RKD STUDIES

Kwab designs continued being influential for Leatherwork frames and other objects in England. Three notable sets of engraved kwab designs were published in the Netherlands between the mid-1640s and 1660. Christiaen van Vianen (1600/5 - 1667), son of the most celebrated auricular goldsmith Adam van Vianen (1568/9-1627), worked in London as Charles I’s court goldsmith from 1633 until the outbreak of the Civil War, returning to Utrecht probably the next year in 1643.¹ Christiaen published 48 of his father’s kwab designs for vessels as Constighe Modellen (Artful Models), in instalments between about 1646 and 1652.² Silversmith Johannes Lutma (1587-1669) was born in Germany but settled in Amsterdam. He published 12 of his kwab designs for cartouches and silverware in 1653, engraved by his son Jacob (1630-1654), as Veelderhande Niewe Compartemente (Manifold new compartments) and in 1654 he published 12 more as Verscheijde Snakerijen (Various drolleries) ‘useful for goldsmiths, sculptors, stone-carvers, and all those who love the Arts’.³ The Dutch painter Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674), born in Amsterdam and a former pupil of Rembrandt was also interested in ornament [32]. Baarsen states:

‘In 1655, Amsterdam publisher Nicolaes Visscher I produced a series of engravings entitled ‘Various amusing compartments and tables, invented by Gerbrand Vanden Eeckhout’.⁴ They mainly show designs for auricular cartouches, a genre that was much in demand. Van den Eeckhout’s forms are strong and fleshy, as if he intended his designs to be carved in stone […]. A second, larger series of prints designed by Van den Eeckhout, ‘Manifold new compartments’, was published in Amsterdam by Clemens de Jonge.⁵ Speculating on a broad interest in auricular cartouches, the Dutch title page of this undated series is followed by one in French and another in Latin’.⁶

A demonstration of how engraved designs from the Netherlands could swiftly be exported and used across the North Sea can be seen in a map cartouche in The Down Survey of Ireland carried out after Cromwell’s campaigns and printed in 1658.⁷ The title cartouche of the survey’s map for ‘The County of Antrim’ [33] directly copied one of Van den Eeckhout’s printed designs.

32
Michiel Mosijn after Gerbrand van den Eeckhout published by Clement de Jonghe
Cartouche with lobe ornament, above and below a mask with gaping mouth
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv./cat.nr. RP-P-1883-A-7443

Three years later at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, the same cartouche was carved in stone for the monument to Thomas Gurney, a Fellow of Brasenose College who died of smallpox in 1661 [34].⁸ The unknown sculptor skilfully incorporated Gurney’s coat of arms at the top of the cartouche.

However, whilst kwab can be identified in Netherlandish prints, tapestries and silver, extant designs do not appear directly linked to surviving English Leatherwork frames. Nevertheless, while it is clear that auricular frames developed in England before the Netherlands, there was an ongoing mutual exchange of ideas, and the particularly curious design of the Sunderland may have been influenced by Dutch as well as English patterns. For example, a Dutch engraving of about 1647 by Pieter Nolpe (1613/4-1652/3) after Pieter Jansz. Quast (1605/6-1647) of Dancing Peasants [35] has a fictive frame with irregular inner and outer edges and central masks which has some similarities, especially when viewed upside down, with the later English Sunderland pattern.

A second example of a carved and gilded oak Sunderland Leatherwork frame of the 1670s is from Ham House on a portrait of John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale painted by Peter Lely in about 1672-1675. Is thought to be original to the painting, and it was exhibited at the Kwab exhibition in 2018 [36]. It is of carved oak with mason’s mitres, nailed onto a half-lapped pine back-frame. The Sunderland was the most numerous Leatherwork pattern used from about five years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.⁹ This frame was almost certainly made by Charles II’s framemaker, John Norris.¹⁰ The Norris family had also been framemakers to Charles I. The characteristically irregular sight-edge all around the Sunderland pattern is not seen on kwab frames.

Reiner Baarsen describes the Sunderland frames at Ham House as crude: ‘The individual motifs have coarsened into flat shapes whose origin is often obscure. The design is obviously indebted to auricular predecessors, but nothing remains of their subtlety or ambiguity. This crude stylisation must have been deliberate, as a similar phenomenon can be observed in English auricular silver of the same period’.¹¹ However, as demonstrated, by the 1670s highly sophisticated Leatherwork frames had been made in England for over three decades, challenging assumptions that Leatherwork frames were crude, even deliberately so.

36
Peter Lely
Portrait of John Maitland (1616–1682), 2nd Earl and Duke of Lauderdale in Garter Robes, c. 1672-1675
Richmond (Greater London), Ham House, inv./cat.nr. NT 1139952

36a
Fig. 36 in gilded oak frame, Ham House, National Trust (painting 1139952, frame 1140903)
Image: Gerry Alabone, Kwab exhibition, 2018