Philip William was the eldest son of William the Silent by his first wife, Anne of Egmond, and therefore the heir to the title of Prince of Orange. In 1568, at the age of 14, during his studies at the University of Leuven, he was taken hostage and brought to Spain by the Duke of Alva as a repercussion of his father’s financial involvement with the Dutch Revolt and subsequent refusal to appear before the Council of Troubles in Brussels. In Spain, Philips William, who was king Phillips II’ godchild, was raised as a Catholic and loyal subject. After the murder of his father in Delft in 1584, he was known as the Prince of Orange. In 1595 he was allowed to return to the Spanish Netherlands. As a Catholic and potential Spanish sympathizer, Philips William was distrusted by the States-General and it was only in 1606 that he was recognized in the Republic as Lord of Breda and Steenbergen. In 1608, he travelled with his wife, Eléonore Charlotte de Bourbon-Condé, to The Hague, where he met his younger half-brother Maurice for the first time since their youth. After making his ceremonial entry into Breda in July 1610, he resided there and in Brussels until his death in 1618. Since he had no children, his half-brother Maurice was the next in line to become the new Prince of Orange.
Philips Willem is portrayed wearing the luxurious dress of a nobleman and the insignia of the Catholic order of the Golden Fleece, which he was awarded in 1599. The bust is signed and dated on the hollow reverse by the renowned Antwerp sculptor Johannes (‘Jan’) Claudius de Cock (1667-1735), though the last digit of the year is illegible. The carefully modelled portrait is likely derived from an engraving by Willem Delff (Hollstein 65) after a painting by Michiel van Mierevelt (SK-A-517). The museum also possesses a bust of prince Maurice by the same sculptor (BK-B-53). Although the busts of the two half-brothers entered the museum by different routes they undoubtedly belong together. They are the same size, made of the same material and have the same finish. Moreover, they are on identical plaster bases and the compositions are very similar, the heads of the men both turned in three-quarter view. They may have belonged to a dynastic series of portraits of the Princes of Orange that was ordered for one of the stadholders’ palaces. From 1692 to 1695/97 De Cock was based in Breda, where he was commissioned by King-Stadholder William III to make sculptural decorations for this castle, and the busts are very likely to have been commissioned during that period. Since Philips William was never a stadholder and had taken no part in the Dutch revolt against Spain, it seems that only a personal, dynastic interest of the patron, probably William III, could account for the commissioning of his portrait. In the inventories relating to the House of Orange there is just one entry that could refer to a series of ancestral portraits, namely the ‘Eight fired busts, of which one is broken’ which were at Honselaersdijk Palace (near The Hague) at the time the inventory was made up (1755).
Bieke van der Mark and Frits Scholten, 2025
This entry is a revised version of F. Scholten, Gebeeldhouwde portretten/Portrait Sculptures, coll. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1995, no. 28
