Rupert (1619-1682), Prince-Palatine of the Rhine, in Combat Dress

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 24 januari 2006

Provenance

…; ? acquired by the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718-92), of Hinchingbrooke, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where recorded in 1751¹N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich 1718-1792, London 1993, p. 69. and 1761²E. Montagu, 8th Earl of Sandwich, Hinchingbrook, London 1910, p. 4., seen by Horace Walpole in 1763;³Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with George Montagu, 1736-61, eds. W.S. Lewis and Ralph S. Brown, 2 vols., London/New Haven (Conn.) 1941, II, p. 79. recorded in the library, Hinchingbrooke, 1808 (‘half length[s] of Prince Rupert when a youth’),⁴J. Britton and E.W. Brayley et al., The Beauties of England and Wales; or Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of each County, 18 vols., London 1801-15, VII, 1808, p. 475. in the Yellow Drawing Room, 1876 (‘Prince Rupert by Van Dyck Three quarter length Rich Dress of Murrey coloured Satin with Cuirass’) and 1910;⁵M.L. Boyle, Biographical Notices of the Portraits at Hinchingbrook, London 1876, p. 138, where the costume is not accurately described; a photogravure in the Witt Library, London, of the portrait at Hinchingbrooke, from an unidentified book presumably published not long after Boyles’s volume, is of the present work. sale, Victor (Alexander) Montagu, Viscount Hinchingbrooke (1906-95), the eldest son of the Earl of Sandwich, London (Sotheby’s), 4 December 1957, no. 172, as Van Dyck, £ 150, to the dealer Duits, for the museum⁶E. Montagu, 8th Earl of Sandwich, Hinchingbrook, London 1910, p. 36.

ObjectNumber: SK-A-3927

The artist

Biography

Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - London 1641)

Anthony van Dyck was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Antwerp, on 22 March 1599, the seventh child of a prosperous haberdasher. He died on 9 December 1641 in Blackfriars, London, and was buried two days later in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. By then he was internationally famous, and had to his credit an oeuvre of well over seven hundred paintings, consisting mostly in portraits, but also some highly esteemed sacred and profane figure subjects. He had outlived Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had greatly influenced him in his youth, by only some eighteen months, but he was to prove the more widely influential.

Enrolled as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen (1574/1575-1632) in 1609, he became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke nine years later before he was eighteen and a week before he received his majority – an event perhaps connected with this father’s financial difficulties which had begun in 1615 and ended with the sale of the family house in 1620, having caused strife in the family. In the meantime, Van Dyck had earlier entered Rubens’s studio, and had perhaps already operated unofficially as an artist working from a house in Antwerp called Den Dom van Ceulen. He was the only one of Rubens’s assistants to be named in the contract for the paintings for the Antwerp Jesuit Church signed on 22 March 1620.

There is no contemporary archival evidence for the existence of a studio functioning for Van Dyck before he left Antwerp for London and Rome. However, statements given in a lawsuit in Antwerp in 1660/1661 and the number of contemporary versions of some of Van Dyck’s works of that time would indicate at the least that there was a group of artists working in Van Dyck’s milieu, however informally.⁷See S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 15-16; for a recent review of the evidence concerning Van Dyck’s practice in these years, see F. Lammertse and A. Vergara, ‘A Portrait of Van Dyck as a Young Artist’, in F. Lammertse and A. Vergara (eds.), The Young Van Dyck, exh. cat. Madrid (Museo Nacional del Prado) 2012, pp. 23-74, esp. pp. 28-29 and nos. 34-48.

Van Dyck left Antwerp for London in October 1620; the purpose of his short visit – he was granted permission to leave at the end of the following February – is not known, but he received a payment from King James I (1566-1625) and was expected to return in eight months. He was recorded soon afterwards as living in Rome in the same house as George Gage (c. 1582-1632), an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ employed by the British crown to advance negotiations for the prince of Wales’s ‘Spanish match’ at the papal court.⁸See F. Rangoni, ‘Anthony van Dyck and George Gage in Rome’, The Burlington Magazine 160 (2018), pp. 4-9.

In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.⁹For his time in Palermo, see X. Salomon, Van Dyck in Sicily 1624-25: Painting and the Plague, exh. cat. London (Dulwich Picture Gallery) 2012. He re-established himself in 1627 in Antwerp, and was appointed court painter to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduchess Isabella (1566-1633); his practice extended to The Hague whence he was summoned on two occasions.

By the summer of 1632, Van Dyck had settled in London; he was knighted by King Charles I (1600-1649) and then granted an annual pension as a retainer. But in the spring of 1634, he was in Antwerp and by the end of the year he was living in Brussels. By March 1635 he had returned to London and was established in a studio, specially converted by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), on the Thames at Blackfriars. In great demand, not only by the king as a portrait painter, Van Dyck mixed with members of the court and married in 1640 Mary Ruthven, who was of a Scots noble family. In the autumn of 1640 he was in Antwerp, and early in 1641 briefly in Paris whence he returned hoping to gain the patronage of King Louis XIII (1601-1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642). There in November, he wrote that he was very unwell; back in London with his wife for her lying-in, he died shortly after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana.

References
S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 1-12

Entry

The sitter in this portrait wears combat dress: a buff surcoat over a slashed mulberry-coloured tunic trimmed with gold lace, pointed with lace collar and cuffs. A baldric supports a sword at his side, round his neck and shoulders is a gorget; his breeches are also mulberry-coloured and trimmed with gold lace.

The warrior can be safely identified as Rupert (1619-1682), Prince and Count Palatine of the Rhine and later Duke of Cumberland, by virtue of the similarity of his features with those in Anthony van Dyck’s full-length portrait at Baltimore.¹⁰Millar in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, no. IV.207. He was the second surviving son of Frederick V (1596-1632), the Elector Palatine, and Princess Elizabeth (1596-1662), the daughter of King James I of Great Britain. The prince was brought up in the Dutch Republic; following the death of his father, he joined his dispossessed elder brother in London in early February 1636 and left the country in mid-1637 to join the siege of Breda.¹¹Ian Roy in H. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols., Oxford 2004.

It is at this juncture that he would have sat to Van Dyck, as he remained on the continent until the end of 1641. Van Dyck portrayed him at least four times: in the full length at Baltimore already referred to, wearing black costume; in armour with his elder brother at three-quarter length (Paris, Musée du Louvre);¹²Millar in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, nos. IV.207 and IV.69. and at half length in military uniform his baton help up, known only by an engraving.¹³S. Turner and C. Depauw, The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Anthony van Dyck, 8 vols., Rotterdam 2002, III, no. 163. The present portrait is one of three versions, perhaps after a lost original or a lost studio variant of the full-length at Baltimore. The other two are in the National Gallery, London,¹⁴Bequeathed to the National Gallery by Cornelia, Countess of Craven (†1961), 1965; from 1965-85 on long-term loan to the National Portrait Gallery; from 1988-91 on long-term loan to the Government Art Collection; now in store at the National Gallery. See National Portrait Gallery Annual Report to the Trustees 1965-66, London 1967, pp. 36-8. and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin;¹⁵D. Oldfield, Later Flemish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland: The Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, coll. cat. Dublin (National Gallery of Ireland) 1992, pp. 42-44, no. 1738. they all differ in some respects from each other.

The Dublin picture is a full-length and thought to be an early copy; it was owned by Philip Wharton (1613-1690), 4th Baron Wharton, who possessed an important group of paintings by Van Dyck, as well as having sat twice to the artist.¹⁶Millar in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, IV.237.328; the Dublin picture is not referred to by Millar, but see D. Oldfield, Later Flemish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland: the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, coll. cat. Dublin (National Gallery of Ireland) 1992, no. 1738, pp. 42-45. The London painting is optimistically described as the work of the studio, this in spite of its possible provenance from William Craven (1608-1697), 1st Earl of Craven, an ardent adherent of the family of the dispossessed Elector Palatine.¹⁷It is not known when the painting entered the Craven collection; it is perhaps listed in a 1739 inventory of Combe Abbey, the family residence, National Gallery dossier, no. 6363. The date of the Rijksmuseum portrait is not certain, but it seems to be early and perhaps 1645 or later.

The portrait perhaps came to the attention of the museum when it was exhibited in the Michiel de Ruyter exhibition (no. 154) at the museum in 1957, shortly before being sent to auction. Following its acquisition, it was attributed to the English artist William Dobson (1611-1646), who depicted the prince on three occasions in the 1640s, when Prince Rupert was in Oxford supporting his uncle, King Charles, now at war with Parliament.¹⁸M. Rogers, William Dobson, 1611-1646, exh. cat. London (National Portrait Gallery) 1983-84, nos. 25, 26 and fig. 18. This attribution was challenged by Frewer in 1965 and again by Millar in 1977.¹⁹Letters in object file RMA. By then the attribution had been qualified; it was abandoned in the 1992 museum catalogue.

Prince Rupert was a charismatic, royalist cavalry commander in the English Civil War; after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he was a successful admiral. Edward Montagu (1625-1672), 1st Earl of Sandwich, in his early career a Roundhead and supporter of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, whose descendants were to own this portrait, was in the opposing army in several of the Civil War battles, and escorted the prince to Oxford after his surrender of the city of Bristol to the Parliamentarians. The pair, however, later enjoyed cordial, professional relations as admirals in the English navy.²⁰R. Ollard, Cromwell’s Earl: A Life of Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich, London 1994, p. 144.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

Millar in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, under no. IV.207

Collection catalogues

1976, p. 195, no. A 3927 (as attributed to William Dobson); 1992, p. 51, no. A 3927 (as after Anthony van Dyck)

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'copy after Anthony van Dyck, Rupert (1619-1682), Prince-Palatine of the Rhine, in Combat Dress, after c. 1645', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8305

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