1678), 1645
Oxford (England), Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, inv./cat.nr. WA1898.24

4
Signature: F van Hees F / Ao 1656 on Fig. 5

5
F. van Hees
Group portrait of William Penn (1628-1693) and Sarah Shallcross († 1698) with their four children, half-lengths, with dogs and a monkey in a tree, in a landscape
Buckinghamshire (county), Trustees of the Howe Settled Estates