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Herrick, Hollar, and the Tradescants: Piecing Together a Seventeenth-Century Triptych

2001; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/crt.2001.0032

1536-0342

Thomas Moisan,

Art History and Market Analysis

WERE THERE NO OTHER affinities, coincidences of biography alone might justify a synoptic glance at the figures brought together in this paper, the seventeenth-century contemporaries Robert Herrick the poet, Wenceslaus Hollar the engraver, and the John Tradescants, father and son, gardeners and collectors of curiosities for the rich and royal. Herrick, Hollar, and the elder Tradescant all found, and lost, patronage in or close to the court of Charles I. Both Herrick and the elder Tradescant participated in the unhappy military expedition led by the Duke of Buckingham, to the Isle de Rhe, within a year of the Duke's assassination in 1628; Herrick refers to the Tradescants' curiosities in one of his poems ("Upon Madam Ursly, Epigr." 232.4.3) 1 and elsewhere pays homage to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, conspicuous collector of arts and artists and patron, for a while, of Hollar; 2 Hollar, in turn, made several engravings of the man from whom the elder Tradescant bought his celebrated house in Lambeth, did the illustrations for the catalogue to the collection prepared by the younger Tradescant and Elias Ashmole in 1656, is cited as "my kinde friend Mr Hollar" by the younger Tradescant in the dedicatory epistle to the catalogue ("To the Ingenuous READER," l. 22), 3 and later testified on behalf of Tradescant's widow when she sued, unsuccessfully, to block Ashmole's claim to the Tradescants' collection. As the intersecting careers inscribed in these vitae reveal, and reflecting the pressures and vagaries of the times, the productions of each of these figures in varying ways and to varying degrees of success negotiate the passage between the domains of private, royalist patronage, and coterie and public commodification, a passage reflected in what these productions represent and how they represent them.