Adriaen HANNEMAN (c.1603-1671, Dutch)

Adriaen HANNEMAN (c.1603-1671, Dutch)    

Portrait of Charles II

oil on canvas

30 x 25 inches

Price: Sold

Adriaen Hanneman was a Dutch Golden Age painter best known for his portraits of the exiled British royal court. He studied drawing with the Hague portrait artist Jan Antonisz. van Ravesteyn and left for England in 1623 where he lived for 16 years. There he met and was influenced by Anthony van Dyck, Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen, and Daniel Mytens. 

Hanneman enjoyed the patronage of Constantijn Huygens, who introduced him at court. He returned to the Hague, where he married the daughter of his old drawing teacher, Maria van Ravesteyn, in 1640. In 1645 he became a deacon of the Guild of St. Luke. In 1656 he was one of the dissenters who split off into the Confrerie Pictura, which he headed the first period. In 1666 he was awarded a silver goblet for his years of service to this group. 

Like so many other Catholic painters, he fell on hard times as the Rampjaar approached. Records show him selling possessions again and again in 1670, and the next year he died in The Hague, leaving all of his drawings and engravings to his student Simon du Parcq. Though he had been a highly respected and successful man, his entire estate only brought 1,000 guilders.

Hanneman is best known for court portraits of the British and Dutch nobility. In the Hague, he painted several English Royalists who had gone into exile in the Netherlands after the English Civil War. In about 1648, he painted Charles, the Prince of Wales, later Charles II of England, when he was in the Hague staying with his sister. The original painting is lost, but a number of versions were made (including the present work), many of which are found in such museums as the Ashmolean in Oxford.