Sir Constantine Huygens, England, and Holland

Sir Constantine Huygens, England, and Holland IA . G. H. Bachrach Among the untold treasures of the National Gallery, London, there is a small Dutch painting which is not always on show. When it is exhibited, as it is at present, it does not strike anyone as particularly exciting. And this lack of popularity is not really surprising when we glance at it in passing. At first sight, all the picture represents is two male figures in what is apparently an ante-room in a big Renaissance dwelling; the one is seated by a carpet-covered table cluttered up with an odd assortment of objects, the other is standing on his right and handing him a minutely folded letter for which he reaches out. What sort of man the principal figure is, seems difficult to say. He looks like a rich merchant or senior official: dignified, middle-aged, dressed after the dark, severely cut fashion of contemporary Calvinist The Hague. The light from an unseen window in the foreground shows him almost emphatically booted and spurred. A wide-brimmed hat is planted squarely on his crown, and his pale face and gloved right hand are raised to the young messenger. The rest, to all intents and purposes, is darkness. "A good specimen of seventeenth-century genre-painting," is the judgment most often heard. And, indeed, you might put it on a par with any number of its female counterparts any day. Most museums of European art can boast a picture or two of the type. They show you again and again some well-to-do Dutch lady, usually in respectable negligee, reading the billet-doux brought her by a servant-girl waiting more or less discreetly in the background. Occasionally, the subject is an officer interrupted at somewhat un-warlike pastimes by a signal-bearing trumpeter . And, as a rule, these pictures are superbly painted. With that consummate skill of a great school, which marks even the most insignificant of its representatives, each artist depicts his own variations on these continually recurring themes. Interiors are as intimate as they are 143 144 A.G.H.BACHRACH colourful. ~ettIDJ~S Op1.Uerlt. And the Il211res>-:m fixed thea· well-scrubbed· faces-are borbut is this all? Quc~st1on. of course, revolves round the of the effect such a has on us. The average filel7.re·-Dllt'!ce no matter whether in in or in U7...·lh~,1Y us to discriminate. It is characteristic of because of this-it is anonymous. But our is not anonymous . In you will find it referred to as "Sir 1-I",u""",,,,L' and his Clerk." The-date the artist Thomas de To the Constantine at a footnote. He is this because of his translations into Dutch of a number of Donne's poems at a time when the been t-'....u~~'~ in In his own tous of an ext:reIneJlV eltnclent, and a real "virtuoso.~' He was born at The in 1687. this span he knew almost PUF'1"'UI",nrl'u worth and J:mglano, a is COlnct;:rlliea. life of the Dutch "notable" rtD1i1¥O••T"lll"'i"'FA in the National is best eXt~ml)lttied in the contrast between two of his most characteristic when he first went over to J:!Dlglalna fal'ew'ell in Latin verse to his lalllt::Jr1i111U, ,,",n.~"'''''U''''''''''''''IS' Ut modo ne civis sim Britannorum fave!"! SIR CONSTANTINE HUYGENS 145 The other belongs to a period more than fifty years later, when he would send home staccato accounts of his latest trip, reporting on the affability of Charles II and his Queen, the ways of the Court, the charms of the conversation, and the allurements of the bookshops-accounts which he would conclude by proudly declaring that such was the kind of existence he could lead at this latter end of his life, overseas.2 If we ask how we should account for the development implied, the answer is almost classical. At least, it is that to those compatriots of Constantine Huygens, who for centuries have found that they, too, in a sense, went to England at one time "in order not to be a miserable...