RKD STUDIES

In several phases of Christian Ludwig's quest for his art collections, the prince followed clearly discernable strategies to pursue his purpose. During the first years his agent was in the Dutch Republic every summer to take advantage of important auctions in The Hague and Amsterdam. Later, the duke changed to choosing from the stock of dealers who sent works of art to Schwerin to be examined before purchase or visited Schwerin in person. Furthermore, Christian Ludwig used personal contacts with contemporary artists to get hold of their work.

Christian Ludwig was interested in paintings already before he aspired to rule the country. In a fire in 1725 he lost a small collection of some 120 works. It has been demonstrated that this earlier collection was no comparison to what he bought later.¹ The loss was valued at roughly 10.000 guilders, but in 1733 he spent 9.000 guilders for only 16 paintings. This was in The Hague at the auction on 11 August 1733 of the collection of the late Adriaan Bout (1663-1733). It was there that the German prince spent more than on any other occasion and, as contemporaries judged, ‘carried off the crown of Dutch painting’ to his remote German abode. The most important lot was Frans van Mieris' Duet of 1658 [1] for which he invested the enormous sum of 3000 guilders.

1
Frans van Mieris (I)
Woman at a harpsichord, dated 1658
Schwerin, Staatliches Museum Schwerin, inv./cat.nr. G 82

Auctions
Not only did Christian Ludwig start out with a large investment at his first auction, the Bout sale, he also remained very much interested in keeping informed about upcoming sales for a number of years. The Schwerin archives therefore are a trove of Dutch sales catalogues of the 1730s and 1740s.² This is not the place to illustrate the complex information management that made it possible for the duke, sitting in Mecklenburg, to participate successfully in auctions in The Hague and Amsterdam.³ His key instrument was one of his chamberlains, Johann Nicolaus van Hafften, who travelled to Holland almost every summer starting in 1733. The auctions he attended were great sales of their time: Adriaan Bout (1733), Coenraad Droste (1734), Johan van Schuylenburch (1735), Samuel van Huls (1737), Count Thomas De Fraula (1738), Ferdinand Graf von Plettenberg (1738), and an anonymous sale thought to be by one Baron von Schönborn (1738).⁴ Only some of the correspondence between the chamberlain in Holland and the duke in Mecklenburg is preserved. Still, it becomes sufficiently clear that the duke had very specific views on what was necessarily to be included into his growing collection. He looked out for the works of specific artists, the subject matter of which was not as important as the state of preservation. To some artists specific requirements were attached, most famously the candle light scenes by Godefridus Schalcken.⁵ The duke went so far as to disallow bidding on two beautiful pieces by Schalcken because they were not night scenes [2-3]. He later regretted the decision. Other artists directly sought for were Jan van Huijsum, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Gerard Dou, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Paulus Potter and Philips Wouwerman. For some of them, it took years until adequate pieces were found.

We tend to think a prince would build his collection to be able to show it off to visitors. This was certainly the case, and the ducal apartment in Schwerin castle was later restructured to allow for a sequence of ceremonial rooms including the gallery, that was similar in function though far less sumptuous in scale compared to the Munich residence or castles of other monarchs.⁶ While this must have been one goal of collecting, another one was the performative act of acquiring itself. By spending so much money on few, small, and precious works of art, Christian Ludwig could leave a mark in the minds of his equals and their surroundings. In fact, Philip van Dijk, the rich painter-dealer who was often bidding for Willem Carl Hendrik Friso, the later stadholder Willem IV,⁷ approached Christian Ludwig in 1739 and offered to bid for him in some important upcoming auctions.⁸ The duke of Mecklenburg had apparently made his point; he was counted among the great collectors.

2
Godefridus Schalcken
A young girl with the box of Pandora or Lesbia, 1688-1692
Arnhem, Museum Arnhem, inv./cat.nr. B 1116

3
Godefridus Schalcken
Interior with a doctor inspecting a bottleof urine, with a woman crying and a boy, c. 1688-1692
The Hague, Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, inv./cat.nr. 161

Dealers
Christian Ludwig pursued this sumptuous strategy only for a few years. Even while sending his chamberlain to Holland in 1737 and 1738 he at the same time bought from the offers of art dealers who sent paintings to Schwerin. Most important among these was Domenicus Gottfried Waerdigh (1700-1789), a Dutch painter-dealer in Hamburg. The documentation we have about him is fragmentary for the first years of the contact, but the first offers we know of were sent in December 1737. Waerdigh states that he had received the eight paintings he sent only two days before from Holland. It is not clear whether the duke bought anything from this offer, but from then on Waerdigh would rise to be his most important source for paintings delivering works by Bakhuizen [4], Kalf [5-6], Koninck [7], de Lorme [8] and Moreelse [9], some of which are still counted among the important items in the collection. On the other hand, many of the works arriving from this source were acquisitions Waerdigh made from Hamburg auctions on behalf of the duke so that Waerdigh was in fact acting as an agent not as a dealer. Balthasar Pahmann, a German gentleman-dealer based in The Hague who had already been seminal for Christian Ludwig’s involvement in the Bout sale, also started to send paintings to Schwerin for the duke to choose from. He supplied for instance an excellent but so far anonymous painting from the 1630s [10], the Lovers in a Landscape by David Vinckboons [11], and a rare tronie by Philips Wouwerman [12].

4
Ludolf Bakhuizen
Ships on the IJ before Amsterdam, dated 1707
Schwerin, Staatliches Museum Schwerin

Gerard Morell (c. 1710-1771), a Danish dealer in Hamburg, operated an interesting business model involving a companion in the Dutch Republic named Hendrik de Winter (1717-1790). They would bid at Dutch auctions for paintings at the lesser end of the price range and then sell them in Germany and later in Denmark too. In this way they sold, among other paintings, the Sentry by Carel Fabritius [13] to Schwerin in 1755, the last year of Christian Ludwig's life.⁹ The connection to Mecklenburg started in 1745 at the latest. Compared to Waerdigh's articles, the paintings Morell sold to Schwerin were much more significant, like for instance the only Jacob Jordaens in the collection, his enigmatic Night Vision [14], but also works by Jan Brueghel the Elder [15], Simon de Vlieger [16], Jan Asselijn [17]and Gerard ter Borch [18].

Personal Contacts
Obviously, the smooth exchange of information was essential for all purchases. A precondition was the existence of reliable post routes between Mecklenburg and Holland, Brussels, Paris and other places the duke wanted to be active in. The vicinity of Schwerin to Hamburg, being the hub of postal communications to the Baltic region since earlier times already, made this possible.¹⁰ Letters between The Hague and Amsterdam on the one side and Hamburg on the other took only three days and correspondents knew when exactly the mail was leaving and could seal their letters in time.¹¹

The other prerequisite for a prince in Germany who was much too occupied with political activities to travel himself, were capable agents he could trust. This is quicker said than the necessary qualities and faculties of such a person are named. The agent had to have command of several languages. He had to be able to meet socially high ranking people as well as being capable of organising packing and shipping for example. He would be trusted with considerable sums of money in the name of his patron involving bank transfers in foreign currencies, and finally he had to know a lot about art and had to be able to judge by his own eye.

In fact, Christian Ludwig had such an individual in his entourage. Johann Nicolaus van Hafften was born in Cleves to a Dutch family [19]. It is not known when he entered the services of Christian Ludwig, but we find him as an important companion of the duke's trip to Paris in 1726 already. This was the trip when the duke first met Jean-Baptiste Oudry [20] and long before he would come to power. Van Hafften married the daughter of another courtier of the duke's in 1728, and in 1737 he became postmaster in Rostock. Even while holding this office, he would still be sent to the Netherlands to acquire artworks for the collection of the duke. Thus, through many years his importance for the expanding collection was second only to that of the duke himself and of his son, the hereditary prince Friedrich [21].¹²

19
Daniel Woge
Portrait of Johann Nicolaus van Hafften, 1756
Whereabouts unknown

The duke could not leave the dominion he was about to take into possession. Another proof for the underlying political agenda of the duke's activities proposed here, is that while his acquisitions took such an upsurge, he also took up contacts that he himself had made with artists during his travels many years earlier. Most important among these are Jan van Huijsum [22] in Amsterdam and Jean-Baptiste Oudry in Paris.¹³ When van Hafften went to Holland because of the Bout sale in 1733, he first visited van Huijsum and was shown what the artist had on the easel. Van Hafften also was the correspondent for the French court painter Oudry, and when van Hafften was traveling in the Netherlands, Oudry would direct his letter concerning his Wild boar and hound there and not to Mecklenburg [23]. Van Hafften and other people close to the duke, such as his political representatives in The Hague and elsewhere, or Balthasar Denner [24] or even the hereditary prince on his Grand Tour in 1737-1738, were also instrumental in making contacts. Both van Hafften and the young prince for instance visited the Van Mieris family in Leiden [25] inquiring about the painting by Frans van Mieris the Elder which the duke had bought and about a work by the elderly Willem van Mieris, his son. Frans van Mieris the Younger was quite upset that a painting he had made for the duke was not accepted¹⁴ and scathed van Hafften for this disappointment.¹⁵ From the correspondence we know of contacts with Jacob de Wit in Amsterdam and with Jan van Gool [26] and Philip van Dijk [27] in The Hague. Still, it is not clear whether the Arcadian Landscape by van Gool in Schwerin was bought directly from the artist or came through other channels [28]. In the 1730s and 1740s contacts to Dresden included exchanges with the Elector’s and Polish King’s court painters Alexander Thiele [29] and Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich [30] resulting in the acquisition of large convolutes of their work in Schwerin [31-33].

22
Arnold Boonen
Portrait of Jan van Huijsum (1682-1749), c. 1720
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

23
Jean Baptiste Oudry
Dog overpowering a wild boar, dated 1731
Schwerin, Staatliches Museum Schwerin