The art collections and museum of King William II of the Netherlands (1792–1849) (2024)

Abstract

The acquisition and dispersal of the art collections of William II (1792–1849), who ruled the Netherlands from 1840 to 1849,1 are the central issues considered in this article. Both in character and tastes, William II was the polar opposite of his father William I (1772–1843, r. 1814/15–1840): while the father had no interest in art, the son was a true art lover. An autocratic though enlightened monarch, William I was, in principle, well disposed to the two art museums in his kingdom – the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) and the Mauritshuis (The Hague) – at least until 1830, when the Belgians rose in revolt against his rule. William II, however, was hostile, believing it unnecessary that the national museums should acquire art with public – let alone royal – money, as they had done before 1830; he seems to have thought of collecting art rather as a royal prerogative. He expended a great deal of money from his own resources on expanding the collections in his private museum in The Hague, and for their accommodation.2

The Belgian Revolt in 1830 marks an important moment not only for Dutch history but also for the personal progress of William II. The Northern and Southern Netherlands had been united by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as the Kingdom of the Netherlands, a move designed to establish a northern counterweight to France, with William I as the first king of the house of Orange-Nassau. With the Belgian Revolt the alliance fell apart again when the Southern Provinces seceded from the Kingdom of the Netherlands to become the Kingdom of Belgium. This reduction in the territory of the Netherlands led to a corresponding reduction in the royal budget (see below), though this did not prevent William II from expanding his collections and housing them in truly royal fashion. Only in the king’s latter years did private financial problems lead to his art collections being sold, with the result that they are now widely scattered.

Just as the collections themselves have all but disappeared from the Netherlands, the places where they could be admired seem to have been swept away. Almost everything that had been added as an extension of the Kneuterdijk Palace in The Hague in the reign of William II was demolished before the end of the nineteenth century. Of the neo-medieval fortress that was built there as the setting for the equestrian statue of the ‘Father of the Fatherland’, William of Orange (1533–1584), unveiled in 1845 (Fig. 1), only the Gothic Hall with the gallery connecting it to the existing palace remains. The statue now stands alone, stripped of its historical context. As a model for the Gothic Hall, built in the middle of the palace gardens, William relied largely on the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, where he had studied law from 1809 to 1811.3 His collection of Old Master paintings was hung in the Gothic Hall from 1842 (Fig. 2) and was extended into the slightly later Marble Hall from 1845 (Fig. 3); parts of the collection were also hung in the king’s study (Fig. 4). Ultimately, the Marble Hall met the same fate as the rest of the palace, and was demolished; only the Gothic Hall remains as a shadow of what it must once have been.

Special attention is given here to the way in which William II’s art collections were presented. One question is to what extent the king sought to create a museum, which in the context of the early nineteenth-century Netherlands we take to mean a collection in state or private ownership accessible to the public. What were then the national art museums – the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague – were freely accessible, with designated days for artists and tourists and two days for the general public. Attendants supervised all the visitors and each museum had a catalogue in Dutch and French – a necessary feature since no identifications were marked on the picture frames, only numbers. The permanent collections alone were on display: there were, at that time, no temporary exhibitions in museums and galleries. To decide the question of whether the king aspired to found a museum, this article analyses his activities from nineteenth-century biographical material as well as from publications concerning the picture collection and, above all, from contemporary depictions of the king and his collections, created partly at the instigation of the monarch himself (see online Appendix 1). In addition, it considers comments evoked by the collections and by the new building at the Kneuterdijk Palace.

In their article of 1989, Hinterding and Horsch illustrated only three of the eleven images presented in online Appendix 1.4 At that date, the two important watercolours by the Düsseldorf artist Augustus Wijnantz (1795–after 1850), of the Gothic Hall (1846; Fig. 2) and the Marble Hall (1850; Fig. 3), remained unknown to them: they were published only in 1995. The picture dated 1847 of the king in his study (Fig. 4) became widely known even more recently and was published only in 2004, as were several preliminary studies for the two watercolours that entered the collections of The Hague in 1901.5

Before I discuss the vicissitudes of the collections and their functions, the fame of the king in the nineteenth century will be analysed more generally, especially in relation to its cultural aspects. The emphasis here is on the court at The Hague from the time William became king in 1840; rather less is known of what happened in Brussels before that date.

Unfortunately, William left no personal comments on his art purchases or other cultural activities. In addition, his financial data have been handed down in the order established by, and with additions from, the commission ‘for the settlement of the estate of William II’, which was formed after the king’s death.6 Apart from a few snippets of information, mainly to be found in financial documents in the Koninklijk Huisarchief in The Hague, we have to make do with the record of the actions of the king. The statements in this article about ‘presentation’ or ‘image’ are my twenty-first-century interpretations thereof.

King William II (1792–1849)

William II was King of the Netherlands from October 1840 until his death in March 1849. When his achievements as monarch are compared with those of his father, William I, the comparison is always to the disadvantage of the son.7 This probably has to do with the final and definitive loss of Belgium in 1839: William II ruled over a considerably smaller territory than William I, who had become ‘Souverein’ Prince of the Northern Netherlands in 1814 and then in 1815 King of the Northern and Southern Netherlands together – roughly the territory of today’s Benelux countries. These were the territories he ruled until the Belgian Revolt in 1830. Esteem for monarchs seems to have been proportionate to the size of their territories, so William’s prestige was reduced when the size of the kingdom was diminished, and so was his royal allowance: while William I received 2.4 million guilders annually from the Dutch state, William II had to make do with 1.5 million,8 a sum that proved inadequate for the new king.9

In comparisons made between the two monarchs, emphasis is generally placed on William I’s great abilities as a financier (he was nicknamed the ‘Merchant King’) and a careful administrator. William II spent money too easily, and was careless and impatient when he had to read detailed documents – unsurprising, perhaps, for someone with a military background. As Prince of Orange, after his law studies at Oxford he had made a career as a soldier in British service under the Duke of Wellington, first in Spain and later in the Southern Netherlands.10 He had fought at Waterloo, where he and his horse Vexy had been wounded, earning him among the Dutch the nickname ‘the Hero of Waterloo’.

William was admired not only for his bravery but also for his generosity, which included his patronage. Magnanimitas (generosity) was, like fortitudo (strength), a princely virtue: he spent vast amounts of money on the theatres in The Hague. That generosity extended also to members of the royal household.11 At the court in The Hague under William II we see on the one hand royal generosity and on the other the Dutch bourgeoisie striving for equality. Courtly life at that time was characterized as ‘something very homely’,12 a regime that lasted as long as the king was not weighed down by worries.

His last years, however, were years of urgency and doom, owing both to government affairs in the revolution year of 1848 and to private financial problems; the latter led William II in the same year to borrow 1 million guilders from his brother-in-law, Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855), a loan for which his art collections were pledged as collateral. After William’s sudden death in March 1849, the claim from Russia came as a complete surprise to his heirs. That claim and other debts, which together allegedly amounted to 4 million guilders, meant that the art collections had to be sold in 1850 and 1851.13 The chaotic financial administration ensured that the commission ‘for the settlement of the estate of William II’ was active until 1882.14When the financial details were eventually unravelled after some thirty years, it turned out that there had been no need for the sale of the art collections.

There was clearly something wrong with this king: even the most positive publications on William II remark upon it. For example Riko, who generally writes generously on the king, does not ignore his negative qualities. His stubbornness – he did not want to listen to the contractor – made him choose glazed tiles instead of lead or zinc as the roof covering for the Marble Hall: the rapid demolition of his palace was certainly due in part to the monarch himself.15

In the biography of William II by the historian Bosscha published in 1852 – more than 700 pages long and slightly hagiographically tinted – one again finds unvarnished criticism of him contrasted with his father. Bosscha emphasizes the period before William II became king, which receives no mention until page 610, leaving only some 100 pages for the period of William’s kingship. In the earlier pages his military achievements are widely reported, both the campaigns against the French under the Duke of Wellington in Spain and the Southern Netherlands and the fight against rebellious Belgium in the years 1830 and 1831. Maps of all battles are included.

William I had burnished his son’s military image as the Hero of Waterloo by buying The Battle of Waterloo (Fig. 5) by Jan William Pieneman (1779–1853) in 1827 for the phenomenal sum of 40,000 guilders. There the Duke of Wellington is the main character, but the Prince of Orange is shown wounded, clearly justifying his nickname.16 This emphasis on military achievements seems entirely in keeping with the image that William II wanted to propagate of himself: he walked around almost permanently in the uniform of a Dutch general in British service, albeit combined with a piece of ‘Russian’ headgear of his own invention. This is how he was often portrayed (Fig. 6).17 Illustrative of William’s liking for the military is the above-mentioned equestrian statue of William ‘the Silent’ by the French sculptor Count Emile de Nieuwerkerke (1811–1892), which was made at the king’s own expense (see Fig. 1).18 This prompted the young Catholic critic Joseph Alberdingk Thijm (1820–1889) to protest: ‘The modest, mild-tempered Christian, the Silent does not belong on horseback!’.19

While the monarch was generally seen positively as the Hero of Waterloo – the one who had expelled the French occupiers – some were less charmed by his orientation in the cultural field, which was largely international rather than Dutch. He privately commissioned and purchased works from foreign artists such as de Nieuwerkerke20 at a time when the government paid little attention to contemporary Dutch artists, let alone foreign ones. The period from about 1830 to about 1870 is generally referred to as the ‘tijdperk van nationale onverschilligheid’ (‘age of national indifference’) when it comes to the relationship between government and art in the Netherlands: during those years almost no money was spent on the arts.21

After an unfortunate betrothal to the British crown princess Charlotte (1796–1817) in 1814, William found in St Petersburg an even more prestigious princess, Anna Pavlovna, daughter of the Russian tsar. They were married in St Petersburg in 1816 – first in the Russian Orthodox rite and then the Protestant.22 Anna Pavlovna contributed to the international orientation of the Dutch court, but above all to the couple’s lifestyle. William’s Russian in-laws were used to spending a great deal of money: Anna Pavlovna’s jewellery collection was famous, and jewellers from The Hague and especially from London (not from Paris) were constantly sending new items on approval.23

The pomp and circ*mstance at William’s inauguration particularly attracted criticism. It was feared, moreover, that ‘the new King would bring to the throne ideas that belonged to a previous century or to another nation’.24 The allusion is somewhat veiled, but Dutch Protestants feared that William would convert to the Catholic faith.25 The realm of the Netherlands owed its origin to the revolt against Catholic Spain, for which a war of liberation had been waged for eighty years (1568–1648). Today, the monarch of the Netherlands must still be Protestant.

Even when it came to art, comparison between the first two monarchs of the house of Orange proved unfavourable to the son. De Bosch Kemper, writing in 1875, observed that ‘William I deliberately gave liberally to useful institutions, to artists, because he believed that the encouragement of art is a royal matter, even though he himself had little sense of art’; the art-loving William II, on the other hand, was ‘willing, without any research, to spend money, even treasures, on buildings and paintings, for his own aesthetic pleasure’.26 We find this kind of analysis of William II’s cultural activities in the less complimentary literature on the king in general, though the author just quoted also highlights the positive side of spending when he explains the monarch’s growing popularity in 1844 for ‘his generous condescension’ and for ‘his encouragement of the fine arts, evident in his collection of paintings in the Gothic Hall behind his palace’.27 The writers who are favourable to the monarch – though, like the less benevolent, they usually write only a few paragraphs about art in their general considerations – often limit themselves to similar positive remarks: collecting and building are good for the art and construction worlds; what the monarch built was beautiful and what he collected even more beautiful, and it was a pity that the collections had to be sold.28

In light of the frequent and multifaceted criticism of the monarch, it is surprising that the new building of the palace and, above all, his art collections received so little comment from the contemporary art world. It is fortunate for the reputation of William II that his (unsuccessful) attempt in 1842 to bring the royal ‘properties’ of the national art museums into the sphere of his private possession remained unknown to the outside world for many years.29

The art collections of William II

Information about William’s collecting is scarce. We know that in 1814 he visited the well-known Amsterdam collector Josephus Augustinus Brentano (1753–1821) with his future brother-in-law, Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825).30 Brentano, who was of Italian descent, owned not only paintings from the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age but also Italian pictures, including one by Giovanni Bellini that was for several years in the prince’s collection (1823–5).31

As crown prince, William seems to have started collecting around 1816, perhaps inspired by his visit to St Petersburg for his marriage in that year. There the imperial collection, begun by Peter the Great (1672–1725) and considerably expanded by Catherine II (1729–1796), with all the great names that William II would eventually collect, was on display to the court. The Hermitage remained closed to the public until 1852. There must also have been inspiration from Britain: the Gothic Hall carries many echoes of British great halls, and William II was familiar with the British royal collections because of his long stay in Britain and his close relationship with the Duke of Wellington, who, after 1815, had himself begun to assemble a collection of Old Masters (now in Apsley House, London).32 Perhaps the inspiration was closer to hand, however: on his return to The Hague (if not earlier), William must have become familiar with the Buitenhof Gallery, which had been built in 1774 by his grandfather, Stadholder William V (1748–1806).33

There is unfortunately no systematic inventory or list of purchases. The new Kingdom of the Netherlands had two capitals between 1815 and 1830, with the court residing alternately in The Hague and Brussels. The princely collections were divided between the capitals, and were housed in several palaces. Part of the early collection was lost in 1820 in a fire in part of the prince’s Brussels residence. One work lost in that fire was an early nineteenth-century painting by Joseph Ducq (1762–1829) entitled Antonello da Messina visits Jan van Eyck in Bruges, a subject entirely in keeping with the enthusiasm in the Southern Netherlands at the time for the Flemish Primitive (then also called ‘Gothic’) painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of these, Jan van Eyck was considered the most important as ‘the inventor of oil painting’, and it was all the more appropriate that an Italian painter, Antonello da Messina (c. 1430–1479) from Sicily, should have visited Van Eyck to learn that art. However, though Antonello was strongly influenced by Flemish painting, there is no evidence that he ever left Italy. William II was one of the early collectors of Flemish Primitives, in which he clearly showed solidarity with the southern nationalism of the time, or rather with the various urban patriotic movements in Flanders and Wallonia.

William and Anna Pavlovna had a preference for the southern part of the realm which manifested itself rather painfully in 1830 when the crown prince proposed himself as King of Belgium, completely against his father’s wishes.34 Initially his collection in Brussels seems to have focused on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings – a novel fashion, since these early masters were not generally admired in the nineteenth century. William’s purchases were in fact mixed: he acquired seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, as well as early Flemish works, such as copies after panels of Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, acquired in 1823 (visible in Fig. 7; see also online Appendix 2).

In 1824 the prince bought an expensive picture thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) but now considered to be by Leonardo’s favourite pupil Francesco Melzi (1493–c.1570). In 1825 and 1826 he acquired a whole series of costly paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck’s life-size portraits of Marie de Raet and Philippe Le Roy, and some Italian sixteenth-century works by painters including Andrea del Sarto (1486/8–1530/31; for the paintings now in the Wallace Collection see online Appendix 3).

In 1827 the prince received from his father as a birthday present two large paintings by Dieric Bouts (1410/20–1475) with the theme of The Justice of Emperor Otto (1470–75; now in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels). Thematically they were very appropriate, since they encouraged the prince to behave like a good monarch. They are the only two early Flemish paintings that remain prominent in the display of the picture collection in The Hague (see Fig. 7). After that, the collecting of any kind of art virtually came to a standstill, understandably enough, and certainly after 1830, when the Belgians revolted and the Dutch waged war within and against Belgium.

We have no images of the display of the collections in Brussels and we know little more than what was published about them in the catalogue of the prince’s picture collection in 1837. This was compiled by the art dealer Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1799–1883), whose father, Lambertus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1777–1862), had been the main supplier of the Prince’s ‘Primitive’ paintings. Christianus Nieuwenhuys deals with fifty-seven paintings and indicates the rooms in which they were hung in the Palais de la Nouvelle Cour. The older, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century, paintings predominated, or at least they are discussed first. The salon de service displayed chiefly fifteenth-century Flemish pictures. Only two later paintings hung in this room, by two seventeenth-century artists: the Italian Luca Giordano (1634–1705) and the Fleming Gonzalez Coques (1614–1684). In the salon des aides-de camp de service there were nine pictures, including the two large paintings by Dieric Bouts; the only seventeenth-century painting in this room was what was thought to be a self-portrait by Rembrandt, now in a private collection in Germany.35 Two large paintings by Rubens were in the salle d’audience, one of them, Christ’s Charge to Peter, now in the Wallace Collection. The salon bleu had the valuable sixteenth-century Italian paintings by Leonardo/Melzi and Raphael’s Portrait of Gianfrancesco Penni (present whereabouts unknown), and a Van Dyck portrait.

The salle à manger had four full-length seventeenth-century portraits: two supposed to be by Velázquez and two Flemish –Van Dyck’s portraits of Marie de Raet and Philippe Le Roy. In the salon gris, described as the ‘Antichambre pour les dames d’honneur de S.A.R. la princesse d’Orange’, we find some contemporary paintings. Portraits of two tsars, her brothers Alexander I (r. 1801–25) and Nicholas I (r. 1825–55), looked down on the audiences of Anna Pavlovna in her salle d’audience de S.A.R. la princesse d’Orange, where she was flanked by two recent seascapes36 and works by five seventeenth-century Northern Netherlandish masters.37 While the audience rooms of the future king were graced with paintings by Rubens, the walls of the princess’s audience room displayed her relatives and works of art by masters of the Dutch seventeenth century or their nineteenth-century imitators. This tells us something about her preferences.

It is particularly puzzling why a catalogue was compiled in 1837, presumably at the behest of the prince. The collection was out of reach as long as the problems with Belgium remained unresolved. Had there been indications in 1837 that the Prince of Orange might return to Belgium? If not, a catalogue organized by the location of the pictures in the palace there would not be very useful. Much to the regret of the princely couple, the final settlement of the Belgian Secession in 1839 did not entail a return to Brussels, but the art collections that had remained there since 1830 were released. It seems most likely that the paintings were transported north in 1840.38

The most important activity of the prince with regard to his collection was the construction of the Gothic Hall in The Hague. On 4 September 1840, more than a month before his father William I abdicated on 7 October, the prince laid the first stone. The major difference between this new location and the palace in Brussels was that there was now a separate room for works of art, whereas in Brussels the paintings had hung in the living and working areas. Before analysing the function of the collection in the Gothic Hall, we shall first consider William II’s involvement with Old Master drawings.

Old Master drawings

The Prince of Orange evidently thought that a royal collection with pretensions to be a museum should contain Old Master drawings, in which belief he was decidedly ‘modern’. The Rijksprentenkabinet, which formed part of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, collected only prints, often reproductions after Italian masters; drawings did not come to enrich the collection until around 1876. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collecting drawings by Old Masters was a speciality of true ‘connoisseurs’, who often formed groups and took turns holding art appreciation gatherings at the members’ homes. Drawings were usually kept loose in folders and portfolios or bound in albums.39 William took a different approach: he bought a collection of drawings en bloc, and he hung them up.

Coincidentally, the beautiful collection of Old Master drawings that had been assembled by the English portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) came on to the European art market after his death.40 It was bought by the London art dealer Samuel Woodburn (1786–1853), who had been involved in assembling it. Lawrence would have liked the drawings to go to George IV (1762–1830) or to the British Museum, which had had a collection of prints and drawings since its foundation in 1753; Woodburn did offer them, but in vain. He then tried for a long time – also unsuccessfully – to sell the drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo (1475–1564) to the National Gallery in London, but that would remain a gallery for paintings only.41 After the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford acquired some of the drawings, the Prince of Orange bought another part of Lawrence’s collection in 1838. Some of those drawings were framed behind glass and hung in the corridor between the Kneuterdijk Palace and the Gothic Hall.42 These were drawings by Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian artists, including Correggio and Andrea del Sarto, as well as Flemings, including Van Dyck and Rubens. Most of these drawings were returned to England after the sale of the king’s collections in 1850, and found their way mainly to the British Museum.43

The function of the collections and the Gothic Hall

That the Gothic Hall, with its monumental organ, was not merely a museum space is apparent from the first official ceremony that was held there: the marriage of the king’s daughter Princess Sophie to Charles Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, on 8 October 1842. We know from the travel account of the future keeper of the National Gallery in London, Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812–1877), that the paintings must have been on display earlier in 1842, since he noted in his journal in the summer:

Visited the Hague; excellent picture Gallery belonging to the King, but sorry to see that Lawrence’s fine collection of drawings by the Old Masters had been allowed to leave the Country. Two extraordinary pictures by Steuerbout [i.e. Bouts] in this collection . . . Returned to England with my books all safe on 29 August.44

It is not clear whether Wornum saw the paintings in the Gothic Hall or elsewhere in the Kneuterdijk Palace.

The Gothic Hall was a multifunctional space that served as a court chapel at least once a week. No pulpit is visible anywhere in the images, so it must have been movable. Did William want his Gothic Hall to be presented as a museum space? The organ provided music for the church services, but also for balls.45 The hall had a striking parquet floor and was equipped with the most modern features, such as underfloor heating and Carcel lamps, a new form of oil lighting. These, mounted on the two spectacular candelabra made of crystal and gilt bronze (visible in the passage to the Marble Hall in Fig. 7), formed the light source.46 Apart from the scene with the wedding, no images are known of the Gothic Hall used as a court chapel or as a ballroom.

According to some authors, the king used the Gothic Hall as a religious space partly in order to be spared the stares of other worshippers during his weekly attendance at church service. Courtiers and court staff, however, were welcome. Inspiration seems to have come from the private chapels of the English Anglican nobility, which were accessible to staff, but not to outsiders.47 In Bosscha’s biography, the English inspiration for the Gothic Hall becomes clear: during his two journeys through England when he was a student at Oxford (1809–11), William was hospitably received at many houses, and he had been impressed by the ‘domestic religious practice of English nobility’, where ‘the members and dependants of a family were united in a private castle chapel’.48

Concurrently with the new building, the Prince of Orange, not yet king, took up the expansion of his collections, which had almost come to a standstill after September 1828, with the exception of the purchase of the drawings from the Lawrence collection in 1838. In 1840, five days before he became king, a purchase was made for a large sum, 73,680 guilders, that included an Immaculate Conception attributed to Murillo (in a spectacular frame, hung on the right wall in Fig. 2). William apparently thought that his picture collection should be enriched with monumental works by masters who appeared in every princely collection of the time.49 Moreover, the wedding ceremony for his daughter was imminent, which is why, in 1842, the twelve paintings with the Apostles by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) and a large Rubens, The Tribute Money, were also bought. Unfortunately Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove’s painting depicting the wedding of Princess Sophie is lost, but these works are shown in his oil study for the painting – namely, the Ribera series between the windows, the Murillo, the Rubens, and two portraits supposedly by Velázquez. These pictures continued to play a prominent role in the various images of the Gothic Hall.

Obviously not all works of art were suitable for hanging in a space that also served as a church. According to Riko, when religious services took place curtains were drawn in front of the ‘profane’ paintings (he mentions two paintings with nudes).50 No such works are visible in any of the images of the Gothic Hall, however, and it seems more likely that paintings with nude figures were hung in the private rooms.

Huib van Hove (1814–64), the son of Bartholomeus, also depicted the Gothic Hall in 1842 (Fig. 8), viewed from the same angle as his father’s study. Where his father emphasized the wedding ceremony, the son shows the hall as a museum space: chic people are depicted conferring about the works of art, and some objects stand and lie picturesquely on the floor. It is clear that there were still some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish paintings on the walls (and one Italian).51 That had to change: accounts show that from January to December 1843 the king spent time with the concierge – the custodian – of the Kneuterdijk Palace, Victor Amadeo Trossarello (1794–1882), to arrange the redecoration of the hall.52 Like the other archival records, the accounts show that the king alone was involved with the collections. The queen is not mentioned anywhere; she limited herself to copying the paintings (as seen in Fig. 7) and embroidering furniture.53

Apart from the removal of the earlier paintings, the only difference discernible in the images over time is that the walls become more crowded around the iconic paintings, which remain in the same positions. It is therefore puzzling why it took the king so long to redesign the display: the hall was already largely fitted out by October 1842.54

As part of these activities, also in 1843, the ‘Horse of Waterloo’, Vexy, which had been injured in the battle and afterwards stuffed, was placed in the Gothic Hall, as shown in a lithograph of 1843–4. The horse is the only reference in the room to the king’s military career. There were two suits of armour in the study (see Fig. 4), but the military display was modest, especially compared to those in the great halls of the English nobility, where militaria such as armour, banners and guns were much more prominent.55

While the king was busy arranging the hang in the Gothic Hall, a small publicity campaign was being worked on elsewhere. Nieuwenhuys, who had produced the catalogue in 1837, now produced another, also in French. In both, his attention was mainly focused on early Flemish paintings: he claimed that enough was already known about the painters and paintings of the last three centuries, but not about early Flemish art, so he would concentrate on those pictures.56 Three particularly positive articles were written for the Dutch public.57In 1837 Nieuwenhuys had called the pictures ‘the collection of paintings that adorn the palace’ and had discussed them in the order in which they hung in the Brussels palace. In 1843, on the other hand, they were presented as ‘the picture gallery of H.M. The King of the Netherlands’, and they were catalogued by country.58

The paintings in the Gothic Hall were not organized by school: Rembrandt hung next to Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Pietro Perugino (1446/7–1523) next to Van Dyck, and Titian (c.1488/90–1576) was flanked by two portraits by Michiel van Mierevelt (1566/7–1641). Only on the long wall to the left of the organ, next to one of the large Van Dycks, is there what looks like an Italian corner.59 Another difference between the two catalogues is that in 1837 contemporary paintings were included, but that was not the case in 1843.

Nieuwenhuys thought, probably in accordance with the wishes of the king, that contemporary artists should benefit from the royal collections, and so too should the general public.60 The artists did indeed come: Riko names some who came to study.61 Many of them must have been at work copying at the time, but they are, remarkably, not shown in any images of museums or the Gothic Hall.62 In one of the many drawings by Augustus Wijnantz we see Anna Pavlovna seated at an easel in the Gothic Hall (see Fig. 7), but the picture makes it a palace space, not a museum.63

Foreign tourists like Wornum could visit as easily as the artists, but what about the ordinary Dutch? Given that the catalogue was entirely in French, the king was clearly not concerned with a large local audience; the Dutch version in the Kunstkronijk, in folio format, was too inconvenient and too expensive to serve as a Dutch catalogue. It remains unclear how much of an obstacle was raised by the fact that visits were possible only when the king was not in residence.64 It is further unknown whether during the annual fair in September large groups of ordinary Dutch people poured into the Gothic Hall, as was customary in the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis, both of which were freely accessible.65

Published notices were mostly favourable. Criticism is known only from two sources. In an anonymous pamphlet of 1843, Physiologie van Den Haag, the entire city and its institutions are criticized and the king is also attacked. The author wrote of the catalogue that, though ‘this may seem strange to you’, it was ‘printed in French and in Brussels, but will probably be available for Dutch money’.66 On the style of the new building, he wrote:

We have the king’s palace . . . It used to be, like all our palaces, the residence of a private individual; but what was suitable as a dwelling for the noble family of Wassenaer was not brilliant enough for the royal palace of a king. So it has been tampered with and tampered with, now in a style intended to represent Gothic, now again in a spirit that does not even lay claim to any name. The interior is therefore narrow and confused.67

The hall is certainly not correct Gothic – a view that was to be expressed a few years later by the young Catholic Joseph Alberdingk Thijm. He wanted to return to the Dutch past: he detested the picturesque Gothic that came over from England, and saw no benefit in foreign art. According to him, the king should spend money on the restoration of genuine medieval buildings in the Netherlands rather than spend it on ‘strange’ (that is, foreign) paintings.68

It has been generally believed that criticism of the king came from the Protestant quarter and that it was directed against the Catholic paintings and against the ‘Gothic’ – Roman Catholic – architectural style.69 It is thus paradoxical that the only person who objected to the contents of the collection was the Catholic Thijm, as mentioned above. Even in the Physiologie, with all its criticism, the king received a compliment for his collection: ‘the only thing that can be called royal is the small but choice collection of old paintings’.70 In other publications the king was particularly praised for his interest in foreign, rather than Dutch, art, in which regard he was unlike his subjects.71

The king went on with his palace extensions, and the Marble Hall that backed on to the Gothic Hall was inaugurated in 1845 (see Fig. 3). This was intended as a fireproof room where the paintings from the Gothic Hall could be kept safe in an emergency. It failed to work out that way for a variety of reasons. The Marble Hall became an exhibition hall and had very varied contents. Flemish Primitives, which had been hung in the Gothic Hall in 1842, were now hung on the walls of the Marble Hall. On its side walls were three colossal paintings: a family portrait by Bartholomeus van der Helst (c.1613–1670; now in the Hermitage State Museum in St Petersburg) and two contemporary paintings with scenes of Dutch history.72

Shortly after the opening of the Marble Hall, Wijnantz must have made his large watercolours (see Figs 2, 3, 7), preceded by many detailed preliminary studies (see online Appendix 1). It remains unclear why they were undertaken: only one watercolour is now in the royal collections.73 Might this have been a commission that was interrupted by the death of the king?74 As we have seen in the watercolour by Wijnantz with the royal couple and the custodian (see Fig. 7), the Gothic Hall looks very private.75 In the other two watercolours, however, the halls are presented as museum spaces, with anonymous, elegantly dressed visitors. Was one watercolour intended as a gift for the queen, and were the other two preliminary studies for a publication about the museum? Were prints based on them to have been added to Carl Wilhelm Mieling’s series of lithographs, published between 1848 and 1857, for which Jacob van Lennep (1802–1868) had written a short introduction? Van Lennep’s introduction is in French, a choice of language that seems paradoxical for so patriotic an author; but it seems that the king’s intention was to make his museum known to foreigners. This laudatory text, which can be read only standing up because of the publication’s huge format, repeats Nieuwenhuys’s comments of 1843 about the purpose of the collection, albeit in reverse order: the public (‘les masses’) is mentioned first – 1848 was the year of revolutions – and then the artists. The publication was intended for people who could not come to The Hague.76

Perhaps the contradictions in the terms relating to the collection and the exhibition spaces can be explained by the fact that these did not always turn out as the king intended. The images give only a poor impression of the wealth of contemporary masters that he must have owned.77 We see a comparable difference between the images and the texts in the matter of North Netherlandish paintings. It seems that almost all were hung in the palace rooms (like the works that were inappropriate for a chapel).78 In the Gothic Hall there were only the three Rembrandts (Jan Pellicorne and his son Caspar and Susanna van Collen and her daughter Eva on the left wall and Titus on the right wall in Fig. 2) – all now in the Wallace Collection – and two portraits by Mierevelt; later, in the Marble Hall, there was the portrait of a family by van der Helst (on the left wall in Fig. 3).79 None of the other works by well-known artists of the Golden Age – Bakhuizen, Both, Hobbema, Ruisdael, Steen, William van de Velde and Weenix – are visible in either ‘museum space’. Did the king imagine that Dutch genre paintings were unsuitable for a room that was also a court chapel?80 Or was it that he preferred to keep them closer by him, in his private quarters? Or did the queen want them nearby?

It is curious, however, that the many early Flemish paintings that hung prominently in the living and working spaces in the Brussels palace (where no ‘museum’ spaces had been provided) played a subordinate role in The Hague, at least after 1845.81 Only the large paintings by Bouts, showing The Justice of Emperor Otto, catch the eye, left and right of the passage from the Gothic Hall to the Marble Hall (see Fig. 7). The emphasis on early Flemish paintings in Nieuwenhuys’s catalogues has created the impression that the Gothic Hall displayed early paintings, and that it had been built in a style matching its contents.82

The watercolours by Wijnantz dated 1846 and 1850 that were rediscovered only in 1995, and thus were unknown to Hinterding and Horsch in 1989, convincingly demonstrate that the hall and its furnishings did not form a stylistic unity, but had the effect, following the English example, of an ensemble that had grown up over the generations.83 In Wijnantz’s pictures, works by Spaniards such as Murillo, Ribera and Velázquez, Flemings such as Van Dyck, Jordaens and Rubens, Italians such as Carracci, Sebastiano del Piombo (1485/86–1547) and Titian, and the Rembrandts are given visual emphasis, through both their size and their placement.

Another contradiction arises in connection with a painting by Wijnantz that appeared even more recently, in 1998; it came from the family of the custodian Victor Amadeo Trossarello (see Fig. 4). This portrait of the king, sitting in his study, with the custodian in the doorway, dates from 1847 and was probably made as a gift for Trossarello: official portraits of princes generally do not show staff.84 This painting in particular presents us with problems. Is it possible that in 1847 in the king’s study, which seems to have been depicted very faithfully – the pen and ink set is still present in the royal collections – there were three paintings that the same artist had depicted on the walls of the Gothic Hall in 1846? They are a shorter version of Van Dyck’s Marie de Raet on the left wall, La Colombine by ‘Léonard’, Rubens’s Tribute Money and, low down behind the armour, Titus by Rembrandt.85 Were the paintings really moved, or did the king – or the custodian – have his favourite works of art displayed by Wijnantz in the royal study? This workroom scene, with its picturesque carelessness, fits better with nineteenth-century portraits of collectors than with those of monarchs.86

The painting of the king in 1848 by Jean-Baptiste Van der Hulst (1790–1864; see Fig. 6) belongs to an older tradition: see, for instance, the portraits by Daniel Mijtens (c.1590–c.1647/8) of the Earl and Countess of Arundel.87 It shows the king seated, in his general’s uniform, this time with his ‘Raphael’ of a Madonna and Child with John the Baptist (now Andrea del Brescianino; present whereabouts unknown), acquired a year earlier, on the wall at the left, partly hidden behind a curtain.88

A royal museum?

Looking at these depictions of the collections, with or without their owner, it seems clear that the king wanted to present his Gothic Hall to the world as a museum, or rather like an English ‘gallery’, a space with paintings only, although it also served for church services and balls. There are domestic scenes – the queen drawing in the ‘private museum’ (see Fig. 7) and the king in his study (see Fig. 4) – where paintings decorate the palace walls. Both these works include the custodian Trossarello, who acted as an attendant as well as concierge.

The portrait of the king by Van der Hulst (see Fig. 6) is, in keeping with an English tradition aimed at presenting the figure with a noble aura. It is worth noting that a later Italian painting, the ‘Raphael’, is depicted here rather than an early Flemish picture. There is the same emphasis on later pictures in the painting by Wijnantz. As important as the early South Netherlandish paintings were initially, certainly in Brussels, in The Hague they had to make way for the masters of the ‘classic’ canon of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Leonardo, Titian, Raphael, Rubens and Rembrandt. However ‘modern’ William II was to start with as a collector, with his interest in Flemish Primitives, he ended up ‘classic’.

The publications about the collections were mainly aimed at a foreign audience, but reactions to them were also positive in the Netherlands, so it is striking that it was specifically a Netherlander and a Catholic, Joseph Alberdingk Thijm, who criticized both the collections and their accommodation. In short, between October 1842 and March 1849 the Kneuterdijk Palace housed a royal gallery-cum-museum, albeit probably not as accessible to the general public as the two national museums were. But neither artists nor foreigners had cause for complaint.

However much the king tried to make his collection function as a museum, he was unable to ensure its permanent existence, which many, such as the members of the Fourth Class of the Royal Dutch Institute (now the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences), thought was a shame.89 Illustrative of the feelings in The Hague is the caption under a print of 1850: ‘The Gallery of His Majesty King William Two the Only One, as it was on 10 August 1850 before the demolition on 12–19 August by His children’.90 The sale was held in midsummer, a time not conducive to the presence of wealthy buyers. As a result, many paintings had to be bought in because they failed to meet the target price. The National Gallery in London was not represented, since the trustees who might have taken the initiative to purchase were in their country houses, and the gallery was also affected by national indifference.91 Wornum, later keeper, had visited William II’s collection in 1842 and had expressed his admiration for the two paintings by Dieric Bouts.92 Some other early paintings did end up in the National Gallery.93

The Louvre was present through an art broker, who managed to seize a portrait by Rubens and a Madonna by Perugino.94 The highest prices were paid by the representatives of the Hermitage in St Petersburg – a total of 136,725 florins for ten paintings, including the two life-size portraits by Velázquez (now attributed to the studio and school of Velázquez), the large Bartholomeus van der Helst, a portrait of an old man by ‘Raphael’ (now assigned to Ridolfo Ghirlandaio), the ‘Leonardo’ (now given to Melzi) and the Sebastiano del Piombo.95

Samuel Mawson, acting on behalf of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, whose private collection is in the Wallace Collection, now a national museum in London, spent the most in total. He paid 173,150 florins for six lots, two of which were pendants, so in fact eight paintings. The marquess later acquired two further pictures, in 1857 and 1870, and Sir Richard Wallace purchased one in 1872. (For the pictures that came to the Wallace Collection, see online Appendix 3.)

Belgian museums directly or indirectly acquired the paintings by Dieric Bouts (Brussels), a portrait by Van Dyck (Antwerp), a copy after Rembrandt (Antwerp), a Both (Brussels) and a Ruisdael/van de Velde (Brussels). The last two had hung in Anna Pavlovna’s audience hall in the Brussels palace in 1837. Via detours, other important Old Master paintings ended up in renowned American museums, including two Rembrandts, one in the Frick Collection and the other in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc (Van Eyck, formerly in the Hermitage). The Städel Museum in Frankfurt was, apart from Old Master drawings, interested in paintings both old and contemporary.96

Some Dutch private individuals ensured that something of William II’s collections remained in the Netherlands: Carel Joseph Fodor bought some important drawings by Rubens, Leonardo and other Italian masters, now in the Amsterdam Museum.97 Two paintings – a portrait by Rubens and a rather expensive Teniers (12,300 florins) – came into the Amsterdam collection via Adriaan van der Hoop (both now on loan from the City of Amsterdam to the Rijksmuseum).98 Some other paintings later ended up in the Rijksmuseum by other routes.99

The sale was held in the midst of the ‘age of national indifference’, which in the Netherlands lasted from 1830 to 1870. As a result, both Flemish Primitives and paintings from the Italian and Spanish schools are particularly rare in Dutch public and private collections.100

Supplementary material

Online appendices at https://academic.oup.com/jhc present respectively: Appendix 1, images of the art collection William II in the Kneuterdijk Palace, The Hague (1842–1850); Appendix 2, a chronological list of the acquisitions of William as prince and king in 1817–28 and 1837–48; and Appendix 3, details of eleven paintings now in the Wallace Collection, formerly in the collection of William II.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Erik Hinterding (Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum) and Gary Schwartz; to the following staff of the Haags Gemeentearchief, The Hague: Sjoukje Atema, Ronald Grootveld and Wendy Louw; and to those of the Koninklijk Huisarchief and the Koninklijke Verzamelingen, The Hague: Francisca Ambachtsheer-Vullers, Geerte Broersma, Steven Coene, Claudia Hörster, Krista van Loon and Bernard Woelderink. And many thanks also to my editor, Emily Lane.

¹

This article is an abridged adaptation and translation of Ellinoor Bergvelt, ‘De kunstverzamelingen en het museum van koning Willem II’, in Willem II: de koning en de kunst, ed. Sander Paarlberg and Henk Slechte, exh. cat., Hermitage State Museum, St Petersburg; Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht; Villa Vauban, Musée d’Art de la Ville de Luxembourg (Zwolle, Dordrecht and Luxembourg, 2014), pp. 82–109, 222–27 (cat. nos. 114–25), 299–300 (cat. no. 202), 317–19, 322, 325. That was, in its turn, an adaptation of Ellinoor Bergvelt, ‘Een vorstelijk museum? De rol van de kunstverzameling aan het Haagse hof van koning Willem II (1840–1850)’, in Representatie: kunsthistorische bijdragen over vorst, staatsmacht en beeldende kunst, opgedragen aan Robert W. Scheller, ed. Johann-Christian Klamt and Kees Veelenturf (Nijmegen, 2004), pp. 27–52; appendices, pp. 53–66. The two appendices there have been updated and translated here; the new third appendix here, about the eleven Wallace Collection pictures, is based on a seminar of 26 April 2021, The Dutch King William II (1792–1849) as Collector and Source of some Important Pictures in the Wallace Collection, in the series Seminars in the History of Collecting of the Wallace Collection. Material concerning William II’s collections of contemporary art, as published in the previous versions of this article, has been omitted here. See also Erik Hinterding and Femy Horsch, ‘“A small but choice collection:” the art gallery of King Willem II of the Netherlands (1792–1849)’, Simiolus 19 (1989), pp. 5–45, 55–122 (the catalogue list is referred to hereafter as hh); Femy Horsch, ‘Willem II: zijn kunstgalerij van moderne schilderijen – en Jacquand’, Oranje-Nassau Museum Jaarboek (1990), pp. 68–80; Ellinoor Bergvelt, ‘Kunstsammlung und Museum König Wilhelms II (1792–1849)’, in Gemalt für den König: B. C. Koekkoek und die luxemburgische Landschaft, ed. A. Pelgrom, exh. cat., B. C. Koekkoek-Haus, Cleves (Luxembourg, 2012), pp. 48–61; Femy Horsch, ‘De kunstverzameling van koning Willem II in Den Haag: een reconstructie aan de hand van de werken van Augustus Wijnantz’, Desipientia 20 no. 1 (2013), pp. 17–23. In 2013 a new biography of the king was published in Dutch: Jeroen van Zanten, Koning Willem II, 1792–1849 (Amsterdam, 2013).

²

Initially, during the Brussels period, William II was advised by the art dealer Lambertus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1777–1862) and his son Christianus Johannes (1799–1883), who also wrote several catalogues of the collection. Later, especially after 1842, William bought from various art dealers and private individuals, guided by his own judgement, which resulted in purchases of lesser quality; Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1).

³

According to van der Laarse, William II’s choice of the neo-Gothic style can also be related to his dynastic and ideological ties with Prussia; Rob van der Laarse, ‘Vorstelijke smaak en vorstelijk verlies: de paleisbouw van Willem II en Anna Paulowna in Brussel en Den Haag’, in Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 134–7. From 1765 Christ Church, Oxford, had an important collection of pictures and drawings, which might also have inspired the Prince of Orange.

⁴

They are illustrated in the online Appendix 1 no. 2b (as Bart van Hove, but signed and dated ‘H. van Hove. BZ. 1842’ – that is, Huib van Hove (son of Bartholomeus, 1814–64), who was the son of Bartholomeus Johannes van Hove (1790–1880)); no. 3b (as Augustus Wijnantz, now attributed to Augustus Wijnantz; 1843 or 1844); no. 7 (by Jean-Baptiste Van der Hulst (1790–1864), 1848).

⁵

The two watercolours (Figs. 2 and 3 here) were published in Reinier Baarsen, ‘De lelijke tijd’: pronkstukken van Nederlandse interieurkunst, 1835–1895, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 78–80, cat. nos. 14c, 15. In 1901 Victor de Stuers (1843–1916) gave the preliminary studies to the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. In 1923 all topographical drawings from the municipal collections were moved to the Gemeentearchief in The Hague, where they remain; Wendy Louw, Gemeentearchief, The Hague, email to the author, 19 December 2022. Two of the preliminary drawings for the two watercolours appear in H. E. van Gelder, ‘De kunstverzameling van koning Willem II’, Maandblad voor Beeldende Kunsten 24 (1948), pp. 143, 144, 146, esp. p. 144 (online Appendix 1, no. 5c, left part), p. 146 (online Appendix 1, no. 5c, right part). Several other preliminary drawings and the picture dated 1847 are mentioned in Bergvelt, op. cit. [2004] (note 1), pp. 45 (fig. 6), 53, 54 (no. 6).

⁶

B. Woelderink, Geschiedenis van de Thesaurie: twee eeuwen Thesaurie van het huis Oranje-Nassau, 1775–1975 (Hilversum, 2010), pp. 77–84.

⁷

See, for instance, J. de Bosch Kemper, Geschiedenis van Nederland na 1830 met aanteekeningen en onuitgegeven stukken, 5 vols. (Amsterdam, 1873–82), vol. iv (1875), pp. 2–4. See also E. Bergvelt, Pantheon der Gouden Eeuw: van Nationale Konst-Gallerij tot Rijksmuseum van Schilderijen (1798–1896) (Zwolle, 1998), pp. 139–40.

⁸

Woelderink, op. cit. (note 6), pp. 59–62. As a guideline, at the time 12 Dutch guilders were roughly the equivalent of £1.

⁹

¹⁰

In July 1814 he became ‘lieutenant general in British service with orders to take command of the British and Hanoverian troops in Brussels’; inventory of the archives of King William II, kha, a 40. On 28 July 1845 he received the honorary title ‘Field Marshal of all English troops’.

¹¹

A. J. Riko, ‘Het glanstijdperk van het Koninklijk Paleis op den Kneuterdijk te ’s Gravenhage onder de regeering van koning Willem II en koningin Anna Paulowna’, Jaarboek Die Haghe (1906), pp. 110 (distribution of tickets for the theatres and the opera), 126 (presents for the children of the court staff on 5 December).

¹²

For example, it often happened that courtiers chatted with the court staff; Riko, op. cit. (note 11), p. 126.

¹³

B. I. Asvarisjtsj, ‘Dutch–Russian cultural relations in the nineteenth century’, in B. I. Asvarisjtsj and J. M. Vliegenthart-van der Valk Bouman, Dutch 19th-Century Painting from the Hermitage and Paleis Het Loo, exh. cat., Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn (Zwolle, 1994), pp. 19–35; Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 38.

¹⁴

Woelderink, op. cit. (note 6), pp. 84–99.

¹⁵

Riko, op. cit. (note 11), pp. 107, 131. See also A. J. Ubels, ‘Een koninklijk architect’, Die Haghe Jaarboek (1966), pp. 51–2; H.W.M. van der Wijck, De Nederlandse buitenplaats: aspecten van ontwikkeling, bescherming en herstel (Alphen aan den Rijn, 1982), p. 386.

¹⁶

Pieneman had produced the picture on his own initiative, and he travelled around England with it, charging an entrance fee to view it. He probably intended to sell the painting to the Duke of Wellington, but that ambition proved fruitless. For a recent discussion of this picture and Pieneman’s travels, see Michael Putter, ‘“A very naive and completely new manner”: Pieneman, history painting and the exhibitions of the Battle of Waterloo’, Rijksmuseum Bulletin 63 (2015), pp. 196–227, 318–19.

¹⁷

The Hague court staff were dressed in fantasy uniforms which expressed not only William’s militarism but, as Riko put it, also his magnificence; Riko, op. cit. (note 11), p. 111. The many dozens of metres of blue and red cloth mentioned in receipts from Tilburg textile firms were probably used for this type of fantasy uniform; kha, a 40-ix 44, folder Rekeningen (Accounts) 1839–45.

¹⁸

M. van der Wal, ‘Krijgsman of staatsman? De oprichtingsgeschiedenis van de twee standbeelden voor Willem de Zwijger in Den Haag’, in Monumentale beeldhouwkunst (Weesp, 1984) [Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 34 (1983)], pp. 50–55.

¹⁹

According to Alberdingk Thijm, the only correct way to portray ‘our William’ was standing as a statesman; van der Wal, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 54–5. For another example of amazement at the equestrian statue, see A. Ising, ‘Een bezoek aan de residentie: vierde dag – Het Voorhout’, Kunstkronijk 9 (1848), p. 91.

²⁰

Horsch 1990, op. cit. (note 1), p. 73, cites the Kunstkronijk (1843–4) which criticized a commission the king had given to the French landscape painter Théodore Gudin (1801–1880).

²¹

E. Bergvelt, ‘Potgieter’s “Rijksmuseum” and the public presentation of Dutch history in the National Museum (1800–1844)’, in Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, cultural heritage and the nation, ed. L. Jensen, J. Leerssen and M. Mathijsen (Leiden and Boston, 2010), p. 177. This term was first used in E. Boekman, Overheid en kunst in Nederland (Amsterdam, 1939), pp. 15–35.

²²

On the marriage, see E. Elzenga, Ja, ik wil: koninklijke huwelijken, 1791–2002 (Amsterdam, 2001), p. 6.

²³

As a result, several tens of thousands of guilders were permanently outstanding; they were occasionally paid off in part only, as was customary with monarchs. The invoices of jewellers can be found in kha, a 40 ix 44, folder Rekeningen (Accounts) 1839–45. The penchant for jewels had not been much less under William I, but payment seems to have taken place more quickly then; see, for example, E. Bergvelt, ‘Koning Willem I als verzamelaar, opdrachtgever en weldoener van de Noordnederlandse musea’, in Staats- en natievorming in Willem I’s koninkrijk, ed. C. Tamse and E. Witte (Brussels, 1992), pp. 261–3. For Anna’s jewels see Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 42–43, 202–5 (cat. nos. 77–80).

²⁴

De Bosch Kemper, op. cit. (note 7), vol. iv (1875), p. 7; and J. Bosscha, Het leven van Willem den tweede, koning der Nederlanden en groothertog van Luxemburg (Amsterdam, 1852), p. 621.

²⁵

Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 28; G. Brom, Romantiek en katholicisme in Nederland, 2 vols. (Groningen and The Hague, 1926), vol. ii, p. 302.

²⁶

De Bosch Kemper, op. cit. (note 7), vol. iv (1875), p. 3.

²⁷

Ibid., p. 476.

²⁸

Bosscha, op. cit. (note 24), pp. 253–4 (on William’s preference for Flemish and Belgian art), pp. 373–4 (on decorating palaces, making drawings himself and on his art collection, a ‘world-famous treasury’), pp. 712–13 (on the collection and its sale). In the first passage the tone is neutral; in the other two completely positive.

²⁹

In January 1842 William II asked what could be regarded as ‘royal property’ in both national art museums (the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Mauritshuis, The Hague); both museum directors skilfully resisted answering this embarrassing question (the director of the Mauritshuis wrote that the minister of the interior had said to him that there was no hurry to answer the question); Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 139–40.

³⁰

See the picture of this visit by Jan Kamphuijsen (1780–1841); Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 168–9 (cat. no. 11).

³¹

It is now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. On Brentano, see R.W.A. Bionda, ‘De Amsterdamse verzamelaar J. A. Brentano (1753–1821) en de inrichting van zijn “zaal” voor Italiaanse kunst’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 34 (1986), pp. 135–76; Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 9 (fig. 5; with an image of the wrong painting by Bellini in the Louvre), p. 15, note 43. With many thanks to Erik Hinterding.

³²

The collection of the Duke of Wellington built on the gift of twelve Spanish and Italian paintings in 1812 from the grateful Spanish people, on the occasion of the liberation of Spain from the French occupier; C. M. Kauffmann, Catalogue of Paintings in the Wellington Museum, Apsley House, rev. edn., rev. S. Jenkins, with contributions by M. E. Wieseman (London, 2009), pp. 9–10; for Wellington’s later acquisitions of Old Masters, see pp. 10–17. The collections of paintings and drawings at Christ Church, Oxford (see note 3), may also have inspired the Prince of Orange.

³³

This gallery was built for the collection of paintings that had been initiated by the father of William V, Stadholder William IV (1711–1751); C. W. Fock, ‘De schilderijengalerij van Prins Willem V op het Buitenhof te Den Haag (1)’, Antiek 11 (1976–7), pp. 113–37; B. Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, ‘De schilderijengalerij van Prins Willem V op het Buitenhof te Den Haag (2)’, Antiek 11 (1976–7), pp. 138–76.

³⁴

Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 12.

³⁵

G. Schwartz, Rembrandt in a Red Beret: The vanishing and reappearance of a self-portrait (Zwolle, 2022).

³⁶

By Johannes Christiaan Schotel (1787–1838); C. J. Nieuwenhuys, Description de la collection des tableaux qui ornent le palais de S.A.R. mgr. le prince d’Orange, à Bruxelles (Brussels, 1837), pp. 108–10, nos. 51 and 52; A. Hoogenboom, ‘Aanteekeningen betreffende de schilderijen door den heer J. C. Schotel, geschilderd van den jare 1817 tot 1838’, in Een onsterfelijk zeeschilder J. C. Schotel, 1787–1838, ed. J. M. Groot, W. de Paus and G. J. Schweitzer, exh. cat., Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht (Zwolle, 1989), p. 99, nos. 55 and 59. In 1825 these paintings had been purchased by Baron H. fa*gel (for 1,200 and 1,800 florins), who had sold them in the same year to the Prince of Orange.

³⁷

Nieuwenhuys, op. cit. (note 36), pp. 111–9, nos. 53–57.

³⁸

Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 21. According to Nieuwenhuys, this did not happen until 1841; C. J. Nieuwenhuys, Description de la galerie des tableaux de S.M. le Roi des Pays-Bas: avec quelques remarques sur l’histoire des peintres et sur les progrès de l’art (Brussels, 1843), p. ii. Van Lennep, apparently basing his judgement on Nieuwenhuys, says the same thing; J. van Lennep, Galerie particulière de tableaux de S.M. le Roi des Pays Bas: planches lithographiées d’après les tableaux des meilleurs maîtres sous la direction de C. W. Mieling, 4 pts. [12 prints] (The Hague, 1848–57), unpaginated [p. 2].

³⁹

M. C. Plomp, Collectionner, passionnément: les collectionneurs hollandais de dessins auxviiie siècle, exh. cat., Teylers Museum, Haarlem; Institut Néerlandais and Hôtel Turgot, Paris (Paris, 2001); Michiel C. Plomp, ‘Een voortreffelyke liefhebberye’: het verzamelen van tekeningen door voorname liefhebbers in de Republiek en later het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, 1732–1833, 2 vols. (Groningen, 2002).

⁴⁰

Erik Hinterding and Femy Horsch, ‘A note on Willem II’s collection of Old Master drawings’, Simiolus 19 (1989), pp. 46–54. This article is omitted from Nicholas Penny, ‘The fate of the “Lawrence Gallery”: Samuel Woodburn and the National Gallery’, Burlington Magazine 164 (2022), pp. 1234–51.

⁴¹

See, for example, Samuel Woodburn, letter to Sir Robert Peel, 3 February 1835, National Gallery Archive, London (hereafter nga), ng5/23/1835; Chancellor of the Exchequer (T. Spring Rice), letter to the Trustees of the National Gallery, 24 March 1836, nga, ng5/26/1836; Report of the Gentlemen appointed by the Lords of the Treasury according to the recommendation of the Trustees of the National Gallery, 4 May 1837, nga, ng5/29/1837: ‘British Museum, May 4th, 1837; . . . We are of the opinion that the Collection of Drawings by Raffaele, and M. Angelo now in the possession of Mess. Woodburn, and which was formed by the late Sir T. Lawrence is fully worth the Sum of Twenty Thousand Pounds’, signed by Henry Josi, H. Wellesley and C. L. Eastlake; Messrs Woodburn, letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, asking for an offer for the Lawrence drawings, 14 August 1837, nga, ng5/31/1837. For a recent comprehensive overview of all the attempts Woodburn made to sell Lawrence’s collection to the National Gallery, see Penny, op. cit. (note 40).

⁴²

Woodburn had shown the framed drawings in exhibitions in London; ibid., p. 1241. Around the same time (1838–44), prints were hung behind glass in the Rijksprentenkabinet of the Rijksmuseum in the Trippenhuis; Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), p. 103.

⁴³

For the drawings sale, see Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 40). The most expensive drawing, Raphael’s Lamentation, was bought not for the British Museum but for the Louvre, for an amazing 6,900 florins; ibid., pp. 50 (fig. 46), 51.

⁴⁴

Journal of Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812–1877), nga, no. ng32/1, p. 16.

⁴⁵

Riko, op. cit. (note 11), p. 95. The organ was also played on a weekly basis for the visitors who were admitted to the art galleries in very large numbers by William II.

⁴⁶

Ibid., p. 96; Baarsen, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 73–8 (cat. nos. 13–14).

⁴⁷

De Bosch Kemper, op. cit. (note 7), vol. iv (1875), pp. 3–4.

⁴⁸

Bosscha, op. cit. (note 24), p. 30; for the two journeys through England, see also van Zanten, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 69–85.

⁴⁹

Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 17–19; Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 141–2.

⁵⁰

Riko, op. cit. (note 11), pp. 95–6: ‘the mistress of Philip II, a colossal piece by Titian’ (now in the Mauritshuis, inv.no. 343, not in Appendix 2, hh 185), and ‘Leda is also a very fine academic picture’ (now Staatliche Museen, Kassel, inv.no. 15, Appendix 2, no. 11, attributed to Giampietrino, hh 192).

⁵¹

They are hh 50, Lambert Lombard (now attributed to the Master of St Michael, private collection, New York, not in Appendix 2; Y. Bruijnen, ‘The Master of Saint Michael: a newly established group of paintings by an artist in the orbit of Bernard van Orley’, Oud Holland 115 (2001–2), pp. 79–110); hh 33, 34, Barend van Orley, present whereabouts unknown, both not in Appendix 2; hh 17, Rogier van der Weyden, the Miraflores altarpiece, Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Berlin, inv. no. 534 A, Appendix 2, no. 39; hh 39 Jan Gossaert (now attributed to the school of Jan Gossaert), present whereabouts unknown, not in Appendix 2; hh 22, Jan Provoost, Hermitage, St. Petersburg (Russia), inv. no. 417, not in Appendix 2; hh 45, Master of 1518, present whereabouts unknown, not in Appendix 2; hh 6, 7, Simon Marmion, Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Berlin, inv. nos. 1645, 1645A, Appendix 2, nos. 7-8; hh 170, Perugino, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 719, not in Appendix 2.

⁵²

A carpenter submitted invoices for ‘hanging’ and ‘moving’ paintings over a great number of days: ‘Voor werkzaamheden aan ZM Paleis’ (‘For work on His Majesty’s palace’), kha, a 40, ix-158, Rekeningen (Accounts) 1823–35. There are itemized bills per day: for example, 25 February, again moving paintings in both the Gothic Hall and the new dining room, 5 days, 6.50 guilders; 8 July, moving, unpacking and installing the ‘Horse of Waterloo’, and installing paintings and more on the instruction of Heer Victor, 6 days, 7.80 guilders; 15 July, unpacking paintings in the Gothic Hall on the instruction of His Majesty and Victor, 4 days, 5.15 guilders. I assume that ‘Heer Victor’ is Victor Trossarello, the custodian of the Kneuterdijk Palace.

⁵³

For a copy after Murillo, made by her before 1816, see Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (note 1), p. 171, no. 18 (M. Putter), inv. no. at/01116; for an armchair possibly embroidered by her, see Baarsen, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 81–2, no. 16 (a matching sofa and chair are illustrated in figs. 16a and b). Paleis Het Loo, Nationaal Museum, Apeldoorn (loan from Koninklijke Verzamelingen, The Hague).

⁵⁴

And given all the later purchases, it seems that he continued to decorate the spaces himself, though no carpenter’s bills from later years have survived.

⁵⁵

C. Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British collector at home, 1750–1850 (New Haven, 1989), pp. 19 (fig. 16), 170 (fig. 146), 199 (fig. 167), 253 (fig. 222), 278 (fig. 253).

⁵⁶

Nieuwenhuys, op. cit. (note 38), p. vj [recte iv].

⁵⁷

Written by Johannes Jacobus Franciscus Wap (1806–80), Johannes Immerzeel (1776–1841), and an unknown author signing as ‘B’. We can assume that the catalogue by Nieuwenhuys and the article by Wap, with an illustration, were published at the request of the king. His Majesty wanted to have a catalogue raisonné of his gallery; Nieuwenhuys, op. cit. (note 38), p. iii. See also B., ‘’s Konings schilderijengallerij’, Kunstkronijk 4 (1843–4), pp. 46–51, which is a Dutch summary of Nieuwenhuys’s text of 1843, op. cit. (note 43); [J. Immerzeel], ‘De koninklijke galerij van schilderijen te ’s Gravenhage’, Kunstkronijk 3 (1842–3), p. 40; J.-J. F. Wap, ‘’s Konings Gotische Zaal’, Kunstkronijk 3 (1842–3), pp. 73–4. The original text of Wap’s article is in kha, a 40, viii-22 (with small differences from the printed text), together with the preliminary study for the illustration; online Appendix 1, nos. 2a and b. Wap had published a piece about William II’s inauguration and the attendant ‘Feesttogten’ (festive parades) a little earlier; J. F. Wap, Gedenkboek der Inhuldiging en Feesttogten van Zijne Majesteit Willem II, 1840–1842 (Den Bosch, 1842).

⁵⁸

The numbering differs considerably from that in the sale catalogue of 1850; Catalogue des tableaux anciens et modernes, de diverses écoles: dessins et statues, formant la galerie de feu Sa Majesté Guillaume II, Roi des Pays-Bas, Prince d’Orange-Nassau, Grand-Duc de Luxembourg, etc. etc. etc. (Amsterdam, 1850) [Lugt 19978].

⁵⁹

In most countries the paintings in museums were arranged by school – a system that had started in the eighteenth century; Debora J. Meijers, ‘Naar een systematische presentatie’, in Kabinetten, galerijen en musea: het verzamelen en presenteren van naturalia en kunst van 1500 tot heden, ed. E. Bergvelt, D. J. Meijers and M. Rijnders (Heerlen and Zwolle, 1993); 3rd edn. (2013), pp. 279–304. This was not yet the case in London’s National Gallery. For Wijnantz’s sketch, see online Appendix 1, no. 5e, Municipal Archive, The Hague, inv.no. kl. A 338. This drawing can only have been created on or after 14 September 1847, since the Madonna and Child by Annibale Carracci depicted in it was acquired then; online Appendix 2, no. 61 (hh 146; present whereabouts unknown).

⁶⁰

Nieuwenhuys, op. cit. (note 38), p. iii (in translation): ‘The arts are the most beautiful appanage of an enlightened country, and their influence on all branches of industry is invaluable, because they give the masses the taste and love of the good and the beautiful in all things.’

⁶¹

Riko, op. cit. (note 11), p. 99. Riko mentions Carel Jacobus Behr (1812–1895), Anthony Jacobus Offermans (1796–1872) and others. Lithographers also worked in the art galleries, including the well-known Franciscus Bernardus Waanders (1809–1880), who was also a painter. Waanders made five lithographs for the publication by van Lennep and Mieling, op. cit. (note 38).

⁶²

On student artists in the Rijksmuseum, see Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 99, 166–7.

⁶³

The queen was fond of her privacy: ‘The king’s private lower rooms and the queen’s apartments could not be seen’; Riko, op. cit. (note 11), p. 99.

⁶⁴

‘’s Konings verzameling van moderne schilderijen’, Nederlandsch Kunstblad 1 (29 June 1844), p. 3, as cited in Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 26 n. 92.

⁶⁵

Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 99, 313 nn. 89–94; E. Bergvelt and C. Hörster, ‘Kunst en publiek in de Nederlandse rijksmusea voor oude kunst (1800–1896): een vergelijking met Bennetts Birth of the Museum’, Druk bekeken: collecties en hun publiek in de 19e eeuw (2010) [special issue De Negentiende Eeuw 34, no. 3], pp. 232–48.

⁶⁶

The author was later identified as W.J.A. Jonckbloet: [W.J.A. Jonckbloet], Physiologie van Den Haag door een Hagenaar (The Hague, 1843), pp. 25–6.

⁶⁷

Ibid. Of course not all palaces were originally built for private individuals. For instance, Huis ten Bosch was built in the seventeenth century for Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (1602–1675), in memory of her late husband Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange (1584–1647). The Royal Palace in Amsterdam was built as the city hall of Amsterdam.

⁶⁸

J. A. Alberdingk Thijm, ‘Twaalfde brief van Pauwels Foreestier’, De Spectator 6 (1847), pp. 177–84, at p. 179; partly quoted in Brom, op. cit. (note 25), vol. i, p. 291. Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 29, mistakenly took this to be an endorsem*nt of the neo-Gothic style of the Gothic Hall. An article of 1850 talks about the king’s ‘(however misguided) sense of Gothic architecture’; R., ‘Willem II’, De Spectator: Kritiesch en Historiesch Kunstblad 9, new ser. 3 (1850), pp. 115–16, as cited in Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 28 n. 100. It is not clear to me why Brom thinks this ‘R’ was Alberdingk Thijm; Brom, op. cit. (note 25), vol. ii, p. 303.

⁶⁹

As I have argued before; Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 143–4. It is true that there are criticisms of early North and South Netherlandish paintings in the first half of the nineteenth century (Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 26–8), cited by the art historians Brom and Marius. Usually, however, these comments are in literary and historical writings, not from connoisseurs of the visual arts. These negative statements in no way relate to the paintings of William II.

⁷⁰

[Jonckbloet], op. cit. (note 66), p. 26.

⁷¹

R., op. cit. (note 68).

⁷²

Hence to me it seems incorrect to say that the Marble Hall was intended for the modern paintings, as earlier commentators have done; see Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 37; Baarsen, op. cit. (note 5), p. 79. For the pictures depicted here, see online Appendix 1, n. 20.

⁷³

Fig. 7 here. It is possible that the other two large watercolours (Figs. 2, 3 here) were originally made for the king, and were bought by the English ambassador in The Hague, Sir Edward Disbrowe (1790–1851), after the king’s death; Baarsen, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 79–80 (no. 15 and fig. 14c); ‘Keuze uit de aanwinsten’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 44 (1996), pp. 130–53, at pp. 138–9. The known preliminary studies have ended up in the Gemeentearchief in The Hague; online Appendix 1.

⁷⁴

As was the case with the two publications with reproduction prints after the king’s pictures by Abraham Lion Zeelander (1789–1856) and Carl Wilhelm Mieling (1815–1903); A. L. Zeelander, Gravures aux traits d’après les tableaux de la galerie de Sa Majesté le Roi des Pays-Bas: des écoles Flamande-, Hollandaise-, Allemande-, Italienne-, Espagnole- et Française-anciennes (n.p. [The Hague], 1848); van Lennep and Mieling, op. cit. (note 38). Arguing against this is that information concerning the problems encountered by Zeelander and Mieling can be found in the Koninklijk Huisarchief in The Hague (see also Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 25), but there is none related to Wijnantz’s works.

⁷⁵

This watercolour must have been made on or after 30 January 1846, since one of the paintings by Rubens shown on the left wall was bought then; online Appendix 2, no. 57.

⁷⁶

Van Lennep and Mieling, op. cit. (note 38), unpaginated [p. 2] (in translation): ‘He did not want to keep to himself the enjoyment of the masterpieces with which he was pleased to surround himself; he understood the influence that viewing and studying so many excellent models could have on the masses, to inspire them and increasingly to strengthen in them taste and the love of good and beautiful things: thus he not only allowed [the gallery] to be open daily to the public, so that artists, having free access, could come and find models and seek inspiration, but he also expressed the desire that those who could not visit The Hague could at least, inasmuch as he could arrange it, get to know the main masterpieces that made up his gallery. The work that we are presenting to the public is therefore only the complement of this royal thought.’

⁷⁷

Among Mieling’s twelve lithographs there are none after early paintings; in addition to the four reproducing contemporary works, there are eight Old Masters (see the introduction to online Appendix 2). Zeelander on the other hand made 183 line engravings after Old Masters, and no contemporary ones. Perhaps the king had provided a separate catalogue for contemporary paintings, and perhaps also a separate room for them?

⁷⁸

For example, Horsch 1990, op. cit. (note 1), p. 71, fig. 2, The White Hall of Kneuterdijk Palace with the Entrance to the Gothic Hall, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Weimar, Gr-2009/8470, online Appendix 1, no. 10; C. W. Fock, T. Eliëns, E. Koldeweij and J. Pijzel-Dommisse, Het Nederlandse interieur in beeld, 1600–1900, exh. cat., Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (Zwolle, 2001), pp. 389 (fig. 352, Een suite in Den Haag, 1837), 398 (fig. 368, Een koninklijke salon, 1848; Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-T-1957-359; see also online Appendix 1, no. 11).

⁷⁹

The Mierevelts (hh 106–7) flank a ‘Titian’ (hh 187) in a preliminary study by Wijnantz, Gemeentearchief, The Hague, no. kl. a 351: online Appendix 1, no. 5c. The family portraits of members of the house of Orange hung separately in the corridor between the Gothic Hall and the North Tower of the Kneuterdijk Palace; Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 37.

⁸⁰

Dutch paintings of this kind were not absent from other princely or royal collections: they were an integral part. Lucien Bonaparte, for example, owned paintings by De Heem, Ostade, Potter, Ruisdael, Weenix and Wouwerman, and the Teniers that ended up with William II; E. W. Moes and E. van Biema, De Nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum: bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 1909), pp. 92–4. I do not know how Lucien’s Dutch (and Flemish) paintings were hung.

⁸¹

Where, for example, were Van Eyck’s Lucca Madonna (hh 2) and Rogier van der Weyden’s Miraflores Altarpiece (hh 17) hung? Bergvelt 2004, op. cit. (note 1); online Appendix 2, no. 54, fig. 4. It is still depicted in 1842; online Appendix 2, no. 2b.

⁸²

Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 21. See also my earlier discussion of this; Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), p. 143.

⁸³

Baarsen, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 75–8 (no. 14). For the English situation, Baarsen mainly relies on Wainwright, op. cit. (note 55).

⁸⁴

The painting by Wijnantz was bought at a sale in 1998, and came from the descendants of Trossarello. In October 1828 he had been appointed custodian of the Kneuterdijk Palace, where he remained until his retirement in 1859. The first time Trossarello is mentioned is in 1828, kha, a40- ix-119, information in an email from Krista van Loon (kha) to the author, 9 May 2023, and a letter with further information from the kha, 23 May 2002. For an overview of portraits of princes in the nineteenth century, see R. Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1975). Princes in their studies were usually depicted alone, not with ushers or custodians: see Schoch, ills. 110–13, 183.

⁸⁵

For the pictures depicted, see online Appendix 1, n. 18. Information about the pen and ink set is based on a friendly communication from Bernard Woelderink of the Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague.

⁸⁶

Wainwright, op. cit. (note 55), pp. 11 (fig. 6), 39–40 (figs. 29–31), 65 (fig. 51), 173 (fig. 148), 178 (fig. 151), 270 (fig. 241), 271 (fig. 242).

⁸⁷

The earl and countess are each depicted, seated, with a gallery of works of art (National Portrait Gallery, London, npg 5292, npg5293); J. Brown, Kings & Connoisseurs: Collecting art in seventeenth-century Europe (New Haven, 1995), p. 22; rkd images, no. 283717, at https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/images/283717, no. 283718, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/283718 (both accessed 13 September 2021). Van der Hulst relined, retouched and varnished fifty-three paintings, including the apostles by Ribera, in 1842, before the latter were hung in the Gothic Hall: Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 25.

⁸⁹

This institute was founded by King Louis Napoleon (r. 1806–10). The sale of William II’s collections was discussed in various meetings of the Fourth Class. They would have preferred to retain the entire collection, and if that was not possible, then at least the work by Hobbema, an artist so far missing from private or public collections in the Netherlands. See the report prepared by the members and correspondents of the Fourth Class in The Hague (J. Z. Mazel, Z. Reyers, A. Schelfhout, C. Kruseman, A. Waldorp, J. Bosboom and the correspondents Meyer and Weenink); Report vi, no. 13, 28 May 1850, Archive of the Royal Dutch Institute, no. 138, Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem, discussed in the meeting of the Fourth Class on 3 June 1850, Minute Book v (1845–51), pp. 285–7, Archive of the Royal Dutch Institute, no. 138, Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem; Bergvelt, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 172–3, 334 n. 81.

⁹⁰

Online Appendix 1, no. 9. The sale was held on 12–19 August 1850; see, for example, E. N. Wornum, ‘Art in the House of Commons’, Art Journal 12 (1850), pp. 301–4; Anon., ‘The Late King of Holland’s collection’, Art Journal 12 (1850), pp. 306–7.

⁹¹

It was not until 1855 that the National Gallery was reorganized; a purchase budget was introduced, and a travelling agent was appointed, who for three years had to search Italy for altarpieces. Before then, the situation was very similar to that in the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis in the period 1830–70; E. Bergvelt, ‘De Britse parlementaire enquête uit 1853: de “modernisering” van de National Gallery in Londen’, in Kabinetten, galerijen en musea: het verzamelen en presenteren van naturalia en kunst van 1500 tot heden, ed. E. Bergvelt, D. J. Meijers and M. Rijnders, 2nd edn. (Heerlen and Zwolle, 2005); 3rd edn. (2013), pp. 335–58.

⁹²

See note 44.

⁹³

A diptych after Quinten Massijs I (1465/6–1530) was acquired in 1857 (National Gallery, London, ng295.1, ng295.2), hh 23–4: see Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (see note 1), p. 232, no. 130 (L. Hendrikman); see also rkd images, no. 54772, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/54772 (accessed 14 September 2021). A picture after Hugo van der Goes (c.1440–1482) was acquired in 1860 with the Beaucousin collection (ng658), hh 52, then thought to be by Martin Schoen (now known as Schöngauer); rkd images, no. 107977, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/107977 (accessed 13 September 2021).

⁹⁴

For the Madonna by Perugino, hh 170, see Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), p. 42 (fig. 39).

⁹⁵

For the acquisitions by the Hermitage, see Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 41–3; hh 120 and 121 (Velázquez, now studio and school of Velázquez); hh 82 (Bartholomeus van der Helst); hh 177 (a portrait by Raphael, now Ridolfo Ghirlandaio); hh 191 (Leonardo, now Francesco Melzi); hh 173 (Sebastiano del Piombo).

⁹⁶

J. Sander, ‘The acquisition of paintings and drawings at the Willem II auction by the Städel Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt’, Simiolus 19 (1989), pp. 123–35.

⁹⁷

Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (note 1), Rubens, pp. 284–5, no. 184 (Michiel Jonker); Leonardo, p. 281, no. 179 (Michiel Jonker); Annibale Carracci, p. 278, no. 176 (Sander Paarlberg). For further Rubens drawings in Fodor’s collection, see M. Schapelhouman, Tekeningen van Noord- en Zuidnederlandse kunstenaars geboren voor 1600, Oude Tekeningen in het Bezit van de Gemeentemusea van Amsterdam, waaronder de Collectie Fodor 2 (Amsterdam 1979), pp. 102–7, nos. 64–7. For Italian drawings, see B. Koevoets, Italië 15e–18e eeuw, Oude Tekeningen in het Bezit van de Gemeentemusea van Amsterdam, waaronder de Collectie Fodor 1 (Amsterdam 1976): school of Leonardo?, p. 13, no. 3; Florentine School, p. 14, no. 4; attributed to Fra Bartolommeo, p. 21, no. 11; Guercino, p. 34, no. 24; Leonardo, p. 38, no. 28; Raphael, pp. 48–9, no. 37. Several Italian and Flemish drawings ended up (mainly via other owners) in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam; Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit (note 1), cat. nos. 177 (Parmigianino), 178 (Correggio), 181 and 182 (Fra Bartolomeo), 185 (Rubens), pp. 290–91 (Albert Elen). Some drawings also remained in the Koninklijke Verzamelingen in The Hague, cat. nos. 176 (Annibale Carracci), 187 (after Leonardo), 188 (a cupboard with a drawing after Van Dyck).

⁹⁸

Paarlberg and Slechte, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 238–9, no. 137 (Rubens; H. Rijpma); see also De Hollandse meesters van een Amsterdamse bankier: de verzameling van Adriaan van der Hoop (1778–1854), ed. E. Bergvelt, J. P. Filedt Kok and N. Middelkoop, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum and Amsterdams Historisch Museum, Amsterdam (Zwolle/Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 67 (no. 5; Rubens; N. Middelkoop), 171 (no. 149), 72 (no. 10, Teniers; N. Middelkoop), 178–9 (no. 181).

⁹⁹

In 1880 the Rijksmuseum bought two paintings that the collector Viruly had acquired at the sale in 1850: a picture by Adam Camerarius (active 1644–59), then attributed to Charles Armand (Rijksmuseum, sk-a-733; hh 109; rkd images, no. 1950, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/1950 (accessed 14 September 2021)), and one by Ferdinand de Braekeleer I (1792–1883), no. 5 of the modern paintings (sk-a-966); Wouter Kloek, ‘Twee Nuyens voor de prijs van één’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 52 (2004), p. 87 n. 4. Kloek also says that hh 15 was acquired for the Rijksmuseum in 1978: an Adoration of the Magi by Jacob Cornelisz. from Oostsanen (sk-a-4706). The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, has four pictures: hh 32 by Bernard van Orley, rkd images, no. 28267, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/28267 (accessed 22 December 2021); hh 77 (mirrored in Hinterding and Horsch, op. cit. (note 1)) and hh 78, both by studio of Jacques Jordaens (I), rkd images, no. 5578, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/5578, no. 5583, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/5583 (both accessed 22 December 2021); hh 83 by Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne and Nicolas de Plattemontagne, rkd images, no. 204353, at https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/204353 (accessed 22 December 2021). In the Mauritshuis is hh 185, a picture after Titian, mh 343.

¹⁰⁰

One other person in the nineteenth century who had the opportunity to collect foreign Old Master paintings (but who did not do so) was King Louis Napoleon. He eventually shied away from purchasing the famous collection of his brother Lucien Bonaparte, and preferred to spend (a lot of) money on furnishing his countless palaces. However, by purchasing a large number of important Dutch and Flemish pictures in 1808 and 1809, he ensured a firm focus on the Dutch Golden Age, while improving the artistic level of the already existing national collection in the Royal Museum (later the Rijksmuseum): E. Bergvelt, ‘Lodewijk Napoleon, de levende meesters en het Koninklijk Museum (1806–1810)’, in Lodewijk Napoleon en de kunsten in het Koninkrijk Holland (Zwolle, 2007) [special issue, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 56–7 (2005–6)], pp. 257–99.

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press.