RKD STUDIES

By 1628, when Honthorst came to London, Charles had assembled around him not only an art collection of unprecedented scale and importance, but also a network of courtiers and agents with a keen interest in collecting’s dual purpose: to demonstrate their own intellectual virtue, and to curry a unique type of favor with the king. Rather than being satisfied with just acquiring paintings as gifts, Charles’s relationship with his courtiers was instead characterised by a flurry of exchanges and purchases, in which the king more readily paid for or traded specific objects than acquiring them outright as gifts.¹ Charles’s collection increased more than 70-fold in 15 years, and this network constituted a rising tide that lifted all ships, as those who successfully navigated this system gained or retained high status.

Honthorst stayed less than eight months in London — he left Gravesend on 8 December 1628 and was back in Utrecht by the end of the month — but in that time completed seven paintings, all commissioned by or for the King. Only three of these paintings survive: Apollo and Diana [8], the Portrait of King Charles I [9], and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, with his Family [10].² Apollo and Diana is the largest and best-known product of Honthorst’s time in London. In this image Charles and Henrietta Maria (1609-1669) assume the mythological guises of Apollo and Diana and oversee Buckingham as Mercury as he presents personifications of the liberal arts. Immediately to his right is Grammar — possibly a portrait of Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham (1603-1649) — holding a book with the alphabet of which Mercury and Apollo were thought to be the partial composers.³ She reaches up toward Charles/Apollo with her right hand, extending the key to the liberal arts and thus an ideal court to the king.⁴ A group of allegorical figures and their attributes unfold behind Buckingham, including Music, Astronomy, Mathematics and Architecture, surrounded by putti who trumpet and throw flowers.⁵

Significantly, the figure of Astronomy with her armillary sphere and calipers is accompanied by a young Black boy, the only person of colour depicted in any of Honthorst’s surviving paintings.⁶ Probably a personification of the night sky, he holds a Jacob’s staff, used to measure distance for navigation by stars. His prominent presence within the painting and role as one of only two attendants to Honthorst’s array of personifications has not previously drawn scholarly attention.⁷ The reception of this figure in Caroline England merits further consideration, particularly in the context of Honthorst’s masque-like painting and the well-known Masque of Blackness, performed in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall in 1605, during the reign of Charles’s father James I (r. 1603-1625)⁸

Honthorst’s command of dynamic, Caravaggesque chiaroscuro is synthesised in Apollo and Diana with a classical sensibility in the subject and arrangement of figures, a new type of international style that was particularly well suited to the work’s placement and context. Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), a student of Honthorst’s that accompanied him as an assistant, claimed that Honthorst had been called to England specifically to paint Apollo and Diana, which hangs today at Hampton Court Palace.⁹ The 3,000 guilders that Sandrart states Honthorst received upon his departure from London demonstrated his success and has sometimes been interpreted as payment for the Apollo and Diana, but this could also be due to the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628.¹⁰ It is probable that Buckingham was the patron or original designer of the picture, and that Charles paid for it in light of his friend’s death rather than as part of a planned commission. Given the prominent place that gifts held in the uses of paintings at Charles’s court, as well as the major role played by Buckingham in the painting itself, Apollo and Diana was likely a gift from Buckingham to Charles and thus evokes the close friendship between the two men and the court culture in which it was produced.

8
Gerard van Honthorst
Apollo and Diana, dated 1628
Hampton Court Palace (Molesey), Royal Collection - Hampton Court, inv./cat.nr. 405746

9
Gerard van Honthorst
Portrait of Charles I Stuart (1600-1649), king of England, 1628
London (England), National Portrait Gallery, inv./cat.nr. 4444

10
Gerard van Honthorst
Portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628) with his family, 1628
Great Britain, private collection The Royal Collection, inv./cat.nr. RCIN 406553

Our knowledge of the work’s original placement comes from Sandrart, who states that it was hung in the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, finished in 1622 by Inigo Jones (1573-1652) after fire destroyed the previous one.¹¹ Apollo and Diana’s display in this space has great resonance given the elaborate masques staged there.¹² These performances, featuring the King, Queen, and various members of court, were a vital fixture in Charles’s London. Often presenting the monarchs as mythological figures, the masques are characterised by the movement from disorder to order precipitated by the arrival onstage of the King and Queen.¹³ Seen as presenting higher truths in a spectacle that was as much about the courtly participants as anything else, the masques are equally present in Honthorst’s painting, which features portraits of court members.¹⁴ While the masque overlapped the real and fictional by spatially dissolving the boundary between the two through the use of illusionistic stage sets, it also collapsed the two temporally by including recognizable figures in historic guise.¹⁵

By including life-size portrait figures of court members reenacting a masque in a fantastical painted setting, Honthorst utilised the masque’s own language to codify the visual program of Caroline dramatic allegory. At the same time, the inclusion of portraits would have invited fascination and elicited a personal connection from a contemporary audience, who would experience the painting first and foremost as portraits of people they knew and only secondarily as the depiction of a masque.

Apollo and Diana also pays homage to the large, moveable sets used for masques through the cave from which the allegorical figures emerge at right. This bears a striking resemblance to the elaborate stagings designed for the Banqueting House by Inigo Jones and others, most notably one that had been constructed in 1613 as part of the celebrations of Charles’s sister Elizabeth’s marriage: George Chapman’s (c. 1559-1634) The Memorable Masque. In the narrative description before the dialogue, Chapman introduces the major set-piece as ‘an Artificiall Rock, whose top was neere as high as the hall it selfe’, from which some participants appear.¹⁶ At the end of the first song, ‘the vpper part of the Rock was sodainly turn’d to a Cloude, discouering a rich and refulgent Mine of golde; in which the twelue Maskers vvere triumphantly seated: their Torch-bearers attending before them’, causing their costumes to ‘spangle or spark’.¹⁷

The appearance of the monarchs as Apollo and Diana also references a masque staged at Whitehall in 1625 on the occasion of Charles’s marriage, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union. In it Prince Charles, the chief masquer, was presented on a floating island—a large set that actually moved about the hall—in reference to the mythology of the Island of Delos, where the twins Apollo and Diana were born.¹⁸ A strong secondary theme of Stuart masques was thus virtuous love.¹⁹ The King and Queen in various guises represented their romance as one Platonic and chaste, triumphant over base appetites and embodying the self-regulation that equipped men to rule.²⁰ Thus in Honthorst’s Apollo and Diana, Charles and Henrietta Maria sit ensconced in heavenly light while Envy and Hate are banished by torch-wielding Virtue and Love directly below.²¹

In the politics of portraiture at the Stuart court, Charles was seeking new visual forms to establish a double effigy of the King as virtuous both in rule and in love, and as a glorious patron of the arts. His interest in foreign artists is evocative of his ambitions to insert the Caroline image into the international language of court culture. Apollo, Diana, and Mercury furthermore occupied an important place among the intellectual class in early modern Europe. As the God of the sun, music, poetry, art, medicine, and the keeper of laws, Apollo was a potent identification figure for early modern rulers, most spectacularly in Louis XIV’s (r. 1643-1715) incarnation as Le Roi Soleil.

Some ten years after Honthorst’s departure from England, Abraham van der Doort‘s (1565/70-1640) inventory of Charles’s collections located Apollo and Diana in storage at Whitehall Palace. Some art historians have interpreted this as evidence of the work’s inferiority, reading it as a marker of Honthorst’s lack of skill and a consequent lack of appreciation for the painting.²² In fact, its location ‘in Store at whit=hall … in ye Passage roome betwene ye Banquetting house & the privie lodgings’, indicates that the painting could have been recently hung in the Banqueting House.²³

The other objects in the room must also be taken into account, which included two of Rafaël‘s (1483-1520) Cartoons for the Sistine Chapel Tapestries in a flat case and Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) St. George [11], which, like the Apollo and Diana, were specifically purchased by the King.²⁴ The St. George is also noted as having been recently displayed in the ‘kings brekfast chamer’, or in the privy lodgings, meaning that this storage room may have been used as a temporary staging area between the two spaces that it connects.²⁵ The relationship between the depicted figures and their initial audience of Caroline courtiers could have gone so far as to affect reactions to and interpretations of the painting, and even when and where it was displayed.²⁶

In a note earlier in the inventory Van der Doort states that, ‘Heere followeth the number of yor Mats Pictures and other things wch are — kept in store in severall places and: are as yet unplaced’. This indicates that ‘in store’ was common parlance for the spaces where works were kept in the midst of curatorial changes.²⁷ This argument is supported by Erin Griffey’s recent analysis of the language of Stuart inventories, which notes a discrepancy between these documents and our modern understanding of display as governed by the idea that the highest quality is showcased while the lowest quality is hidden.²⁸ Another possibility to consider is that the painting was damaged and moved into storage while awaiting repair. The room also contained several damaged works, most notably five paintings from the Gonzaga collection that had arrived from Mantua badly damaged by mercury, or, as Van der Doort described, ‘utterlie ruined and Spoyled peeces by quicksilver’.²⁹

Based on these possible reasons for storage, it is important to take the conservation history of the work into account. It is obvious even in reproduction that the condition of the painting is not pristine. The canvas has been relined, which might account for the exaggerated appearance of the seams, particularly near the bottom edge, where a pattern of losses is visible at center. Black and white photographs documenting a previous restoration campaign [12] reveal extensive losses along the painting’s central, horizontal seam, as well as another horizontal band of losses whose close proximity indicates that the painting was probably rolled or folded.

Whatever the condition of the painting around the time of Van der Doort’s inventory, it is clear that its location in storage does not necessitate the dismissal of its importance in Charles’s picture collection and the culture of the Stuart court. Indeed, it both expanded the potential of the royal image and codified Honthorst’s place as a transnational court painter. Taken together, it is my hope that these two case studies of Honthorst’s court paintings prompt new questions about the role of his smooth, colorful, more international works, and begin to reframe our understanding of Honthorst’s pictorial strategies, output, and evolving style over the course of his career. Moving away from a focus on the Caravaggesque toward a broader picture of Honthorst’s oeuvre in the context of his patrons, this study situates this Dutch artist within the international, Anglo-Dutch context in which he lived, worked, and gained immense success.

11
Peter Paul Rubens
Landscape with Saint George, c. 1630
London (England), Royal Collection - Buckingham Palace, inv./cat.nr. 105

12
Detail of Honthorst’s Apollo and Diana during restoration
Photo: Ministry of Works, no. 64306/5 (Visual Documentation RKD)