Dutch Gift - The Other Works

The Other Works

Of the four non-Italian works, two were by Gerrit Dou, one of which, The Young Mother (1658), was only two years old when presented. The regents of the city of Leiden may have chosen The Young Mother to augment the yacht Mary as a means to encourage Charles to look after the interests of the House of Orange in the Netherlands, which had lost effective political power in 1650. At the time of the Restoration, Charles' aunt Mary was in perilous political waters as the guardian of her son, Prince William III of Orange. This was one of those works repatriated by William III and is now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

A heavily damaged version of The Mocking of Ceres by Adam Elsheimer (c. 1605), long thought to be a copy, but now seen as the original of this rare and important work, surfaced in the English art market in the 1970s and is now in the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario. The composition is known from a copy in the Prado and an engraving, and the painting was still in the Royal Collection during the reign of George II. The damage was apparently caused by fire, perhaps in the 1698 fire of the Palace of Whitehall, when a considerable part of the Royal Collection was lost, probably including most of the statues in the 1660 Gift, though at least one of these remains in England.

The fourth non-Italian painting was a work by Pieter Jansz Saenredam, a recent (1648) and unusually large topographical painting of the Groote Kerk, Haarlem, which might have been intended to cement feelings of grateful nostalgia in Charles. This was apparently given to one of William III's Dutch courtiers, William van Huls, Clerk of the Robes and Wardrobe, as it appeared in his sale; it is now in the National Gallery of Scotland.