Born in Gimborn Castle, in the county of Mark, when it was a county-state of the Holy Roman Empire in the Lower Rhenish–Westphalia, Adam was the heir to his father, Adolf, Count of Schwarzenberg (1547 – 1600), who was a distinguished general. An ancient family, first recorded in the 12th century, they became imperial counts of the Holy Roman Empire in 1599 thanks to Adolf’s heroic military feats. Adam’s father, being the first Count under this guise, only enjoyed the title briefly as he died in battle, fighting the Ottoman Empire, in 1600; Adam thus inherited his lordship at the tender age of seventeen.[1]

Rather than follow his father’s path in the military, he embraced a career in politics, becoming a privy councillor and chief minister for the Elector of Brandenburg, Georg William (1595 – 1640) in Berlin. In 1613, he married Margaretha von Pallant (1583 – 1615), daughter of Hartard, Baron van Pallandt.

Tragically, she died in her early thirties whilst giving birth to their second son, Johann Adolf (1615 - 1683), who would later become the first Prince of Schwarzenberg.[2] Rather than seeking another wife, he entered the Johanniterorden, becoming its Herrenmeister (‘Grand Master’) in 1625, a post he held until his death in 1641.

Despite having an inconspicuous early career in Berlin, Schwarzenberg became a controversial figure within the Brandenburg court, no doubt charged by his Catholicism and inherent imperialist sympathies. Being mindful of the absolutist goals of the Holy Roman Empire, Schwarzenberg attempted to sway the Brandenburg court away from its historic neutrality toward full support for the Habsburgs, likely incentivised by the promise of power beyond Berlin. This was challenged several times, first by a Protestant faction of the Brandenburg court, and then by pro-Calvinists who were aligned with the Swedish forces, who intervened during the height of the Thirty Years’ War.[3]

Despite his father’s aptitude in warfare, Schwarzenberg hastily attempted to raise an army to thwart the Swedes by appropriating the Privy Council’s funds for a new Council of War. As well as introducing unforgiving taxes to assist this financing and hiring rogue mercenaries, his dictatorial style proved too ill-fitting with Georg William’s successor, Frederick William (1620 – 1688), who quickly curtailed Schwarzenberg’s powers upon his accession to the Electorship in 1640. Schwarzenberg died suddenly in 1641 - possibly hastened by the stress in handling an ill-disciplined army - and his pro-imperialist legacy was swiftly reversed in favour of interstate, continental harmony, which was ultimately realised through the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

It seems likely that, upon inheriting the Electorship of Palatine in 1640, Frederick William actively removed the authority, and any presence, of Count von Schwarzenberg from the Brandenburg court; this probably included his portrait as the first written reference of it, in 1685, records it not in the Brandenburg collection, but rather that of Schloss Heidelberg. It seems plausible that Frederick William gifted the portrait of his late father’s advisor to his cousins in Heidelberg, wishing to remove the tactile likeness of the man with whom he had such negative associations. However, it would not remain in Heidelberg for long; when the heirless Elector Karl II died in 1685, the Simmern branch of the dynasty died out – so began a contest for the succession of the prestigious Electorship.

Karl II’s younger sister, Elizabeth Charlotte (1652 – 1722), better known as Liselotte, Madame Palatine, was married to Philippe, Duke of Orléans (1640 – 1701), the younger brother of Louis XIV of France. When Karl II died without an heir, Louis XIV asserted inheritance claims on behalf of his brother and sister-in-law. French troops marched into the Electoral Palatinate and devastated its towns and farmland, ultimately destroying much of the fortifications and buildings within the Heidelberg Castle estate in 1693. It seems that in anticipation of the invasion, much of the castle’s art collection was dispersed, largely within Brandenburg-Prussia, to avoid it being plundered by the French troops. Unfortunately, there is no surviving record that denotes what went where, though many of the historic portraits of the Electors were eventually absorbed into the Hannover and Düsseldorf public collections.

Our portrait re-surfaced in 1903, when it was lent by the prominent Paris-based collector Adolphe Schloss to an exhibition about old portraits in The Hague. How it entered his collection remains unclear, but we know that by this time the sitter’s identity had been forgotten. Our research correctly reidentified Schwarzenberg as the portrait’s subject thanks, in part, to Mierevelt having inscribed the sitter’s age and date of the portrait alongside his signature. This irrefutable data - that the subject of the painting was aged 46 in 1629 - along with the sitter wearing the distinctive Order of St John and reference to another full-length portrait that clearly depicts the same man [Fig. 1], enabled us to definitively identify the subject as being Adam von Schwarzenberg. There is also a later stone bust, which was designed for Berlin's Siegesallee [Fig. 3].

Our portrait is representative of the wider Schloss collection, which was primarily focussed on seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish old masters and thought to be the last of the great collections of Netherlandish art constituted in France in the 19th century. The collection, comprising of at least 334 paintings, was housed in the family residence at 38 Avenue Henri Martin in Paris [Fig. 2]. Even after Adolphe’s death in 1910, it was preserved, intact, by his family until it was moved to Château de Chambon, Laguenne – for ‘safe keeping’ - in 1939. Alas, this was not to as it was one of 5350 paintings that were misappropriated for Adolf Hitler’s - fortunately unrealised - Führermuseum in Linz.[4] This provenance was first established by us when the painting was offered for sale in 2019 and, as a result, it was correctly restituted to the heirs of Adolphe Schloss in 2020.[5] Poignantly, had his wife not died just before the advent of the war, most of the Schloss collection would have been kept safely at the Louvre, which had been offered the chance to acquire the majority of the collection.

James Plaut, one of the heroic members of the ‘Monuments Men’, a band of art historians who restored and returned more than five million stolen works of art to their pre-war owners, said: “One of the most involved, and ugliest, swindles in France was the confiscation of the celebrated Schloss Collection by the Vichy government in 1943 in concert with the German occupation authorities. This was the only major instance of official French collaboration in the transfer to the Germans of valuable art properties. Formally, the negotiation was classified as a voluntary sale. The Vichy government was to pay the Schloss family 18,500,000 francs for 49 masterpieces of Dutch painting desired for the Louvre; the German government was to pay 50,000,000 francs for the 262 pictures desired for Linz; the remaining 21 paintings were to revert to the family. In essence, however, the affair was bald confiscation. Vichy never paid its debt; the German funds were placed at the disposal of the Vichy Commission for Jewish affairs and the 21 paintings were sold for personal gain by one Lefranc, the official negotiator appointed by Vichy. Not a sou reached the Schloss family.”[6]

Born in Delft in 1567, Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt was the son of a goldsmith. He was firstly apprenticed to the copperplate engraver Hieronymous Wierix, and then to the painter Willem Willemsz.. Mierevelt showed precocious talent and in 1581 was invited by the artist Anthonie van Montfoort (also known as Blocklandt.) to enter his school at Utrecht, after he had seen two of Mierevelt’s early engravings, Christ and the Samaritan and Judith and Holofernes. Two years later, he returned to Delft, and became an officer of the Guild of St. Luke as early as 1589. Unfortunately, little of Mierevelt’s early oeuvre survives, a time when he devoted himself to still lives and history subjects. However, from 1590 he devoted himself almost entirely to the art of portraiture, and it was as a portraitist that he achieved fame and fortune. He was described and praised specifically as a portraitist in 1604 by the contemporary historian, Karel van Mander, in his ‘Schilder-boek’. Indeed, Mierevelt achieved such success at the time that his studio became one of the largest in operation; it is thought that Mierevelt and his studio painted at least one thousand portraits during his lifetime. In 1607 he was appointed official painter of the Stadholder court of Mauritsz, the Prince of Orange-Nassau, in The Hague, whom he portrayed in the same year (Stadhuis, Delft).[7] Thereafter, he was regularly employed to paint official portraits destined as diplomatic gifts, with his studio producing high-quality replicas in various formats, often for circulation within the sitter’s family but also wider afield.

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Mierevelt’s role as court painter also emphasised his status as the most fashionable portraitist of his day, receiving commissions not only from noble families of the Dutch Republic but also from visitors from abroad. His foreign sitters included many English clients who sat for him whilst on their travels to the Netherlands, notably Sir Dudley Carleton (Montacute House, Somerset) and Edward Cecil, Viscount Wimbledon (NPG, London).[8] In his autobiography of 1631, Constantijn Huygens described Mierevelt as ‘the leader in this field [portraiture]. Who he is and how great he is, is known not only in Delft, the Netherlands, Belgium and Europe, but, I truly believe, throughout the world’. Many of the artist’s pupils and assistants rose to fame, including Paulus Moreelse and Jan Antonisz. van Ravesteyn. His portrait was painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, and engraved by his son-in-law, Willem Jacobsz. Delff.

[1] J. Bérenger, “Les Schwarzenberg à l'époque moderne” from Économie et Société, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Septembre 2007), p. 35.

[2] A portrait of the present sitter’s great-grandson, Adam Franz, Prince of Schwarzenberg (1680 – 1732), by the court painter Johann Georg von Hamilton, was also sold by The Weiss Gallery.

[3] C. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947, Cambridge 2006, p. 29.

[4] James S. Plaut. “Hitler’s Capital” from The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 178, no. 4 (October 1946), p. 5.

[5] For thorough pre-and post-war histories of the Schloss collection, click here.

[6] Plaut, 1946, p. 5.

7 R. Ekkart, “Michiel van Mierevelt” from The Grove Dictionary of Art, online 2003.

[8] Mierevelt’s popularity in England may be easily understood if one compares his work to that of British court painters such as Robert Peake, John de Critz and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Prince Henry, was so impressed by Mierevelt’s work that in 1611 he made several attempts to persuade him to come to England as his Court Painter.