The Raising of Lazarus

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Raising of Lazarus is nothing short of a Mannerist masterpiece of stagecraft – all gesture and posture, painted in 1602, two years before the publication of Karel van Mander’s artistic treatise Het Schilder-boeck (Haarlem, 1604). This seminal work on painters marked a pivotal moment in the history of Dutch art, becoming for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters became for Italy. Van Mander praised this picture as one of Cornelis’ best, having admired it at the residence of the man who commissioned it: ‘Among others he made a remarkably beautiful piece in 1602, which is to be seen with Jan Mathijssen in the See-Peerdt in Haarlem, with The Raising of Lazarus, notably, attractively, glowingly and well painted and executed’ (op. cit.). Highly elaborate and wonderfully preserved (with a later enlargement at the top), this work is one of the best documented and notable paintings in Cornelis’ oeuvre.

Karel van Mander's arrival in Haarlem in 1583, and his creation, together with Cornelis van Haarlem and Hendrick Goltzius, of the so-called Haarlem Academy, instigated one of the most fruitful collaborations in the history of Dutch art. In the same year that Cornelis painted this Raising of Lazarus, he carried out one other commission, namely The Preaching of Saint John the Baptist now in The National Gallery, London (also signed and dated 1602; fig. 1). It must have been a significant year for Cornelis, as it was also one in which Haarlem was visited by Bartholomeus Spranger, the most important Northern Mannerist painter of his generation, whose work had made such a deep impression on Cornelis in his early artistic development in the 1580s.

In the same year of Spranger’s visit, Cornelis signed his Raising of Lazarus, choosing to depict his long, attenuated figures more sedately in his representation of this dramatic subject. Yet the flair with which the figure of Lazarus is conceived suggests that it was based on an Italian example, and was no doubt recorded for future use in study drawings, making reappearances in the artist’s The Fall of Man of 1620 (Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum) and 1622 (Hamburg, Kunsthalle), and in reverse in his Allegory of the Brevity of Life of 1617 (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst). The pathos and spatial dynamism achieved in Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary, was also undoubtedly Italian in origin, with the three figures, together with the kneeling man in the lower right corner, forming a gentle curve across the balanced composition. Cornelis’ two-part arrangement, with the figures looming up from the darkness of the background in a conflated flow of light and dark, placed Lazarus, his family and the Jews of Bethany in direct confrontation with Christ and his disciples, among whom stood Jan Matthijsz. Ban and Cornelis Vlasman.

The ‘Jan Mathijssen’ to whom this picture belonged, and by whom it was commissioned, was Jan Matthijsz. Ban, counted among the most important sixteenth and early-seventeenth century Haarlem art collectors (see Jeroense, op. cit., p. 115, note 2). Ban was a gold and silversmith (though his work is now lost), and operated a brewery ‘Het Seepaerd' (‘The Seahorse’) with his brother-in-law Cornelis Gerritsz. Vlasman, located on the Bakenessergracht behind Goltzius’ house, with whom he remained a close friend for the rest of the artist’s life. Ban’s dominant role in the arts of Haarlem is evidenced by the fact that Van Mander dedicated his Het Schilder-boeck to both Ban and Vlasman in 1604, writing: ‘To the honourable, worthy gentlemen, my good friends Jan Mathijsz Ban and Cornelis Gerritsz. Vlasman of Haarlem, doubly related by marriage, and lovers of the art of painting’ (fol. 197r-v).

Ban and Vlasman must have indeed been in constant contact with Haarlem artists in the first decade of the seventeenth century, with their appearance in the present painting bearing witness to the personal ties they had with Cornelis. Portrayed among the disciples of Christ, they are pictured in contemporary clothing as a customary trait of Haarlem history painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Generally regarded as the more important of the two, Ban is assumed to be the man looking out at the viewer, drawing our attention to Christ with his right hand and to Lazarus with his left, while Vlasman stands to the right of Christ. Goltzius appears to have captured the only other known likeness of Ban in a drawing of circa 1592 (fig. 2), when he accompanied the artist on his trip from Rome to Naples and on the return journey to Haarlem. Pictured on the left at around the age of 26, Ban’s physiognomic traits appear highly comparable to the figure in the foreground of the present picture, here slightly aged with a beard around a decade later, fitting Van Mander’s description of him as a man with a ‘tall and a distinguished demeanour’ (op. cit., I, p. 394).

This was seemingly not the only historical painting in which the brothers-in-law recorded their likenesses. Van Mander reported one other painting owned by Jan Matthijsz. Ban: a large panel he commissioned from Goltzius depicting the mystic marriage of Saint Catharine, now lost, but most likely preserved in Goltzius’ drawing of The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catharine of circa 1600-02 (Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett). Dating to around the same time as the present picture, Ban and Vlasman seemingly appear in a salient detail to the right of the composition, outlined in almost identical poses to those pictured here. One can imagine that the Catholic brewers intended to hang the work in close proximity to The Raising of Lazarus as ‘praiseworthy and important pieces by the most accomplished hands’, to quote Van Mander, overlooking the clientele of their brewery, to be discussed over a pitcher of beer.

THE 1ST MARQUESS OF HERTFORD AS A COLLECTOR

Francis Seymour Conway, successively 2^nd Baron Conway, 1^st Earl (1750) and 1^st (1793) Marquess of Hertford (1718-1794), was both a patron and a collector of considerable acuity. His example clearly inspired both his grandson, Francis Charles, 2^nd Marquess (1743-1822) and his great-grandson, Richard, 4^rd Marquess (1800-1870). If the 1^st Marquess’ acquisitions helped to inspire his successors, his urge to collect must also have owed much to the collections that he knew in youth, most obviously that of his uncle by marriage, Sir Robert Walpole, from 1742 1^st Earl of Orford, which was kept at Downing Street and other residences in London before being transferred to Houghton. The future first marquess and his younger brother, Field Marshal the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway, were intimate friends of their cousin, the Hon. Horace Walpole, who would eventually succeed his nephew as 4^th Earl of Orford. Walpole gave one of the three autograph versions of the portrait of himself by Sir Joshua Reynolds to his cousin: this remains at Ragley. Hertford must also have been familiar with the collection of his father-in-law, Charles Fitzroy, 2^nd Duke of Grafton, who had inherited the rather remarkable group of pictures acquired by his maternal grandfather, the Earl of Arlington.

Lord Conway, as he was until his elevation in 1750, invited his Horace Walpole to travel with him in Italy in 1737: he declined, but the two were in Rheims with Thomas Gray, the poet, from June until September 1739. By then, Conway had apparently spent some two years on the continent. He is known to have been in Rome in February 1738 and clearly went to Venice, as the pictures by Canaletto he obtained suggest. The large intersecting pair of views of the Bacino (London, Wallace Collection, nos. 497 and 499) must clearly have been specific commissions, and it is tempting to speculate that these masterpieces were ordered in emulation to the large pair that Sir Robert had placed prominently at Downing Street.

Conway married Lady Isabella Fitzroy in 1741. When its design was resolved by Robert Hooke for his grandfather’s kinsman, Edward Conway, 1^st Earl of Conway, Ragley had been one of the most advanced mansions in England. By the mid-eighteenth century, it must have seemed out of date and the architect James Gibbs was retained to alter the interior in circa 1750-5, creating in the Hall one of the finest rooms of the time, famous not least for its plaster decoration.

By March 1755, Lord Hertford was certainly in touch with Joshua Reynolds, whose portrait of Walpole of 1757 he was presumably given in that year. In David Mannings’ view, it is possible that a portrait of Hertford was in progress by April 1758. In December of that year Reynolds waited on the brothers; his portrait of the future field marshal at Ragley has tentatively been dated 1763. In 1770, Hertford commissioned a portrait of his seventh son, the Hon, later Lord, George Seymour Conway that was formerly at Ragley from Sir Joshua. In 1781, the fine portraits of his eldest and fifth daughters, Frances, Countess of Lincoln and Lady Elizabeth Seymour Conway (London, Wallace Collection, nos. 33 and 31) were ordered, but it was not until 1785 that Reynolds’ extant portrait of Hertford himself, at Ragley, was supplied. Hertford was in his late sixties and had seen a life-time of public and court service: a Lord of the Bedchamber from 1751 until 1765, a successful ambassador in Paris in 1763-5 and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1765-6, he had on his return been appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household, retaining that post until 1782 and returning briefly to hold this in 1783.

While Hertford’s public career is well understood, his activity as a collector is not well documented. He is known to have in 1766-7 bought ‘a Picture [of] Charles 2^d’ for 25 guineas from Reynolds, who dealt rather assiduously in pictures. He presumably wanted this because Lady Isabella Fitzroy, whom he had married in 1741 was a great granddaughter of the king. The Cornelis van Haarlem was formerly in a magnificent swept frame of the 1760s, in which it was presumably placed soon after the sale in which it is recorded in Amsterdam in 1764. This may well have been intended for Ragley. That Hertford had sophisticated architectural tastes is indicated by his patronage of James Wyatt, who undertook a long sequence of alterations at Ragley from 1778 onwards and was called on to design a new mansion, Sudbourne Hall in Suffolk, about 1784.

The 1^st Marquess’ long years in the service of King George III no doubt set the stage for the long association of his grandson, Francis Charles, 3^rd Marquess of Hertford with the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, in which their mutual interest in pictures took so significant a part. His interest in the arts had a direct influence on his successors, and it is surely not coincidental that Richard, 4^th Marquess bought major works by Reynolds to complement those commissioned by his great-grandfather and formed a significant group of Venetian views that supplement the magnificent Canalettos he inherited. As he recorded in 1832, to please his father he had entailed the family’s ‘settled Estates’, including Ragley and Sudbourne with their contents. He did not, however, renew the entail of the family house in Grosvenor Square or its contents which he moved to his new residence in Manchester Square: ‘Exempli gratia: in Manchester Square the Canalettis in the Blue room are mine’ (J. Ingamells, The Wallace Collection, Catalogue of Pictures, I, London, 1985, p. 431). On his death, the contents of both Ragley and Sudbourne thus passed to passed to his cousin, Francis, 5^th Marquess, while Hertford House and its contents, with those of his residence in Paris were left to his natural son, Sir Richard Wallace, himself a collector; his widow, Lady Wallace, bequeathed the most significant section of this to the nation.