Spencer House is one of the finest surviving aristocratic residences of eighteenth-century London. Commissioned by John Spencer (1734–1783), later the 1st Earl Spencer, it was constructed between 1756 and 1766 as a town house that would proclaim the wealth, political standing, and cultural ambitions of the Spencer dynasty.
The design began under John Vardy (1718–1765), working within the Palladian idiom, but its most striking interiors were created by James “Athenian” Stuart (1713–1788). Stuart’s work marks a pivotal moment in British architectural history, as his interiors at Spencer House constitute some of the earliest and most influential examples of neoclassicism in England. Drawing on his archaeological studies in Greece and his celebrated publication The Antiquities of Athens (1762–1816, with Nicholas Revett), Stuart re-imagined classical forms with a scholarly rigour previously unknown in English domestic architecture.
The Palm Room, with its gilded columns capped by palm fronds, is perhaps the most celebrated of these interiors, a theatrical evocation of antiquity filtered through Georgian refinement. Elsewhere, elaborate stuccowork, painted ceilings, and furniture designed for the house reinforced the unity of architecture and decoration, making Spencer House both a model of taste and a manifesto of cultural identity.
Restored in the late twentieth century, the staterooms now display paintings and furniture under the stewardship of the Rothschild Foundation. More than a preserved relic, Spencer House remains a landmark in the history of British neoclassicism, encapsulating the aspirations of one of England’s great Whig families and the intellectual ambitions of the architects who shaped its design.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Titus, the Artist’s Son, 1657. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 57.3 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Titus, the Artist’s Son, 1657. Oil on canvas, 68.5 × 57.3 cm. The Wallace Collection, London
In November 1655, a fourteen-year-old boy in Amsterdam sat down to make a will. The boy was Titus van Rijn (1641–1668), and the will named his father, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), as sole heir, a legal manoeuvre designed to shield what remained of the family’s assets from the painter’s creditors (Crenshaw, 2006, pp. 68–69). It was an act that no child should have needed to perform. What kind of adolescence produces a testamentary document before a first commission, a first love, or a first independent thought? Titus was not yet fifteen. Within months, in July 1656, Rembrandt would apply for cessio bonorum, the formal surrender of goods to the municipal authorities, and the household on the Sint Anthonisbreestraat would begin its slow dismantlement. It is somewhere in the wake of that collapse, around 1657, that Rembrandt painted this portrait.
The painting belongs to a concentrated period in which Rembrandt, stripped of legal competence over his own affairs, could no longer sell his own work. By 1660, Titus and Rembrandt’s companion Hendrickje Stoffels (c.1626–1663) would establish a formal company dealing in paintings, prints and curiosities, hiring Rembrandt as their employee. The arrangement was a legal fiction, but an effective one: it allowed the painter to continue working while his earnings were insulated from further claims. At the time this portrait was made, then, Titus was already something more than a sitter. He was the person on whom the practical survival of the household depended, a teenager carrying obligations that would have been heavy for a grown man.
Rembrandt dresses him in a sixteenth-century Venetian costume, complete with a gold chain and a soft red beret from which loose curls spill forward. The costume was drawn from the painter’s own collection of studio props, which the 1656 inventory had meticulously catalogued before it was all sold off. There is something pointed, perhaps even defiant, about cloaking one’s near-penniless son in the garments of a wealthy merchant. Was this aspiration, irony, or simply the habitual reach of a painter who had always thought in terms of borrowed roles? The question hangs over the image without resolution.
The face, however, refuses all theatre. Lit from the left, with strong shadow falling across the right side and pooling beneath the brim of the beret, Titus looks out with an expression that resists easy paraphrase. It is not quite sadness, not quite composure, not quite absence. The gaze is steady but slightly lowered, and the paint itself, applied in thin, dragged strokes across the forehead and thicker impasto along the bridge of the nose, seems to hesitate between precision and vulnerability. Rembrandt restricts himself to a narrow range of browns, ochres and dark reds, so that the warm accents in the hair, lips and beret are the only notes of colour in a field of near-monochrome shadow. Lelia Packer, Curator of Dutch and Pre-1600 Paintings at the Wallace Collection, has drawn attention to the economy of means here, noting how a single stroke of the brush along the right shoulder is sufficient to define the entire fall of the fabric (Packer, 2019).
It is worth pausing over the category of image this represents, because it does not quite settle into any one genre. Rembrandt painted Titus repeatedly in the 1650s and 1660s, and across these likenesses the boy appears variously as himself, as a figure type, and as something closer to what the Dutch would have recognised as a tronie, a character study in which individual likeness serves a broader pictorial purpose. The earlier Titus at His Desk (1655, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) shows a younger, softer child absorbed in reading; the later Titus as a Monk (1660, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) places him in a Franciscan habit, where the identification as Titus has itself been questioned. The Wallace Collection portrait sits between these poles. The Venetian costume distances the image from straightforward portraiture, yet the face is so particular, so clearly observed, that the viewer cannot treat it as a stock figure. Does it matter whether Rembrandt intended this as a portrait for the market or as a private record? The two categories were never as separate in seventeenth-century Amsterdam as modern viewers tend to assume, and Rembrandt, more than most, moved freely across that boundary.
The family history shadowing the picture is well known but still difficult to absorb. Titus was the only surviving child of Rembrandt’s marriage to Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642), whose three previous children had all died in infancy. Saskia herself died in 1642, barely a year after Titus’s birth, leaving a will that granted Rembrandt the usufruct of her estate on condition that he did not remarry (Schwartz, 2006, p. 188). This stipulation shaped the remainder of Rembrandt’s domestic life: his relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels, which produced a daughter, Cornelia (b. 1654), could never be formalised without forfeiting Titus’s inheritance. Hendrickje died in 1663. Titus himself married Magdalena van Loo (1641–1669) in February 1668 but died that September, probably of plague, before the birth of his daughter, Titia, in March 1669. Rembrandt followed his son to the grave on 4 October 1669 and was buried in the Westerkerk.
The painting’s own later history carries a quieter but instructive drama. It was acquired by Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870), at the sale of the collection of King Willem II of the Netherlands in The Hague in 1850, for 6,000 florins. When the Wallace Collection was bequeathed to the British nation by Lady Wallace in 1897, twelve paintings were accepted as autograph Rembrandts. Over the following century, one after another fell to connoisseurial scrutiny. By 1986, as the Rembrandt Research Project continued its rigorous programme of disattribution, this portrait of Titus was the only painting in the collection to have retained an uncontested attribution to Rembrandt himself (Van de Wetering, 2014). Christopher Brown subsequently restored several other works to Rembrandt’s hand, including the Self-Portrait in a Black Cap (c.1637), which now hangs opposite the Titus in the same first-floor gallery, creating a silent dialogue between father and son across the room. But the fact remains that for a decade, this single painting was the only genuine Rembrandt the Wallace Collection could claim.
Today the canvas sits inside a heavy nineteenth-century frame whose ornamental excess sits uneasily against the restraint of the image it contains. The gilded scrollwork and raised moulding belong to a different sensibility altogether, one that wanted old master paintings to look expensive. Whether the Wallace Collection would ever consider reframing is another question, but the contrast is instructive: it shows how thoroughly later taste can misread the intentions of a painting that works precisely through reduction, through the refusal of decorative surplus.
What remains, when the frame and the biography and the attribution history are set aside, is a picture of a boy who had no business looking this old. Rembrandt does not sentimentalise him and does not heroicise him. He simply paints what is there: a face shaped by circumstance, lit by a narrow fall of light, and held in a silence that the viewer is left to interpret for themselves.
References
Crenshaw, P. (2006) Rembrandt’s Bankruptcy: The Artist, His Patrons, and the Art Market in Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwartz, G. (2006) Rembrandt’s Universe: His Art, His Life, His World. London: Thames & Hudson
Strauss, W. and Van der Meulen, M. (eds.) (1979) The Rembrandt Documents. New York: Abaris Books
Van de Wetering, E. (2014) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited – A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt , Portrait of Titus, c. 1657. RKDimages, image no. 232768. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/232768 (Accessed: 26 June 2023)
Beneath the present church lies a small exhibition that charts the site’s long and complex history. For nearly nineteen centuries this ground has borne successive layers of London’s past, beginning with a Roman villa, the remains of which still survive in tessellated flooring uncovered below the crypt. Upon these Roman foundations a Saxon church was established, and in the following centuries a sequence of medieval buildings arose, rebuilt or substantially altered in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 17th centuries.
The church suffered devastating damage during the Second World War, and what remained was reconstructed in the 1950s by Lord Mottistone of the firm Seely & Paget. The surviving walls and crypt, combined with the results of archaeological investigation, reveal a palimpsest of architectural forms spanning the Roman, Saxon, medieval, and modern eras. Among the objects displayed are fragments of fine Baroque memorial tablets that once adorned the interior, testimony to the church’s role as a place of civic memory as well as worship.
All Hallows by the Tower, City of London.All Hallows by the Tower, City of London.All Hallows by the Tower, City of London.
Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532), Adam and Eve, c.1520. Oil on oak, 166.5 × 109 cm. The Royal Collection, on long-term loan to The National Gallery, London
Jan Gossaert (c.1478–1532), Adam and Eve, c.1520. Oil on oak, 166.5 × 109 cm. The Royal Collection, on long-term loan to The National Gallery, London
Gossaert’s Adam and Eve belongs to a long Northern tradition in which the unclothed human body was framed less as a celebration of beauty than as a vehicle for moral instruction. Since the fifteenth century, artists in the Low Countries and Germany had developed a visual language in which nudity was bound to the Fall, serving to articulate themes of sin, desire and human frailty. This work, painted around 1520, engages directly with that tradition while also introducing new Italianate elements derived from Gossaert’s exposure to Renaissance art during his travels to Italy in the entourage of Philip of Burgundy.
The composition is rich in symbolic detail. The Tree of Knowledge rises at the centre, its branches twined with the serpent, while Adam reaches for the fruit held out by Eve. Beneath them grow columbine, associated with the fear of God, and sea holly, prized for its aphrodisiac qualities—a juxtaposition that crystallises the tension between reverence and sensual appetite. The setting expands into a landscape of Eden, with the Fountain of Life as its focal point, anchoring the figures within a theological geography of paradise and loss.
The influence of Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve engraving of 1504 is evident, as is Gossaert’s awareness of Marcantonio Raimondi’s prints after Raphael. Yet the result is not a mere adaptation. Gossaert’s nudes, though often described as awkward in their proportions, possess a sculptural weight and a heightened expressiveness in their faces that distinguish them from both Italian prototypes and the smoother idealisations of his Netherlandish contemporaries.
In this way the painting fuses Northern moral didacticism with Italian notions of the antique body. The nude here is neither purely classical nor wholly medieval in conception, but a hybrid form through which Gossaert explored the human condition: vulnerable, fallible, and suspended between physical desire and divine command.
Bibliography
Ainsworth, M.W. (ed.) (2010) Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bass, M.A. (2016) Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
In the summer of 1638, Rembrandt was living with his wife Saskia van Uylenburgh (1612–1642) in rented rooms on the Binnen Amstel in Amsterdam, in a house known locally as the Suikerbackerij, the Confectionery. By then he was the most sought-after painter in the city, managing a busy workshop and negotiating the final stages of his Passion series for Stadholder Frederick Henry (1584–1647), a commission brokered by the state secretary and connoisseur Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and the most prestigious that the young painter had yet received. On 22 July 1638, Saskia gave birth to a daughter christened Cornelia, named for Rembrandt’s mother. Three weeks later, on 13 August, the infant was buried. She was their second child to die: their firstborn son Rumbartus, baptised in December 1635, had survived barely two months. A second daughter, also named Cornelia, born in July 1640, would likewise live only days. Somewhere in the midst of this year of professional triumph and private grief, Rembrandt signed and dated, on the face of the tomb itself, a small panel painting of the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden.
The painting takes its subject from John 20:11–18, the most circumstantial of the gospel accounts of the events at the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene has stayed behind alone after Peter and the beloved disciple have departed. Weeping, she stoops to look inside the sepulchre and sees two angels seated where the body had lain. She turns, and finds a man standing behind her whom she takes to be the gardener. ‘Sir,’ she says, ‘if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him.’ He speaks a single word, her name, and she recognises him. Most painters who treated this episode chose the moment that follows: the Noli me tangere, the risen Christ’s command to Mary not to touch him, which offered a dramatic exchange of gestures and a visually legible confrontation between sacred and human bodies. Rembrandt does something different, and arguably more difficult. He pauses the narrative a beat earlier, at the instant before recognition breaks through. Mary kneels, twisting her body towards a figure she has not yet understood, her face lit with searching expectation. The scene is held at the threshold of a disclosure that has not yet occurred, and the painting’s psychological force depends on this suspension.
Christ stands in the centre of the composition, directly aligned with the distant silhouette of a temple-like structure evoking Jerusalem, so that his partially silhouetted vertical form draws the eye upward from the dark mouth of the tomb to the first light of dawn. He is dressed as a working gardener: broad-brimmed hat, a spade in one hand, a pruning knife tucked into his belt. This iconography was not Rembrandt’s invention. The motif of Christ as gardener had circulated in northern European art since at least the early fifteenth century and had been codified in printed bibles produced in the Low Countries between 1481 and 1540, where gardening implements, a wide hat, and a city in the background were standard attributes. Albrecht Dürer’s (1471–1528) woodcut of the Noli me tangere from the Small Passion (1509–11) shows Christ holding a hoe with a halo, while Lucas van Leyden’s (c. 1494–1533) engraving of the subject includes the gardener’s hat, the ointment jar, a tree, and a distant city. Rembrandt almost certainly owned impressions of both prints: his 1656 insolvency inventory records a substantial collection of works by Dürer and Lucas. But where these earlier images tend to present Christ in a costume that sits lightly over an already divine figure, Rembrandt takes the disguise seriously. His Christ is a sturdy man dressed for labour, his sleeves pushed to the elbow, his robe belted for movement. The shovel is not a prop; it is at the ready.
Behind Christ and Mary Magdalene stands a tree, a detail that Rembrandt inherits from earlier iconographies but that carries a particular weight in the Reformed exegetical tradition. As Bobbi Dykema has argued in her study of this painting as a Calvinist visual typology, the tree deliberately invokes the tree behind Adam and Eve in images of the Fall, casting Christ and Mary as a new Adam and a new Eve. The garden of Arimathea becomes a second Eden, and the gardener is recast as the cultivator of a restored creation. This typological layering, in which Old Testament and New Testament episodes are figured as mirroring one another, was central to Reformed preaching and to Dutch bible illustration. Whether Rembrandt consciously intended the parallel or simply absorbed it from the visual and textual culture around him is an open question, but the composition encourages the reading: the tree leans over the two figures like a silent witness, and the neatly trimmed box hedge in the foreground establishes the setting as a tended, purposeful garden rather than a wilderness.
Rembrandt enriches the composition with secondary episodes drawn from the synoptic gospels rather than from John alone. Two angels keep vigil at the empty tomb, their pale forms barely distinguishable from the rock. On the left, two women descend a flight of steps, a detail that corresponds to the three Marys mentioned in Mark and Luke rather than to John’s account, which names only Mary Magdalene. Their presence is a quiet liberty, a compression of separate gospel traditions into a single pictorial field. Beyond them, in the dim half-light, the apostles are already departing, their silhouettes receding towards the city. The sky above flushes with the first light of dawn, and this opalescent radiance picks out, selectively, the towers of the Temple of Jerusalem, the upper half of Christ’s figure, and the upturned face of the Magdalene.
The paint itself is thin, almost monochrome, as though Rembrandt were working close to the tonal register of a drawing or an etching. Colour is withheld from most of the surface and released only in the warm tones of Mary’s mantle and the cool blaze of Christ’s robe, so that light does the work of declaring significance.
The painting is one of only two occasions on which Rembrandt treated this subject. The second, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, is dated 1651 and is compositionally and tonally different: there Christ appears without the gardener’s attributes, in his burial shroud, and the mood is quieter, more intimate, less staged. The Rembrandt Research Project catalogued the Greenwich panel as no. A 124 in volume III of the Corpus (1989) and as no. 158 in volume VI (2015), confirming its autograph status. It is signed and dated, somewhat indistinctly, on the tomb at right: Rembrandt ft. 1638.
The year 1638 placed this painting at a significant junction in Rembrandt’s development. He was completing the Resurrection for the Passion series, the final work to be delivered to the Stadholder’s gallery at the Binnenhof in The Hague. In a letter to Huygens, Rembrandt had already suggested that the Ascension would ‘show to the best advantage in the gallery of His Excellency since there is a strong light there’, evidence that he was thinking carefully about how his religious paintings would function in specific settings. The Greenwich panel, by contrast, is a small, private picture, intended for close looking. Its restrained palette and intimate scale suggest a work made for domestic devotion or for a particular patron rather than for display, and the thinness of the paint, which approaches grisaille in places, gives it something of the contemplative character of Rembrandt’s etchings of biblical subjects. This was also the period in which Rembrandt was painting Belshazzar’s Feast (c. 1635–38, National Gallery, London) and the Landscape with a Stone Bridge (c. 1638, Rijksmuseum), works that show him moving between dramatic spectacle and quiet observation with unusual freedom. What links them is not a single style but an attention to the fall of light, to the way illumination discovers form and gives it meaning.
The contrast between the darkness surrounding the tomb and the arriving dawn is the painting’s central organising principle, and it is at once physical and theological. In the Reformed tradition, the sunrise at Easter carried a specific typological charge: it was the dawn not merely of a new day but of a new dispensation, the visible analogue of the passage from death to life, from the old covenant to the new. Rembrandt handles this with characteristic understatement. The light does not stream from the risen body, as it does in many Italian and Flemish treatments; it enters from the left as the natural light of morning, falling equally on Christ and on Mary. There is no supernatural aureole, no emanation. The risen Christ is lit as a gardener would be lit, standing in a garden at first light, and the theological claim is embedded in the ordinary world rather than imposed upon it. Whether this reflects a specifically Calvinist sensibility, a personal temperament, or simply a painter’s instinct for the way light actually works in the early hours is one of those questions that the painting raises without resolving.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, 1638, oil on oak panel, 61 × 50 cm, The Queen’s House, Greenwich
References
Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S.H., van Thiel, P.J.J. and van de Wetering, E. (1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. III: 1635–1642. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project).
Dykema, B. (2012) ‘Woman, Why Weepest Thou? Rembrandt’s 1638 Noli me tangere as a Dutch Calvinist Visual Typology’, in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages through the Baroque. Leiden: Brill
Klessmann, R. (1988) ‘Rembrandts “Noli Me Tangere” — Mit den Augen eines Dichters gesehen’, Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, 27, pp. 89–100
McNamara, S. (2015) Rembrandt’s Passion Series. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Perlove, S. and Silver, L. (2009) Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, 1638. RKDimages, image no. 47566. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/47566 (Accessed: 20 June 2023).
Van de Wetering, E. (2011) ‘Rembrandt — The risen Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene [“Noli me tangere”]’, in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. V. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project), pp. 516 ff.
Van de Wetering, E. (2015) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. VI. Dordrecht: Springer (Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project), no. 158.
Lodewijk van der Helst (1642–1693), Portrait of Willem van de Velde the Younger, Oil on canvas, 103 × 91 cm. Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich, London, on loan from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Lodewijk van der Helst (1642–1693), Portrait of Willem van de Velde the Younger, Oil on canvas, 103 × 91 cm. Queen’s House, Royal Museums Greenwich, London, on loan from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
On 12 January 1674 Charles II (1630-1685) ordered the Treasurer of the Navy to pay a father and son from Holland a hundred pounds a year each, the father for making draughts of sea fights, the son for putting those draughts into colours for the king’s use. The warrant describes a division of labour that Willem van de Velde the Elder (1610/11 – 13 December 1693) and Willem van de Velde the Younger (baptised 18 December 1633 – 6 April 1707) had operated in Amsterdam for two decades before they crossed the North Sea: the father recorded fleets and battles in drawings, the son turned the drawings into paintings. Van der Helst’s portrait of the son makes exactly this arrangement its subject. The sitter holds one of the firm’s drawings and points to the signature painted on the sheet, a depicted signature that the academic literature notes could read as his own or as his father’s, and the picture is honest about the fact that no one was meant to care which. The portrait is usually captioned 1672 and read as a farewell image from the year of the Dutch collapse, and both the date and the reading are weaker than their repetition suggests; what the picture actually documents, with some precision, is how a signature functioned in a family business.
The caption date has a traceable and unimpressive origin. A dating of 1672 would place the portrait in the Rampjaar [Disaster Year], when France, England, Münster and Cologne attacked the Republic simultaneously, Holland flooded its polders against the French advance, and the Amsterdam art market, weakened by years of oversupply, largely stopped functioning (Daalder 2016). The Rijksmuseum’s record gives no support for it. So far as that record shows, the canvas is neither signed nor dated by Van der Helst; the museum dates it broadly to 1660–1672, and the scholarship attached to the Greenwich loan prefers the late 1660s on style. The year 1672 is simply the upper bound of the museum’s bracket, set there because it was the sitter’s last full year in Amsterdam, and repetition has hardened a biographical end point into an inscribed date, the same process by which undated vanitas still lifes acquire plague years. On the record as it stands, the portrait shows a successful Amsterdam painter at an undetermined moment in the decade before the crash, and the farewell reading is something later viewers have added because they know what happened next.
The undocumented commission sits inside a documented working relationship, which removes most of its mystery. Lodewijk van der Helst was the son of Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613- 1670), among the most sought-after portraitists in Amsterdam at mid-century, patronised by the regent class and the militia companies, and he trained in the family shop and painted in its manner (Van Gent 2011). It is known that Willem van de Velde the Younger painted the sea backgrounds in Van der Helst portraits on a number of occasions. One workshop dynasty supplied faces, the other supplied water, and the arrangement had run long enough to be routine.
The depicted signature carries the weight of the picture, and its ambiguity was a fact of commerce before it became a pictorial conceit. The son’s earliest paintings, made in the Amsterdam studio in the 1650s, were signed by the father as head of the workshop, so that a Van de Velde signature warranted the shop and identified a hand only incidentally. The father’s drawings were the firm’s capital, made at sea from a small vessel stationed among the fleets during the battles of the Anglo-Dutch wars, and the son’s paintings were manufactured downstream of them (Daalder 2016). The drawing in the portrait belongs to that stock, its long horizontal format the workshop’s standard for laying out a fleet hull by hull. A sitter who wished to be portrayed as an individual talent had other options available, and the finest of them was his own: by the 1660s the younger Van de Velde painted calm water better than anyone in Europe, with effects of light and stillness the father’s pen technique could not reach (Robinson 1990). He chose to be shown instead with the firm’s raw material and the firm’s name, the input rather than the output, and whether that choice records filial piety or accurate reporting is a distinction without much difference in this family.
The emigration, when it came, had more motives on record than the economic one. Charles II issued a declaration in 1672 encouraging Dutch subjects to settle in England, and the Greenwich scholarship counts among the family’s reasons the death of the sitter’s brother Adriaen van de Velde (1636 – January 1672), a landscape painter of real gifts dead at thirty-five, and the breakdown of the father’s marriage, attributed in that literature to his own infidelity; he settled in England and died in London in December 1693 without returning to his wife. The politics of the move troubled the period less than a modern reader expects. The firm had spent twenty years recording Dutch fleets in action against England, the father had drawn the burning of the Royal James at Solebay in May 1672 from the Dutch side, and by the mid-1670s the workshop was laying out tapestry designs in the Queen’s House celebrating English successes over his countrymen, with an order of 1675 for blinds in the ground-floor painting room. Loyalty in the seventeenth-century art trade followed the commission, and the terms confirm how the acquisition was valued: the salary has been noted as equivalent to Peter Lely’s (1618–1680), the king’s Principal Painter, and the Greenwich studio stood within sight of the royal dockyards at Deptford and Woolwich.
The son’s independence, when it finally arrived, arrived through the same accounting that had once submerged him. The 1674 warrant paid him separately, named him separately, and defined his stage of the work as his own, which the Amsterdam signatures never had. He had trained under his father and then with Simon de Vlieger (c.1601–1653); a marriage at nineteen to Petronella le Maire in 1652 ended in dissolution proceedings within about two years, and he married Magdalena Walraven in 1656. The portrait, whenever in the 1660s it was painted, caught him in the years between escapes, an independent master by any measure of skill who still presented himself holding his father’s kind of drawing. The Rijksmuseum acquired the canvas by purchase in 1906, and the present loan places it a few rooms from the parlour where the blinds were fitted so that a father and son from Holland could paint English victories in a good light.
References
Daalder, R. (2016) Van de Velde & Son, Marine Painters. The Firm of Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem van de Velde the Younger, 1640–1707, trans. M. Hoyle. Leiden: Primavera Pers
Israel, J.I. (1995) The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Robinson, M.S. (1990) The Paintings of the Willem van de Veldes, 2 vols. London: National Maritime Museum
Royal Museums Greenwich (2023) The Van de Veldes. Greenwich, Art and the Sea. London: Royal Museums Greenwich. [Exhibition publication, Queen’s House, 2 March 2023 – 14 January 2024; editorship to be confirmed from the volume.]
Van Gent, J. (2011) Bartholomeus van der Helst (ca. 1613–1670). Een studie naar zijn leven en zijn werk [Bartholomeus van der Helst (c.1613–1670). A Study of his Life and Work]. Zwolle: Waanders
St Magnus-the-Martyr stands at the northern end of the medieval London Bridge and was among the fifty-one parish churches rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666. Wren’s design here follows the formula that became characteristic of his post-Fire parish churches: a strongly rectangular plan, ordered fenestration that admits abundant light, and an interior unified as a single space, suited to Anglican liturgy with its dual emphasis on sermon and sacrament. The interior is enriched with finely executed woodcarvings and a two-tier reredos, features that emphasise proportion, clarity, and controlled Baroque ornament rather than the vertical intricacy of the Gothic tradition.
The iconography of St Magnus-the-Martyr is unusually layered. The stained glass recalls the long-lost chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury, which once stood at the very centre of London Bridge and remained for centuries a station for devotion and pilgrimage until the bridge was remodelled in the eighteenth century and the chapel finally demolished in the nineteenth. At the same time, the church’s dedication is traditionally connected to Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney (c.1106–1117), canonised as St Magnus. The adoption of a Norse martyr saint for a London parish is striking and remains uncertain in origin, but it introduces a northern, even maritime, resonance to a church positioned at the threshold of the Thames crossing.
In this way the church’s fabric and its symbolic associations form a complex whole: Wren’s rational architectural formula for an Anglican parish interior combined with a dedication that links the site simultaneously to the memory of Thomas Becket on London Bridge and to the cult of a Norse saint from the far north of Christendom.
Church of Saint Magnus-the-Martyr, the City of LondonChurch of Saint Magnus-the-Martyr, the City of LondonChurch of Saint Magnus-the-Martyr, the City of LondonChurch of Saint Magnus-the-Martyr, the City of London
Unidentified 18th century wood carver, The figurehead of an ancient hero, Hardwood sculpture. Queens House, Royal Museums Greenwich, London
This figurehead, carved in hardwood during the eighteenth century, once adorned the bow of a merchant vessel, although the specific ship to which it belonged remains unidentified. The sculpture’s current stripped surface, left in natural wood to suggest an ‘antique’ finish, is the result of later restoration; during its service it would have been polychromed, in keeping with standard maritime practice.
The figure represents a bearded warrior in classical armour with a crested helmet, set against a scroll-form support. The choice of subject reflects the persistence of neo-classical models in European decorative art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where images of heroic antiquity—frequently Alexander the Great or comparable exemplars—were adapted into naval ornament. The combination of martial attributes and classicising detail suggests a symbolic association between ancient heroic virtue and the perceived strength or prestige of the vessel.
Within merchant shipping, figureheads functioned as visual identifiers in an era before uniform numbering systems. They also embodied the personification of the ship itself, a belief widely attested in seafaring culture and particularly resonant during long oceanic voyages. Naval vessels, by contrast, tended towards more restrained or heraldic devices, reflecting institutional discipline rather than individualised identity.
Chapel of St Peter and St Paul, King William Walk, Greenwich, London
The Chapel of St Peter and St Paul at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, was rebuilt between 1783 and 1789 after a fire destroyed the earlier chapel designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed by Thomas Ripley in the seventeenth century. The redesign was entrusted to James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, whose authority rested on his archaeological studies of Greek architecture, published with Nicholas Revett in The Antiquities of Athens (1762 onwards). At Greenwich, Stuart adapted this knowledge to create an interior that balanced classical restraint with decorative richness.
The ceiling by John Papworth is central to the design. Its pattern of interlocking squares and octagons provides a strict geometric framework, while the ornaments—unusually carved by hand rather than cast—lend an uncommon precision and depth. The use of pale blue and cream links the scheme to the fashionable Jasperware of Josiah Wedgwood, aligning the chapel with the neoclassical taste of the late eighteenth century.
Yet the building’s function also shaped its character. As the chapel of the Royal Hospital for Seamen, later the Royal Naval College, it was both a place of worship and a symbol of Britain’s maritime power. The fusion of Greek Revival discipline with ornamental lightness created an interior that could speak both to Stuart’s scholarly engagement with antiquity and to the naval community it served, embedding neoclassical ideals within the lived culture of Britain’s seafaring empire.
Inigo Jones (1573–1652) and Nicholas Stone (c.1586–1647), The Tulip Stairs, 1629–35. The Queen’s House, Greenwich, London
The Tulip Stairs at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, are among the most striking passages of early Stuart design. Designed by Inigo Jones (1573–1652) and constructed in stone by Nicholas Stone (c.1586–1647) between 1629 and 1635, the stair is generally regarded as the earliest cantilevered example in England. Each tread is socketed into the enclosing wall, the load carried forward step by step, so that the structure rises without visible means of support. The resulting spiral appears weightless, yet its equilibrium depends on careful calculation of thrust and bearing within the fabric of the wall.
The design belongs directly to Jones’s Italian formation. During his first journey in 1597 he studied Palladio’s work at Venice, most notably the staircase of the Convento della Carità, and absorbed the theoretical models set out in the Quattro Libri dell’Architettura. There Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) illustrated open-well stairs derived from Roman examples including the Pantheon, which demonstrated how classical geometry could govern circulation. At Greenwich these principles were not reproduced but reconfigured. Jones translated Palladian precedent into a form suited to a royal commission, while Nicholas Stone’s execution refined the details so that the treads project with an unusual delicacy, their apparent suspension exceeding the Venetian model in refinement of proportion and finish.
The iron balustrade, introduced in the 1630s, contributes a second register of meaning. Its repeating tulip motif reflects a taste for rare exotics that had entered England from the Low Countries earlier in the century. Far from incidental decoration, the motif situates the stair within the orbit of Henrietta Maria’s (1609–1669) court, where the cultivation of imported plants and the collecting of curiosities formed part of a broader culture of display. The floral pattern winds upward in concert with the rising geometry of the stair, binding ornamental metalwork and stone construction into a single visual rhythm.
The Queen’s House itself, begun in 1616 and brought to completion in the 1630s, was the first fully classical residence in England, its cubic form and measured enfilades announcing a new architectural order. Within this setting the Tulip Stairs articulate Jones’s ambition on a more intimate scale. The stair embodies the transference of continental theory into English practice, joining the rigour of Palladian precedent with the ingenuity of English craftsmanship and the symbolism of courtly ornament. Its subsequent renown lies not only in structural innovation but in the way it condensed the larger project of the Queen’s House: the accommodation of imported architectural language within the ceremonial and cultural world of the Stuart court.
The Tulip Stairs did not remain an isolated marvel but set a pattern for the English reception of continental stair design. Their cantilevered form, rooted in Palladian precedent yet transformed in a Stuart context, became a point of reference for later architects from Christopher Wren (1632–1723) to James Gibbs (1682–1754), who absorbed the lesson that a staircase could be more than a means of ascent: it could serve as a central act of architectural invention.
