The Discovery of Nature: Art of the Netherlands & Low Countries. 7

Huygens & Holland

Born at the Hague in 1596, Constantine Huygens (1596-1687)- known to the English as “Huggins”- was something of a homo universalis. Not only was he learned in the classics, an excellent art connoisseur, a poet and musician (he composed over four hundred works) and courtier; but he was also articulate and highly skilled in statecraft. Constantine had a good model: his father was educated in the law and politics, preparation for a public life in serving the House of Orange. The father’s side of the family came from Brabant; but his mother was one of the Hofnagels, renowned artists displaced from the mercantile community of Antwerp. In her study of Anglo-Dutch culture, Going Dutch, Lisa Jardine stresses the importance of Constantine Huygens to the fortunes of the House of Orange: Huygens Senior had a hand in every aspect of the dynasty’s development from diplomatic initiatives to the design of the houses that the Stadholder lived in.¹ In 1627 Constantine married Susanna van Baerle (1599-1637), the eldest of six children from a prosperous and well-connected Amsterdam family. Susanna was an intelligent woman, and according to Jardine was esteemed enough by Huygen’s correspondent, the philosopher Descartes, to be included in the process of appraising one of his works which he sent to Huygens for proof-reading.² The double-portrait (above) thought to be by the painter-architect, Jacob van Campen that surfaced on the English art market in 1992, suggests a private, wealthy and intelligent couple happy in each other’s company. There may be thematic undertones: the music sheet they both hold may be symbolic of matrimonial harmony, ideas of music, love and matrimonial union worthy of Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte.³ More specific to Huygens, this portrait might be viewed as the pictorial equivalent of Constantine’s most famous poem, the Daghwerck (“The Daywork”) which has been described as “the practical and intellectual epithalamion of a happy union.”⁴

1Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (Harper/Collins, 2008), 91.

2The book was Descarte’s Discours de la méthode, Jardine, Going Dutch, 153-4.

3Julius Held, “Constantine Huygens and Susanna van Baerle: A Hitherto Unknown Portrait,” Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Dec, 1991), 653-668. According to Held, the picture is not signed nor is there “a lengthy provenance.”

4Worp, cited in Held, “Constantine Huygens,” p. 661.