RKD STUDIES

The earliest mention of the Van de Veldes at work in the Queen’s House appears in a written request relating to the series of tapestries they were commissioned to produce for the Stuarts.¹ In 1674, the Lord Chamberlain’s office wrote to ‘the Keeper of His Majesty’s Lodgings above stairs att Grenewiche’ to notify him that 'His Majesty hath contracted William Vandervelder and his Sonn for the painting of a large shuite of designes for tapestry hangings. Allow them such roome above staires as may bee convenient for them to Accomplishe the said designes'.² From this letter, we can understand that the cartoons for the tapestries were laid out in the Queen’s House, presumably on the first floor.³ The House’s foundations straddle what was once a walled public road that formed a division between the complex of red brick Tudor buildings that made up Greenwich Palace to the north and the royal park to the south. Given the monumental scale of the tapestries – the weaving now in the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich measures 3.94 m x 5.64 m – only a handful of rooms would have been ‘convenient’ for such a task. These include the two ‘Presence Chambers’ – the King’s on the east side and the Queen’s on the west – facing the Thames on the north side of the house, and two ‘Privy Chambers’, rooms that bridged the public road.⁴ Certainly, if the Van de Veldes had already set up their studio in the house, as discussed below, that space alone would not have been large enough to undertake the task at hand.

The studio proper was located on the south side of the house, on the ground floor, as noted by the King’s Clerk of Works ten months later in his entry recording work undertaken by carpenters 'in makeing and hanginig III paire of shutters of split deale for three windowes in a lower roome, at the Queenes building next the park (where the Dutch Painters worke)'.⁵ In March 1677 carpenters are once again employed 'to work upon at the Queens buildings in mending the floor at the Backstairs there and new joysting and boarding parts of the floor in a lower roome next the park where the dutch painters work that was very much broken'.⁶

On account of the proximity within this entry in the King’s Works between the ‘lower roome next the park where the dutch painters work’ and the ‘Backstairs’ – presumed here to be the staircase that joins the ground and first floors on the south west side of the house (and at the time the only stair on this side)⁷ – current consensus is that the Van de Velde studio occupied the south west corner room.⁸ However, it is not impossible that the use of the indefinite article to refer to ‘a lower roome next the park’ might indicate that in fact more than one ground floor room on the south side of the house might have been given over to the Van de Veldes.⁹

Indeed, if the south west corner room was the only room allocated to the studio, then its spatial limitations – not just as regards such large objects as the tapestry cartoons – would have soon become apparent. This in turn became apparent to us as we embarked on plotting out the evocation of the Van de Veldes’ working space in this room for the exhibition. The room measures 53.8m2. By comparison, Rembrandt’s ‘groote Schildercaemer’ measured 51m2, but he had a separate space on the floor above for his pupils, and other elements of the studio operation and assets were distributed throughout other rooms in the house.¹⁰ Although the Queen’s House room is generously proportioned, its walls are pierced by multiple apertures, as can be seen in a near contemporary plan of this floor [10]. There are three windows: two on the south elevation and one on the west. The north wall has both a door and a large fireplace, while the east wall originally had two doors, one of which led directly to the staircase which may correspond to the ‘Backstairs’ referred to in the King’s Works in March 1677. Bearing in mind the presumed presence of multiple artists at work in the space at any given time, the need to use the fireplace for at least some of the year, and the implications of that for proximity of easels and painting material to it, the space must have quickly felt quite cramped. A Royal Visit to the Fleet in the Thames Estuary, conceived and probably brought close to completion in the Queen’s House studio, illustrates the issue: although our original intention had been to display this work within the exhibition as part of the studio evocation, its sheer size (measuring 3.3m wide unframed) greatly limited both the number and arrangement of other objects in the space. The difficulty of accommodating this vast work within the studio space might lend some weight to an anecdote conveyed by antiquarian George Vertue in 1715. Vertue described how two visitors from the Admiralty had been so impressed by the painting that they requested it be cut in two, so they could each have half. We are told that Van de Velde the Younger rolled up the canvas and vowed that neither could have it. With its echoes of the Judgment of Solomon, this anecdote conveys a sense of the painting’s unusual monumentality: to the Admiralty visitors, the painting was twice the size it needed to be; Van de Velde was forced to remove it from its stretcher in order to remove it from view.¹¹

10
Ground plan of Queen’s House, probably mid-1690s, All Souls College, Oxford, AS IV.136
The south west corner of the building corresponds to the lower left corner of this image, with the presumed location of the Van de Velde studio the lower left corner room and the two smaller rooms immediately north of it presumed to be overflow rooms for the studio.

The issue of space would have been further complicated by the south-facing aspect of a studio ‘next the park’. This was unorthodox for an artist’s studio.¹² As Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688) describes, an artist’s studio (in the northern hemisphere) ideally faced north in order to benefit from cooler, more consistent light throughout the day.¹³ Sandrart also argued that in an ideal studio it should be possible to shut the upper and lower parts of studio windows independently; it is possible that the Van de Veldes’ shutters installed in March 1675 may have had this capacity to close at half height in this way.¹⁴ Such shutters would have facilitated the kind of lighting given by the high windows seen in purpose-built artists studios such as that of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in Antwerp; indeed Sandrart also specified that windows ought to be high and ideally directly under the ceiling.¹⁵ Nor does this practice appear to have been specific to the Low Countries. Portraitist William Gandy (1655-1729) made a sketch of Lely’s studio that shows a high window on one side of the room.¹⁶ Glass painter Henry Gyles (1640-1709) of York also recommended a high window, the light from which could be regulated with a curtain.¹⁷ In any case, as Katja Kleinert has observed, functional lighting was of utmost importance to any artist’s studio, determining aspects of studio efficiency as fundamental as the hours of work that were possible.¹⁸ As if short winter days weren’t enough of an impediment to working hours,¹⁹ strong glare from a low sun would have been a further nuisance in a south-facing studio.²⁰ An additional advantage of the shutters would have been to compensate for the impact of the dual aspect of the room, with windows on the south and west walls - a further feature of this space that was out of keeping with typical studio spaces, which favoured a single light source.²¹ Finally, the installation of shutters in the Van de Veldes’ Queen’s House studio also attests to an idea of a studio space that was not static in its layout but surely shifted periodically according to different commissions, and different seasons - something Sandrart also advocated.²² Shutters would have enabled the Van de Veldes to respond as best they could to the varying levels and angles of sunlight in the space throughout the day and the year. The arrangement of easels, furniture and studio assets within the space would also have varied, depending on the artists’ need to use the fireplace and the number of artists at work together in the space at any one time.

Another way in which the Van de Veldes might have adapted to the various limitations imposed by the architecture of the studio space proper, is in the use of the two adjacent ‘withdrawing rooms’. Their use during this period is unrecorded, but the exercise of ‘dressing’ the studio space made palpable the need for overflow spaces. The use of multiple rooms in this way would have been entirely typical of the period, Rembrandt’s studio being just one such example of a studio environment being spread across multiple rooms.²³ The extraordinary corpus of Van de Velde drawings also provides important evidence for this hypothesis. The large number of surviving drawings by the Van de Veldes – some 2,500 in public collections alone²⁴ – attests not only to the sheer size of the drawings repository maintained by the studio, but also to the care with which it was kept. This vast resource comprised a wide variety of drawing types, from highly detailed ship portraits and reportage drawings of sea battles to rapid compositional sketches and ‘tutorial’ drawings for pupils. It the bedrock of the studio business, key to the authenticity and accuracy that was central to the Van de Velde ‘brand’ and vital to maximising efficiency by facilitating a mix-and-match mechanism for new compositions. As the most valuable studio asset, it stands to reason that it was stored with care, and by and large this is borne out in the condition of the drawings today, as well as the fact that so many have survived. Considered in combination with the space limitations in the studio space proper, it seems plausible that one of the ‘withdrawing rooms’ adjacent to it (conceivably the northeast room) would have housed the drawings archive, a prudent measure to keep it protected from the hustle and bustle of the relatively cramped painting room. It would also have been an approach to storing drawings entirely in keeping with that taken by other artists of the period, who often stored drawings and prints in spaces separate from the studio, from more elaborate ‘kunstkamers’ such as that kept by Rembrandt, intended to showcase a collection, to more private ‘cantoor’ (office) spaces where important items were secured.²⁵ We can imagine that the Van de Veldes’ drawing library - a business-critical asset - fell more into the latter category.²⁶ Other artists must have found solutions to the storage of drawings, prints and other reference material such as illustrated books. When Lely’s print and drawings collection was organised for sale, for example, the Executor Roger North (1653-1734) recorded ‘neer 10,000’ of these items present in Lely’s house at Kew.²⁷ Some of these were organised in ‘Portfolios’, but it is unknown whether these were simple rigid covers containing a bundle of prints, or albums containing blank leaves with items attached to them.²⁸ It is also unknown whether they were stored with Lely’s extensive book collection in his Library, as a room in the house was known, or elsewhere.²⁹

11
Michiel van Musscher
A painter in his studio, dated 1667
Haarlem, Teylers Museum, inv./cat.nr. R+ 14a

Similarly, we might imagine that the north west ‘withdrawing room’ could have been used as a space for grinding pigments. Many depictions of artists’ studios show pigment grinding taking place ‘backstage’, in a space segregated from the main studio area [11], and this is borne out in the positioning of grinding stones in rooms separate to the primary painting rooms in the probate inventories of Dutch painters of the period.³⁰ It is well known that high-profile artists sought to cultivate their image through a highly staged studio environment, receptive to visits from high-standing patrons. As Joachai Rosen has observed, these visits also became the subject of a visual tradition, developed by artists including Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Michiel van Musscher (1645-1705).³¹ The manual task of pigment grinding was out of step with the more aspirational image of the artist-courtier that those such as the Van de Veldes’ predecessors at the English court, Van Dyck and Rubens, had pursued.³² Even before their time as court painters in England, the Van de Veldes were not strangers to princely visitors to their studio – Cosimo III de’ Medici had visited them at their Amsterdam studio on 26 December 1667 – but it is interesting to speculate to what extent the need to stage themselves as court painters was magnified by virtue of the location of their studio within a royal building.³³