This is a tiny and deceptively simple painting of the view of the south-east garden front of the Huis ten Bosch (‘House in the Wood’), which was built just outside The Hague as a summer palace for Amalia van Solms. She was married to Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange, the head of state of the Netherlands from 1625 to 1647 – the period when it was becoming a global superpower, with a formidable navy, huge merchant fleet and a worldwide network of trade and political influence.
We see the building in its original state, a decade or so after it was finished. Today it is used by the Dutch royal family as an official residence, though it has been substantially altered and extended, and the statues and lattice-work obelisks are no longer in the garden.
Van der Heyden was famous for his exquisitely detailed paintings of buildings and street scenes which depicted, as one contemporary put it, ‘every little stone in the buildings so minutely that one could clearly see the mortar in the grooves in the foreground as well as the background’. That isn’t quite the case here: the canvas is too small to render such detail, though some of the mortar lines are visible in the brickwork of the house. But he painted at least six other views of the house and estate, including another from the same angle (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) which is almost exactly twice the size of the painting we see here.
We can use the larger picture to make sense of some the details of the smaller, such as the intricate scrolling patterns of the French-style box hedges in the formal flowerbeds, known as parterre de broderie. We can also see that the low white flat-topped stands which line the avenues between the statues, empty in our picture, were used to display terracotta pots.
While the scale reduces the scope for precision, van der Heyden has created a remarkably powerful illusion of depth in a highly compressed space: dark green horizontals are crossed by white pot stands, statues and obelisks, and combined with figures of diminishing size. These straight lines are countered by the strong curves of the topiary hedge in the foreground, which are reflected by the trees to the side of the house. And if you look closely at the hedge you can see how carefully van der Heyden has picked out the detail: the sheen of the sunshine on the top surface, the lighter green of the new shoots and the orange patches of old clippings which have died but remain stuck.
As often in van der Heyden’s paintings, there are more people present than at first appears. We’ve counted 11 here; if you can’t find them all, look between the two statues on the right hand side. They represent both the garden workers and the leisured classes who benefitted from their labour.
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