RKD STUDIES

In April of 1628, the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656) [1] received an invitation. He had been in Utrecht and The Hague for eight years, labouring to make his painting style more appealing to courtly patrons, an endeavour in which he had evidently succeeded. The missive from the secretary of King Charles I’s (r. 1625-1649) Royal favorite, the Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), to British Ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton (1573-1632) [2] read: ‘I trust you will not forget to bring Mr. Honthorst; for the Duke intends to employ him, as well as his Majesty, who will give him cause not to complain of crossing the sea’.¹

Preserving both a sense of the roughness of crossing the North Sea as well as the benevolent umbrella of courtly patronage in the early modern period, this event rocketed Honthorst to the heights of success, making him one of the most in demand royal painters of the 17th century. Yet, the previous art-historical emphasis on Honthorst’s Italianate or Caravaggesque paintings has obscured our understanding of the major part of his career, and our knowledge of his transnational appeal has remained incomplete.² Honthorst, in fact, functioned as a kind of intermediary between the courts of Charles I in London and his sister Elizabeth (1596-1662), the deposed Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia, exiled in The Hague.³

In London, Honthorst and his paintings served Charles’s ambition to rival the courts of Europe. In the shadow of his near-obsession with collecting and display, paintings — and painters — were elevated to the most valuable form of political, social, and sometimes actual currency. His sister Elizabeth’s lavish lifestyle and hopes of restoration to the Palatinate relied on the support of her brother. This study asserts that in order to further secure her brother’s favor, Elizabeth utilised his interests in collecting to her advantage and commissioned visual iterations of her written entreaties to Charles, and, helped to facilitate Honthorst’s invitation to London.

I present here two case studies, which together demonstrate Honthorst’s pivotal role in the dynamics of Stuart patronage in this period, to critically examine the ways in which he positioned himself in relation to his patrons and his patrons to one another. The first is a pair of paintings completed at the moment when Honthorst was evolving his style away from the Caravaggesque in pursuit of courtly patronage. The second, the most famous commission that Honthorst completed in London for Charles, functioned as an emblem of Stuart court theater and the relationships between the king and his circle. This group of paintings contributed to Honthorst’s success between these two Stuart monarchs and evidences the ways in which he sought to depict the royal body in new forms and to create an appetite for a new, more international style.

Upon his return to his native Utrecht from Italy in 1620, Honthorst targeted a steady patronage system instead of the open market: the courts in The Hague of first Elizabeth and, from 1625, of Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647) and Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (1602-1675), Elizabeth’s former lady-in-waiting. The key to Honthorst’s court patronage was Sir Dudley Carleton, British Ambassador to The Hague. Within a year of his homecoming, Honthorst approached Carleton and offered to demonstrate his skill by painting him anything he could think of.

Carleton, ever enterprising himself, subsequently sent Honthorst’s now-lost Aeneas fleeing the sack of Troy to the prominent British courtier and collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585-1646).⁴ In his letter, Carleton praised Honthorst as an artist on the rise, describing him as ‘growing into reputacon’, having been ‘for some years at Rome & other parts of Italy to mend his art ... consisting much in night works’, and Arundel responded enthusiastically to the painting, saying that ‘I have seene fewe Duch men arrive unto it, for it hath more of ye Itallian then the Flemish & much of ye manor of Caravagioes colouringe, wch is nowe soe much esteemed in Rome’.⁵

Despite this high praise, Honthorst’s Caravaggesque painting failed to produce an overture from a reigning European monarch. An invitation to the court of Charles I would eventually materialise, but in the intervening eight years between his return from Italy and trip to London, Honthorst worked to fashion his painting style into something less tied to Rome. Moving away from the Caravaggesque, he sought a new way to appeal to noble and royal patrons and, eventually, a new way of picturing the courtly persona.

1
Paulus Pontius (I) after Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656), c. 1632
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

2
Gerard van Honthorst
Portrait of Dudley Carleton (1574-1632), c. 1620-1630
Saffron Walden, Audley End House (English Heritage)