Shaping the royal image: Gerrit van Honthorst and the Stuart courts in London and the Hague, 1620-1649

Abstract

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656) developed a new method of picturing the courtly persona. My dissertation analyzes his contact with and commissions from Charles I of England and his sister Elizabeth Stuart, the exiled Queen of Bohemia in The Hague, to reformulate our understanding of the display and reception of early modern portraits as part of the enterprise of self-making. Previous literature has emphasized Honthorst’s early, Caravaggesque work and has overshadowed the importance of his later, courtly paintings. My research brings the international contributions of the major part of his career into focus and better conceptualizes the role of the Netherlands in European court culture. Situating Honthorst as a piece within and product of the larger European system, this study insists on the transnationality of court culture and painters, further developing the international turn in scholarship on the history of Netherlandish art. It explores networking systems between courts by placing Honthorst and his paintings as a fulcrum around which such networks operated, providing new insight into the currency of art in the early modern era. The dissertation follows Honthorst’s contact with and production for various courts from his return to Utrecht from Italy in 1620 to Charles’s execution in 1649, which temporarily dissolved the Royal Collection. This project thus elucidates the role of art in the relationship between Charles and Elizabeth through the lenses of court culture, family relationships, and the work of a single artist. By thinking critically across Honthorst’s body of work, we may better understand how he positioned himself in relation to his patrons and his patrons to one another.