Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), The Eavesdropper, c. 1655–1659, Oil on canvas, 57.5 x W 66 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London
Few painters of the Dutch Golden Age captured the intrigues of everyday life with the sly wit of Nicolaes Maes. A pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, Maes absorbed the master’s command of chiaroscuro but turned it to an entirely different end: not biblical drama, but the theatre of the bourgeois household. His celebrated Eavesdropper series embodies this shift, transforming the domestic interior into a stage for moral reflection and human curiosity.
The picture at Apsley House belongs to this series, which shows a housewife peering around a doorway, finger raised to her lips as if silently inviting the viewer to share her discovery. Beyond the door lies a scene of servants or children at play, idling in neglect of their duties. The narrative is light-hearted, yet beneath it lies a moralising core: idleness versus industry, virtue against vice—concerns deeply rooted in the Calvinist culture of the Dutch Republic. The lesson is clear: vigilance is required to maintain both order in the home and order in the soul.
Central to the work’s success is Maes’ mastery of the doorkijkje—the ‘view through’ that leads the eye from one space into another. This compositional device not only adds depth but also draws the viewer into the act of spying, implicating them in the drama. Light, learned from Rembrandt, is used sparingly and with precision, falling across the mistress’s figure and illuminating her knowing gesture, while casting the servants in a softer glow.
The composition exists in several versions, one of the earliest being the more elaborate example in the Dordrecht Museum. This Apsley House canvas, slightly simplified, was probably produced to speed the process of repetition while still retaining the playful details that delighted collectors. The popularity of the subject was such that it was even imitated by Reinier Coveyn (1632–1681), a fellow Dordrecht painter, who produced near-identical copies.
In The Eavesdropper, Maes manages to blend entertainment with moral edification, creating a scene that is at once humorous and admonitory. It is a glimpse not only into a Dutch household but into the moral fabric of a society where the private world of the home mirrored the wider concerns of civic virtue and religious discipline.
Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693), The Eavesdropper, c. 1655–1659, Oil on canvas, 57.5 x W 66 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, LondonNicolaes Maes (1634-1693), The Eavesdropper, c. 1655–1659, Oil on canvas, 57.5 x W 66 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, LondonNicolaes Maes (1634-1693), The Eavesdropper, c. 1655–1659, Oil on canvas, 57.5 x W 66 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London
Titian (c.1490-1576), Danaë, 1551-1553, Oil on canvas, 192.5 cm x 114.6 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London
This composition ranks among the most acclaimed works of the genius Titian. Six known versions are attributed to Titian and his workshop, each distinct in execution, igniting ongoing debates about their attributions. This version, significantly reduced in the 18th century with the total loss of the upper part, is believed to be the version commissioned by King Philip II of Spain. This was the second interpretation of this theme, following the initial version made for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, which is often described as a subtle commentary on a famous story of the patron’s affair with a courtesan. The painting signifies the start of a commissioned series of mythological ‘poesie’ works inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
As told by Ovid and Boccaccio, the myth narrates the story of Danaë, imprisoned in a bronze tower after a prophecy foretelling that her son would kill her father. Jupiter, overwhelmed by desire, transforms into a shower of gold to seduce and impregnate her despite her awareness of the prophecy’s grim implications.
Until recently, it was thought that the second version, currently in the Prado, was acquired directly by Philip II from Titian. Nonetheless, compelling evidence suggests that the Wellington Collection’s Danaë was painted a few years earlier and was the piece directly bought by Philip II, with the Prado version later joining the Spanish royal collection.
The Wellington Collection’s Danaë, part of Spain’s royal collection for over 250 years, was captured by the Duke of Wellington from Joseph Bonaparte after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. Joseph, installed as King of Spain by his brother Napoleon, attempted to transport this and over 160 other artworks out of Spain. For his role in liberating Spain from Napoleonic rule, Wellington was gifted these works by King Ferdinand VII. Known as ‘The Spanish Gift’, this collection has become a cornerstone of Apsley House’s permanent collection.
Titian (c.1490-1576), Danaë, 1551-1553, Oil on canvas, 192.5 cm x 114.6 cm, The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London
Raphael (1483-1520), Christ’s Charge to Peter (Matthew 16: 18-19, John 21: 15-17), c.1515-6, Bodycolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 343 x 532 cm, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Royal Collection Trust
Raphael (1483-1520), Christ’s Charge to Peter (Matthew 16: 18-19, John 21: 15-17), c.1515-6, Bodycolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 343 x 532 cm, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Royal Collection Trust
Few works shaped the European Renaissance as profoundly as Raphael’s Cartoons, the monumental full-scale tapestry designs he created in 1515–16 for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Commissioned by Pope Leo X (1475–1521), they were intended to hang beneath Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling and above the marble wall panelling, creating a dialogue between the two greatest artistic cycles of the age. Of the original series, only seven survive, all centred on the missions of Saints Peter and Paul—their calling, preaching, miracles, and martyrdom—presented as models of apostolic authority at a moment when the papacy was asserting its supremacy within Christendom.
Christ’s Charge to Peter is among the most important of the set. Based on Matthew 16:18–19 and John 21:15–17, it depicts the moment when Christ entrusts Peter with the keys of heaven and the pastoral care of his flock. The scene is rendered with a clarity and grandeur that distinguish Raphael from the richly ornamental, yet narratively diffuse, tapestry traditions of Flanders and France. His broad, coherent composition, monumental figures, and architectural setting combine to underline both the gravity of Peter’s commission and the universality of the Church’s mission.
The commission itself epitomised the height of Renaissance patronage. Tapestries, far costlier than paintings, were the ultimate symbols of wealth and power, requiring years of labour by the finest weavers in Brussels, who translated Raphael’s designs into shimmering textiles of silk, wool, and precious metal thread. The cartoons, meanwhile, took on a life of their own. Though conceived as working designs, they were preserved, copied, and engraved, spreading Raphael’s vision across Europe. Prints after the cartoons were eagerly studied by painters from Antwerp to Fontainebleau, reinforcing Raphael’s authority as the supreme master of narrative art.
Their impact endured for centuries. From the sixteenth century onward, the cartoons became cornerstones of artistic education, providing models of composition, figural arrangement, and dramatic clarity. In their balance of classical restraint with human emotion, they encapsulated Renaissance ideals of beauty and order, securing their place not only as tools of papal propaganda but as enduring monuments of European art.
Raphael (1483-1520), Christ’s Charge to Peter (Matthew 16: 18-19, John 21: 15-17), c.1515-6, Bodycolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 343 x 532 cm, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Royal Collection TrustRaphael (1483-1520), Christ’s Charge to Peter (Matthew 16: 18-19, John 21: 15-17), c.1515-6, Bodycolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 343 x 532 cm, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Royal Collection TrustRaphael (1483-1520), Christ’s Charge to Peter (Matthew 16: 18-19, John 21: 15-17), c.1515-6, Bodycolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 343 x 532 cm, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum from the Royal Collection Trust
St Michael Paternoster Royal, on College Hill, has been part of London’s ecclesiastical life since at least 1219. Its name carries traces of medieval commerce: Paternoster recalls the rosary sellers of Paternoster Lane, while Royal derives not from monarchy but from the nearby street Le Ryole, once home to Bordeaux wine merchants trading in the City. The church is most closely associated with Richard Whittington (c. 1354–1423), four-time Lord Mayor of London, who paid for its rebuilding in the early fifteenth century and established a collegiate foundation and almshouse beside it.
After the Great Fire of 1666, St Michael was among the last of Christopher Wren’s City churches to be rebuilt. Work began only in 1689, under Edward Strong the Elder (1652–1724), Wren’s master mason, and was completed in 1694. The steeple, added between 1713 and 1717 and probably designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736), is a Portland stone tower capped with an open octagonal spire, a form Hawksmoor used again elsewhere in London.
Inside, the late seventeenth-century Baroque fittings largely survive. The reredos, framed by Corinthian columns, dominates the east wall, and carved figures of Moses and Aaron, brought from the demolished church of All Hallows the Great in 1894, stand before it. The church came through wartime bombing better than many of its neighbours, and today medieval patronage, post-Fire joinery, and salvaged pieces from lost City churches all sit together under one roof.
References
Pevsner, N. and Bradley, S. (1998) London 1: The City of London. The Buildings of England. New Haven: Yale University Press
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Ham Street, Ham Street, Ham, Richmond, Surrey, TW10 7RS
Ham House, Richmond, London
Ham House stands as one of the most complete and evocative survivals of 17th-century domestic architecture in London, a rare place where the Jacobean age still seems to breathe within its walls. Built between 1608 and 1610 for Sir Thomas Vavasour, Knight Marshal to James I, the house preserves the austere symmetry of early Stuart design while bearing witness to the ambitions and shifting fortunes of its later owners.
In the 1630s, William Murray, confidant of Charles I, reshaped the interiors to reflect the refined tastes of the Caroline court. The addition of Solomonic columns in the North Drawing Room spoke directly to the fashion for ornate Italianate forms, while still harmonising with the house’s Jacobean core. The more radical transformation, however, came with John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale (1616–1682), and his formidable wife, Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart (1626–1698). From the 1670s they turned Ham into a residence of international sophistication. French influences were deliberately woven into its design: an enfilade of State Apartments, a ceremonial axis running through the house, echoed continental models, while innovations such as one of the first large-scale uses of sash windows—probably introduced by the architect William Samwell (1628–1676)—proclaimed a modernity unprecedented in English domestic life.
Other features underscored this spirit of experiment. The Duchess’s bathroom, an early attempt at integrating comfort and privacy into aristocratic living, and the library—now the earliest surviving in a private house—testify to the Lauderdales’ fascination with both intellectual and material culture. Yet these changes did not erase the house’s Jacobean identity. Instead, they layered it with Baroque invention, creating an architecture of continuity rather than rupture, where each phase of taste could be read against what came before.
Ham House, Richmond, LondonHam House, Richmond, LondonHam House, Richmond, LondonHam House, Richmond, LondonHam House, Richmond, London
Peter Lely (1618 –1680) and Studio, Portrait of Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart, later Duchess of Lauderdale (1626-1698), 1648, Oil on canvas, 122 x 98cm, Ham House, Richmond, Surrey
Peter Lely (1618 –1680) and Studio, Portrait of Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart, later Duchess of Lauderdale (1626-1698), 1648, Oil on canvas, 122 x 98cm, Ham House, Richmond, Surrey
Few women in 17th-century England moved with such daring across the fault lines of politics, power, and intrigue as Elizabeth Murray, later Duchess of Lauderdale. Born in 1626 into a family close to the Stuart court, she became, during the upheavals of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, one of the most resourceful Royalist agents. Her ability to inhabit two worlds—socially engaged with Oliver Cromwell’s household, while secretly funnelling intelligence to Royalist exiles—made her indispensable to networks such as the Sealed Knot. It was a dangerous game of duplicity and coded correspondence, in which charm and social dexterity became weapons as sharp as any blade. By the time of the Restoration in 1660, Elizabeth had ensured her place as both survivor and power-broker, a woman whose wit and audacity were as legendary as her beauty.
Peter Lely’s earliest portrait of her, painted with the assistance of his studio in 1648, captures Elizabeth at just twenty, newly married to Sir Lionel Tollemache. The picture freezes a moment of youthful ascendancy, presenting a poised young woman at the threshold of the turbulent career that would define her. It is the first in a visual sequence that charts her evolution from ingénue to formidable duchess.
As the decades advanced, so too did the way Elizabeth was portrayed. Lely’s later images, painted in the 1660s at the height of her influence, show her transformed into the assured Countess of Dysart, draped in silks and jewels befitting her prominence in Charles II’s resplendent court. One later portrait even brings her together with her second husband, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, one of the most powerful of the Restoration grandees. Here, the couple is presented as a political partnership, their likenesses embodying not only personal union but also their role as arbiters of courtly and cultural life.
Taken together, these portraits offer more than likenesses: they are fragments of a political biography in paint. Through Lely’s brush, we see Elizabeth Murray’s metamorphosis—an aristocratic daughter, a covert agent, a consummate courtier, and finally a duchess whose presence shaped the Restoration world.
Attributed to Pytheos (4th century BC), the Amazon frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Ionia, c. 350BC, Marble frieze, 130cm (a fragment), the British Museum, London
The Amazon frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus draws the viewer into one of antiquity’s most enduring images of conflict: the Amazonomachy. Designed under the direction of Pytheos, the leading Ionian architect and theorist of his generation, this sculpted cycle was not mere decoration but a deliberate act of cultural definition, binding myth to the monumental tomb of Mausolus.
The battle between Greeks and Amazons had long been a charged metaphor in Greek art and literature, symbolising the confrontation between civilisation and barbarism, order and the dangerous allure of the foreign. Here, the Amazons appear in their familiar guise: clad in Phrygian caps, patterned tunics, and with one breast exposed—a detail that reinforced their paradoxical image as both noble and barbaric, alien yet recognisably human. Opposed to them, the Greek warriors are idealised in Corinthian helmets and polished armour, standing for civic virtue, heroism, and the defence of Hellenic identity.
Such imagery cannot be understood in purely mythical terms. The Amazons’ origins, though firmly embedded in epic poetry from Homer onwards, were almost certainly coloured by Greek encounters with the nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppes, where women sometimes fought alongside men. Writers like Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BC), Diodorus Siculus (fl. 1st century BC), and Strabo (c. 64 BC–c. AD 24) transformed these reports into narratives of an inverted society, a mirror of the Greek world turned inside out. In art, the Amazonomachy offered a stage on which anxieties about gender, cultural boundaries, and military ambition could be played out with heroic clarity.
Set upon the Mausoleum, itself one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the frieze amplified the political message of Mausolus’s power and cosmopolitan vision. It did so by placing his tomb within the shared visual language of the Greek polis, while at the same time projecting Ionia’s claim to intellectual and artistic leadership.
Attributed to Pytheos (4th century BC), the Amazon frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Ionia, c. 350BC, Marble frieze, 130cm (a fragment), the British Museum, LondonAttributed to Pytheos (4th century BC), the Amazon frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Ionia, c. 350BC, Marble frieze, 130cm (a fragment), the British Museum, London
St Etheldreda’s Church , 14 Ely Place , London , EC1N 6RY
Hidden within Ely Place, once a Cambridgeshire enclave in the capital that retained its own peculiar legal status and postal identity until the 1960s, St Etheldreda’s is one of the most remarkable survivals of medieval London. Dedicated to Etheldreda of Ely (c. 636–679), the Anglo-Saxon queen-turned-abbess who founded Ely’s first religious community, the chapel was built in the late 13th century as part of the London residence of the Bishops of Ely. It is one of the very few buildings in the city to have endured from the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), remarkably escaping both the Great Fire of 1666 and subsequent waves of urban redevelopment.
The chapel’s history is inseparable from the figures who occupied Ely Place. John of Gaunt (1340–1399), Duke of Lancaster and son of Edward III, made Ely Place his London home after the destruction of his Savoy Palace in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In 1576, Sir Christopher Hatton (1540–1591), favourite of Elizabeth I, secured a lease of much of the property through royal pressure on the Bishop of Ely, embedding Ely Place in Elizabethan court politics. Such associations underscore the chapel’s role as a witness to the shifting power networks of medieval and early modern England.
By the 17th century, the chapel had fallen into neglect, and after the Reformation it ceased to serve its original liturgical function. Its revival came in 1873 when the lawyer William Lockhart (1820–1892) purchased and restored it, re-establishing it as a centre of Roman Catholic worship in London at a time when Catholic emancipation was reshaping the city’s religious landscape.
Severe wartime damage during the Blitz necessitated major repairs in the 1950s, when the restoration sought to recapture something of its medieval spirit. Efforts were made to strip away later accretions and return the church to an interior closer in form and atmosphere to its 13th-century origins. Today, despite Victorian and post-war interventions, St Etheldreda’s retains an unmistakable medieval character: its lofty Gothic windows, narrow proportions, and enduring stone fabric evoke the ecclesiastical culture of medieval Ely transplanted into the heart of London.
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Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl Fording a Stream followed by Two Horse-and-Carts with Grooms, c.1675, oil on canvas, 122 × 203 cm, Ham House, London
The uneven survival of seventeenth-century Dutch painting has left a distorted view of the period. Canonical masterpieces by celebrated figures dominate cultural memory, while the vast substratum of everyday production that once sustained the Dutch art market has largely vanished. The late seventeenth-century mass production of landscapes, pastoral cattle scenes and decorative overdoors was often consumed as a form of domestic furnishing. Few designed cycles in original settings remain intact, and when such ensembles do survive, they stand out as rare evidence of a market that thrived on abundance, variety and serial consumption. What survives today privileges the extraordinary over the ordinary, so that what was once a living fabric of visual culture is now filtered through a narrow canon.
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–after 1690) represents this broader stratum of Haarlem painters whose work was less innovative than that of their early-century predecessors and relied more on well-elaborated formulas adapted to a saturated market (RKD n.d.). Haarlem itself held a distinctive place among the Dutch cities. Long an active centre of painting, its prominence grew after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, when shifting trade and migration patterns brought it new artists and new demand. The re-chartering of the Guild of St Luke in 1590 consolidated this position, and in the decades that followed Haarlem became renowned for the breadth of its artistic life (Miedema 1980). Naturalistic landscapes and animal pieces, formal portraiture, expressive tronies, peasant interiors, decorative cycles and ambitious history paintings all flourished, while a vigorous print industry bound its painters to civic identity and humanist culture. The guild itself remained the institutional framework: a body that regulated apprenticeship, certified masters, controlled who could sell paintings in the city, and protected its members against competition from outside, including from foreign-trained painters and from peripatetic dealers (Miedema 1980; Boers-Goosens 2001).
This flourishing was tempered by demographic and economic pressures. Recurrent plague, especially in the 1630s, reduced the city’s population and narrowed its market. Haarlem never ceased to produce, but by the mid-century its primacy was challenged by Amsterdam. Through the 1650s and 1660s its painters continued to refine and specialise, yet by then abundance had tipped into overproduction. The middle-class buyers who had once sustained Haarlem’s boom were themselves under pressure, and the market favoured repetition and familiar formulas (Bok 1994; North 1997).
It was in this environment that Dirck van den Bergen trained. What is known of him as a person comes almost entirely from Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719), whose De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen [The Great Theatre of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses] appeared in three volumes between 1718 and 1721 (Houbraken 1718–1721). Houbraken modelled his project on Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boeck [The Book of Painters] of 1604, and through it on Vasari, but the resulting work is closer to a vernacular collection of moralised anecdotes than to documentary biography. Its entries on lesser painters typically run to a paragraph or two of recycled material, gathered from family memory, hearsay and Houbraken’s own opinions about how an artistic life should fit into a moral arc. The Van Bergen entry follows the standard pattern: pupil of Adriaen van de Velde (1636–1672), painter of pastorals in his master’s manner, jolly in temper, well paid in Haarlem but financially undisciplined, and reduced at the end of his life to such circumstances that his friends had to collect money for his funeral. The arc, gift then success then dissipation then posthumous tidy-up, is the kind Houbraken liked, and recurs almost word-for-word in his entries on several other minor painters; on its own it tells us less about Van den Bergen than about Houbraken’s habits of moral framing. What can be verified independently is the pupillage with Adriaen van de Velde, the Haarlem base, the membership of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke, and a working span of signed and dated pictures running from 1676 to 1690 (RKD n.d.; Dulwich Picture Gallery 2019).
His work belongs to the Italianising branch of the landscape tradition, a mode that idealised nature with warm Mediterranean light, harmonised compositions and the integration of figures and animals into Arcadian settings. The idiom had been imported into the Republic by Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598–1657) and Cornelis van Poelenburch (c.1594/95–1667), and developed in the second generation by Jan Both (c.1618–1652), Jan Asselijn (c.1610–1652) and Nicolaes Berchem (1620–1683), who worked in Rome in the 1630s and 1640s, or absorbed its visual conventions at second hand, and brought back Arcadian fictions blending memories of the Campagna with Dutch narrative sensibilities (Biesboer, Buvelot and Bok 2006). Karel Dujardin (c.1622–1678) continued the tradition with lyrical elegance, Paulus Potter (1625–1654) gave cattle monumental autonomy, and Adriaen van de Velde produced smaller, highly finished pastorals of great refinement. Van den Bergen adopted these models yet remained in their shadow, producing competent, formulaic variants aimed at the broad middle tier of the market.
By the 1660s the wider Dutch system showed signs of strain. Production had been immense for decades, and households were saturated with paintings. The most accomplished masters still commanded high prices, but middling painters faced intensifying competition from second-hand pictures released through probate auctions (Bakker 2008). The crisis of 1672, the Rampjaar, accelerated the downturn: simultaneous French, English, and German invasions, the panic-flooding of the Hollandic Water Line, and the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt disrupted trade so completely that the market for new paintings never returned to earlier heights (Loughman and Montias 2000). Adriaen van de Velde died on 21 January 1672, ending Van den Bergen’s formal connection with his Amsterdam master at almost exactly the moment the Republic itself entered its political and economic crisis. Local artistic ecosystems continued to function but their autonomy was weakened, and many second-rank painters looked abroad for work.
The London they reached was not a new destination for Dutch and Flemish painters but a long-established one, sustained by court patronage, religious community, and commercial contacts going back generations. Daniel Mytens the Elder (c.1590–1647) had served as court portraitist under James I and Charles I; Cornelius Johnson (1593–1661) trained and worked in London until the Civil War; Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641) had set the terms of English aristocratic portraiture during his decade as Charles I’s principal painter; Peter Lely (1618–1680), Haarlem-trained, settled in London in the early 1640s, became a freeman of the Painter-Stainers’ Company in 1647, was naturalised in 1662, and by the Restoration was Principal Painter to Charles II, with a studio that drew steadily on Dutch and Flemish assistants (Curd 2010; MacLeod and Marciari Alexander 2001). The Dutch Reformed Church at Austin Friars served as a community hub for newcomers, and dealers, frame-makers and intermediaries operated within it. By the 1670s this was a settled migration route rather than a sudden phenomenon, and the Rampjaar accelerated, rather than created, the flow. Painters arriving in London came through known channels, with known patrons, and to a recognisable infrastructure.
The institutional framework they entered was, however, fundamentally different from the Dutch one. The Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, established by royal charter in 1581 and with medieval antecedents, controlled the painting trade in the City of London, but its statutes excluded foreigners unless they took out English citizenship (Painter-Stainers’ Company n.d.). Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543), the model case, had never become a member; Lely is the conspicuous exception, who joined only after his career had already taken shape under royal patronage. Most Dutch painters in 1670s London therefore operated outside the guild altogether, working directly for the Crown, for the great noble households, or through a network of dealers, agents and resident colleagues. The guild itself was in any case losing power: when Charles II seized the City charters in the 1680s, the protective monopolies the livery companies had relied on were further eroded, and the market began to shift towards entrepreneurial dealers and auctioneers (Meadows 1988). Painters from the Republic slotted into this opening structure not as freemen subject to local regulation, but as suppliers of foreign skill on an essentially contractual basis. The arrangement was usually informal: lodging in or near a noble household, a stream of work specified by the patron or steward, and payment by the picture or per quarter rather than by stipend.
English aristocratic patrons drew on this supply selectively and along stratified lines. For grand ceiling and mural decoration in the new continental manner they recruited Italian painters: Antonio Verrio (c.1636–1707), born in Lecce and trained in Naples and France, crossed to England in March 1672 and within a few years was working on the vast scheme of Charles II’s State Apartments at Windsor Castle. For state portraiture they continued to rely on Flemish- and Dutch-trained painters in the Van Dyck and Lely tradition. For the Dutch specialities, marine painting, landscape, naval and topographical views, animal pieces and decorative panels, they recruited from the Republic directly. The pattern was set at court: on 12 January 1674 Charles II formally retained Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693) and Willem the Younger (1633–1707) at £100 each per year, with a studio in the Queen’s House at Greenwich, and a further £50 to the elder from James, Duke of York (1633–1701), bringing the family’s combined royal income above Lely’s own and on a par with the highest court painters of the previous reign (Robinson 1990; Apollo Magazine 2023). Hendrick Danckerts (c.1625–1680) painted royal topographical views, including a record of Ham itself from the south (c.1675–1679); Abraham Begeyn (c.1637–1697) was working at Ham House at the same time as Van den Bergen and the younger Van de Velde (Royal Museums Greenwich 2023); Jan Wyck (c.1645–1700) painted equestrian and battle scenes. Payment hierarchies were steep. At the top, Italian ceiling painters and royal marine masters earned in the hundreds; in the middle, a single Lely portrait at Ham was valued at £80 in the 1679 inventory (Rowell 2013); at the lower end, middling specialists like Van den Bergen worked by the picture, almost certainly for modest sums via an agent or steward. No payment records survive for the Ham House cycle, and the figures must be inferred from comparable cases; what is clear is that English aristocrats were not uniformly generous but paid the rate the market set for the role each painter occupied within the household scheme. Some immigrants, such as the Van de Veldes and Wyck, established long-term careers; others, including Van den Bergen, found shorter-term employment before returning to the Republic.
This stratified patronage system sat inside a wider cultural reorientation. Charles II (1630–1685) had spent fourteen years in exile on the Continent, mostly between France (1646–1654) and the Spanish Netherlands (1654–1660), and the courtiers who shared that exile returned with him in 1660 to occupy the senior positions at court. French and Dutch taste was not, in this generation, a foreign import bolted onto an English original; it was the formative experience of the entire ruling class, absorbed during the Cromwellian years in Paris, Brussels, Bruges and The Hague (Thurley 2020). The decorative culture that emerged after 1660 reflected this. Puritan severity gave way to a fashion for magnificence, opulence and continental novelty (Restoration style; Britannica n.d.). Sash windows were introduced in the 1670s, classical orders and pediments were applied to country house facades, and interiors were reorganised around new hierarchies of room: a sequence of reception spaces leading to bedchambers and closets, with each room defined by fitted decoration, hangings and pictures coordinated to a single scheme. Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) provided carved limewood swags, garlands and picture borders; Jean Tijou (active 1689–1712) supplied wrought ironwork; Verrio supplied ceilings; Italian, French and Netherlandish craftsmen supplied gilt furniture, marquetry, lacquer, mirrored glass and damask hangings. Within this layered scheme the painted overdoor and overmantel became standard architectural elements. They were not Dutch inventions, but had been developed earlier in Italy, by painters such as Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) at the Palazzo Sampieri in Bologna in the late sixteenth century (Overdoor n.d.). By the 1670s they had become one of the typical contexts in which Dutch and Flemish landscape and animalier painters supplied work to English aristocratic schemes.
There is a further oddity worth noting. Van den Bergen’s London period coincided with the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), in which the Republic and England were active military enemies. Charles II had signed the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV in 1670, committing England to support France against Holland; the war began in March 1672. That Dutch painters were nevertheless welcomed in London during these years, and continued to work for the King and his ministers even as English and Dutch fleets fought in the Channel, says something about the porousness of cultural and political life in the Restoration. Painters operated under aristocratic protection at a level largely indifferent to the official state of hostilities, and the network of resident Dutch painters, dealers and intermediaries was robust enough to absorb new arrivals whatever the headlines from the North Sea.
Ham House in Richmond provides one of the rare surviving sites where this demand for coordinated decorative schemes can still be studied. John Maitland, 1st Duke of Lauderdale (1616–1682), and Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart (1626–1698), modernised the interiors in the 1670s following their marriage in 1672 (Rowell 2013; Rylance-Watson 2022). Maitland was Secretary of State for Scotland and a member of Charles II’s so-called Cabal ministry; Elizabeth Murray managed the acquisitions and had her own continental experience, with substantial purchases of Dutch and Flemish painting, French furniture, Japanese lacquer cabinets and tapestry. Both had spent time on the Continent: Maitland had been in The Hague in 1649 to meet the new de jure king Charles II, where Cornelius Johnson painted him alongside William Hamilton, 2nd Duke of Hamilton (1616–1651); Elizabeth Murray is believed to have visited Vaux-le-Vicomte and to have drawn directly on French models for the Ham scheme (Rowell 2013). The diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706), visiting on 27 August 1674, called Ham ‘inferiour to few of the best Villas in Italy itselfe, The House furnished like a greate Princes’ (Evelyn 1955, IV, p. 43). Van den Bergen supplied at least eighteen canvases, an unusually large cycle for a minor painter, documented across the household inventories of 1677, 1679 and 1683.
The signed Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl Fording a Stream followed by Two Horse-and-Carts with Grooms (1675), bearing the monogram DVB on a chest in one of the carts, was probably the centrepiece. It first appears in the inventory of 29 May 1677 on the Great Staircase among ‘Nyne Pictures wt carv’d frames whereof two guilt’ (National Trust Collections n.d., NT 1139667), a phrasing that records as much about the framing trade as about the paintings: by this date framers were treated as part of the same coordinated decorative operation as the painters, and the carved and partly gilt frames were specified items in their own right. Mountainous Landscape with a Caravan and Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats provided monumental anchors, drawing on Berchem’s vocabulary of ruins and antique motifs. Narrow horizontals such as Herdsman, Horseman and Cattle (NT 1140173), Night Scene with Figures grouped around a Fire and A Landscape with a Shepherd under an Awning were conceived as overdoors, integrating painting with architecture. Variations such as Landscape with Figures, Horses and a Dog, Ruins in the Distance and Landscape with Figures, Cattle, Sheep, and a Castle in the Distance reinforced decorative rhythm. Domestic inflections appear in A Mother with Two Children, Two Cows, Sheep, and an Ass outside a Cottage and Landscape with a Milkmaid milking a Cow, while myth and allegory were subdued into pastoral contexts in Landscape with Mercury and Battus (NT 1140142) and An Old Woman and a Young Girl in a Garden (Vertumnus and Pomona). A Pair of Lions with a Leopard in a Cave and Figures spearing a Lion devouring a Fallen Rider introduced controlled violence, providing contrast within the sequence. Several of the pictures share the standard 124 × 168 cm format and were almost certainly designed as paired or grouped sets along walls, with the 40 × 99 cm overdoors carrying the horizontal axis across doorways.
The Ham House cycle shows how a Haarlem idiom was repurposed abroad. In the Republic, Arcadian pastorals had become overfamiliar, and for a painter like Van den Bergen they were increasingly difficult to sell. In London, however, they could serve as signs of continental refinement. The Lauderdales did not seek singular masterpieces but required a coordinated programme to unify their rooms, and Van den Bergen’s canvases, serial and formulaic, fulfilled this decorative brief.
The reception of Italianised Arcadian landscapes in England helps to explain their success in this setting. In Holland by the 1670s, such pictures were crowded out by overproduction; in England, they retained cultural prestige because they were linked to continental models, Italy above all, and fitted comfortably into the classical language of country house interiors that was itself being imported wholesale from France and Italy. They carried the aura of antiquity and pastoral order, projecting cultivation without demanding the intellectual engagement of history painting. They were also safe. Unlike overtly religious images, they avoided confessional controversy in a fragile Restoration settlement; unlike mythological scenes in the grand manner, they carried no risk of excessive nudity or erotic display. They were also legally easy to acquire: until the law of 1694, paintings could enter English ports only for private use, not for public sale (Meadows 1988), which meant that aristocratic patrons either commissioned directly from resident painters or imported pictures through private channels. Hiring a Dutch landscape painter in person, lodging him near the house, and producing the entire cycle on site bypassed those restrictions entirely. Arcadian pastorals offered an idealised vision that was neutral yet cultivated, decorative yet resonant.
The Ham House ensemble shows how Dutch painting, even at its middling levels, could be exported as cultural capital, fitted into aristocratic schemes that required quantity as much as quality. It also reveals the precariousness of the migration: Dutch painters filled a niche in the London market, some establishing lasting careers, others working only briefly. The cycle embodies the dispersal of Dutch pictorial idioms abroad and the shifting hierarchies that marked the close of the Golden Age, when the Republic’s artistic surplus became an export commodity rather than a domestic necessity. The fact that we can still walk through the rooms where these pictures hang, alongside the carved frames, panelling and overdoors that were specified together with them, makes Ham House something close to a working specimen of late-Restoration interior practice. Almost nothing else of the period has survived intact at this scale. Without the accident of dynastic continuity that kept the house and its contents together from the 1670s to the gift to the National Trust in 1948, Van den Bergen would now be one of the many vanished painters of his generation: a name in a Haarlem guild list, a few signed cabinet pictures in distant museums, a paragraph in Houbraken.
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl Fording a Stream followed by Two Horse-and-Carts with Grooms, c.1675, oil on canvas, 122 × 203 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Mountainous Landscape with a Caravan, 1675–1677, oil on canvas, 134.6 × 180.3 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 167.6 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Figures, Horses and a Dog, and Ruins in the Distance, 1665–1690, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 112 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Figures, Cattle, Sheep, and a Castle in the Distance, 1670s, oil on canvas, 123 × 112 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Mother with Two Children, Two Cows, Sheep, and an Ass, in a Clearing outside a Cottage, 1670s, oil on canvas, 127 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with a Milkmaid milking a Cow, a Farm Dwelling, Cows, Sheep, and a Donkey, 1670s, oil on canvas, 127 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Mercury and Battus and Animals, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), An Old Woman and a Young Girl in a Garden (Vertumnus and Pomona, with Juno’s Peacock), 1670s, oil on canvas, 112 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Herdsman, Horseman and Cattle, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Night Scene with Figures grouped around a Fire, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Landscape with a Shepherd under an Awning surrounded by Sheep and a Goat, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Nursing Herdswoman, Sleeping Herdsman and a Cow, a Horse, and Sheep, 1675, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with a Herdsman leading a Staling Mule, a Goat, Dog, Cattle and Sheep, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Cattle, Sheep, a Horse, a Goat and a Courting Couple of Rustics, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Pair of Lions with a Leopard in a Cave, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Figures spearing a Lion devouring a Fallen Rider, with a Dead Lion and other Horsemen, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, London
Dirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with a Herdsman leading a Staling Mule, a Goat, Dog, Cattle and Sheep, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 167.6 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 167.6 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Landscape with a Shepherd under an Awning surrounded by Sheep and a Goat, 1670s, oil on canvas, 40 × 99 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), A Pair of Lions with a Leopard in a Cave, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Mercury and Battus and Animals, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Nursing Herdswoman, Sleeping Herdsman and a Cow, a Horse, and Sheep, 1675, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Figures spearing a Lion devouring a Fallen Rider, with a Dead Lion and other Horsemen, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Figures spearing a Lion devouring a Fallen Rider, with a Dead Lion and other Horsemen, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124 × 168 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with Ruins, a Tomb, Herdsfolk, Sheep and Goats, 1670s, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 167.6 cm, Ham House, LondonDirck van den Bergen (c.1645–c.1690), Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl Fording a Stream followed by Two Horse-and-Carts with Grooms, c.1675, oil on canvas, 122 × 203 cm, Ham House, London
Biesboer, P., Buvelot, Q. and Bok, M.J. (2006) Nicolaes Berchem: In the Light of Italy. Ghent: Ludion
Boers-Goosens, M.E.W. (2001) Schilders en de markt, Haarlem 1605–1635 [Painters and the Market, Haarlem 1605–1635]. PhD dissertation, Universiteit Leiden
Evelyn, J. (1955) The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer, 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Houbraken, A. (1718–1721) De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen [The Great Theatre of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses], 3 vols. Amsterdam. Available via the Digital Library for Dutch Literature (DBNL): https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/houb005groo01_01/ (Accessed: 11 February 2024).
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MacLeod, C. and Marciari Alexander, J. (2001) Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II. London: National Portrait Gallery; New Haven: Yale Center for British Art.
Meadows, A.W. (1988) Collecting Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting in England 1689–1760. PhD thesis, University of London. Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1382491/ (Accessed: 10 February 2024).
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National Trust Collections (n.d.) Dirck van Bergen, paintings at Ham House. Individual records consulted: NT 1139667 (Landscape with an Old Herdsman and Young Market Girl fording a Stream), NT 1140173 (Landscape with Herdsman, Horseman and Cattle), NT 1140142 (Landscape with Mercury and Battus and Animals), NT 1140135 (Landscape with Nursing Herdswoman, Sleeping Herdsman and a Cow, a Horse, and Sheep). Available at: https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1139667 (Accessed: 12 February 2024).
North, M. (1997) Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
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RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Dirck van Bergen. RKDartists, no. 7086. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/7086 (Accessed: 22 May 2026).
Robinson, M.S. (1990) Van de Velde: A Catalogue of the Paintings of the Elder and the Younger Willem van de Velde, 2 vols. Greenwich: National Maritime Museum.
Rowell, C. (ed.) (2013) Ham House: 400 Years of Collecting and Patronage. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the National Trust
Unidentified English painter, Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh, 1588, Oil on panel 91.4x 74.6cm , National Portrait Gallery, London
Pearls were among the most highly prized jewels of the sixteenth century, associated with wealth, purity, and refinement. Sir Walter Ralegh’s wearing of a single pearl earring signalled both his access to luxury goods derived from overseas trade and his self-fashioning as a courtier of distinctive style within Elizabeth I’s circle, where pearls also carried connotations of loyalty to the Queen, herself an avid wearer of them. The detail contributes to the image of Ralegh as a figure who combined martial ambition with cultivated taste. The Latin inscription to the left, Amor et Virtute (‘By love and virtue’), underscores the moral and chivalric framework of the portrait, while the legend to the right, Aetatis suae 34 / Anno 1588, records his age at the time of painting and situates the work within a moment of heightened national crisis, the year of the Armada.
Unidentified English painter, Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh, 1588, Oil on panel 91.4x 74.6cm , National Portrait Gallery, LondonUnidentified English painter, Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh, 1588, Oil on panel 91.4x 74.6cm , National Portrait Gallery, London
