Prince Henry Frederick Archives - The History JarThe History Jar

De Caus was a French Huguenot who was an engineer and a garden designer. He arrived in England in about 1610 where he soon found himself in the employ of Anne of Denmark and Prince Henry. The former asked him to build aviaries for her birds as well as assorted fountains and grottos. He worked on the design for Somerset House’s garden and also for Hatfield House where Lord Cecil wanted a new fountain. His work at Richmond Palace was for Prince Henry – who also wanted to improve water supplies. His most famous employer was Elizabeth’s husband Frederick, Elector Palatinate who commissioned him to create gardens at Heidelberg.

De Caus’s inspirations came from his travels to Italy during the 1590s. IN 1601 he worked for the governor of the Spanish Netherlands and in 1605 he was described as a ‘fountain engineer’. He travelled widely -even so far as Persia.

As well as gardening it is thought that he was responsible for tutoring Prince Henry in mathematics and drawing. Nadine Akkerman also states that he taught Elizabeth art and music … the year after he had designed Anna’s French garden in Greenwich”. La Perspective avec la raison des ombres et Miroirs, published in 1612, was dedicated to the Prince who died at the end of the year. Elizabeth would continue to employ de Caus until 1619 not only as a designer of gardens but also a designer of masques.

He had returned to France by 1624 where he wrote a book abut sun dials.

Luke Morgan, Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth Century Landscape design.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/777804

https://www.schloss-heidelberg.de/en/interesting-amusing/figures/salomon-de-caus

Portrait of Prince Henry Frederick ... — Robert Peake the elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m very much enjoying my current research into the life of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia as a child. A particular delight has been the work of Robert Peake the Elder who died in 1619 and who was commissioned to paint several portraits of Elizabeth as well as her brothers, Henry Frederick and Charles .

Peake was an apprentice of the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard. He became a freeman of the Company of Goldsmiths in 1576. By the 1590s he was a fashionable portrait painter at the court of Elizabeth I.

In 1607 he was appointed sergeant-painter to King James I having already been appointed, in 1604, as picture maker to Prince Henry. It was his task to paint the portraits that were sent as gifts to foreign kings and princes. And when not required to do that he was responsible for making sure that the royal collection was up to scratch and if the queen wanted some scenery for a masque that was his job as well.

After Henry’s death in 1612, Peake moved to the household of Henry and Elizabeth’s younger brother, Charles. He died in 1619, the same year as Anne of Denmark. His death and the death of Nicholas Hilliard (1619) saw a change in the way portraits were painted. The style would become increasingly baroque rather than full of the detail viewers often associate with the works of Holbein, Hilliard and Peake – but they also became more fluid. The pictures of Princess Elizabeth, lovely as they may be, as quite stiff in comparison to the work of later artists.

Auerbach, Erna. Tudor artists; a study of painters in the royal service and of portraiture on illuminated documents from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I. (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1954)

Strong, Ro., The Elizabethan Image.