Catshuis

[click images for enlarged versions]


An estate at Sorghvliet, near The Hague in South Holland, was established in 1651 by the politician and eminent poet, Jacob Cats. Known as Catshuis, the original building was first expanded by Hans Willem Bentinck after Cats' death in 1660. There have been additional episodic refurbishments of the house, particularly in the recent past, which has served as the residence of the Prime Minister of The Netherlands since 1963.

Perhaps of greater interest than the house itself, especially in the hand coloured engravings above, are the surrounding baroque gardens, said to have been modelled after the parklands at Versailles. None of these decorative elements - the coiffed hedgerows, fountains, fishponds and topiaries, which I'm guessing time-wise, were a post-Cats addition - have survived. It appears to be all wooded parkland today.

A set of 32 illustrations by Johannes van den Aveele were produced by Amsterdam printer Nicolaus Visscher during the 1690s. The example images above are from a set of 18 prints in an anonymous bound album of Italian, French and Dutch garden pictures, probably assembled in Holland in the 18th century.

• I found these prints among the wonderful Catena Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Lanscapes - developed by a consortium of American botanical and university bodies. The digital collection employs the LunarInsight browser so turn off any pop-up blockers. Launch the Insightbrowser from the left margin, then: 'search', 'by work creator' and add 'Aveele'.
• Sorghvliet, Bird's-Eye View of Formal Gardens - George Glazer Gallery.
• Satellite view of the estate.
• 'Introduction to Dutch gardens and garden architecture' by Carla S. Oldenburger-Ebbers at the Wageningen Digital Library.
• Panorama views of the Catshuis today.
• A couple of aerial shots of the estate at flickr.
• The house featured between the skeletons in a frontpiece in one of Cats' poetry books.
• Giornale Nuovo on Jacob Cats emblemata series.

The Marshal Insect Album

The website displaying these images is firefox incompatible so I'll reproduce some of the accompanying commentary...

"Alexander Marshal, 162?-1682, was chiefly known as an illustrator of flowers and plants. In 1980, his expertise in painting insects also came to light, through this album of insect drawings. The album consists of 57 pages containing 129 watercolors of insects: butterflies, moths, caterpillars, beetles, locusts, spiders, flies, and crickets. The backs of Marshal's drawings contain notes in his own hand, and these annotations provide autobiographical information as well as material for study of word usage and dialects."

"Alexander Marshal's date of birth remains unknown (162-?), but it is known that he died on 7th December 1682, leaving a widow, Dorothea (daughter of Francis Smith), but no children. Marshal first appears as a mature artist in the late 1640s, so was probably born before 1625. He was previously a merchant, and had resided for some time in France. It appears that Marshal had no house of his own. He is mentioned as living at Ham in 1650, London in 1651, and Islington in 1654 where he resided with the son of an Alderman Dewes, and he spent the last years of his life in Fulham Palace, home of his friend Henry Compton, who was Bishop of London from 1675."

"Marshal's great nephew and eventual heir, William Freind, described him as a gentleman with "an independent fortune [who] painted merely for his Amusement". Nonetheless, already in 1958, Marshal was described in Sir William Sanderson's Graphice as a flower and fruit artist among "our Modern Masters comparable with any now beyond seas". He became renowned as one of the earliest water-colorists, and his ingenious experiments derived pigments from flowers, berries, gums, and roots, as well as verdigris and arsenic, that give his paintings a unique vibrancy of color."

"A keen lepidopterist, Marshal's annotations describe his subjects in great detail. He also tells of enlisting the help of two of his friends: John Tradescant (1608-1662), and Bishop Henry Compton (1632-1713), in order to acquire many rare insects from foreign lands. [...] Marshal was a man of dialectal (and inconsistent) spelling who nonetheless used some technical terms from Latin, knew some Greek and incorporated in his informal communication terms not generally known no to have been in use in his era."

The Alexander Marshal Insect Watercolors Album (probably 1660-1680) is online at the Ewell Sale Stewart Library at the Academy of Natural Sciences. (firefox incompatible)

Westphalian Peace Commemorative Album

[mouseover for date/caption and click to enlarge to full size]


'Sammlung aller Denkmale des Westphälischen Friedens' contains 140 engravings and was assembled between 1650 and 1789. The book is online at the University of Augsburg (click on 'anzeigen' for the complete thumbnails)

It was a very odd experience looking through this extraordinary album on the first occasion from a point of complete ignorance. I saw 'Westphalia' and 'pax' around so I guessed it had something to do with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. I originally thought it was a kind of regional chronicle, but for every depiction of what I guessed was a local building or town meeting, there were these eccentric allegorical engravings, packed full of emblematic puzzles and otherworldly motifs.

The further you go further through the book the more the images become demonstrably biblical (probably not as well represented above), but even then, they're often associated or seem to be associated with regional Germany. That's not always true - there are a fair number of more naturalistic illustrations obviously set in the middle east but it was still quite weird; if I hadn't had some background christian religious knowledge I'd swear everything in the bible took place in the Westphalian region of Germany. {What is Jesus doing in a pharmacy?!}

And of course, now that I've recounted my own strange meeting with this work, you'll be able to go through and see how unfounded or foolish were my initial reactions. They have a lot to do with the way I stumble across oddities accidentally and the evolving response that follows before I start trying to search/translate my way out of a {happy} state of dazed curiosity.

Even now I'm only vaguely aware that some sort of young person's evangelical religious group commissioned or assembled or contributed to this century and a half of commemorative imagery and it's not altogether certain that each piece of work was completed in the stated year.

I'm hoping that a benevolent german speaking visitor to this site will be able to provide a bit more background via a comment or email. Title pages: I, II. Each of the images above is worth enlarging to see all the baroque accoutrements and complex allegorical tropes, with the occasional monster and star wars jet fighter thrown in to compound the intrigue. This is the bread and butter of a satisfying BibliOdyssey.