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Bernard van Orley (Netherlandish, ca. 1488–ca. 1541)
Otto, Count of Nassau, and His Wife, Adelheid van Vianen, ca. 1530
Pen and brown ink, watercolor, over traces of black chalk; verso: tracing in black chalk of the figures on the recto; 14 x 19 in. (35.6 x 48.3 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1995 (1995.12)

Curator Comment

In the late 1520s Henry III of Nassau, advisor to Emperor Charles V, commissioned eight tapestry designs from the Brussels master Bernard van Orley glorifying his ancestors in the house of Orange-Nassau. The tapestries were woven by Willem de Moyen in Brussels but probably were destroyed in a fire in 1760; this drawing and six others are the only records of the commission. Discovered shortly before the Museum acquired it in 1995, the drawing depicts one of Henry's fourteenth-century ancestors, Count Otto II of Nassau, and his wife, Adelheid van Vianden, splendidly dressed and seated on horseback before an elaborate landscape. Their coats of arms, a festoon, and a cartouche mentioning their names top the composition, but the tapestry also would have had an ornamental border. The contrast between the figures and their carefully observed horses in the foreground and the deeply receding landscape is characteristic of Van Orley's approach to tapestry, which differed markedly from the more two-dimensional designs of earlier northern artists.

Stijn Alsteens, associate curator, Department of Drawings and Prints