Cast.

Good.

…; first recorded in the museum in 1973¹¹J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 458.

Object number: NG-817

This cast iron relief with the portrait bust of King William II will have come about not long after the subject had ascended the throne on 7 October 1840. The anonymous modeller probably based his work on one of the two large official portraits which Jan Adam Kruseman (1804-1862) painted of the new king in 1842 for the city halls of The Hague and Amsterdam.²²Cf. E. Lipke-Deetman et al., Jan Adam Kruseman 1804-1862, exh. cat. Apeldoorn (Paleis Het Loo) 2002, figs. 5 and 7, nos. 399 and 405. The simple relief may have been cast by Enthoven in The Hague, a company not only producing functional objects and structures, but also specialized in casting (semi-)artistic items of this type. For example, a brass bust of the said king in the Hague Historical Museum,³³The Hague, Haags Historisch Musuem, inv. no. 0000-0022-BEO. and a cast iron bust of King William I by Louis Royer (1793-1868) in the Rijksmuseum (NG-MC-1320) both come from that foundry.

Bieke van der Mark, 2026

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 458

B. van der Mark, 2026, 'anonymous, Plaquette with King William II of the Netherlands (1792-1849), Netherlands, c. 1840 - c. 1842', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20048868