Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 9, No. 1 • Fall 2014 “Une abondance extra ordinaire”: The Porcelain Collection of Amalia van Solms Virginia Treanor o speak of personal taste in relation to the patronage and collecting Tof art in the seventeenth century is somewhat misleading; motivation, perhaps, would be a better term to describe the choices that patrons and collectors made, particularly among Europe’s nobility. Kings and princes, known as much for their art collections as their military victories, sur- rounded themselves with art that reflected their erudition, humanism and, above all, status. Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647) and Amalia van Solms (1602–75), the Prince and Princess of Orange, were no exception.1 Eager to be recognized as the peers of their monarchical counterparts in France, Spain, England and elsewhere, the prince and princess modeled their 1 Their titles were hereditary ones that designated them as the rulers of the tiny principality of Orange in southern France but gave them no similar jurisdiction in the United Provinces in the Netherlands where they lived. Theirs was an anomalous political position in seventeenth-century Europe as the United Provinces was, at this time, a republic. Frederik Hendrik held the position of stadhouder, an office dating back to the Middle Ages and originally designated to represent the authority of the feudal lord in his absence. Willem I (1533–84), Frederik Hendrik’s father, held the post for the Habsburgs in the Spanish Netherlands until he led the revolt against Spanish control in 1581. Despite the subsequent independence of the United Provinces, the position of stadhouder was maintained and inherited by Prince Maurits (1557–1625) upon the death of his father, Willem I. Frederik Hendrik also inherited the stadhouder title, along with those of Captain General of the Army and Admiral of the Navy, when his half- brother, Prince Maurits, died in 1625. Even though Frederik Hendrik was the titular head of state, he served at the pleasure of the States General, a representative body that was the official governing entity of the Dutch Republic. 141 142 EMWJ Vol. 9, No. 1 • Fall 2014 Virginia Treanor collection after those of royal courts and built it to rival those of other great European treasure houses. The current understanding of the genesis and formation of the couple’s collection is unbalanced because there is a dearth of primary source documentation concerning Amalia’s contribu- tions. During her married life, she collected in her husband’s name; her own activities, like those of most seventeenth-century women, were less thoroughly chronicled than those of men. Amalia’s collection of porcelain, however, offers a unique way to understand more fully her role as a collec- tor because it was an interest that Frederik Hendrik did not share.2 Her porcelain collection demonstrates that Amalia was an avid collector and that she used her wealth and status to procure objects that symbolized the might of the Dutch maritime empire and, by extension, the power of the House of Orange. The most ambitious artistic program in which Amalia undisput- edly played a role was the decoration of the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch (The House in the Woods). In 1645, the States of Holland granted Amalia a parcel of land just outside The Hague on which to construct a summer palace. The building was almost certainly intended as a home for Amalia once she became a widow, considering the eighteen-year difference in age between her and her husband.3 Construction began in 1645 while Frederik Hendrik was still alive, but plans for the interior, particularly the central hall, the Oranjezaal, changed radically after his death in 1647. In that year, Amalia asked Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the House of Orange, and the artist and architect Jacob van Campen to create a memo- rial to honor the memory of her husband. Inspired by the Medici cycle that Peter Paul Rubens had painted in the 1620s for the French queen, Marie 2 I use the term “collection” here as a designator for all the pieces of porcelain that Amalia possessed. I do not mean to imply that it was physically concentrated in one specific location. Rather, like her collection of paintings, the porcelain was housed in Amalia’s various residences. 3 Pieter van der Ploeg, Carola Vermeeren et al., Princely Patrons: The Collection of Frederick Henry of Orange and Amalia of Solms in The Hague (Zwolle: Waanders, 1997), 47; Marten Loonstra, Het Huijs int Bosch: het Koninklijk Paleis Huis ten Bosch historisch gezien/ The Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch in an Historical View (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1985), 15. The Porcelain Collection of Amalia van Solms 143 de Medici, Amalia commissioned eleven artists from both the southern and northern Netherlands to create a cycle of paintings in the Oranjezaal consisting of over thirty large works on canvas for the walls and four paint- ings executed directly on the wood paneling of the vault. The completed cycle, rich with allegorical representations and symbolism, celebrates the life and military achievements of Frederik Hendrik.4 Running along the perimeter of the room is a sequence of scenes that form a triumphal procession. One of these images, painted by Van Campen, features a tangle of figures and objects festooned with garlands of flowers bursting out of a trompe l’oeil archway in full Baroque exuberance (Figure 1). In this painting, Goods from the East and West Indies (c.1648– 49), eight white Europeans are joined by one African woman who wears a white garment and holds a parrot. What is presumably an American Indian, identifiable by his dark skin and the feathers in his hair, crouches in the lower right corner. Surrounding these figures are exotic foods including lemons, pineapples, and corn, as well as shells from distant seas. Other for- eign objects like baskets, porcelain, feathered shields, and Japanese armor are located in the upper half of the composition. This image, like the other triumphal scenes in the Oranjezaal, cel- ebrates the Dutch “Golden Age” and specifically the global power of the Dutch maritime empire. Van Campen’s painting depicts the vast variety of goods that came to the Netherlands from the far reaches of the globe. Many items featured in the image, such as the suit of Japanese armor and the large porcelain vase adorned with flowers, were actually owned by Amalia and Frederik Hendrik.5 Another porcelain dish, filled with exotic seashells, balances on the head of a half-nude figure in the lower left. These 4 For the complexities of the iconographic program, see B. Brenninkmeyer-De Rooij, “Notities betreffende de decoratie van de Oranjezaal in Huis Ten Bosch,” Oud Holland 96, 3 (January 1, 1982): 133–85. The artists who worked on the Oranjezaal project are Salomon de Bray, Christiaen van Couwenburgh, Theodoor van Thulden, Willeboirts Bosschaert, Gerard van Honthorst, Caesar van Everdingen, Pieter de Grebber, Pieter Soutman, Jacob Jordaens, and Jacob van Campen. 5 Prince Maurits was given at least one suit of Japanese armor by the Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada and it may be this suit that is represented in Van Campen’s painting. See K. Zandvliet and (Netherlands) Rijksmuseum, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 144 EMWJ Vol. 9, No. 1 • Fall 2014 Virginia Treanor Figure 1: Jacob van Campen, Goods From the East and West Indies, c.1648–49, oil on canvas, 380 × 205 cm. Oranjezaal, Huis ten Bosch, The Hague. The Porcelain Collection of Amalia van Solms 145 vessels, in addition to serving as symbols of international trade, also refer to objects in Amalia’s porcelain collection, much of which was displayed in her apartments, which were located just behind the wall on which Van Campen’s painting hung. In fact, by 1673 Amalia had assembled no fewer than 441 porcelain pieces at Huis ten Bosch alone.6 Frederik of Dohna, nephew to Amalia van Solms, wrote in his mem- oirs of his illustrious aunt, “she possessed in short time a prodigious num- ber of solid gold dishes for all uses of life, elaborate furniture of all kinds, paneled cabinets of Chinese lacquer, [and] porcelain vases of extraordinary grandeur and abundance.” 7 By the time of her death in 1675, Amalia had amassed a truly impressive collection of porcelain from China and Japan. Unlike the paintings that she and Frederik Hendrik owned and collected, and which reflected the couple’s shared taste in Italianate, clas- sicist styles and subjects (painted by Dutch and Flemish artists), porcelain was Amalia’s own passion. Thanks to inventories drawn up of the goods the couple assembled over the course of their lifetimes, porcelain appears solely in rooms that belonged to Amalia and nowhere else. An evaluation of her porcelain collection, therefore, allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the role played by decorative art within the context of the couple’s collecting interests and a way to assess the extent to which Amalia shaped those interests. Just as Van Campen’s scene is a part of the overall cycle of paintings in the Oranjezaal, Amalia’s porcelain collection is a component of the larger whole of the couple’s collection and part of her campaign to emphasize the central position of the House of Orange in Dutch society. 1600–1950 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2002), 101–6. My thanks to Karina Corrigan for bringing this to my attention. 6 S.W.A. Drossaers and Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer (D/LS), Inventarissen van de inboedels in de verblijven van de Oranjes an daarmede gelijk te stellen stukken, 1567–1712 (’s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1976), 1: 310. 7 r F édéric Dohna, Les mémoires du Burgrave et Comte Frédéric de Dohna .