Henric Piccardt

Henric Piccardt (25 March 1636, Woltersum [nl] – 6 May 1712, Harkstede) was an ambitious Dutch lawyer who made good at the court of young king Louis XIV of France in Paris where he became a published poet in French.

Here he gave an oration on eloquence and law on 14 December 1658, publishing it as his Oratio de eloquentia & conjunctione ejusdem cum jurisprudentia in early 1659.

From gleanings of his now lost autobiography, his nineteenth-century biographers tell a romantic story of Henric – black patch over one eye – earning his keep by singing songs on the Pont Neuf to the strumming of his harp.

are dedicated to courtisans who can be identified, and some describe his experiences at festivities of the court (such as the great Ballet des Arts of 8 January 1663, written by Isaac de Benserade and Jean-Baptiste Lully with a main role for Louis XIV).

Christina Regina directed the family’s unique Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, and Henric was briefly engaged to her sister Johanna (1630–1680), who dedicated to him her Verteutschte Stratonica (Amsterdam, 1666).

Piccardt had returned to Groningen that spring and after the bishop had been driven back to Münster at the end of August, he was promptly arrested by the town authorities ostensibly because of his proximity to the French court.

On the contrary, he fell in with the staunch Calvinism of these parts (a good friend was Paulus Hulsius (1653–1712), indefatigable philosophical and theological opponent at the university of Groningen of the mathematician Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748)).

To poetry Piccardt seems to have returned only one final time when he wrote a sad poem of elegiac couplets in Latin on the death of his beloved wife Anna Rengers in 1704.