Dutch Gift

[4] Charles II was not as keen a collector as his father, but appreciated art and was later able to recover a good number of the items from the pre-war collection that remained in England, as well as purchasing many further paintings, and many significant old master drawings.

Charles had spent many years in exile in Paris, where his mother lived, Cologne, and the Spanish Netherlands, during the short period of the English Commonwealth when England was a republic.

An end of the Anglo-Spanish War (1654–1660), a renewal of the Navigation Act and the foundation of the Royal African Company would mean more competition in the East, the West and Africa.

[8] After the death of Gerrit Reynst, who drowned in the canal in front of his house, his widow sold a selection of the finest works in the collection to the States of Holland in 1660 for the then considerable sum of 80,000 guilders.

[9] The sculptures for the gift were selected by the pre-eminent sculptor in the Netherlands, Artus Quellinus, and the art-connoisseur Gerrit van Uylenburgh, advised on and accompanied the purchase.

The regents of the city of Leiden may have chosen The Young Mother to augment the yacht Mary as a means to encourage Charles to look after the interests of the House of Orange in the Netherlands, which had lost effective political power in 1650.

At the time of the Restoration, Charles' sister Mary was in perilous political waters as the guardian of her son, Prince William III of Orange.

[31] The fourth non-Italian painting was a work by Pieter Jansz Saenredam, a recent (1648) and unusually large protestant church interior of the Groote Kerk, Haarlem,[32] which might have been intended to cement feelings of grateful nostalgia in Charles.