RKD STUDIES

Sometime after the great fire of 1666, Jan Griffier senior came to London from Amsterdam, where he had trained as a painter.¹ In England he successfully made his living in various ways: selling his Rhineland landscapes painted in the manner of Saftleven; painting views of country houses; making topographical landscapes, sometimes with a fantastical element [19]; painting birds and animals; dealing in art; making copies of paintings; restoring art. In 1694 Griffier was paid £1.12s by the Middle Temple for cleaning a portrait, King Charles II, and for cleaning, mending and varnishing a large early panel, The Judgement of Solomon.² In the 1680s he tells us that he was earning £5 or £6 a week, ample for his wife and six children.³ The Dutch painter and writer Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677–1747) tells us that Jan painted pictures for the Duke of Beaufort,⁴ and views of Badminton House are still in that collection. In the 1680s he was employed by a John Archer ‘to paint and copy for him sevall peices and pictures at the houses of severall persons of quality in and about the Cittyes of London and Westminster …’.⁵ One of these persons of quality was the Duchess of Portland, for whom Griffier made a copy of Moses Crossing the Red Sea at her house on Pall Mall; another was the Earl of Peterborough, at whose house on Millbank Griffier made a copy of a view of Edinburgh. Apart from being commissioned to make copies of old master paintings, however, Griffier would appear to have made a substantial living from his talent for imitating the styles of 17th-century painters. Houbraken writes as follows: ‘…it should also be observed that he did not always hold to one way of painting, but that he sometimes let his brush glide after the wind of profit, now in the manner of Rembrandt and then in the manner of Poelenburch, Ruisdael and others, so that his works have often been sold as real pieces by these masters’.⁶ Weyerman, who visited Griffier’s house on Millbank in London in the first decade of the 18th century and saw some of these ‘imitations’, added Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–1695) and David Teniers (1610–1690) to the list. He too observed that art lovers would buy these paintings as if they were by the original masters.⁷ The engraver and antiquarian George Vertue (1684–1756) commented wryly that Jan Griffier was ‘a great mimick of other masters both Italian and Flemish, in which he succeeded & deceived very well’.⁸

19
Jan Griffier (I)
View of Hampton Court Palace, c. 1710
London (England), Tate Britain, inv./cat.nr. T00408

Both Jan’s sons became painters and worked in the manner and traditions established by their father. Jan Griffier the Younger was known in England as John Griffier and was a successful painter of landscapes and townscapes. Ellis Waterhouse (1905–1985) describes Jan the Younger and his brother Robert as, ‘the first decent topographical artists [in Britain]’.⁹ Horace Walpole (1717– 1797) commented that John Griffier was ‘a good copyist of Claude Lorrain …’, confirming that he carried on the paternal tradition of imitating 17th-century artists.¹⁰ Like his father, John maintained a varied practice, including the restoration of paintings. His name occurs as a restorer in the accounts of a number of English and Scottish aristocrats from the 1730s until his death in 1750.¹¹ In his will of 1740 Robert Griffier describes himself as ‘Painter’¹² and there is a considerable output of work in the manner of Jan the Elder’s continental landscapes. He also inherited the talent for imitation; Jan van Gool, Dutch painter and writer (1685–1763), commented in his colourful way that Robert had, besides talents as a restorer, ‘an uncommon ability to imitate the painting style of Wouwerman, Van de Velde and other masters, so naturally that an expert’s eye had to be alert in order not to be deceived’.¹³ Robert became a citizen of Amsterdam in 1716 but returned to London in 1727.¹⁴ After his father’s death, Robert organised sales of Jan senior’s work in London together with consignments of Dutch and Flemish pictures that he had brought over from the continent.¹⁵