Depicted in this captivating likeness is François Langlois (1588–1647), the multitalented French-born art agent for the king of England who was also a print publisher, bookseller, and skilled musician.1 To capture this charismatic figure, the artist Adriaen Hanneman (ca. 1603–71) portrayed him in half-length, gazing outward at the viewer and gripping a wooden flute. He appears poised to play, his hands positioned tautly over the instrument’s finger holes with the embouchure hole just below his chin.2 Loose curls and facial hair frame his weathered face, with creases around his dark-brown eyes and between his full brows. His colorful ensemble includes a substantial red brocade doublet with green-blue cuffs worn under a leather jerkin adorned with metallic trimming, a matching soft-brimmed hat topped by a large white ostrich feather, and a coat hanging from his shoulder. Other accoutrements include a dagger tied with a blue ribbon to his waistband and a gold chain around his neck.
Originally from Chartres, Langlois embarked on an international career encompassing a range of professional pursuits. In the 1610s and early 1620s, he resided in a series of Italian cities, gaining the Italianized moniker “Ciatres” after his birthplace. On his travels, he became acquainted with several highly successful artists, including Claude Vignon (1593–1670), Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641), and Stefano della Bella (1610–64). Around 1621, Vignon captured Langlois’s love of music and his identity as musician by painting a portrait of him playing a style of bagpipe called a sourdeline (fig 1).3 In the mid-1620s, Langlois began selling art in conjunction with Vignon and became a broker for major English art collectors, including Charles I (1600–49), George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), and Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel (1585–1646). He may have gained entrée to the Stuart court in England after crossing paths in Rome with Nicholas Lanier (1588–1666), a musician and art agent for Charles I, who visited Italy to lay the groundwork for the king’s purchase of paintings from the spectacular collection of the Gonzaga family, rulers of the duchy of Mantua.4
In the subsequent years, Langlois continued to move around Europe, and records from the 1620s and 1630s place him in France, Italy, England, and the northern Netherlands.5 In 1634, he formally registered his printing and bookselling trades in Paris, installing his business, Aux Colonnes d’Hercule, on the rue Saint-Jacques. A few years later, Langlois was in London, where The Leiden Collection’s portrait, dated 1636, was produced. The archival record places him in the city the following year as well, when Lanier wrote Langlois a letter regretfully declining his invitation to call on him in London to see some bei disegni (beautiful drawings) that he had for sale.6
The sitter’s identification in The Leiden Collection portrait is largely based on his resemblance to Anthony van Dyck’s contemporaneous portrayal of François Langlois (fig 2). Much as in Vignon’s earlier portrayal of the musician (fig 1), Van Dyck depicted Langlois wearing a red-and-blue outfit while playing a bagpipe, in this instance a small type called a musette de cour. He infused his work with informality and spontaneity by capturing the smiling Langlois in motion, with an attentive dog at his elbow. An inscription on a print made after Van Dyck’s painting confirms the identification of the sitter.7 According to the print publisher Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774), who was a descendant of Langlois’s widow, Madeleine de Collemont (d. 1664), Van Dyck and Langlois were friends, with Van Dyck giving one version of the painting to Langlois and painting a second version to keep for himself.8 Van Dyck also made a now-lost miniature oval portrait of Langlois, which was engraved by Nicolas de Poilly (1626–96) and inscribed with Langlois’s name and profession (fig 3).9 In the print, the sitter’s heavy eyelids, long nose, short fringe, and jawline beard are a near match to those in Hanneman’s painting.
By the time he painted Langlois’s portrait, Hanneman had lived for almost a decade in England, where he had moved in 1628 from The Hague.10 In London he belonged to a group of artists from the Low Countries working in the royal milieu: several of his portraits depict artists with ties to the court of Charles I.11 At the center of this group was Van Dyck, the principal court painter for the English king. Given that Hanneman and Van Dyck were both in London in the mid-1630s, as was Langlois, it is highly possible that they both painted their portraits around the same time.12 That Hanneman depicted the same sitter as Van Dyck comes as no surprise. Not only did the two artists operate in the same professional community, but Hanneman also developed a powerful affinity for Van Dyck’s mode of portraiture. Nevertheless, for his portrayal of Langlois, Hanneman created a picture that differs from the courtly manner Van Dyck used to capture his sitters. In particular, Hanneman’s emphasis on strong contours and deep-set features reflects his training with Anthony van Ravesteyn II (ca. 1580–1669) in The Hague and the influence of the London-based painter Daniel Mijtens (ca. 1590–1647/48), both of whom adhered to a more sober, linear portrait tradition.13
Hanneman’s depiction of Langlois reflects his awareness of artistic trends at the Stuart court and more broadly throughout Europe. While unequivocally an individualized portrait, this work also embodies the fashion for single half-length figures playing the flute that originated in Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In the 1620s, depictions of flute players became highly popular in the Netherlands, especially in Utrecht with artists like Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651) and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629).14 Ter Brugghen, who traveled to Italy, absorbed the innovative half-length genre pictures evoking music and sound by Caravaggio (1571–1610) and his followers, returning to the Netherlands to replicate this imagery—as in his Flute Player from 1627.15
In this cultural tradition, the flute could be associated with both a humble way of life and an idealized pastoral past. These tropes appear in Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd) of 1590 and Pieter Cornelisz Hooft’s Granida of 1615, two oft-performed plays in the seventeenth century that visual artists used as a source of inspiration.16 While Hanneman did not depict Langlois as a shepherd, the combination of the expensive gold chain and fine brocade with coarser accoutrements like the sturdy leather vest, flamboyant feathered cap, and flute infused his portrait with a related insouciant elegance. The overall effect is one of a “genre portrait,” to borrow a phrase used by Carlos van Hasselt to describe pictures in this context.17
At the Stuart court, the visual and intellectual stimulation provided by theater and disguise was central to artistic life, as epitomized by sumptuous masques featuring dance, drama, and poetry.18 In these carefully choregraphed extravaganzas, elaborately costumed characters—often drawn from classical mythology or medieval tales—awed courtiers and foreign visitors in multisensory spectacles involving performances, complex stagecraft, and special effects. The underlying message was typically the power and beneficence of the sovereign, as in The Triumph of Peace by James Shirley (1596–1666), performed in 1634 at Whitehall Palace.19 Hanneman, painting his likeness of Langlois just two years later, created a work that aligned with this courtly taste, producing a portrait the evoked fashionable Italian art, the visceral pleasures of music making, pastoral artifice, and the thrill of masquerade.20 Langlois, with his international career and unconventional social position as a musician and art-market intermediary for elite patrons, was well suited for such a portrait.
The provenance of Portrait of François Langlois Holding a Flute can be traced to the late eighteenth century, when the painting was in Sweden. It belonged to the famed art collector Gustaf Adolf Sparre af Söfdeborg (1746–94), whose father, Rutger Axel Sparre af Söfdeborg (1712–51), was a director of the Swedish East India Company. In the 1760s and 1770s, the younger Sparre traveled on a “Grand Tour” of England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, where he visited art collections and began purchasing paintings and drawings, which is likely when he acquired Hanneman’s painting.21 In 1780, this work is recorded as hanging in the Blue Drawing Room of Sahlgren-Sparre Palace in Gothenburg.22
An inventory of the palace made after Sparre’s death in 1794 reveals that Hanneman’s painting hung in a symmetrical grouping with other Dutch and Flemish pictures, all of which he framed in a similar manner.23 Among these works were paintings by Rembrandt and his workshop, as well as Flemish landscapes. After Sparre’s death, his widow, Elisabeth Ramel (1753–1830), moved the collection to Kulla Gunnarstorp Castle near Helsingborg. The collection passed through the family until around 1840 when Jacob Gustaf de la Gardie (1768–1842) sold Kulla Gunnarstorp and the art collection to Count Carl de Geer of Leufstra (1781–1860), who moved much of the collection to Wanås Castle, in southern Sweden. He later presented most of the paintings to his granddaughter Elisabeth von Platen (1834–1918) upon her marriage to Axel Frederick, Count Wachtmeister (1827–99).
The artist of Portrait of François Langlois Holding a Flute was unidentified until the late nineteenth century, with Olof Granberg listing it in 1886 as the work of an “Italian master, attributed to Ludovico Carracci.”24 Finally, in 1895, the Swedish art historian Georg Göthe discerned on the painting “A o 163 / Hanneman. F”—a signature typical of the artist—and rightfully attributed the painting to Adriaen Hanneman.25 Hanneman’s portrait of François Langlois remained in the Wachtmeister family trust until the 1970s, hanging in pride of place above the fireplace of the large salon of Wanås Castle (fig 4).26