RKD STUDIES

Van Hoogstraten’s English portraits have a new sense of elegance and refinement. His portrait of Thomas Godfrey (1640-1690) [6] is one of two dated 1663.¹ They are a departure from the more conventional, restrained portraits he painted in Dordrecht [7], and show that the artist was looking at new models of emulation that would fit better with the expectations of potential English clients. Not surprisingly, Van Dyck’s modish portraits of English courtiers with hounds [8] played a significant part in Van Hoogstraten’s conception of Godfrey, alluding both to loyalty and the aristocratic sport of hunting, and ultimately harking back to Titian’s portrait of Charles V (1500-1558) from 1533 (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado). Another possible source is Lely’s portrait of Sir Ralph Bankes (c. 1631-1677) (c.1660; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art), probably one of Van Hoogstraten’s English patrons, where the three-quarter-length sitter is also seated and has a raised and dangling left arm, but the dog is more distant.

Godfrey was the member of a prominent Kentish landowning family that had been established at Lydd on Romney Marsh for generations.² He was a cousin of the magistrate Edmund Berry Godfrey (1621-1678), whose murder in 1678 was a key-moment in the so-called ‘Popish Plot’.³ In July 1658 Thomas Godfrey matriculated at New College, Oxford, but never took up his place at the university, possibly because of strained financial circumstances.⁴ As the son of a second son, his position would have been precarious. However, his circumstances improved greatly in 1663, the year that the portrait was painted, when he married a wealthy heiress, Mary Toke (1640-1698), the widow of Sir Robert Moyle (1636-1661), and the daughter of Nicholas Toke (1588-1680). Subsequently, he moved into the home of his new wife, Buckwell in the parish of Boughton Aluph, north of Ashford.⁵ These marriage alliances among a small number of gentry families were also extremely important in Kent, where blood and kinship mattered almost more than in any other county.⁶ Given its proximity to both London and the continent, and the wealth of its agricultural land, Kent was a surprisingly sophisticated market for portrait painting and other cultural pursuits, and Thomas Godfrey was obviously keen to secure the services of a Dutch artist, newly arrived from the Netherlands.⁷

Some years later, in 1667, Samuel van Hoogstraten painted two portraits of the brothers, Sir Norton (1601-1685) [9] and Thomas Knatchbull (d.1703) [10]. They belonged to the same network as Thomas Godfrey and were related to him through marriage.⁸ Sir Norton’s background shows many of the characteristics of the Kentish gentry: inheritance of a landed estate (Mersham Hatch near Ashford), education at a university (Cambridge) and one of the London inns of court (Middle Temple), and service to the county as a Justice of the Peace and MP.⁹ However, he was different from many of them in that he was a deeply learned individual, with extensive intellectual interests, which must have endeared him to the polymath Van Hoogstraten. He was a distinguished theologian and had published a highly regarded Latin commentary on the New Testament in 1659 that ran into several editions and was reprinted at Amsterdam and Frankfurt.¹⁰ The diarist John Evelyn heard him preach in the chapel of a neighbouring property in 1663 and referred to him as a ‘worthy person and learned critic, especially in Greek and Hebrew’.¹¹ The sale catalogue of his library, which survives, reveals that his book ownership was much more diverse than that of his contemporaries, and apart from theology and classical literature, there were texts on philosophy, poetry, medicine, geography, and history, in a range of languages (Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian and English).¹²

6
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Portrait of Thomas Godfrey of Burton Aleph (?-1690), dated 1663
Sale London (Christie's) 1989-11-17, no. 44

7
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Portrait of Jacob Ouzeel (1601-1666), dated 1661
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, inv./cat.nr. DM/936/513

8
Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683), 1635-1638
Weston Park (Weston-under-Lizard), The Weston Park Foundation

We know much less about his younger brother Thomas, who was Recorder of Maidstone. He stabled his horses and possibly received his meals at Mersham Hatch, paying £60 per year for the privilege.¹³ In his last will and testament of June 1682, Sir Norton referred to him as his ‘good brother’ and bequeathed him ‘one hundred pounds as a token of [his] love’.¹⁴ Why Sir Norton chose to have his brother, rather than his wife Dorthea Honywood (d.1694), portrayed by Van Hoogstraten, is far from clear. She was subsequently portrayed by a much more mediocre painter, in the same format as Thomas Knatchbull’s portrait (127 x 101.5 cm).¹⁵ The Knatchbulls placed a great premium on ancestor portraits and had been assembling them at Mersham Hatch since the early 16th century, some of them by high-calibre portraitists such John Michael Wright and Cornelius Johnson.¹⁶ Many of these portraits are of similar dimensions or have compositional elements in common, such as in an earlier, and somewhat smaller, portrait of a Bridget Astley (1570-1625) [11], where the sitter, like Thomas Knatchbull, rests her arm on a chair back.

The full-length, life-size image of Sir Norton is of a format that is not normally used for portraits of the Kent gentry and has no equivalent in terms of its scale in the Knatchbull portrait collection that had been brought together by the mid 17th century. It shows Van Hoogstraten responding to trends that had long been popular in English court portraiture. Knatchbull’s powerful and status-enhancing posture, with one hand propped on a walking stick and the other at his hip, arm akimbo, was used in respective portraits of Charles I by Daniel Mijtens I [12] and Anthony van Dyck [13].

11
circle of Robert Peake (I)
Portrait of Bridget Astley, Lady Knatchbull (1570-1625), c. 1590-1610
Sale London (Sothebey's) 2021-03-24, no. 108

The two portraits were not apparently the only works by Samuel van Hoogstraten that the Knatchbulls owned. In September 1749 an inventory was taken of the contents of the family’s mansion at Mersham Hatch, upon the death of the fifth baronet, Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham (1699-1749).¹⁷ The ‘Hall’ was mostly hung with family portraits, including Van Hoogstraten’s portraits of the Knatchbull brothers, which were placed on either side of John Michael Wright’s portrait of Mary Knatchbull (1610-1606), Abbess of Ghent, a kinswoman. Apart from portraits, the only other paintings in the room were the following:

A Large picture of Hugestrichen a
Painter and his wife -
One large prospective peice

It seems plausible that ‘Hugestichen’ is a mangled variation of ‘Hoogstraten’. However, more complicated is working out whether the ‘Large picture’ depicted ‘a Painter and his wife’ or whether two paintings were intended since the inventory frequently lists separate items in pairs on the same line. Similarly, is the ‘large prospective piece’, presumably an architectural painting, also by the Dutch painter? There is one little-known work by Van Hoogstraten, which has descended through generations of the Knatchbull family and is likely to have been one of the works listed in 1749 [14].¹⁸ It is inscribed with the artist’s initials and the date of 1665. This is a very unusual architectural fantasy in Van Hoogstraten’s output. We seem to be looking from some sort of watery grotto, through columns, to a villa and a garden with sculptures, and up towards ruined building on the hills beyond. One wonders if it was made on commission for Sir Norton, given his interest in the world of Antiquity and Italy. Or did he speculatively gift him the painting in anticipation of patronage, a strategy that he had recommended to young artists?¹⁹ Knatchbull had books on architecture and perspective in his library and, in 1626, he and two companions were given an official pass to travel for three years on the continent, with Italy most likely an essential component of their trip.²⁰

14
Samuel van Hoogstraten
View of a garden terrace with statues, dated 1665
Private collection