The Threatened Swan

Jan Asselijn was known for Italian landscapes with ruins and cattle, and nothing else he painted looks like this. The swan is observed with a naturalist's eye: the arch of the neck, the black knob at the base of the beak, the fine texture of down under the outstretched wings. But the paint is broad and fast, with strokes that follow the direction of the feathers and a few flicks of pure white for the spray. Look at the dog, which is barely more than a head and a snarl, so that all the aggression seems to belong to the swan.

Some years after it was painted, someone added words to the picture. Under the swan is written the Grand Pensionary, beneath the dog the enemy of the state, and on the egg Holland. That turned a scene of nature into a political allegory: the swan became Johan de Witt, the leader of the Dutch Republic who was murdered by a mob in 1672, defending the country against its enemies. Whether Asselijn intended anything of the kind is doubtful, since he died twenty years before De Witt's fall, but the inscriptions made the painting a patriotic emblem, and when the National Art Gallery opened in The Hague in 1800 this was catalogue number one.

Did You Know? The painting was the very first work acquired for the national collection, catalogued as number one when the museum's predecessor opened in 1800.