Paintings Worth Looking At

(Author’s note: This hefty chunk of research dates back to July, but was delayed. Certain materials are still absent. So the mystery's a bit inconclusive, but the rest is perfectly readable.) Let’s start with the theft. Or maybe it was a gift. It could’ve been a perfectly legitimate off-the-record sale, or a simple mishap. Maybe it simply fell off the wall, landed in someone’s pocket by mistake, and walked out on its own, with everyone else none the wiser. Who are we to say, centuries later? All we can say is that, from 1732 to 1915, the Anthony Van Dyck painting of Dr. Baldwin Hamey, Junior, disappeared from the record entirely. 

In which Hamey Junior is slightly unhelpful. Well done, Balduinus Hamey M.D. Socio et Benefactore Collegii Medicorum Londinensis. But a shorter title might have sufficed. - - - As we know well, in past centuries, it was common practice for erudite and scholarly British individuals to write in dead languages. They intended to demonstrate their sophistication and mastery of Greco-Roman culture, not just to confound modern researchers, despite how it may seem. Baldwin Hamey Junior , that great fan of Aristophanes and Virgil, is the usual culprit, especially when grappling with his hefty tome “Bustorum aliquot Reliquae,” an index of sentimental eulogies in immaculate Latin. Which is very ironic, considering my own background in the classics, but I think Hamey’s got me beat.

So you’ve been trying to do some historical research, but you’re vexed by the old-time habit of English people not writing in English? You’ve come to the right place. Highbrow scholars used to conduct their correspondence in the languages of the ancients, using so many extra words that it’d put Charles Dickens to shame, except Dickens very sensibly wrote in his native tongue, which gives him a real advantage here. 1600s London literati — like the usual suspect, Baldwin Hamey — didn’t do us that favor. The method I've used and demonstrated in this guide, to extract handwritten Latin text and process it into English, relies on an AI-powered version of OCR technology (optical character recognition). Here's how.

In which the portrait of the father is recycled for the son. - - - These two pictures are oddly similar. As usual, that’s no coincidence.  Last time on the Hamey Channel, we discussed a big-name painter, Cornelius Johnson. Today, we’ll focus on a small name: Matthew Snelling, a little-known miniaturist.  Snelling is remembered for his portrait of Hamey and not much else. (The record of the picture cites the artist as “Matthew (?) Snelling,” granting him even less dignity.) “Baldvinus Hamey M.D.”, shown on the left, captures the good doctor at age 74, pictured with those timeless hallmarks of the medical profession: a dashing cap, several gigantic books, and the marble busts of his favorite ancient authors, which he strokes lovingly like a household pet. 

This is a cautionary tale. Not on my part, thankfully (at least not yet), but on the danger of leaping to conclusions.   The Baldwin Hamey portraits are an incredibly convoluted story involving at least five separate paintings (some lost, some found), which may or may not actually depict the same man and/or his extremely similar son. In fact, the prospect of untangling this whole thing is so spectacularly complex that it hasn’t been done yet. But let’s give it a shot anyway. The portrait known as Baldwin Hamey, Senior (on the right), is an astoundingly high-quality painting. It stands head and shoulders above standard formulaic portraiture of the era (pun not intended). It’s so good for its time, in fact, that I initially wondered if it had been mislabeled on ArtUK, but it’s credibly inscribed as 1633 and bears the Hamey family coat of arms. Its artistic authorship is a tantalizing, compelling mystery.