Secret Surprise in a 1651 Dutch Painting by Bartholomeus van Bassen

Very clever bit of visual trickery here.

The Ridderzaal (Hall of Knights) of the Binnenhof in The Hague, attributed to Bartholomeus van Bassen ( c. 1590-1652)

It’s an oil painting with a copper plate that can be flipped to change the view. With the plate up, a series of painted screens obscures the benches of the meeting area beyond. Statesmen – and a dog! – gather in the foreground.

When the plate is flipped down, the statesmen are seated in their benches and a table with the motto ‘Concordia res parvae crescunt’ (small things grow through concord) is displayed.

The concord in conversation? Deliberations over the future governance of the Dutch Republic.

The depicted assembly is 1651. The long Eighty Years War with Habsburg Spain had finally been concluded a few years earlier.

The Stadholder of the republic’s seven provinces (the most powerful figure in the republic, commander in chief of its armies, and de facto head of state), William II, had died in 1650.

At the time of his death, William II was engaged in a fierce political contest with the regents of Holland over the future of the army and the power vested in the stadholder. He’d go so far as to imprison eight of these politicians and threaten Amsterdam with the army.

Suffice it to say there were lots of questions about the need behind a stadholder at all when the Prince of Orange died from smallpox in 1651.

Thus the gathering depicted in the painting.

With the Republic finally at peace – and the memory of the quarrel with William II fresh in their minds – five of the seven Dutch provinces declined to appoint a new Stadholder.

This would set the stage for the rise of the great politician and thinker Johan de Witt, who would preside over Dutch politics and diplomacy for the next twenty years.

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This work seems to be counted as in both the collections of the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis. 🤷‍♂️