Sir Arthur Hopton and his secretary in the Meadows Museum, Dallas
Ian Kennedy
The portrait of Sir Arthur Hopton and his secretary has up to now failed to attract a convincing attribution (Pl 1). None of the various names suggested, which include Alonso Cano, Juan Rizzi and Jacob van Oost the elder, appears sustainable.[1] The picture is dated 1641 when Hopton was ambassador in Madrid, a post he occupied from 1638 to 1645.[2] In the early 1630s, he had been resident agent there before being recalled to London in 1636, and so his new appointment represented promotion and the portrait perhaps a belated celebration. The date has understandably suggested that it was painted in Madrid by a Spanish artist, but the clear, realistic, style is more typically Flemish. No Flemish artist, however, of sufficient calibre in Madrid at that time comes to mind. The idea put forward below is that it may have been painted in England in the sitter’s absence and that the artist was a Fleming working in England, Jean de Reyn (c1610–1678).[3]
1 Sir Arthur Hopton and his Secretary, here attributed to Jean de Reyn (1610–1678), 1641.
Oil on canvas, 187.3 x 116.8 cm. Meadows Museum, Dallas
Jean de Reyn was born in Bailleul near the present Franco-Belgian border and began his artistic career in about 1630 as a pupil of Anthony van Dyck in Antwerp, accompanying the latter to London and remaining there until around the time of van Dyck’s death in 1641. With the Civil War brewing he then decamped to Dunkerque, which was then still part of the Spanish Netherlands, and soon became the leading artist in the town. Most notably, he painted an Adoration of the Magi for the church of St Martin in Bergues (now in the Bergues Musée du Mont-de-Piété) and a Four Crowned Martyrs for the church of St Eloi in Dunkerque (1649, now, recently restored, in the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dunkerque). The Bergues painting is broadly Rubensian, while the Dunquerque altar is an old-fashioned crowded composition recalling the late mannerist Antwerp ‘Romanists’ of an earlier generation, with svelte nudes resembling those of Van Dyck’s English period. De Reyn also practised as a portraitist and his best-known portrait is a signed work in the Musée Lambinet at Versailles of the eldest son of the dramatist Pierre Corneille, who is shown wearing the uniform of the light cavalry of the Royal Guard of Louis XIV (Pl 2).[4]
2 Portrait of a Son of Pierre Corneille by Jean de Reyn (1610–1678), signed, c1667.
Oil on canvas, 127 x 94 cm. Musée Lambinet, Versailles
The date is c1667 and the style suitably flamboyant, befitting the sitter’s elite military status. The Corneille portrait forms the basis of the attribution to De Reyn of a lute-player in the Boston Museum (Pl 3),[5] which has been dated to about 1640, since it shows traces of the smooth handling of Van Dyck’s English period as well as the boisterous genre scenes of the Flemish caravaggesque Theodore Rombouts, who died in 1630. Both the Boston and Versailles paintings share the crisply drawn features and soft dense execution of the hair. Since they are widely separated in date, it must be presumed that De Reyn’s portrait style remained consistent over time.
3 A Lute Player, attributed to Jean de Reyn, c1640. Oil on canvas, 157.5 x 114 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The attribution of the Meadows painting to De Reyn is chiefly based on the way the head of Hopton’s secretary has cleanly executed features similar to those both of the lute player and the Corneille, with softly rendered hair that has delicate strands visible at the edges. Hopton’s likeness was possibly based on a Van Dyck oval of Hopton painted when he was in England,[6] another version of which is at Petworth in three-quarter length (Pl 4).
4 Sir Ralph Hopton by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), c1636–38.
Oil on canvas, 112 x 89 cm. National Trust, Petworth House, UK
De Reyn worked closely with Van Dyck and is said to have made copies for him, and so he would have had access to either version. The face in the Meadows painting has been adjusted to make Hopton look slightly older. The date of 1641, when the sitter was out of the country, may be explained by the fact that with either version of the Van Dyck available as a model, the sitter’s presence would not have been necessary for its execution. The secretary merely looks generically Spanish and probably isn’t based on a real individual. Absentee sitters may often have been an occupational hazard, buy especially in the case of diplomats who were always on the move. The clasps on the table-cloth follow those in a Velàzquez portrait of the same period in Vienna of the Infanta Don Balthasar Carlos,[7] but the pattern would have been familiar internationally and simply serves to evoke a Spanish setting. The composition recalls Van Dyck’s portrait of the Earl of Strafford with his secretary Sir Philip Mainwaring of about 1639–40[8] and, even more, Thomas de Keyser’s Stadtholder Constantijn Huygens accompanied by an assistant in the National Gallery London, of 1627 (Pl 5).
5 Constantin Huygens and a Secretary by Thomas de Keyser (1596–1667), signed and dated 1627.
Oil on panel, 92.4 x 69.3 cm. National Gallery, London
Huygens had made two diplomatic visits to England in the 1620s and been knighted by King James 1, and so was well known there. Both the portrait of Hopton and the De Keyser of Huygens show an active rapport between the two figures in each composition. De Keyser shows Huygens being handed a missive, while in the Hopton portrait the artist adds an imaginative touch with the younger man seeming to whisper confidentially in his master’s ear, a typically diplomatic scenario. As in the Hopton, the secretary in the De Keyser portrait is probably too idealised by Dutch standards to be based on any existing individual holding that post.
There are further affinities between the Hopton picture with an earlier De Reyn portrait that was probably painted in Antwerp when he was a pupil of van Dyck: a half-length of the Antwerp sea captain, Pierre van Itersum, who died in Dunkerque in 1633 (Pl 6).[9]
6 Portrait of Pierre van Itersum by Jean de Reyn, early 1630s.
Inscribed on a label on the reverse ‘Portrait de Pierre Van Itersum peint par Jean de Reyn Eleve de Vandyck’.
Oil on canvas, 105.6 x 78.1 cm. Private collection
The painting of his jowls is similar to that in the Hopton portrait, as is the handling of the silky grey hair. The brushwork in the curtain, although it can be called generic, is identical to that in the red cloth on Hopton’s table. A further point is how the clear bright light in the Meadows picture recalls Orazio Gentilleschi, who was established in London in the 1630s and died there in 1639. Orazio was certainly a known quantity to Hopton as well as De Reyn since, as resident agent in 1633, Hopton had arranged for the delivery of the Orazio’s gift of the Finding of Moses to King Philip IV and wrote home about how much the King had admired it.
Unfortunately, there is no mention of any portrait like the Meadows picture in his extensive correspondence, even though a good deal of it is on artistic matters.[10] And so the evidence for the attribution to De Reyn must remain circumstantial and visual for the time being. While it must be hoped that is represents some progress towards the resolution of a perennially knotty problem, it should also help to clarify an important visual document of Anglo-Spanish relations during an uneasy period.
I would like to thank Patrizia Manzano Rodriguiez of the Meadows Museum, Dallas, for her support with this article.
- Jahel Sanzsalazar, ‘Brothers under the Skin: The Portrait of Sir Arthur Hopton and a Secretary by Jacob van Oost’, Philostrato, Revista de Historia y Arte, número extraordinario dedicado a Matías Díaz Padrón, 2024, pp207–235. ↑
- For a concise biography of Hopton see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2005–8 www.oxforddnb.com ↑
- For De Reyn see Jacques Foucart and Jean Lecambre, Le Siècle de Rubens, exh cat., Paris, 1977, pp145–148; and Peter C Sutton, The Age of Rubens, exh cat., Boston 1993, pp399–400. The attribution by Diaz Padrón to van Oost (op cit at n1 above) deserves consideration as indicating a Flemish hand but his reading and moving of the date to1649 is not convincing and, compared to the painter of the Hopton, van Oost is a more forceful and incisive artist. The attribution of the Hopton to Jean de Reyn has been endorsed by Jacques Foucart (letter to the author, 19 April 2025). ↑
- Le Siècle de Rubens, p147, no. 108. An earlier signed and dated 1637 half-length portrait of a woman in the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, is now thought to be by the Hague artist Jan Pietersz van Rijn. See Beatrijs Wolters van der Wey, ‘Jean de Reyn or Jan de Rijn’, Oud Holland, 119, no. 1 (2006), pp65–71. ↑
- Sutton, p400, no. 61. ↑
- Susan J Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, p536, no. IV 137. ↑
- Die Gemälde des Kunsthistorischen Museums in Wien: Verzeichnis der Gemälde, 1991, p682, no. 312. ↑
- Barnes, p600, no. IV 218. ↑
- A search online reveals a Pierre van Itersum who died in 1633 and he is the only van Itersum who died during the period in which the portrait was painted. ↑
- Elisabeth Gue Trapier, ‘Sir Arthur Hopton and the Interchange of Paintings between Spain and England in the Seventeenth Century’, The Connoisseur, no. 164 (1967), pp239–243; no. 165 (1967), pp60–63. ↑