I. William Schellinks: Painter, Draughtsman, Etcher and Poet
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JOURNAL AND GAZETEER OF THE JOURNEY MADE BY MR JAQ. THIERRY JUNIOR AND WILLEM SCHELLINKS through i. England 2. France 3. Italy 4. Sicily 5. Malta 6. Germany 7. Switzerland 8. Holland etc Containing besides their Experiences, clear and accurate notes, of all that has been seen and heard by them in the Kingdoms, Republics, States and Regions Between the 14 July 1661, and the 24 August 1665. [Translation of original title page of MSS] Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 25 Sep 2021 at 00:30:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096011630000004X INTRODUCTION i. William Schellinks: Painter, Draughtsman, Etcher and Poet William Schellinks, the author1 of the Journal edited below, was born in Amsterdam in 1623s an<^ &ed there in 1678. As a visual artist he flourished from c. 1642 to his deadi. So he lived and worked in the golden age of Dutch painting: the third quarter of the seventeenth century, a period notable for such renowned artists as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Vermeer and Jan Steen. This could be one reason why he is not well known, another may be that much of his best output, drawings in ink, crayon and wash, was locked away in the Van der Hem Atlas (see ii below) and hardly seen by anyone. In 1646 he travelled in France with a fellow artist Lambert Doomer and made many drawings there. He apparently kept a diary even then, which enabled him to write a journal of the trip some twenty years later (see iv below). In July 1661 he set out, in some style, with the merchant shipowner Jaques Thierry and the latter's young son, also Jaques or Jacobi, then thirteen years old, from Amsterdam for England. This was the start of a Grand Tour for Thierry junior, also covering France, Italy, Sicily, Malta, Germany and Switzerland, accompanied throughout by Schellinks, who again made many drawings, mostly of a topographical nature. The two returned to Holland in August 1665. Two years after his return to Amsterdam, Schellinks married the well- to-do widow of another fellow artist Dancker Danckerts. Works by Schellinks are widely spread in museums and collections. The British Museum has 16 of his drawings,3 but by far the largest number is in the Van der Hem Atlas. The English drawings in the Atlas were studied by Hulton for the Walpole Society,4 those made in southern Italy, Sicily and Malta, by Aikema.5 Both give much biographical material on the artist. No catalogue of his work seems to exist, but a good idea of the value and variety of his oeuvre can be obtained from the Annual Art Index and Art Review. Two of his better known subjects of oil-paintings, which show his 1 The frontispiece of the Journal gives the name Jaq. Thierry junior' before that of Schellinks, but we have found no evidence that Thierry was a co-author. 2 Most artists' dictionaries give Schellinks's birthdate as 1627, following A.D. de Vries, Willem Schellinks-Teekenaar-Etser-Dichter, in Oud Holland I, 1883. Dudok van Heel of the Amsterdam City Archives confirmed his baptism as 2 February 1623. 3 Edward Croft Murray and Paul Hulton, Catabgw of British Drawings in the British Museum (cited as ECM) Vol I, i960. 4 Paul H. Hulton, Drawings of England in the Seventeenth Century by William Schellinks, Jacob Esselens and Lambert Doomer in Walpole Society 35, 1959. 5 Bernard Aikema and others, Vtaggio al Sud, 1664—1665 Willem Schellinks, Rome 1983. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 25 Sep 2021 at 00:30:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096011630000004X 2 JOURNAL OF WILLIAM SGHELLINKS IN ENGLAND talent and incidentally the change in relations between England and Holland after the Restoration, are worth mentioning. The first is of the embarkation of Charles II at Scheveningen for England in 1660, a large canvas 83 x 116cm, painted on commission for Jonas Witsen, a member of an influential Amsterdam family; it demonstrates the contemporary enthusiasm in Holland for the Stuarts. The original is said to be in the collection of Count Wachmeister.6 An engraving was later made of this picture. The second shows the scene in 1667, when England and Holland were at war and the Dutch fleet entered the Medway and burnt most of the English fleet. ScheUinks had made several drawings of the area (see Appendix I) when he was there in 1661. From these he produced several oil-paintings, four of which are in Amsterdam7 and several versions in pen, wash, and crayon; two of these (c. 50 x 150cm) are in the Atlas. There are three more in the British Museum, one of them a rough sketch. There are also engravings by Romeyn de Hooghe and Stoopendaal, reproduced in several works.8 like many of his fellow artists at the time, ScheUinks, in his youth, indulged in writing poetry. Some of this, including much of Schellinks's was collected and published. De Vries9 quotes eight such collections of the years 1654/5, wnen ScheUinks was in his early twenties, some under the title 'De koddige olipodrigo' [the droU hotchpotch].10 Some of these are illustrated with Schellinks's engravings. The poems themselves are not highly regarded. The earliest known mention of Schellinks's Journal is in Houbraken's Groote Schouburgh (1718), a coUection of biographies of Dutch painters." This tells us very little about ScheUinks the artist, but fortunately Houbraken saw and was fascinated by the Journal, then in the possession of a collector, Arnold van Halen (see iv below). He gives an extract of what he judged to be of interest to his readers: for England he picks three places in London and one college each in Oxford and Cambridge. He does not mention the Atlas and probably did not know about it. De Vries, in 1883, provided a useful biography of ScheUinks; he knew about the Atlas in Vienna, and about the Journal, but he did not know where this was, expressing the hope that it would be rediscovered one day. 6 U. Thierae and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexicon dsr bildenden Kunstler. Vol 30. Leipzig 1930. Another version was sold in New York in 1935. 7 See Laurence J. Bol, Die HoUdndische Marinemalerei des iy. Jahrhunderts, Brunswick, 1973, 297-9. Information from Gregory Rubinstein. 8 e.g. Gerard Brandt, 'Mkhkl de Ruiter1 (1687). 9 de Vries, p. 157-9. 10 From Spanish 'Olla Podrida', a kind of stew. 11 Arnold Houbraken (1661-1721), De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlandsche Konstchilders en Schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718/21. Reprint ed. P.T.A. Swillens, Maastricht 1943. It is a continuation of Karel van Mander's Schilder-boeck, 1604. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 25 Sep 2021 at 00:30:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096011630000004X INTRODUCTION 3 Schellinks arrived in England just a year after the Restoration, a momentous event, enthusiastically welcomed in the Dutch Republic, where it was hoped that the good relations which had resulted from the dynastic link between the Houses of Stuart and Orange, by the marriage of Mary Stuart and William II of Orange in 1641 (see Appendix II) would be fully restored. These good relations had suffered during the Commonwealth, when England challenged the rapidly growing domination of trade and shipping by Dutch merchants, result- ing in the first Dutch war.'2 Schellinks had that war very much in mind when he arrived seven years after its end and referred to it many times in his Journal. He recorded the captured Dutch ships he saw, now incorporated in the English navy, noting their original names, where they were captured and sometimes the captain at the time.'3 He referred to the then ruinous palace at Greenwich, where Dutch prisoners of war were kept, many of whom he says died there as a result of deprivation.'4 But all this and other bad things he noted such as the neglected buildings, the damage to church ornaments and other structures, are blamed on Cromwell.'5 He expresses no anti-English feelings: now that the King had been restored all that was in the past. But Schellinks carefully recorded the fortifications, armaments, strength and weakness, access, condition etc. of the fortresses he visited and the new and old warships which he saw. Many of the drawings which he made concerned harbours, shipping, naval bases and fortifications. Three years after Schellinks left England the two nations were again at war, and de Ruyter entered the Medway and burned all shipping there and the guns of the battle were clearly heard in London. Schellinks's travels in England cover a period of notable events and great change: the marriage of the King to Catharine of Braganza, the re-establishment of the Episcopal Church, the Act of Uniformity, the revival of public entertainment (the Lord Mayor's Show, the theatre with the restoration comedies, bear baiting and wrestling), and also the trials and public executions of the regicides and of other 'traitors', and real or imagined uprisings against the throne. All of these Schellinks described accurately in his Journal, as comparison with the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn and other contemporary sources shows, and in a 12 The first Anglo-Dutch war, 1652—1654, with several sea battles in one of which the Dutch Admiral Tromp was killed; the blockade of the Dover Straits greatly damaged Dutch Trade.