The framing of Prince Eugene's collection

Abstract

A great-nephew of Cardinal Mazarin, one of the foremost art collectors of the seventeenth century, Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736) began to collect paintings during the War of Spanish Succession, but his activity in this field is difficult to reconstruct because the bulk of his personal papers, including all his personal financial accounts, are lost, but there is evidence that his activity as a collector of pictures extended back at least to the first decade of the eighteenth century.’ In the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is preserved the drawing by Pieter van den Berge of Prince Eugene examining paintings at the premises of the Amsterdam art dealer Somer, and Prince Eugene’s presence in Amsterdam is recorded in 1708 and 1712.2 As Governor of the former Spanish Netherlands until 1724, he had ample reason to maintain close contacts with art dealers in the region, but most of his collecting would appear to parallel his building activity. The long drawn out construction of his Stadtpalais in Vienna was executed in stages and the descriptions of visits by Pijllnitz and Keysler to it in 1729 and I 730 respectively3 are too late to be of much assistance, but the limited evidence points to Prince Eugene buying the pictures to furnish the rooms rather than building to house earlier purchases. All his palaces had rooms designated as picture galleries and their creation can be assumed to be roughly coeval with the maximum activity of Prince Eugene as a large scale picture collector and patron of painters. The principal buildings to receive these collections were the Lower Belvedere (1714-16) and the Upper Belvedere (1720-22) though their decoration and furnishing extended over a rather longer time.4 The engravings of the Belvederes by Salomon Kleiner (1731-40) and the descriptions by J. B. Kiichelbecker (published in Hanover, 1730) and by Keysler (also 1730) are unfortunately only of limited value with regard to the framing of Prince Eugene’s collection. The famous series of The Ten Battles of Prince Eugene were painted by Jan van Huchtenburg in Haarlem and engraved in 1720, and these, at least at the end of Prince Eugene’s life, were housed in Schloss Schlosshof in the Marchfeld. Schloss Schlosshof was reconstructed on a grand scale by Prince Eugene in the 1720s and again housed a substantial collection of paintings, but the Huchtenburgs have been reframed and thus do not provide evidence as to the style of framing adopted by Prince Eugene for the paintings he assembled in his residences. Prince Eugene’s taste for heavy, sumptuous interiors for his huge palaces was by no means exceptional in early eighteenth century Vienna, though it provided on occasions a curious contrast to his personal lifestyle. With no immediate family (he remained a batchelor), few servants and a positive disinterest in clothes, Prince Eugene retained until