This equestrian portrait of Frederik Hendrik entered the museum in 1858 as a work by Anthonie Palamedesz, but was soon reassigned to Van Hillegaert. The vertical composition with the rider prominent in the foreground on the dark crest of a hill, and a background with a low horizon, ties in with many of the artist’s other equestrian portraits (see, for example, SK-A-3125 and SK-A-4112). The execution, too, is typical of Van Hillegaert, particularly the way in which the modelling of the horse is defined, the background in green tints, and the schematic rendering of the soldiers’ lances. It is assumed that the city in the background is ’s-Hertogenbosch, with the St Janskerk vaguely visible between the horse’s rear legs. The painting can thus be dated in or a few years after the Siege of ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1629, which is not contradicted by the dendrochronological results.
Another version, which is identical in its dimensions, composition and execution, is in a private collection. The latter work was auctioned in 1974 as the companion piece of an equestrian portrait of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden. It is doubtful, though, that they really were pendants, since the background figures differ too much in scale. It is more likely that the version of the present painting formed a pair with an equestrian portrait of Prince Maurits, both of which were sold together in 1967. The figures in both works have the same proportions, while the horses face each other in similar poses. This makes it likely that the Rijksmuseum portrait also originally had a pendant in the form of a painting of Prince Maurits.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 125.
