Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies

The 1st Earl of Bradford (1619/20–1708)
and the Paintings at Weston Park

The Newports had been lords of Ercall and sheriffs of Shropshire since the early fifteenth century. Richard Newport, knighted in 1615, was created Baron Newport of High Ercall in 1642 in return for services to the Crown – services which eventually led to imprisonment, fines and exile. He died in 1650, declaring in his will that his family was ‘dissolved’, his ‘chief house … ruined’, and his ‘howsholdstuffe and stocke sold’.¹ His son Francis, 2nd Lord Newport, who had also been imprisoned and fined during the Civil War, restored the family fortunes under Charles II, who made him Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire, granted him Shrewsbury Castle in 1666, appointed him Comptroller of the Household and Privy Councillor in 1668, gave him the office of Treasurer of the Household in 1672, and two years later created him Viscount Newport of Bradford (Shropshire). Dismissed from his royal offices by James II, he was restored as Treasurer (Cofferer) in 1689² and as Lord Lieutenant under William and Mary, and was created Earl of Bradford in 1694.

The earliest known record of Lord Newport as a collector of paintings comes in 1682, when he was more than sixty years of age. It was then that he purchased fifteen paintings for more than £300 at the sale by ‘publick outcry’ of Sir Peter Lely’s collection and the contents of his studio.³ His most costly acquisition on this occasion was Van Dyck’s portrait of Thomas Killigrew for £83, followed by the same artist’s Sir Walter Pye for £40. He also bought a self portrait by Van Dyck for £74. Most of his other purchases were apparently minor works by Lely himself – some of them specified as copies and none costing more than £10 – but he also bought a ‘landscape of Savary’ (Roelandt Savery) for £25 10s., ‘flowers of Van Heist’ for £35 10s., and ‘A Mort Christ’ for £36. This last was perhaps a crucifix (ivory crucifixes were commonly framed and hung as pictures).

On Christmas Eve 1685 John Evelyn noted that he ‘dined at Lord Newport’s, who has some excellent pictures, especially that of Sir Thomas Hanmer, by Vandyck, one of the best he ever painted; another of our English Dobson’s painting; but, above all, Christ in the Virgin’s lap by Poussin, an admirable piece; with something of most other famous hands.’⁴

There is a good reason to believe that a decade later Newport exploited his royal office to acquire Bassano’s Way to Calvary (NG 6490), more or less as a bribe from the Queen Dowager, Catherine of Braganza, shortly before she departed for Portugal (the circumstances are described on p. 14). Confirmation of his unscrupulous methods as a collector is found in the note by Jonathan Richardson the Younger, attached to a copy of Holbein’s portrait drawing then believed to be of Anne Boleyn:when he [the old earl] was Confin’d with the Gout, a little before his Death, He sent to request of my F. [that is, the great collector and writer, and mediocre painter, Jonathan Richardson the Elder] that he would lend him a Book of Drawings to Divert him, wich my F. comply’d with. The E. sent him back the Book in a few days, but without this Drawing. My F. went immediately to wait on him, & found the Drawing hanging by the Bed side in which he lay, in a Frame of Glass. There was other Company in the Room, so my F. could not claim it at that time; but look’d several times at ye Drawing, stedfastly, & look’d at my Ld. My Ld. stood it, discoursing with him, quite unconcern’d; & in two or three days fairly Sneak’d out of the World, & kept the Drawing. My F. could not claim it afterwards of his Heir … with out accusing Bradford of a most Infamous piece of villany, of which he had no witness.⁵ Something of the personality and the artistic interests of the 1st Earl – and much evidence of his immense wealth and uneasy relations with his family – emerges in the will he signed on 26 December 1699, to which he added more than thirty codicils in the remaining years of his life.⁶ He appointed his second son, ‘Thomas Newport of Inner Temple London Esq’ (born about 1655), sole executor and residuary legatee of all his personal estate, goods, chattels, debts and mortgages, and he clearly had no confidence in his elder son and heir, Richard (born 1644). Especially revealing is the fact that he itemised all his fine silver plate and placed it in the care of trustees as heirlooms, with instructions that his heir was not to ‘intermeddle with more than the use and possession thereof’.

Many of the codicils concern bequests to servants and relatives – some were to increase the dowries of his elder granddaughters⁷ or to secure annuities for other members of his family, especially his grandson Richard Newport.⁸ And there are complicated instructions to his trustees to complete negotiations to buy land in Shropshire to add to the family property. His chief residence in Shropshire was at Eyton‐on‐Severn (a house built in the first decades of the seventeenth century, of which a delightful summer house and barn survive). He wished to be buried in the church of St Andrew, Wroxeter, not far from Eyton, and set aside £200 for a tomb in the chancel ‘next to that of Sir Richard Newport knight my great grandfather’.⁹ His library was to follow his coffin back to Shropshire, and he asked that all his books be carried from London ‘to my old closet within the Dineing Room chamber in Eyton House in Shropshire to remain there’. Some paintings were to go there too, as he directed in a codicil dated 1 April 1701:My will is that the Picture of Sir Thomas Hanmer holding his Glove in his left hand, a picture of Sir Walter Pye, the picture of Sir [page 444]William Killigrew and the picture of Sir Thomas Killigrew (with a Dogs head) that hang in my Dining Roome at Whitehall (all drawne by Sir Anthony Van Dyke) together with my own picture that hangs in my Little Parlour at Twittenham (drawne by Sir Peter Lely) be all sent down carefully to Eyton House in Shropshire to be hung in the parlour there. The first on the south side of the said parlour and the other on the side opposite it above the chimney and there to remain as heirloomes to my ffamily forever. He revised this plan in another codicil of 6 January 1703 (our 1704): ‘Now my will and mind is that that picture of Sir William Killigrew be not sent; but instead thereof the picture of my Lord Chief Justice Lyttleton in his Robes (afterwards Lord Keeper of the Great Seale of England) drawne by Sir Anthony Vandyke.’

In his original will the earl had bequeathed ‘to my Lord George Howard his mother’s picture being a whole length drawne by Sir Peter Lely’, and in addition had given ‘to Col. Charles Godfrey his choice of any other picture I shall have at the time of my decease other than the pictures beforementioned’. Recognising that this latter request could conflict with his plans for the parlour at Eyton, he added a codicil on 26 December 1705 ‘excepting out of’ Godfrey’s choice those pictures destined for Eyton and also, what was perhaps a recently acquired treasure, ‘that whole length picture at my home in Twittenham of the Queene Mother [the late Queen Henrietta Maria] in a hat with Geofrey the Dwarf in it drawn by Anthony Van Dyke’. This is the great painting now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Obviously the earl held Van Dyck in very high esteem. And the idea of creating a Van Dyck gallery to be kept by his family in perpetuity is truly remarkable. But he may also have wished to commemorate in this room his youthful attachment to the Stuart court, and the group of paintings he hoped to keep together may have been portraits of friends and protectors. Little is known of Sir Walter Pye (1610–1659), father of the Baron Kilpeck who died in exile with James II. Van Dyck’s portrait of him has been identified at Arundel Castle, where it was long supposed to represent the 3rd Earl of Arundel.¹⁰ Sir William Killigrew (1606–1695) and his brother Thomas (1612–1683) were both courtiers, poets and playwrights, the latter noted as a wit dear to Charles II and a keen promoter of Restoration theatre. These men were near contemporaries of Sir Thomas Hanmer (b. 1612), who had been, like Thomas Killigrew, a page to Charles I. They were all a few years older than the earl. The Hanmers from Flint were neighbouring landowners to Lord Bradford, and both Sir Thomas Hanmer and his heir, William, feature in property transactions described in the codicils. By contrast Sir Edward Littleton (1589–1645) was a considerably older figure.¹¹

It is clear from the Earl of Bradford’s will that he kept his paintings in Whitehall and Twickenham. With the exceptions of the group destined for Eyton, Colonel Godfrey’s choice, and Lely’s portrait of Lord George Howard’s mother, all passed to his second son, Thomas Newport, who was then well established in public life. We learn from the handsome ledger stone in the chancel of Wroxeter church that Thomas was Commissioner of Customs under King William and Queen Anne ‘upwards of 14 years’. In June 1715 he was made Lord of the Treasury and created Baron Torrington by George I and, soon after, Privy Councillor and Teller of the Exchequer.

The paintings in his father’s Whitehall house were moved to Thomas’s own residence in Surrey Street, where a ‘catalogue of the Pictures of Tho. Newport Esqre’ was compiled at some date between his father’s death in 1708 and his accession to the peerage in 1715.¹² That the collection catalogued here was almost all inherited may [page 445]reasonably be deduced from the fact that the entry for a print (or drawing) of Coypel’s Susanna and the Elders is annotated ‘my own not my fathers’. There were 160 paintings, divided chiefly between the ‘new room’, the ‘gallery’, the parlour and the staircase. The remainder of the collection was housed at Twickenham. The earl had evidently felt a strong attachment to his house there, noting that he had spent as much on improving it as he had on purchasing it. He hoped it would provide Thomas with a ‘convenient country house for him to dwell in’ but made provision that if he failed to inhabit it ‘for the space of two months at least in every year’ it was to pass to the owner of the manor of High Ercall and be sold to enable improvements to be carried out to that house.¹³ It seems that Thomas did live at ‘Twittenham’ and his third wife, Ann, daughter of Robert Pierrepont, inherited it from him. A manuscript catalogue of the paintings is dated 9 November 1719, six months or so after her husband’s death.¹⁴ If we exclude some pictures listed as Lady Torrington’s own property, and 28 ‘India pictures in watercolours’ and 19 ‘fans made into pictures’, there remain some 140 paintings which may be assumed to have been collected by Lord Bradford. These were hung throughout the house, and 90 of them were portraits, including the great portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria already mentioned. Annotations to the Surrey Street catalogue record the transfer of some paintings from town to Twickenham, most of them portraits. There was a ‘beauty room’ hung with eight female portraits by Lely, Kneller and Van Dyck, no doubt created in imitation of the room at Hampton Court furnished with portraits by Kneller in 1692, and the earlier White Room at Windsor Castle, where Lely’s six maids of honour were hung in the 1660s (there were earlier rooms of this type on the Continent¹⁵).

A ‘catalogue’ also survives of the paintings in Lady Torrington’s town house, no longer in Surrey Street, but with much the same works, albeit differently arranged. In the Surrey Street house small and large pictures had been evenly mixed, which suggests that the former were hung beneath the latter throughout, but now more than twenty of the finest cabinet pictures wefare concentrated in the ‘closet’, although there were also larger pictures in that room and other small paintings elsewhere.¹⁶

Lord Bradford’s collection, as we can reconstruct it from the catalogues made for his son and daughter‐in‐law, included not only the great Van Dycks but a large portion of the paintings by Elsheimer known to us today, including the Martyrdom and Stoning of Saint Stephen (fig. 2), the two panels in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the series of the story of the True Cross now in the Städel Institut, Frankfurt. It was indeed especially rich in small cabinet pictures – intricate and exquisite works by Rottenhammer, Brill, ‘Velvet’ Brueghel, Jan Saftleven, Poelenburgh and Van Swanevelt, for example, as well as small scenes of low life by Brouwer and David Teniers, and two pictures by Dou. There were two self portraits by Rembrandt (one of these has been identified as the portrait now in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) and one by ‘Francis Holst’ (Frans Hals), as well as a seascape [page 446]by Jan Porcellis and landscapes by ‘Barcam’ (Berchem) and Claude.

Modern Italian paintings included a Noli me tangere attributed to ‘Carlo Morat’ (Maratta), who died in 1713 and was thus still living when it entered the collection, as well as works by Filippo Lauri (d. 1684), ‘Carlooch’ (Carlo Loth, d. 1698), Salvator Rosa, Guido Reni, Guercino, Mola and the Carracci. The sixteenth‐century paintings were mostly Venetian and believed to be by ‘Georgioni’, ‘Old Palma’, Titian, Tintoretto, the Bassani and Veronese.¹⁷

There was also Cupid shaving His Bow, given to Correggio but in fact a copy of the famous Parmigianino,¹⁸ and a ‘Monaliza’ by Leonardo. It is easy to smile at these, but the catalogues were clearly compiled by someone who was well informed, and they acknowledge copies, works merely in a master’s manner, and anonymous pieces. In general, if portraits are excepted, the better paintings were kept in town. A notable exception is ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross by Bassan’, which hung with eight other, miscellaneous paintings in a room ‘within’ – that is, beyond – the ‘beauty room’. One would have expected it to hang with the Venetian paintings (before long, indeed, it would be attributed to Veronese) but it may perhaps have been thought more prudent to keep this picture in a relatively private setting.

Both of Lady Torrington’s inventories are annotated to the effect that the pictures had been ‘devised’ by the will of Lord Torrington to pass after his wife’s death to his elder brother, the 2nd Earl, for whom copies of the inventories were made in May 1720.¹⁹ The next inventory known to us records thirty‐one cases containing 325 ‘Pictures belonging to the Rt. Honble. the Countess of Bradford which were sent from London to Weston in Staffordshire’ in June 1735, among them ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross’ with the attribution changed from Bassano to Veronese. Lady Torrington had died earlier in the same year, and by then not only had the 2nd Earl died (in 1723) but also – very recently – his son, the dissolute 3rd Earl, who left all unsettled family property to his illegitimate son. The earldom passed to the 3rd Earl’s brother, who was, however, ‘of unsound mind not sufficient for the government of himself’. The Countess of Bradford who had the pictures in 1735 was the widow of the 2nd Earl and herself quite old. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Wilbraham, Bt, and heiress of the fine seventeenth‐century house Weston Park, with all its lands. She must have known that she would not have long to enjoy the collection there but she wished to ensure that part of it at least would stay at Weston. She died in December 1737 and was buried there.

In accordance with the countess’s will, the collection was divided into equal parts, one of which she wished to be inseparable from the house. The 4th Earl’s share had of course to be entrusted to her two other heirs, her only surviving daughters, Anne, who had married Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Bt, of Castle Bromwich, and Diana, who had married the Earl of Mountrath. In the document recording this division some of the paintings are valued. The most highly valued among the 4th Earl’s share was the portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, at £150 – this painting seems to have passed to the Countess of Mountrath – while ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross’ (in the Bridgeman share) was valued at £100, the second highest value given. Many paintings must have been sold either soon after this division or after the death of the 4th Earl (who never recovered his sanity) in 1762. It is at this point that we lose sight of the portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, the Elsheimers, the Veronese and many other major works. Moreover, it is not clear what happened to those paintings, which were intended to stay forever together at Eyton House. But more than half of the contents of the cases that came to Weston in 1735 remain there today.

Weston passed in 1762 to Sir Orlando’s son Sir Henry Bridgeman, the 5th Baronet, who became 1st Baron Bradford in 1794. He spent heavily on improvements to the house, going to Paris to acquire furnishings for it, commissioning the Gobelins tapestries after Boucher, dated 1786, and the marquetry commode stamped by François Gerrard in the same year. At the same date he commissioned ‘Capability’ Brown to improve the park, which was then graced by the Temple of Diana and the monumental bridge designed by James Paine in 1770. He is not known to have acquired old master paintings – he perhaps felt he had enough of them – but he must have commissioned the insipid group portrait of his family by R.E. Pyne and other individual portraits by this artist. The Stubbs (Two Horses) must also have been commissioned, or acquired, in this period.

The 2nd Lord Bradford, who inherited Weston in 1800 and was made 1st Earl (of the second creation) in 1815, had been a crony of the Prince of Wales but he settled down and dedicated himself to agricultural improvements. The letters written by his wife Lucy (née Byng) to her father, Lord Torrington, on their visit to France during the peace of 1802 reveal that neither she nor her husband had any great knowledge or curiosity concerning works of art (Napoleon’s Louvre is hardly mentioned).²⁰ In that same year, on the death of Charles Coote, 7th Earl of Mountrath, Lord Bradford inherited Weeting Hall in Norfolk and with it came some paintings, including two grand sea pieces by Joseph Vernet, dated 1746, which had been commissioned by Mountrath on the Grand Tour.²¹ Weeting was sold to John Julius Angerstein but the paintings came to Weston.

The ‘house frame’ for the pictures at Weston Park, a slightly coarse Carlo Maratta pattern with broad shields between the acanthus in the ogee hollow, is likely to date from about 1810 and probably reflects a campaign of interior decoration. When he was more than sixty years of age, the earl travelled to Italy, perhaps for reasons of health. In Genoa in March 1822 he was persuaded to buy en bloc 27 paintings and 19 bronzes apparently part of a much larger palace collection (the paintings’ former numbers are given). This cost him 300 napoleons, and on 2 April, from the same source, he purchased seven more paintings for 60 napoleons.²² The most expensive item, attributed to Albani, was a mediocre painting of Hippomenes and Atalanta adapted from the famous picture by Guido Reni, which cost 50 napoleons.²³

Under the 2nd Earl, and doubtless prompted by the architectural modifications and consequent redecoration of the house, the paintings at Weston were cleaned, lined, repaired and endorsed with the artists’ names. The frames too were repaired, regilded (often only in part), and in some cases replaced. This campaign was conducted, largely on site, in 1834 and 1835 by George Barker, described as a ‘painter’ (but evidently not very active as such and unrecorded in the dictionaries of art) of Leamington Spa, and later of Coventry, together with his daughter and a gilder, J. Johnson.²⁴

Records of the arrangement of the pictures at Weston during the nineteenth century survive in the form of small, neat manuscript catalogues with numbered diagrams of the walls, which must have been kept in each room for reference by the family and their guests. From these it is clear how the paintings were hung in 1837 after the extensive campaign of cleaning in 1834 and 1835, and also how they were [page 447]rearranged in 1872 after architectural revisions made upon the 2nd Earl’s death in 1865.²⁵ The arrangement of 1872 was somewhat modified in the 1880s, chiefly to create a gallery of sporting pictures in the Billiard Room (created in 1874 and at first hung with a dozen old masters) and in the adjacent Smoking Room, reflecting the 3rd Earl’s passion for hunting and racing and his position as Master of the Horse to Queen Victoria.

There were more than 200 paintings at Weston but the old masters were largely concentrated in two rooms: the Breakfast Room (42 hung there in 1837, 36 in 1872 – the earlier arrangement included a dense concentration of eleven small pictures clustered around the sea piece by Abraham Storck above the chimney) – and the Dining Room (more than 50 pictures hung there in 1837, 44 in 1872). The Dining Room had been converted into what is now the library in 1865 but the amount of space for pictures in the new Dining Room was much the same. Portraits were kept in the old and new library above the bookcases – a common arrangement.

It is easier to follow the arrangements of the paintings than it is to reconstruct the decorative schemes to which they belonged. Weston is a palimpsest of eighteenth‐century revivals. By 1865 a probate inventory reveals that Bedroom E was not only hung with the Gobelins tapestries but adorned with ‘Old Chelsea china figures’, ebony and buhl wardrobes, white and gilt furniture with striped silk upholstery and amber silk window curtains.²⁶ This cannot have been simply a survival. The firm of Baldock was supplying buhl furniture for the house in the 1840s, and genuine antique French furniture was acquired at the same date. In 1868 the tapestries came downstairs, and later in the century, as the cigar smoke curled around the paintings of hunting and racing in the male rooms, delicate French furnishings arrived in the areas where ladies presided – also more imitation eighteenth‐century pieces and the pair of Beauvais tapestries. Much of what we see today, however, reflects the neo‐Georgian taste of the 1960s and in particular that of Mary, wife of the 6th Earl, whose redecoration involved new plasterwork, the exchanging and replacing of chimneypieces and the creation of new rooms out of the Billiard Room and the Smoking Room.²⁷

The 3rd Earl of Bradford, whose sporting interests have been alluded to above, was not only a wealthy man, with more than 20,000 acres (worth over £40,000 per annum in 1883), but a man at the centre of British political life, perhaps less because he was Lord Chamberlain in Lord Derby’s government of 1866–8 than because his wife was an intimate friend of Disraeli. He certainly did not neglect the paintings at Weston.

A manuscript catalogue begun in the 1870s, with pencil notes dating from the 1880s, is written in his hand and shows that he even tried to relate what he owned to the early eighteenth‐century records. But the only modern authority to whom he referred was George Barker, the restorer employed by his father.²⁸ He authorised the publication of Mary Boyle’s Portraits at Weston in 1888, which contains useful biographical information but is entirely without art‐historical knowledge, and then a catalogue, Pictures at Weston, belonging to the Earl of Bradford, privately printed in 1895 (very rare), compiled by George Griffiths of Weston‐under‐Lizard, which is a minimal and amateur affair. It includes photographic illustrations made in Wolverhampton ‘from photographs taken by Mr Bowler of Oakengates’. These include one of ‘Our Saviour bearing the Cross’, the Bassano (NG 6490) in the National Gallery here attributed to Paul Veronese.²⁹

The importance as well as the size of this painting was acknowledged in the way it was hung. It was the centrepiece of the Dining Room in 1837, with three small pictures below it by Teniers, Brill and Molenaer and a dense symmetrical hang of Dutch, Flemish and Italian paintings to either side of it. In the new Dining Room in 1872 it retained its position at the centre of a somewhat less crowded but similarly miscellaneous arrangement. By 1915 it had been moved to the Breakfast Room, where it was again above the chimney, and it is recorded there by a Country Life photograph in 1945. On the death of the 4th Earl in 1915 it was valued at £700,³⁰ more than any of the other old master paintings, although less than Gainsborough’s Viscountess Torrington (£900) or Hoppner’s Mrs Gunning (£2,000). There is nothing surprising in the failure to recognise that the painting was by Jacopo Bassano: indeed it is very different in style from the mature works by that artist represented in other paintings at Weston, but the persistence of the attribution to Veronese is remarkable, and a strong reminder of the isolation of English country house collections.

The first major solvent to be applied to erroneous old attributions given to pictures kept in rural obscurity in the nineteenth century was the curiosity of German scholars. But neither Passavant nor Waagen ever visited Weston. The second solvent was the London loan exhibition. The Bassano was one of six items requested by the Royal Academy for their Winter Exhibition in 1875 ,³¹ but Lord Bradford did not on this occasion agree to lend, and the painting’s true identity did not emerge until it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1960. The third and most effective solvent was an interest in selling, which at the end of the nineteenth century was sure to attract experts to a great house, however remote. This seems not to have been a temptation for the Bradfords until the second half of the twentieth century.

During the 1950s an absurd but spectacular Snyders was sold to an American collector.³² Other paintings were sent to auction in 1963. The Holbein drawing was sold to the British Museum in 1975. The Bassano was sold to the National Gallery in 1983. The Heritage Lottery Fund’s grant to the Weston Park Foundation in 1986 ensured that many of the remaining paintings would remain in the house, but some still belong to the family, and a group of characteristic small cabinet pictures were auctioned in 1992.³³

Notes

The Reynst Brothers and the ‘Dutch Gift’

Gerard (Gerrit) Reynst, one of the most successful merchants in Amsterdam at the close of the sixteenth century, was founder and director of the Brabant Company. He became a leading figure in that company’s successor, the India Company, and was elected governor‐general of the Dutch East Indies in 1613. He arrived in Indonesia in the following year but died there at the end of 1615, not long after his eldest son, Pieter, who was lost at sea on the way to joining him. Two sons survived: Gerard and Jan, born in 1599 and 1601 respectively. They also prospered as merchants and formed one of the most important art collections in Holland in the mid‐seventeenth century.¹ This has been investigated with exceptional scholarship by Anne Marie Logan, and what follows depends largely on her book.

It was a collection of Italian and Italianate paintings and thus, almost certainly, largely the creation of Jan, who by 1625 was living in Venice, where he was known as Giovanni Reinst. There was a notable picture gallery in his palace which was praised by Ridolfi.² Jan maintained close contact with his elder brother in Holland, who was a partner in his trading ventures and perhaps also in his collecting. In 1634 they together purchased the grand house on the Keizersgracht known as De Hoop (still standing, but much changed), and by 1638 many works of art had been sent there from Venice. More followed after Jan died, in Venice, unmarried, on 26 July 1646.³

It is unlikely that Jan Reynst would have purchased as well as he did without advice. The dedication of the first part of Carlo Ridolfi’s Le Maraviglie dell’Arte to him (and in smaller type to Jan’s brother – ‘Gerardo senatore d’Amsterdamo’) suggests that Ridolfi may have had some association with him. Ridolfi noted that the artist Nicolò Renieri had been a friend of Jan, and since Renieri was recorded as owning half‐a‐dozen pictures attributed to Bonifazio, Schiavone, Sustris, Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese which had belonged to Jan, it is reasonable to infer that these were bequests, or possibly pictures of which Renieri, who was active as adviser, valuer, agent and dealer, had owned a share, or, indeed, perhaps pictures for which Jan had not paid at the time of his death.⁴

In the year before he died Jan Reynst emerged as a public figure, first representing the Levant merchants in their negotiations with the States General over the taxation of foreign freight on Dutch vessels, and then representing the States General itself in negotiations with the French, whose navy was harrying Dutch vessels suspected of trading with Spain.⁵ Gerard, by contrast, achieved only a certain prominence in Amsterdam, serving as one of the city’s thirty‐six councillors between 1646 and 1658, the year in which, on 29 June, he fell into the Keizersgracht and drowned.⁶

Our chief source of knowledge of the Reynst collection comes from sets of engravings of the finest paintings and sculptures in it, probably begun in 1655 but left incomplete on Gerard’s death three years later.⁷ The enterprise was perhaps inspired by the illustrations of sculptures in the possession of the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome, the Galleria Giustiniani, commenced by 1631 and published in about 1640.⁸ David Teniers’s reproductions of 244 of the finest paintings in the great collection of Archduke Leopold William in Brussels belongs to the same period, and Gerard must have been aware of this and also of Hollar’s etchings after works of art in the collection of the Earl of Arundel (a collection even closer to hand, since it was partly housed in Amsterdam between 1643 and 1654).⁹ But an even more important precedent may have been the seventeen richly illustrated catalogue volumes of Andrea Vendramin’s collections, compiled by 1627 under the title Musaeo Andreae Vendrameno – perhaps the first‐ever illustrated catalogue of a private museum, although as far as we know never intended for publication. Jan Reynst acquired this collection en bloc (and doubtless with it the seventeen volumes, of which six survive) probably shortly after Vendramin’s death in 1629.¹⁰

Quite why Gerard Reynst commissioned these engravings is not clear. They certainly broadcast the magnificence of his collection, but was he anxious to record it because he had intimations of its ephemerality? Did he [page 471]wish to enhance its value in anticipation of its sale? Was it indeed always primarily regarded as an investment? The mercantile families of Amsterdam had fewer aspirations to dynastic splendour than those of the noble houses of Venice: a confidential and ‘exclusive’ offer to sell the collection had, in fact, been made in January 1650 to Queen Christina of Sweden, apparently with Gerard’s consent, and it was hinted that the magistrates of the city of Amsterdam had made overtures to obtain the antiquities as embellishments for the new town hall¹¹ (in emulation of the library in Venice and the Palace of the Conservators in Rome).

The Vendramin collection was a cabinet of curiosities. There were fossils, shells, plants, gems, inscriptions and urns (including what was claimed to be the tomb of Aristotle), as well as sculpture and pictures, and, indeed, the 140 or so paintings reproduced in the 150 pen drawings of the volume entitled De Picturis¹² seem not to have been especially distinguished. Fewer than ten of them have been identified and none was included among the thirty‐three paintings selected for reproduction in the engravings commissioned by Gerard, although one, a nude woman in a landscape by Cariani, was later presented to the king of England and remains in the Royal Collection.¹³

When, at the Restoration, King Charles II left Scheveningen for England on 2 June 1660, the states of Holland and West Friesland, hoping to secure an alliance, prepared a valuable diplomatic gift. It was clear that paintings would be welcome from the fact that the king had in April reserved seventy‐two paintings in the possession of the dealer William Frizell.¹⁴ So the officials in charge approached Gerard’s widow, who agreed to part with twenty‐four paintings and twelve antique sculptures for 80,000 guilders. Four modern Dutch works were added (including Saenredam’s View of the Groote Kerk of 1648, now in the National Gallery of Scotland, and The Young Mother by Gerrit Dou of 1658, now in the Mauritshuis¹⁵). The ‘Dutch Gift’ was viewed with pleasure by the English court in November. The paintings selected from the Reynst collection were mostly from the sixteenth century, and the majority of these were Venetian. They were no doubt chosen with an eye to replacing the works of this character which had belonged to Charles I and had been sold by the Commonwealth. The chief attractions remaining in the Reynst collection were modern works, among them two masterpieces by Jan Liss,¹⁶ Bernardo Strozzi’s Old Courtesan, Feti’s untraced Vision of Saint Peter, Pieter van Laer’s Ambush, and a version of Guido Reni’s Susanna and the Elders (another version of which is NG 196).¹⁷

Jacopo Bassano’s Way to Calvary (NG 6490) was the largest painting in the gift. Slightly surprising omissions are the more characteristic paintings by Bassano, all four of which were engraved.¹⁸ The Departure of Abraham (see fig. 10) and the Annunciation to the Shepherds (similar in composition and perhaps pendants, the former being the Old Testament type of the latter) may have been overdoors and inconvenient to remove from the Reynst house, but the Entombment (an untraced variant of the 1574 altarpiece) and the Virgin and Child with Saint John (untraced but close to a composition known in a painting once at Chatsworth) would have been appreciated, especially when we recall how highly esteemed Bassano was among English collectors at that date. Perhaps it was known that the Royal Collection already had good examples of Bassano’s mature style.

The paintings sent to England also included Titian’s Sannazaro, Giorgione’s Concert, Parmigianino’s Athena, Lotto’s Andrea Odoni and Giulio Romano’s Isabella d’Este, as well as lesser works by Schiavone, Bonifazio and (as mentioned) Cariani.¹⁹ Standards of curatorship were not what they had been under Charles I, and the portraits by Lotto and Giulio, for example, were not properly annotated in the royal inventory as part of the Dutch gift. Moreover, the new king was not especially careful of crown property. Guercino’s Semiramis seems to have been given by him to his mistress Barbara Villiers (her descendant the Duke of Grafton sold it and it is today in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston²⁰). Jacopo Bassano’s Way to Calvary and two other paintings from the Reynst collection were later recorded in the apartments of his queen.²¹ Worse was to follow. William III exported paintings to his palace of Het Loo in Holland, including Dou’s Young Mother, and senior officials at his court were either rewarded with pictures or not prevented from rewarding themselves with them. The Saenredam mentioned above turned up in the sale of William van Huls, Clerk of the Robes and Wardrobe,²² while the Royal Cofferer, Viscount Newport, soon to be created Earl of Bradford, seems to have obtained the Bassano as a bribe (see p. 14).

The residue of the Reynst collection was sold at the end of May 1670,²³ a year before the death of Gerard’s widow. Gerard’s son Joan (b. 1636), a friend of the artist Karel Dujardin (with whom he travelled to Rome in 1675), was the last of the male line of this branch of the Reynst family.²⁴

Notes