page_title: Anselm van Hulle
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Anselm van Hulle / Work
context_page_description: Anselm van Hulle or Anselmus van Hulle was a Flemish painter mainly of portraits whose works were highly prized at the Northern European Courts. He was court painter to the Prince of Orange and was one of the few portrait painters who attended the peace negotiations for the Peace of Münster in 1648. Van Hulle established an international reputation by having the portraits he made of the delegates at the negotiations engraved and published.
context_section_description: Van Hulle has been described as a painter of portraits and history paintings.  However, only portrait paintings are currently attributed to him.  His portrait paintings include single portraits, family portraits, bust portraits and equestrian portraits.  He was a portrait painter to the elite.
  As court painter to the Dutch stadtholder Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange he produced, amongst others, a series of equestrian portraits of the Dutch stadtholders starting from William the Silent the Frederick Henry himself. These works have remained in the Royal Collection of the Netherlands and are on display at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam.
  He was able to establish his international fame mainly thanks to the portraits that he made of the delegates to the peace negotiations for the Peace of Münster.  Not only were many copies of the paintings made, but they were also widely distributed through engravings after these paintings.  As court painter to the Prince of Orange, van Hulle was able to obtain a printing privilege in March 1648.  He had reproductions made from his sketches by the leading engravers in Antwerp, such as Paulus Pontius, Conrad Waumans, Cornelis Galle the Younger, Pieter de Jode II and Mattheus Borrekens.  The engravings were made on copper plates with a size of approximately 30 x 20 cm (Folio format) and printed on large-format paper sheets of up to 41 x 32 cm. The prints show the bust of the delegate in an oval in which his motto is inscribed, above him the coat of arms of the entity that the delegate represents at the peace negotiations, below the coat of arms of the delegate's family and below this a cartouche with the delegate's titles. The architectural framework of each portrait is in the form of an epitaph which emphasises that the portrait was made for posterity.  The delegates approved the final version of the motto, coats of arms and the titles of their portraits.  Van Hulle received financial assistance from the city of Münster for his printing project.
  In 1648 a first edition of the prints was published in Antwerp by Daniel Middeler under the title Celeberrimi legati ad pacificandum Christiani nominis orbem, legati ad Monasterium et Osnabrugas ex omni pene gentium nationumque genera missi. Ad vivum Anselmi v. Hulle penicillo expressi eiusque cura et aere per ingeniores huius aevi sculptores caelo representati. This edition contained about 35 to 37 plates. The engravings were also sold individually, so that each diplomat could assemble a personal selection of portraits and have them bound with a specially printed title page.   As a result no two of these anthologies are the same in the selection and sequence of the sitters.  In 1648 van Hulle had 39 engravings produced and in 1649 another 43.
  In later years van Hulle continued to make portraits of the participants in the negotiations on the implementation of the Peace of Münster in Nuremberg in 1649 and as an itinerant painter at various German princely courts, the Diet of Regensburg of 1653/1654 and the imperial election in Frankfurt in 1657/1658.  Finally his collection of portrait paintings and engravings had grown to 132.  Many pirated editions were made by Dutch publishers. The Strasbourg publisher Peter Aubry also made a series of 94 re-engravings, which appeared in 1650/51 and which are known from anthologies with 86 or 93 sheets.
  The collection saw three more editions after van Hulle's death between 1696 and 1717 but the sheets were never numbered.  The edition of the prints dated 1696 appeared under the new title of Pacificatores orbis christiani and contained a total of 131 portraits.  The 1717 edition had the title Les hommes illustres qui ont vécu dans le XVII. siecle: les principaux potentats, princes, ambassadeurs et plénipotentiaires qui ont assisté aux conferences de Munster et d'Osnabrug avec leurs armes et devises / dessinez et peints au naturel par le fameux Anselme van Hulle, peintre de Frederic Henri de Nassau, Prince D'Orange, et gravez par les plus habiles maîtres ('Portraits of the famous men who lived in the 17th century: the
caption: Family portrait group
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