French Connection

Anyone familiar with the great masterpieces of Dutch Golden Age painting could probably list the furnishings favoured by its affluent citizens. Artists working throughout the Republic in the 17th century, perhaps most famously Jan Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch in Delft, Frans van Mieris in Leyden, and Gabriel Metsu in Amsterdam, supply us with luminous images of interiors combining the spare and the sumptuous. Here are the requisite bare chequerboard floors, tables covered by rich Anatolian or Persian carpets, costly Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, and humbler Delft pottery and tiles. Gilt-embossed leather panels line walls or upholster the square seats and simple backrests of so-called ‘Spanish’ chairs.

But what followed in the 18th century? The answer has only recently begun to emerge in its full complexity, and it is not to be found in picture galleries – genre paintings of domestic interiors fell from favour in this period. It is a question that evidently intrigued the connoisseur-collector Cornelis Paulus van Pauwvliet. He spent more than 50 years assiduously assembling furniture, silver, ceramics and clocks – and an extensive library – all housed in his Amsterdam apartment a stone’s throw from the Rijksmuseum. These works of art outline the evolution of Dutch taste over the course of this relatively little-studied century and beyond, with pieces stretching back to the late 17th century and forward to the late 19th century. Barely a square inch of wall or tabletop was left unadorned. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of his apartment, however, was that, at first glance, one might be forgiven for thinking that it was in France.

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French influence had already begun to inform the arrangement and the content of Dutch interiors by the 1630s, but the dissemination of the French court style was accelerated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which saw Huguenot craftsmen migrating to the Netherlands in pursuit of religious tolerance. Not least among them was Daniel Marot, draughtsman to Louis XIV, who was immediately appointed chief architect to William III, Prince of Orange, and set about transforming the palace and gardens of Het Loo.

This aristocratic French taste initially took hold in The Hague, the seat of the Dutch Republic’s princely stadtholders. The merchant families of Amsterdam in the north were more reluctant converts. Even so, French decorative arts arrived in great waves in both cities, those in the taste of Daniel Marot – which became known as the William and Mary style – proving sufficiently popular to delay the advent of the Rococo, which had swept through much of Europe, until around 1745. William IV attempted to establish Rococo as a court style during his brief reign as stadtholder (1747-51), emulating before his untimely death the ambitious patronage of his relatives Frederick, Prince of Wales, and, in Berlin, Frederick the Great.

Such were the quantities of French veneered furniture arriving in the Dutch Republic by the 1770s that the protectionist furniture guilds of both Amsterdam and The Hague complained that their craftsmen were going out of business. They had success in Amsterdam at least, where foreign wares could be sold for a further three months only, so long as they were stamped with the mark of the Guild of St Joseph. Thereafter, imports to the city were restricted to the annual fairs, where any merchant or craftsman could take a stall.

Hardly surprisingly, local cabinet-makers responded to domestic demand by making furniture in the French taste. One, the German-born Matthijs Horrix (1735-1809), proudly proclaimed his emporium to be in de commode van Parijs – ‘in the manner of Paris’. His was the largest and best-known workshop in The Hague, specialising in luxurious ormolu-mounted furniture with inlaid marquetry decoration. Three years after he enrolled in its guild as a master cabinet-maker in 1764, his success was assured by receiving the prestigious commission from the newly married stadtholder Prince William V and his bride, Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, to supply them with ‘Commodes, Tables etc’ for their residence in the city, and further furnishings for Het Loo. Virtually all Princess Wilhelmina’s annual accounts reveal deliveries of marquetry furniture from Horrix.

Paulus van Pauwvliet had a particular admiration for this cabinet-maker, and the sale includes three pieces attributed to him. Two ormolu-mounted Dutch Louis XVI commodes with plain grey marble tops are typical of his refined restraint, but there is no mistaking their costly exotic woods, imported from the New World. Here, tulipwood and purplewood are combined with sycamore. Of tripartite design, the central door of each commode is inlaid with floral ribbon-tied medallions and flanked either by flower-filled urns or ribbon-tied musical trophies. Floral sprays or Classical urns ornament the side panels.

These are market rarities, as indeed is the even more lavishly inlaid Dutch Louis XVI secretaire à abattant, of around 1765 to 1770. So much of this furniture, as well as its 18th-century French counterparts, left the country in the early 19th century after the end of the Napoleonic occupation in 1813 when anti-French sentiment was at its height. No doubt, many of the English dealers scooping up these treasures presumed they were buying French furniture rather than pieces in the French style. Certainly, the 5th Duke of Buccleuch acquired pieces by both Horrix and his Amsterdam counterpart, the German-born Andries Bongen, from the London dealer Edward Holmes Baldock, who bought extensively in Holland. It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to comprehend the extent to which French furniture was imported into, or made in, the Dutch Republic during the 18th century.

Dutch silver – vessels and boxes, not least for tobacco – similarly spans the century. It also reflects the presence and influence of foreign craftsmen on native traditions. Among them was the Swede Johannes Schiotling, who settled in Amsterdam around 1762, and employed several silversmiths from Sweden and Germany, all familiar with the northern Rococo tradition. His tankard of 1767, plain but ornamented with a floral garland, flowers and shells, took a bow in the Rijksmuseum’s seminal Rococo exhibition of 2001-2002.

Typical, too, are the delightful Dutch Delft wall plaques, painted with shipping scenes, flowers, or in imitation of Japanese or Chinese porcelains. Yet it seems that Paulus van Pauwvliet was no less enamoured by grand Louis XV gilt-bronze mounted Chinese monochrome porcelains, as well as garnitures of urns and vases confected from semi-precious hardstones.

Like the furniture and silver, his impressive clock collection boasts rarities among the Dutch pieces, among them a musical table clock by Rutgerus van Meurs. In terms of the spectacular, however, the fine English and Dutch pieces are both cast in the shade by the imposing longcase clock with an ormolu-mounted case by A Dubois and a movement by Julien Le Roy, the horologer du Roi.

In this context, what Paulus van Pauwvliet chose for his walls was unexpected: a sequence of small oil paintings and panels from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Mostly landscapes or marines, they are – appropriately enough – largely Dutch or French, with the likes of the proto-Impressionist Johan Jongkind’s Sortie du port de Honfleur of 1866 neatly linking the two. Bearing the highest estimates are one of the Belgian neo-Impressionist Théo van Rysselberghe’s views of the Dutch port of Veere of 1906 and Kees van Dongen’s Deauville, le Champ de Course of around 1935. It is hard to imagine that this avid collector had time to attend the races himself.

Susan Moore writes for the Financial Times