Rembrandt Probable Portrait of Pieter Six (No.25)

Pictures The room contains the most beautiful and renowned painting at Buscot – Rembrandt’s portrait (1655) of a man who is now identified, but not with certainty, as Pieter Six, the elder brother of the great Rembrandt collector, Burgomaster Jan Six (25). The portrait of a woman, framed as a pair to it, is not in fact a companion picture and its association with Rembrandt must be regarded as doubtful.

Over the fireplace the portrait by Rubens, possibly of Veronica Spinola Doria (28), is an early work of about 1608, done in Genoa towards the end of the artist’s years in Italy.  

Furniture
The set of six single chairs, two stools and settee, is of the Chippendale period, and is decorated with a Gothick fret pattern in low relief. The original gros-point needlework covers are both signed and dated by the local ‘upholder’, S. Price of Gloucester Jany 12th 1771. The two satinwood commodes with concave fronts, inlaid with paterae, are closely related to Chippendale’s work in the neo-classical style of about 1775, and the commode on the wall opposite the door, in mahogany and satinwood, is of the same period.
  
Between the windows is an unusual pair of side-tables of the Sheraton period, completely veneered with tortoiseshell, stained green and red. The oval mirrors above – in giltwood frames with festoons of husks, paterae and ribbons – are further examples of the Adam style. In front of the windows are a pair of George I mahogany side-chairs, and a small mahogany settee, the back carved with trophies of the chase – bow and arrow, thyrsus and hunting horns – which are probably Danish of the late eighteenth century and inspired by English pattern books.

Facing each other across the room are a pair of fine inlaid cabinets, probably made in Spain or the Spanish Netherlands. The highly elaborate tops of the cabinets, decorated with red-stained tortoiseshell and engraved bone, date from the mid-seventeenth century and are considerably older than their bases.

The Sheraton cabinet beside the piano, veneered in hardwood with marquetry decoration, contains, as described in a notice beneath the lid, a ‘Newly Invented Musical Game, dedicated to Princess Charlotte of Wales’. It was made by Muir, Wood and Company of Edinburgh, after an invention by Ann Young. On the early nineteenth-century writing-table is a silver case confirming Stephen Henry Sulivan’s (an ancestor of Lord Faringdon’s paternal grandmother) commission as First Secretary at Lisbon, signed by William IV. The set of rosewood and walnut occasional tables, the smallest having a chequerboard top, is probably by Gillows of Lancaster, dating from the Regency period. In front of the fireplace stands a pair of Sheraton satinwood pole-screens with painted panels.


Ceramics and Objets d'Art
The bronzes on the chimney-piece include a pair of cupids, their late-eighteenth century ormolu plinths swagged with laurel baguettes in the Greek style fashionable during Louis XVI’s reign, as well as a group of three putti, all nineteenth-century French, and a pair of tritons, possibly derived from those on the Fontana del Moro in the Piazza Navona in Rome. One of the two display cabinets contains what remains (after a burglary) of an ivory chess-set, while the other contains various objets de virtu.

On the tables between the windows are two early Qing vases and covers of the mid-seventeenth century, and one yellow Worcester and one Paris jardinière, while below them is a pair of famille verte vases of the reign of Kangxi (1662–1722). The Chinese and Moghul jade on the commodes is mainly eighteenth-century in date. The blue and white pottery on the cabinets is Delftware of the first half of the eighteenth century, imitating oriental porcelain.