4. Fire and Plague: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Career in England
John Loughman
Cover image
attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten
View in the north transept of Westminster Abbey in London, c. 1663-1664
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, inv./cat.nr. DM/984/588
1
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Perspective view with a woman reading a letter, c. 16671
The Hague, Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, inv./cat.nr. 66
This paper focuses on two aspects of Samuel van Hoogstraten’s (1627-1678) career in England between 1662 and 1667: his quest to find influential patrons who would ‘loudly sing his praises’, as he puts it in his 1678 treatise, and his ability to adapt his work to local taste and cultural interests.1 He specialised in three pictorial categories during these years – portraiture, perspectives and trompe l’oeil still lifes – all subjects which were traditionally appreciated at court. The ultimate goal of his patronage must have been to win favour with Charles II (1630-1685), whose restoration in 1660 he had already lauded in poetry.2 The spaniels that appear in Van Hoogstraten’s perspective paintings [1], often looking back at us, drawing attention to the act of viewing, might also be part of this strategy, to win royal approval because of the association of this dog breed with the Stuart kings. Similar small dogs are found in family portraits [2] and images of the mistresses of Charles II, where they act as surrogates for the absent king.3
Van Hoogstraten purposely sought out patrons who were connected to the court and modelled his work on the court portraitists Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) and Peter Lely (1618-1680), and, more broadly, the architectural painter Hendrik van Steenwijck II (1580-1640) who won the patronage of Charles I. His virtuosity in illusionistic art was particularly attuned to the times and to England, not just in terms of the foundation of the Royal Society and growing interest in empirical and experimental science, but also to the prevailing visual and political culture, where people were taught ‘to look beyond surface appearance – no matter how perfectly rendered – to detect ironic, satiric and buried meaning’.4 The Stuart kings were often depicted in anamorphic images and other forms of perspective art. One of Van Hoogstraten’s letter rack paintings [3] has a two-faced medal and a copy of John Tatham’s (fl. 1632-1664) satire The Rump. Many of the characters in this play, first performed and printed at London in 1660, are deceitful and have aliases, and its audience would have drawn analogies between the described chaos of the last days of the Commonwealth after Cromwell’s death and the stability offered by the new regime of Charles II.5
2
Anthony van Dyck
The three eldest children of Charles I Stuart and Henrietta Maria de Bourbon: Charles (1630-1685), Mary (1631-1666) and James (1633-1685), with two spaniels, dated 1635
Windsor (England), private collection Royal Collection - Windsor Castle
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Samuel van Hoogstraten
Trompe-l'oeil of a framed letter board with John Tatham's play "The Rump", c. 1662-1667
Private collection