In 1700, Jan Boskam cast a portrait medal of Agnes Block (fig. 7). Her aged profile appears on the recto; on the verso, she is the personification of Flora Batava: the goddess of flowers of the ancient Batavians, mythical ancestors of the Dutch. Standing tall in front of her country estate Vijverhof, Flora Batava stands for Block’s fame and reputation as an amateur botanist and horticulturist and, arguably, for the achievements of the Republic. This personalization as Flora Batava was the culmination of an extensive and evolutive process of self-fashioning. This exercise in self-fashioning was not an accident; presenting herself to the world as a significant figure at the intersection of art and science was the result of careful curating on Block’s part. Notwithstanding the absence of ego documents such as diaries or personal letters, it is nevertheless possible to trace Block’s agency in fashioning herself as Flora Batava and substantiate this conclusion, thanks to the visual evidence she left us.

While she engaged in self-fashioning from the moment she acquired Vijverhof, the public persona Block fashioned changed over time. As we saw in chapters 1 through 3, becoming known as a knowledgeable amateur botanist and presenting herself as such was important from the outset. The importance of the other attributes of her life ebbed and flowed over time. In the self-fashioning that took place over approximately three decades, the agency of a knowledgeable woman with a clear eye cast toward her posterity emerges, culminating in an identity that was at once deeply personal and inextricable from that of the Dutch Republic.

Self-Fashioning Through Portraits

Three surviving portraits document the arc of Block’s self-representation over time.

Seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings of fishwives, egg sellers, maids, and mothers reveal early modern women’s essential contribution to household management and to the early modern economy. Rarely depicted, however, are the achievements of early modern women outside of this domestic realm. Yet, as this book demonstrates, women contributed to culture, arts, and the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Agnes Block’s world was one in which the extent to which women could participate in the economy, exercise power and agency in a public sphere, and engage in self-fashioning depended on a number of factors, not the least of which included their socio-economic and marital status. Block was fortunate in that she came from a wealthy family that valued education, art, and intellectual pursuits. Through hard work and devotion, she built upon these advantages to become a well-learned, knowledgeable, and respected amateur botanist and an influential patron.

Notwithstanding her auspicious beginnings, however, Block still had to navigate socio-cultural impediments and institutional barriers. She did so by participating in informal networks of experts and amateurs in botany, collectors, and artists, which shared a considerable amount of overlap. As an amateur botanist, she befriended Paul Hermann, director of the Leiden hortus botanicus, and developed relationships with other high-profile experts, such as Caspar Commelin, William Sherard, Jacob Breyne, and Lelio Trionfetti. She provided them with seeds and bulbs, and her expertise. They reciprocated by sharing specimens with her and including her in their botanical treatises, thus bestowing upon her prestige and legitimacy as a knowledgeable botanist.

As a patron, she retained some of the best-known artists of the time—Herman Saftleven, Willem de Heer, Pieter Holsteyn, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Alida Withoos.

Gualtherus Blok, Agneta Blok’s Vyver-Hof (1702)

Translated by Dr. C.L. (Roek) Vermeulen

• 1 Agneta, I’d like to remember the entertainments

• 2 with which you delighted my mind and always set it on fire,

• 3 and tirelessly provided beautiful and rich grounds

• 4 for praising you by means of the famous Vyver-Hof.

• 5 Here you most deliciously stroke and whet our senses

• 6 through art and labour, to love nature perfectly.

• 7 The fruit that the East considers it noblest nectar

• 8 and that the West first brought us from its lap,

• 9 whose pleasing scent fills the biggest halls,

• 10 whose beautiful appearance, which the brush is unable to copy,

• 11 delights the curious eye, is that exotic crop

• 12 flowering in winter, the golden-yellow pineapple;

• 13 its taste surpasses peaches from the best gardens,

• 14 its juice the sweetest muscatel wine.

• 15 Whether I praise the cereus here or the euphorbium,

• 16 naming its various leaves, its species, the places,

• 17 whether this one reached you from Asia

• 18 and that one originated from Africa,

• 19 while America grew the third one—

• 20 its green will never be depicted on my field of letters

• 21 as long as you, through the art of your watercolours

• 22 make nature live again, keeping it from dying.

• 23 One should not paint a flower [even] with the most beautiful hand,

• 24 Tyrian purple is too dull compared to the amaranth—

• 25 which laughs at carmine and through the sun’s rays

• 26 changes its glow, dazzles the eye and keeps it wandering.

• 27 May the amazing passion flower, which shows itself for a single day,

• 28 and the pig-sty daisy be recreated and crowned by the painter’s brush,

• 29 together with a thousand others that we will praise most highly,

• 30 of which you remain Flora, queen of flowers.

• 31 Ancient Cilicia may boast of its saffron,

• 32 but let it see a different/another field of these flowers here,

• 33 and industrious Flora diligently harvesting and collecting

• 34 those yellow dyes to cure the body.

• 35 Regale us with a feast of ambrosia

• 36 and stimulate the spirit with clove wine.

• 37 The scents of jasmine and myrtle fade away;

• 38 orange nor lemon can ever enchant us so,

• 39 and even the oleander, no matter how delicious its smell and great its beauty,

• 40 cedes to the scarlet, to pomegranate blossom.

The examination of the Bloemenboek and of Block’s collection of watercolours more broadly in the previous chapter allowed us to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the manner in which Agnes Block’s devotion to Vijverhof and botany manifested itself through art, which in turn was very much part of her self-fashioning. In order to fully grasp Block’s place in the artistic and cultural environments of the Dutch Republic at the end of the seventeenth century, however, one needs a broader picture, which focuses on the artists of the watercolours and their patrons.

To that end, there is a twin methodological focus to this chapter: in the first place, it adopts lines of inquiry familiar to material culture, in which the emphasis is on the conditions of production and of use of the watercolours. Second, it follows the analytical framework employed in chapter 3 and explores the relationships that are manifested through the artworks. This approach confirms Block’s participation as an influential patron in a circle of artists and within a broader network of patronage. It also demonstrates that, for Block, art and artists, and the networks with which they were associated, were a necessary feature of her self-fashioning.

The Bloemenboek as a Meeting Place

A notable feature of the Bloemenboek is the way in which certain sheets have been assembled: some show the work of two artists, working on the same sheet; others show the work of two or more artists, working separately but reunited on a single sheet through Block’s cutting and pasting. These works put in relief an animating principle of the Bloemenboek and, indeed, of Vijverhof: collaboration.

Agnes Block collected more than four hundred watercolours of flowers, plants, birds, and insects. Of this collection, one volume survives intact in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. The title page of this volume informs us that it contains “Plusieurs especes (sic) de Fleurs dessinees d’apres (sic) le Naturel”—many species of flowers drawn after nature (fig. 25). Block’s collection of watercolours was of enormous significance to her, as evidenced by its reference in her portraits. Arguably, it was the most important collection of watercolours commissioned by a liefhebber for the purposes of memorializing a garden.

This chapter examines Block’s collection of watercolours, with a special emphasis on the Bloemenboek. Since the collection has been dispersed and only limited documentation about it and its constitution is available, it may be more accurate to describe this examination as being about a portion of Block’s collection of watercolours. This qualification, however, is not a limitation in this case. The purpose of this chapter is not to try and reconstruct Block’s collection, nor to attempt the attribution of unsigned works. Rather, the objective is to explore the ways in which what we know about the collection can allow us to deepen our understanding of Agnes Block’s devotion to her practice as an amateur botanist and to situate her self-fashioning at the intersection of art and science. Incidentally, this chapter also sets the stage for the examination of Block’s connections with the many artists who produced the watercolours, which are the subject of chapter 7.

Agnes Block was an impressive individual, particularly as a woman of the seventeenth century: undaunted by the explicit and implicit limitations imposed upon her due to her gender, she taught herself botany; she bought and developed a country estate along the river Vecht, to which she gave the name Vijverhof (meaning Pond Court); she collected watercolours of flora and fauna by the most talented and popular artists of the time, paintings by celebrated masters, coins and medals, books, and naturalia. In a portrait painted by Jan Weenix (fig. 1), she holds the centre of the composition. She was Flora Batava, the goddess of spring and flowers of ancient Batavia reincarnated as the Dutch Republic.

Yet, like so many of her contemporaries, Block has thus far mostly remained in the shadows. The socio-economic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with the obstinately male-dominated history of the discipline of art history, have meant that relatively few of the stories by and about women’s roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. C. Catharina van de Graft wrote the only comprehensive study of Block, and that during World War II. The book’s dust jacket notes that in those dark hours, reading about the stars of the seventeenth century provided a measure of comfort. Implicit in the text was the notion that Block was not considered one of the stars. She was merely a “remarkable woman” who occupied “a prominent place” amongst the people and friends who influenced Joost van den Vondel (who was one of the brightest stars of the period), which made it worthwhile to tell her story.

Van de Graft’s research is meticulous and thorough.

From the moment she acquired it in 1670, Vijverhof became an inextricable part of Block’s identity. Without Vijverhof, there would have been no Flora Batava, no collection of watercolours. Vijverhof is where Block planted seeds and nurtured fragile bulbs, welcomed international botanical experts and amateurs, hosted artists who immortalized her vast collection of rare plants and flowers. Vijverhof was also the backdrop, whether realistic or idealized, of Block’s portraits by Jan Weenix (fig. 1), Adriaen van der Werff (fig. 17), and Johannes Thopas (fig. 21), and of the portrait medal cast by Jan Boskam (fig. 7). Block’s last act of self-fashioning and attempt at posterity was the commission of a poem in 1702 by her cousin Gualtherus Blok, entitled Vyver-Hof van Agneta Blok; she was, in every sense, the creator of the estate and of all it meant.

The aim of this chapter is to present and “recreate” Vijverhof and to understand the essential place the estate assumed in Block’s self-fashioning and in her identity. This “reconstruction” of Vijverhof is hypothetical and proceeds based upon what little visual and literary evidence survives, combined with information about other country estates along the Vecht to provide important context and fill informational gaps. The objective is simply to provide a sense of what the estate might have looked like, and of what it might have constituted. Creating this mental image helps to put into perspective the level of devotion Vijverhof required on the part of Block, and to understand how intertwined the estate and her identity came to be.

The preceding chapter leaves little doubt that Vijverhof must have been a wonderful country escape, and that it was inextricable from Block’s self-fashioning and identity. Two critical questions remain, however: how special was Vijverhof as a garden, and was Block unique as its creator, caretaker, and owner?

Answering these questions requires situating both Block and Vijverhof in the socio-cultural context of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. This was a world in which country life, the pursuit of nature, and the development of natural knowledge were lauded as ideals. The period of time spanning Block’s adult life was characterized by the development of natural sciences, the embrace of empiricism, and a fascination for botany. Indeed, botany and gardens were critical components in the formation of a Dutch national identity. Thus, this chapter argues that Vijverhof exemplified a passion for gardens and botany that captivated the entire country and, as such, placed Block and her pursuits at the heart of the Dutch Zeitgeist. A case study of Magdalena Poulle and her estate, Gunterstein (also along the Vecht, nearby Vijverhof) provides support for the proposition that although it was not necessarily commonplace, women did buy country estates and did invest resources in developing sophisticated gardens.

Vijverhof: Representative of a Particularly Dutch Passion for Botany

It is a key underpinning of this book that Block’s interest in botany and devotion to her country estate transcended the individual and the marginal.

As noted in chapter 2, the period of time spanning Block’s adult life was a time of curiosity and fascination about nature, and empiricism—in the Republic, and throughout Europe. Whereas the earlier chapters established Vijverhof’s centrality in Block’s self-fashioning and self-representation as Flora Batava and its place in Dutch culture, this chapter shows that Vijverhof was also a site of knowledge creation, exchange, and community. The estate was an intermediary in Block’s most important relationships and it served as a platform for her extensive network of experts and amateurs. These networks, in turn, were essential to her achievements as an amateur botanist, and in her self-fashioning as Flora Batava.

This chapter sets out the collaborative nature of early modern botany and examines Block’s participation in that enterprise in that context, a participation that was complicated and hindered by her gender. It was by establishing productive relationships with individuals who did have access to resources and institutions (i.e., men) that Block was able to claim her place as an influential and productive member of a “garden circuit” that was arguably one the seventeenth century’s most important organs of the production of botanical knowledge.

Early Modern Botany: A Collaborative Enterprise

The development of botanical knowledge during the early modern period was a collaborative enterprise that emerged through public debate and exchange. As Brian Ogilvie noted, “it could be the product only of a community.”

The French humanist Marie le Jars de Gournay was only too well aware of the limits imposed upon women in early modern France. She belonged to the informal network of women who participated in the Republic of Letters, as part of a subset of a “Republic of Women” of sorts.