Modelled and fired. On the reverse, the back of the head and the area of the shoulders have been hollowed out, with the exception of a cone-shaped area below the head.

A presumably superficial crack can be discerned, starting at the collar and traversing via the right side of the goatee and ending in the right cheek. The bottom button is missing on the doublet. On the reverse, two pieces along the thin edge of the hollowed-out head have broken off: top middle and on the right side.

…; first documented in the museum in 1906-09;¹¹Captured on a photograph of exhibition room 150, see RMA-SSA-F-00153-1. on loan to Museum het Prinsenhof, Delft, 1949-65

Object number: NG-761

The highly esteemed jurist Hugo Grotius (shown here) and his political ally Grand Pensionary Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (see NG-760), were proponents of a more tolerant Protestantism who sought to turn the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621) with the Spanish into an enduring peace. Their moderate stance on religion and republican, anti-Orangist political sentiment brought them into conflict with the Orangist faction. Led by their military commander, Stadholder Prince Maurits, the latter group was more aggressive in its opposition to Spain and favoured a stricter adherence to the tenets of the Calvinist faith. On 29 August 1618, the stadholder’s troops arrested both Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius on suspicion of high treason. In a mock trial held on 12 May 1619, Oldenbarnevelt was sentenced to death and beheaded one day later. Grotius received a lifelong prison sentence but managed to escape from Loevestein Castle – then the official state prison – on 22 March 1621, hiding inside a book chest. As a consequence of their shared history, the two men are more commonly depicted as a pair. Both present terracotta busts have an unknown provenance. Although Leeuwenberg catalogued them as pendants,²²J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 263a and b. there are in fact strong indications they have a different origin. They were modeled by two distinct hands and are finished in dissimilar ways. Whereas the surface of the Hugo de Groot bust was left bare, the one representing Oldenbarnevelt, which is modeled with far greater skill, is coated with a finishing layer.

That said, the present terracotta busts are roughly the same size and can both be traced back to engravings by Willem Jacobsz van Delff (RP-P-OB-50.076 and RP-P-OB-77.368) made after paintings by his father-in-law, Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt (SK-A-257 and SK-A-581). The frontal, armless busts generally follow a scheme developed by Hendrick de Keyser I in the early years of the seventeenth century (cf. BK-NM-4191) and thereafter continued by his sons through the 1630s (cf. BK-NM-2865). Portrait busts produced in the De Keyser workshop are characterized by elements such as grotesque mascarons and auricular ornament at the lower termination.³³Two undated photos show that the present busts were formerly mounted on plaster pedestals with comparable mascarons in the Auricular style. Van Luttervelt rightly described these pedestals as additions produced around 1930. R. van Luttervelt, ‘Herinneringen aan Hugo de Groot en de zijnen in het Rijksmuseum’, Jaarverslag van het Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap 1961, pp. 47-65, esp. p. 50. Given the rather stiff and slavish manner in which the present portraits adhere to Willem Jacobsz van Delff’s print models – including the busts’ termination – one may reasonably conclude that both were probably executed at a later date in a historicizing style, with no direct relation to the era of the two sitters or any connection to the De Keyser workshop. Conceivable moments are the two so-called ‘Stadholderless Periods’ (1650-1672 and 1702-1747), but even more so the Patriottentijd (Time of the Patriots, 1780-1795): periods when the veneration of historically renowned republican, anti-Orangist figures experienced a revival.⁴⁴M. Warren, Politics, Punishment, and Prestige: Images of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and the States Party in the Dutch Republic, 1618-1672, 2015 (diss. Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.), p. 158. Around 1779, for example, the Amsterdam burgomaster Egbert de Vrij Temminck – sympathetic to the Patriot’s cause – commissioned the English porcelain factory Wedgwood to make a series of almost life-size busts of seminal Dutch historical figures, including Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius (NG-2011-96) executed in black basalt ware.⁵⁵R. Reilly, Wedgwood, 2 vols., London 1989, vol. 1, figs. 650 and 657. A bust portrait of the naval hero Michiel de Ruyter, executed in black basalt ware, also belongs to this series, see BK-1997-39. Later, in the 1780s, the pair were entered in a pantheon of States heroes, a series of small busts introduced on the art market, cast in Loosdrecht porcelain (cf. BK-NM-5844 and -5846) and mounted on neoclassical pedestals in the form of fluted columns.⁶⁶W.M. Zappey et al., Loosdrechts porselein 1774-1784, Zwolle 1988, nos. 262-68. D.H. van Wegen, ‘Een Patriotse oproep aan de porseleinfabriek in Loosdrecht’, Vormen uit Vuur 211 (2010), no. 4, pp. 22-28. The republican climate of the late eighteenth century emerges as the best conceivable context for the present busts. Although their modelling is slightly softer, especially that of Oldenbarnevelt's bust, they share a variety of details in the attire, a similar termination, and the rather staid facial expressions with both the black basalt ware and porcelain portraits, which are all clearly based on seventeen-century print models.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 263b

B. van der Mark, 2025, 'anonymous, Bust of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Netherlands, c. 1700 - c. 1790', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20057370