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This portrait-type of Prince George of Denmark was executed by Willem Wissing in 1684, the year after George and Anne (later Queen Anne) were married. It was the first portrait of George commissioned from an artist working in England following his marriage and was widely disseminated as an engraving.

The prime version of this portrait-type is thought to be that dated 1684 in the collection at Gavnor Castle in Denmark. The Gavnor portrait is almost identical to our work although minor details have been changed by the artist. In the present portrait, for example, George does not wear the Order of the Elephant, an honour from his native Denmark at his sash, but rather a crystal jewel. Given that George was made a knight of the garter in 1684, any artist painting his portrait for an English audience thereafter would naturally have replaced the Danish order with something more familiar and patriotic – in this case a jewel which is far closer in design to the ‘lesser George’, one of the insignia of the garter.

Besides the Gavnor portrait and the present work, only one other version of this portrait-type is recorded. In 2009 it was stated as being in the art collection at Wokingham Town Hall, although it appears to have since been removed.[1] It is not known who commissioned the present version and early provenance remains elusive, although the evident quality of its execution indicates it was a work which Wissing considered important enough to paint himself with only minimal studio assistance.

Born in Copenhagen on 2nd April 1653, George, Prince of Denmark, is best known to history as the husband of Queen Anne. George had married Anne, the daughter of James, Duke of York – later James II – in 1683, having first met her on a visit to England two years previously. In diplomatic terms, the marriage was something for a coup for the French king, who had pushed a match between England and Denmark to counteract the bond that had been formed when the Duke of York’s other daughter, Mary, had married William, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the Netherlands and an enemy to the interests of both France and Denmark.

If the French intention had been to sow divisions among the English, then they were certainly successful as a rift quickly emerged between Mary and Anne over the fact that George had been given precedence at court over William. So severe was the falling out that both William and Mary refused to attend the coronation of James in 1685. When the Glorious Revolution came in 1688, ushering the deposition of James II in favour of William III, George was at first hesitant before eventually deciding to place his support behind the forces of the Prince of Orange.

This was to be a highpoint in the relations between the two men, which were never more than tepid. In the view of Bishop Burnet, contemporary historian of the period, William treated George ‘with the utmost contempt’ at the Battle of the Boyne, the decisive engagement in Ireland against James II at which George had been present. When in 1691 George requested to William that Anne’s favourite, John Churchill, future Duke of Marlborough, should be made a Knight of the Garter, the request was declined, despite the fact – as George observed – that he had never before requested anything of the king. When another rift formed between the two sisters later that year over Marlborough’s suspected Jacobitism – a rift that would only end with Mary’s death – George acted as a mediator between the two.

When his wife came to the throne in 1702, she vigorously promoted her husband’s interests at court. Sometimes this was overly optimistic, such as her attempt to have George made the Captain of the Dutch United Provinces, but it is a mark of the strength of the bond between the two. This had been strengthened in extremely trying circumstances. Of Anne’s seventeen pregnancies, none produced a child who was able to live beyond childhood. When Prince William, the only of their children to live beyond infancy, died in 1700, the pair went to Windsor to mourn in private. When George died in 1708 – the result of chronic asthma from which he had suffered since the 1680s – Anne was left a lonely, isolated figure, deprived of a consort on whom she had depended.

Wissing was one of the leading portrait painters of the 1680s. Born, according to an inscription on his tomb, in Amsterdam, but also perhaps in the Hague, he received his early training from Dutch artists Arnold van Ravesteyn and William Doudijns. After a time perhaps spent studying in France – an experience that one author sees as the source of the ‘polished elegance of Wissing’s style, the luxuriant profusion of details […] and lustrous rendering of drapery and ornament’[2] – Wissing went to England, where he was resident by 1676. Soon after his arrival, he entered the studio of Peter Lely, working as the foremost of his studio assistants. When Lely died in 1680, his executors tasked Wissing with finishing his uncompleted commissions.

In the years that followed, Wissing took over much of Lely’s practice. He soon acquired the patronage of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s favourite bastard. When a portrait of Monmouth caught the eye of Charles, the king commissioned a likeness from the artist of himself, which brought with it an attendant glut of commissions from other members of the court.

A canny self-promoter, Wissing made use of new technologies further to advance his reputation. Making use of the vogue in the 1680s for reproductions in mezzotint – a technique that had been pioneered by Prince Rupert of the Rhine – Wissing partnered with the print publisher Edward Cooper, who published reproductions of many of his portraits. Indeed, Cooper was responsible for the publication of a reproduction of the present work by Isaac Becket.

Shortly following the accession of James II, Wissing was sent by the new king to paint the portraits of his daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, the Prince and Princess of Orange respectively in Holland. The visit drew the attention of the astronomer and rival of Newton Constantijn Huygens, who noted Wissing’s arrival. A letter written by Mary herself reveals her respect for the artist; whilst sitting to the artist, she reveals, she ‘durst not write … for fear of making my eys red’.

In the later 1680s, Wissing began to compete with the growing practice of Godfrey Kneller. Nevertheless, he found new patrons, particularly in the guise of the Brownlow family of Belton and other Lincolnshire families. But Wissing’s career was tragically to be cut short. In 1687, when he was at work on a portrait of the 5th Earl of Exeter and his family at Burghley House, Wissing died suddenly and unexpectedly. This portrait – Wissing’s final work – later became the subject of a poem by Matthew Prior, who writes movingly of the work in which ‘the goddess Triumph'd, and the painter dy'd’.

[1] Ingamells, J. Later Stuart Portraits 1685-1714. London: National Portrait Gallery, p. 95.

[2] M. Hamilton-Philips, ‘Wissing, Willem’, in Grove Art Online