Legs Fit for a King: Masculinity in the Staging of the Dutch Restoration Monarchy, 1813-1819

This article explores visual strategies of legitimisation deployed in the establishment of the Dutch Restoration monarchy. It asks how these visual strategies were shaped by historically specific notions of masculinity and simultaneously helped shape such notions. Concentrating on the first state portrait of William I as King by Joseph Paelinck painted in 1818, it argues that this portrait was part of a ‘staging’ of the Dutch Restoration monarchy. In the absence of  ancien regime  claims to legitimacy, Restoration monarchies needed to have recourse to theatrical means of legitimisation, but also had to make sure not to provoke associations with the theatrical elements inherent in old regime monarchies. The representation of the King’s body in the state portrait, drawing strongly on neoclassical and revolutionary conventions, invoked notions of masculinity centring around political virtue and naturalness. As such, the King’s body, and the masculinity it represented, helped undo the artificiality associated with monarchy and lent a sense of reality to the staging of the Dutch Restoration monarchy.

former Dutch Republic, but also included that which had been the Austrian Netherlands.
Drawing on many of the conventions for the representation of European Kings, Joseph Paelinck's 1818 state portrait of King William I was one of the first of the latter's portraits in which he was depicted as Kingwearing an ermine robe and surrounded by royal regalia -rather than as military commander, as had been the case up until that point. 13 As such it can be read as self-assuredly confirming both William's royal status and the existence of the monarchy he headed. In this light, it appears as the given destination of a route that had led directly to this very portrait -transforming the cautious manoeuvring amidst the contingencies of domestic and international politics of the previous years into a path of necessity. If the less than straightforward nature of the journey of the years since 1813 casts doubt on this representation of William's ascendency to royal status, the political and military history of the period before 1813, and the ways in which these shaped the political fate of his family and himself, does so even more.
With the downfall of the once glorious Dutch Republic, that set in during the early 1780s, came the downfall of the House of Orange, headed at that time by Williams father, William V. 14 As Princes in a republic, occupying the position of 'stadholder', the successive male heads of the House of Orange had represented something of an anomaly in the political structures of the Dutch Republic. A key to political survival for the Princes of Orange in a political context shaped by struggles for power between the stadholders and provincial and national Estates was not to arouse the suspicion of harbouring legs fit for a king dudink ambitions of monarchical power and status. Instead, efforts to maximise power had to rely on the deployment of the myriad of prerogatives that came with the position of stadholder in the highly decentralised and corporatist world of the Dutch Republic. After a democratic revolution followed by civil war and a return to power by a vengeful stadholder and his supporters had shaken this world to its core, French occupation in 1795 delivered the final blow to the Dutch ancien régime. Forced into exile with his family, the end of the Republic spelled the start of a long and insecure journey for a young Prince hoping to find a suitable place for himself and his house in a constantly shifting European political context. As the Netherlands were placed under increasing French supervision, culminating in Napoleon first making his brother King in 1806 and finally annexing the country in 1810, William tried his luck in obtaining subsequently Prussian and French patronage. Unable to permanently secure territories of substantial size to rule over, he turned to the British in 1812. They showed themselves willing to consider him as a serious candidate to govern the Netherlands after a future French defeat 15 : and so it happened. It would be very hard to claim however, that this outcome was in any sense to be expected. If anything, the fundamental transformations of political legitimacy and of the European model of the state, the redrawing of borders and the shifts in European power relations during and after the Napoleonic wars, and the ways all this affected the Netherlands and the fortunes of the House of Orange, had made this outcome rather unlikely.
Painted after almost fourty years of unprecedented political and military upheaval, Paelinck's state portrait of King William I could not simply represent the monarchical order of things as the given and inevitable outcome of the events of the preceding four decades. In 1818, it was impossible for it to appear as merely confirming a self-evident status quo; it could only try to evoke this political reality as given in a seemingly assertive gesture that attempted to both ward off the uncertainties of the past and call forth a secure future.
This gesture was repeated time and again. A programme of 'mass production' of (state) portraits of King William I to be put on display in government buildings preceded and followed his inauguration -a programme that ended the lull that had beset the production of state portraits in the Dutch for authority and legitimacy in a part of country where he could not readily assume to possess these, and a willingness on the part of members of southern local elites to express loyalty to the new King, some of these portraits were in several ways co-productions. Although painted on the initiative of local authorities, they required the King's permission and cooperation, in particular his willingness to pose for an artist, and presumably the King had considerable influence in deciding which artist was to be granted the commission and how he was to be depicted.
When the Brussels city government decided in 1818 to have a state portrait painted of, by then, King William, it was no coincidence that the job went to Joseph Paelinck, who had by that time established himself as the court's favourite painter. 18 Already in 1814, William had seemed to agree with the opinion of those around him that the state portrait Paelinck had done for him that year was to be preferred to a portrait painted earlier in 1814 by Mattheus Van Bree. 19 The letter to his sister Princess Louise in which he expressed this view, does not mention the reasons for this preference. A look at the two 1814 paintings however, is quite suggestive of the way the future King preferred to be seen. Although in the two paintings he is dressed in a similar general's uniform, the ensemble of high boots with tassels, long tight trousers, high cut coat with epaulettes, and sash around the waist seems to envelop two different bodies. In Van Bree's rendition of William, his slightly protruding belly and somewhat sagging pose do not suggest the determination and will to rule which his emphatically more athletic and upright body exudes in Paelinck's work. Rather than having William gaze at his subjects directly with a benign and friendly expression, as Van Bree did, Paelinck gave him an imperious sideway glance that hardly acknowledged the presence of the spectator, whose point of view was considerably lower than it was in Van Bree's work. If all of this was not enough visual support for the rule of a freshly installed sovereign, Paelinck put an impressive sheathed sabre in William's left hand -instead of the rolled up piece of paper Van Bree had him holding.
Paelinck received the impressive sum of 3,000 guilders for the 1814 portrait.
This was more than the King paid for any other portrait in these years and, as was stated explicitly, the sum served to express the high regard in which the King held Pealinck's talents. 20 To be more precise, the theatrical performance that took place on these canvasses was an overly theatrical performance that failed politically, in the sense that it did not manage to hide or diminish its very theatricality.
In this respect Paelinck had an easier job. The obstacle to an effective staging of monarchy in a post-Revolutionary world that his colleagues could not manage to overcome did not stand in his way. He was not forced to visually create a sense of monarchy's unbroken dynastic continuity where this continuity had been shattered or was permanently at risk of being shattered.
The strategies of legitimisation around William I's ascendancy to the throne did invoke the dynastic continuity of the House of Orange, but they could not claim William rightfully occupied his place in a long line of Kings. After all, there had never been a monarchy to which the new King needed to be seamlessly connected. What might appear as a weakness of the new monarchy -the absence of historical foundations for a monarchy -in this respect turned out to be an asset. Since there was no monarchical past to be evoked, the overly theatrical gestures that served to link the present to a past with which it would necessarily fail to connect itself, could be avoided. As a result, the staging of monarchy succeeded in the sense that it did not call attention to its theatrical nature in a manner that would jeopardise its political effectiveness.
One aspect of the self-defeating theatricality of the post-Revolutionary state portraits that tried too hard at connecting with the past was the opulent and ostentatious nature of the manner in which their subjects were dressed.
Their dress still adhered to the rules of a court sartorial culture of 'splendour' instead of being adapted to the post-Revolutionary culture of (military) 'service' and its promotion of the (military) uniform as the preferred mode of dress for Kings and their male entourage. 23 The splendour of ermine, silk, velvet and brocade, embroidered with silver and gold thread, was the splendour that had confirmed the royal status of these monarchs' eighteenthcentury predecessors. Draped around the bodies of early nineteenth-century Kings of the Restoration era, these fabrics tended to produce a costume that signalled their wearers' performance in a historical play that tried to revive the past but beyond the duration of the play, failed to do so. Characteristic of this mode of dress was the fact that under the layers of fabric most of the King's body was invisible, it was 'hardly discernible through the cascading folds of voluminous robes'. 24 Other than the lower two thirds of one or both low countries histories of masculinity pair of breeches. Breeches cut men's legs in two at the knee, and their low waistbands further shortened the length of their wearers' legs. Standard wear for many eighteenth-century men, and for those from the higher ranks specifically, breeches with silk stockings were worn as a rule by Kings on pre-Revolutionary state portraits. They also featured on some Restoration state portraits, in particular those that sought to establish an unbroken link to a pre-Revolutionary past, such as the paintings of Louis XVIII and George IV in modern times for dressing men's legs, and of the resulting male leg as long, one and undivided, cannot be reduced to a single origin. The trousers' hegemony did not originate with the sans-culottes ('without breeches'), although the mythology surrounding these radically republican artisans, small shopkeepers and tradesmen has proved spacious enough to accommodate this idea. 31 If not the sole point of emergence of modern menswear, the sansculottes' adoption of long, loose, baggy trousers during the French Revolution is one of these points -and one that is relevant for the argument developed here. The sans-culottes took to wearing the trousers that were customarily worn by manual workers and turned them, together with a short jacket, wooden shoes and bonnet rouge, into a sign of ardent republicanism. 32 The outfit also it showed, to all who wanted to see, the true nature of its inhabitant, the regenerated, virtuous and free male citizen of the republic.
On Paelinck's state portrait the King's body has been constructed out of neoclassical materials that even include the semi-nudity suggested by the tightness of the royal trousers. His legs and body also carry other references, some of which point back to the Napoleonic years, others to the revolution, in both its radical and moderate guise, that preceded them. None of these references are able to establish a fixed meaning of the King's body. They have to contend with each other, and with a 'preferred reading' of the meaning of this body that is guided by the painting's mobilisation of the visual tropes of neoclassicism for the purposes of monarchy. 47 The meaning of the King's legs and body in other words, is overdetermined; it cannot be reduced to a single cultural site from which it supposedly originates. As such, the painting's meaning is also unstable -culturally, as well as politically. What, if anything, guarantees the dominance of the preferred reading of the image and the repression of its potentially subversive elements? Why would a Restoration monarchy be represented as resting on a pair of legs that might wander off to a Napoleonic and revolutionary past it was supposed to have transcended? Do this male body and this pair of men's legs and the political masculinity they point to, support or work against the staging of the Dutch Restoration monarchy?

Regimes of theatricality
In order to answer these questions it is useful to return to this article's focus on legs fit for a king dudink deceitful political theatre, as a masquerade of corruption. The effectiveness of this re-signification beyond the revolutionary moment made post-Revolutionary state portraits in a traditional vein, such as those of Louis XVIII and George IV, seem overly theatrical and therefore politically ineffective.
In their time however, the pre-Revolutionary state portraits of Kings, with the opulent dressing up of their subjects, had also been recognised as theatrical but they functioned under a different cultural regime of theatricality. Under this regime theatre was not merely theatre -an assemblage of appearances behind which reality hid -but theatre in a sense was all.
Reality was seen as profoundly shaped by performances of a theatrical nature. Concentrating on eighteenth-century notions of identity and the self, historian Dror Wahrman argues that these were governed by an 'ancien régime of identity'. 49 The leading assumptions of this regime were, first, that identity was not fixed but malleable, double, or replaceable. Second, and related to this, under this regime identity did not appear as resting on a stable and deeply seated inner core of selfhood. Rather, it was assumed to be a matter of positioning oneself, or being positioned, in an externally given matrix of identity. As a result of this positioning, identity was conferred upon a personfrom outside. Wahrman argues that this regime of identity forces twenty-first century historians to take the notion of the theatrum mundi more literally and radically than they are accustomed to do. 50 If the eighteenth-century world was a stage, it was not one with reality and truth hiding backstage, masked by the on-stage performance. Literally all the world was a stage. Roles and performances were not mere artificial appearances masking a true self; the self was the result of these roles and performances. 51 An interesting accessory in the externally given matrix of identity was the wig -an accessory that also is helpful in connecting Wahrman's argument to masculinity and politics. The wig is one of most evocative and enduring signs in a post-eighteenth-century imagination, shaped by late eighteenth-century satire and revolutionary propaganda, of an aristocratic world of artifice, luxury and general debauchery. In this imagination men's wigs represent effeminacy, techniques of seduction both skilful and deceptive, and sexual licentiousness. These meanings definitely also circled around the low countries histories of masculinity bewigged heads of eighteenth-century men, but in general the wig represented masculinity and male authority in particular. 52 By wearing a wig men of standing adopted the appropriate sign of this male authority, an authority that the wig conferred upon them. The wig was a crucial accessory in a performance of rank, authority and masculinity, in which these were constituted, rather than merely suggested. This performance, moreover, was identifiable as such -the wig was not supposed to resemble real men's hair. This fact, however, did not undermine the effectiveness of this performance. It could not do so in a culture in which performance was never merely performance but the site of the constitution of reality.
By the first years of the nineteenth century, the wig had fallen from grace. This was partly the result of the revolutionary political ideals of transparency and naturalness and of the criticism of sartorial artifice they entailed. The naturalness of the neoclassical male body also resided in its hair, which came to carry as much political weight as its legs did. In France, many revolutionaries no longer wore a wig or hair powder. They had their hair cut short, often in a coupe á la Titus in neoclassical style, a coupe Napoleon also adopted. 53 In Paelinck's 1818 state portrait too, William I wears his hair short in a natural and loose cut, whereas his father's 1769 portrait depicts him wearing a wig. In the years between the production of the two portraits a change had take place in men's hairstyles that represents a simultaneous shift in the cultural meanings of theatricality and performance and of the strategies 53 Ribeiro,Fashion,53,67,117,122. legs fit for a king dudink r Unknown artist, Prince William of Orange-Nassau ca. 1808.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. that preceded it, and that his hair and body represented a naturalness that serves to unmask the artifice of the past, is not to say that they actually were natural. His body is dressed in a style that is meant to suggest the lean, manly and natural nudity of neoclassicism. Moreover, the neoclassical male body was in itself a highly specific and idealised version of the male body that represented naturalness, but was not therefore 'truly' natural. Naturalness, in other words, is a suggestion that results from a specific stylisation. William I's hair was styled to suggest virtuous naturalness, the short and loose cut made it appear natural according to early-nineteenth century cultural conventions. That these conventions represented naturalness, but were not identical to it, is borne out by the fact that divergent conventions for the depiction of naturalness existed in the same era. During his years as a Prince without country, William had his portrait done by an unknown Berlin artist who painted the Prince with his own hair. The cut is short and loose, almost bordering on wildness. The wildness of the Prince's hair visually corresponds with the darkly clouded sky in the background, lending the Prince a romantic aura of the uprooted aristocrat in exile. This is naturalness of a different nature than that suggested by the King's natural and yet controlled hairstyle of 1818.
In the 1818 state portrait the King's body and hair were styled to suggest virtuous naturalness, together they were part of a performance of an idealised natural male body. The theatrical element in all of this, however, was denied and rendered invisible. 54 This invisibility of the theatrical aspects of the performance of nature is what distinguishes this performance from those of the old regime of theatricality. There the need to make invisible the artifice of the masquerade was absent, given the leading cultural assumption that literally of all the world was a stage.
However, although the King's body is represented in the style of natural neoclassicism, the staging of William I as King on Paelinck's 1818 state portrait is also guided by the assumptions of the ancien régime of identity and theatricality. The presence of the attributes of monarchy, and of the royal ermine robe in particular, point to the persistence of these old regime assumptions. The eighteenth-century ancien régime of identity, Wahrman argues, had its roots in pre-modern Europe where clothes, for instance, had been invested with the power to literally 'transnature' the wearer. Linked to the power of external authorities, the power of clothes to literally constitute identity applied to the livery of household servants, but also to the robes legs fit for a king dudink of monarchs. 55 Already greatly diminished by the late-eighteenth century, this power attributed to clothes lived on in a few specific settings. It was still being appealed to in royal coronation ceremonies, and also in the staging of monarchy in the post-Revolutionary world where the constitutive power of royal robes was no longer a given. In Paelinck's state portrait, William has been outfitted with a bright red robe, lined with ermine. With this robe, the old regime of theatricality enters the picture, where it encounters the neoclassically styled body of the King, governed by a new regime of cultural representation in which nature is performed at the same time that this performance is denied.

Masculinity and the staging of monarchy
On the canvas of the 1818 state portrait then, monarchy is staged simultaneously in two contradictory regimes of theatricality. One is of old regime provenance, explicitly theatrical and assuming that political reality is constituted in performance; the other is post-Revolutionary, grounded in a denial of its own theatricality and suggesting the given presence of a low countries histories of masculinity