VHP 000-000-000-201-L

'A Catalogue of My Lord Marquis's Pictures': List of paintings of James, 3rd Marquis, later 1st Duke of Hamilton.

This inventory consisting of 600 pictures packed into 44 cases must have been written before 12th April 1643. It is headed 'A Catalogue of my Lord Marquis's Pictures' and must have been written before the 12 April 1643 when Hamilton was elevated to the Dukedom. It relates very closely to an almost identical list (M4/22). The list reflects the depth and breadth of Hamilton's collection in the early 1640s when the court in London was abandoned by Charles 1 with courtier collectors either fighting for the crown or seeking asylum in Europe. By this date the magnificent Venetian component of the collection surpassed that collected by Charles 1 and other courtier collectors such as the Earl of Arundel and the late Duke of Buckingham. On the other hand the inventory may have been written slightly earlier, when the 3rd Marquis had his house Chelsea Place built in 1639.

The list contains items from the collection of Bartolommeo della Nave (see M4/10), Niccolo Renieri and the Procurator Priuli, all three legendary Venetian collections. The collections also consisted of Flemish paintings, other paintings from Northern Europe, and a corpus of family portraits by contemporary painters (see M4/20 for these).

The pictures were bought by Hamilton with the help of Basil Feilding, the English ambassador to the Venetian Republic between 1636-1638. Later in the civil war the collection was confiscated by order of Parliament, and entrusted to Basil Feilding by now the Earl of Denbigh who had sided with the parliamentarians. There is evidence to suggest that these pictures remained in his care despite requests by the Scottish Parliament to release them after Hamilton was taken prisoner in 1648, condemned to death on 6th March 1649 and executed 3 days later.

The collection somehow made its way abroad to Holland possibly being sent to Hamilton's brother William, Earl of Lanark, to whom the Duke bequeathed his titles and estates. The Earl had escaped to the continent in February 1649. By 1651 the collection had been sold to the Archduke Leopold William, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands in Brussels. Eventually as many as 400 of the total collection of 600 entered the Imperial Collections in Venice still retaining their integrity as a collection formed by Hamilton. (See M4/40) They passed directly from here into the collections of the Kunsthisorisches Museum in Vienna where they can be still seen today

• Klara Garas, *Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien * 'Die Entstehung der Galerie des Erzherzogs Leopold Wilhelm' xxvii (1967), pp139-180
• Paul Shakeshaft, Burlington Magazine, "To Much Bewiched with Thoes intysing things": The letters of James, Third Marquis of Hamilton and Basil, Viscount Feilding, concerning Collecting in Venice 1635-1639", February 1986, cxxviii, 995, p78+114-134

Note on transcription

Transcription with spelling and punctuation modernised:
The artists' names have been checked against the online indexes of the National Gallery, London and the National Maritime Museum, London, and modernised where possible. Those names which have not been found are transcribed in their original form.

Words added and information supplied by the transcriber are in square brackets. A query within square brackets indicates that the comment is speculative.

Minor deletions on the original manuscript have not been included.

A dotted line running across the screen indicates the end of a page of the original manuscript

The word 'of' before the name of an artist means 'by' and is usually preceded by a semi colon in this modernised transcript, e.g. ';of Titian' means ';by Titian'.

The word 'piece' as in 'A piece of Cain' means 'picture'.