A golden age of royalty and seduction
The National Trust has raided its walls to shed light on one of the great flowerings of art and its relationship with the British country house, reveals Nick Trend
Above the fireplaces, on the walls of state rooms, bedrooms and dining rooms and often hidden away in the gloomy, roped-off corners or storerooms of the National Trust’s houses, are some 13,000 paintings. They amount to the greatest single art collection in britain.
True, among that huge number, there are many undistinguished portraits of rather dull aristocrats, of interest only because of their association with the history of the house in question, but there are also some absolute gems, from Titian’s Venus and Adonis at Hatchlands Park in Surrey to works by velázquez at Ickworth in Suffolk and Kingston Lacy, Dorset, and the Canaletto at Tatton Park, Cheshire.
The frustration for the Trust’s curators is that few people either realise what an impressive hoard it has or visit its houses in order to look at art. The point of ‘Prized Possessions’ is to provide a new, more focused context for some of the jewels of the collection. Twenty-two paintings on loan to the Holburne Museum from 13 Trust houses highlight the extraordinary quality and variety of art from the Dutch Golden Age—appropriately, one of the strengths of the Holburne’s own collection—and explore the Anglo-dutch relationship.
From the very beginning of that period—the early years of the 17th century—the english were fascinated by the wealth of new art that was coming out of Holland, from atmospheric landscapes and seascapes, still lifes and interior scenes of extraordinary precision and realism, to new genres of naturalistic portraiture. The star of the show—the 1635 Rembrandt selfportrait from buckland Abbey in Devon—is a reminder that Charles I owned one, too.
Although he never managed to persuade Rembrandt to come to england, Charles tempted several leading Dutch artists to the english Court, including Gerrit van Honthorst, whose colourful portrait of the youthful king is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Honthorst is represented here by his portrait of Charles’s sister elizabeth, Queen of bohemia, who drips with exotic pearls and has an impressive head of curls. She returned to London in 1660, with her nephew Charles II, who was also enamoured of the art of the Low Countries and immediately recruited Peter Lely as the principal Court painter.
The Dutchman from Haarlem had also been a favourite of Cromwell, but his ability to convey a combination of glamour and the knowing look—as seen here in his portrait of a blonde, louche-looking elizabeth Murray shimmering in blue satin— was ideally suited to the new Restoration Court. This painting of elizabeth, Countess of Dysart, later the Duchess of Lauderdale (1648), is on loan from the sitter’s former home, Ham House in Richmond, where, as have several others included in the exhibition, it has hung as part of the same decorative scheme since the 17th century.
other paintings selected for display were collected over later
centuries; they emphasise the dazzling variety of Golden Age painting and its enduring appeal.
Following the logic of the hang, we progress from Petworth House’s moody landscape of about 1663 by Hobbema, whose work would have such a huge influence on Constable nearly 200 years later, to Cuyp’s large and wonderfully luminous view of Dordrecht, with its glassy water hardly disturbed by a gentle breeze and limpid air infused with the warmth of a summer’s evening.
For me, however, the most intriguing and original side to Golden Age art is its bawdy sense of humour and the exhibition includes a run of seduction scenes loaded with the kind of innuendo that the Dutch did so well. Jan Steen’s The Tired
Traveller was probably given its title by a cautious Victorian saleroom; in fact, there’s little sense of fatigue in the leery look of the ‘traveller’, who leans hopefully towards the wench serving him his wine. By contrast, Gabriel Metsu’s The Duet (both this and The
Tired Traveller are from Upton House in Warwickshire) seems at first to radiate harmony and innocence—until, that is, you clock the phallic connotations of the lutanist tuning his instrument as a young woman with a dreamy look in her eye toys with her singing score.
Placed right next to it is Gerard ter Borch’s The Introduction from Polesden Lacey in Surrey. This may have been appreciated by Borch’s Deventer patrons as much for the glorious depiction of the shimmering folds and creases of the young woman’s white-satin dress and the gleam of her suitor’s military breastplate as for its subtexts—most obviously, the old lady in the background, who is most surely a bawd.
There may be only 22 paintings on display, but this is a jewel box of a show. Come to Bath before mid September and, as well as enjoying one of Britain’s most beautiful cities bathed in summer sunshine, you’ll be able to reflect on two other great contributions to world culture and civilisation: Dutch Golden Age painting and the English country house. ‘Prized Possessions: Dutch Paintings from National Trust Houses’ is at The Holburne Museum, Great Pulteney Street, Bath, until September 16 (01225 388569; www.holburne. org). The exhibition will move to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Holland, in October and then to Petworth House, West Sussex, in January 2019 Next week C. R. Mackintosh
There may be only 22 paintings, but this is a jewel box of a show