Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History
- 2 Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette
- 3 By Candlelight: Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night
- 4 In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch
- 5 Louise Hollandine and the Art of Arachnean Critique
- 6 Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking
- 7 Towards an Understanding of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx
- Index
4 - In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: An Historiographical Perspective on Women Making Netherlandish Art History
- 2 Catharina Van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette
- 3 By Candlelight: Uncovering Early Modern Women’s Creative Uses of Night
- 4 In Living Memory: Architecture, Gardens, and Identity at Huis ten Bosch
- 5 Louise Hollandine and the Art of Arachnean Critique
- 6 Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking
- 7 Towards an Understanding of Mayken Verhulst and Volcxken Diericx
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This essay proposes an interpretation of Huis ten Bosch as a dynamic built portrait of Amalia van Solms. The architect Pieter Post, responsible for both building and garden designs, presented staged vistas to mobile viewers that incorporate all visual components – including the living body of the resident herself – to position the Princess as a central figure in Dutch national independence and identity. While the site does celebrate the lost Prince, it also leverages his identity to promote and prolong the social role of the Princess. By re-centering the narrative around Amalia van Solms, I attempt to secure her place as one of the great underacknowledged art patrons of the seventeenth century.
Keywords: Amalia van Solms; Huis ten Bosch; Oranjezaal; Pieter Post; garden history; portraiture; patronage; House of Orange; Dutch classicism
In 1645, Amalia van Solms, Princess of Orange, was faced with a dilemma. Her husband, stadholder and Prince of Orange, Frederik Hendrik, was in failing health. Amalia knew that following his death she would lose both her political influence and her right to reside in the palaces that she and Frederik Hendrik had built and decorated during their twenty-two years of marriage. Her solution to both problems was the construction and decoration of the palace now called Huis ten Bosch. The palace, built and decorated between 1645 and 1652, is a small brick villa suburbana outside of The Hague. Designed by the architect Pieter Post, Huis ten Bosch is one of the major monuments of Dutch Classicism. The best known component of the complex is the Oranjezaal, a central cruciform reception hall covered in a cycle of paintings celebrating the life and virtues of the Prince of Orange, ostensibly in funereal tribute. The rest of the building and its surrounding gardens have been significantly altered over time and no longer exist in their seventeenth-century forms. As a result, the scholarship on the site is overly focused on the paintings at the expense of an examination of the spatial experience of the site. Considered together with the garden as a holistic experience for a mobile viewer, the paintings and palace not only commemorate the Prince, but more importantly, emphasize the critical role of the fidelity and fertility of the Princess in the Dutch Republic more broadly.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500-1700 , pp. 85 - 112Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019