Genius Fan

Portrait Summary

Subject: Belle De Zuylen, 20 October, 1740 – 27 December, 1805

• Belle De Zuylen’s relationship with Scottish lawyer James Boswell could have made a nice little Netflix dramedy…if only it went somewhere and didn’t fizzle out leaving us all hanging. Belle De Zuylen was the nickname Isabella Agneta Elisabeth van Tuyll van Serooskerken, an Eighteenth century Dutch noblewoman. She also had a pen name: Zelide. “Zélide lived in her father’s moated castle in Holland, like a fairytale princess in a tower. She was the clever, sexy, mercurial young Dutch blue-stocking with whom Boswell fell disastrously in love in 1764.” [Correction to that quote: De Zuylen and Boswell actually met on Sunday 30 October, 1763.] This brilliant summary is from biographer Richard Holmes in his book ‘Scott on Zelide,’ a recent republication of Geoffrey Scott’s book, Portrait of Zelide. Now, in case you don’t know, James Boswell, a young Scotsman from Ayrshire was studying law at Utrecht in Holland at the time. He was very traditional, energetic, obsessed about his own identity and a man constantly seeking social validation. You can see the romcom material here.

Boswell, often a romantic dreamer – throughout his life, in fact – composed this ten line verse about De Zuylen after their first meeting. She most certainly caught his eye.

And yet just now a Utrecht lady’s charms
Make my gay bosom beat with love’s alarms.
Who would have thought to see young Cupid fly
Through Belgia’s thick and suffocating sky?
But she from whom my heart has caught the flame
Has nothing Dutch about her but the name.
Let not an ear too delicate recoil
And start fastidious when I say “De Zoile”;
So mere a trifle I can change with ease:
Your tender niceness will “Zelida” please?

Boswell in Holland 1763-1764, Frederick A Pottle (1952)

• From October 1763 until June 1764 when Boswell set off on his grand tour, he and De Zuylen met in company and challenged, tested and despaired over each other’s knowledge, intellect and morals. Boswell wrote in his memoranda about his feelings for De Zuylen and he speculated about making a proposal to her. She would not have accepted (my opinion).
• That to and fro continued by letter for four years, and after all that time, with less and less contact, and questions still unanswered, their lives peeled away from one another. Boswell married his cousin Margaret Montgomerie in November 1769 and De Zuylen married Charles-Emmanuel de Charrière de Penthaz in 1771. She became Madame de Charriere. Her potential was not fully realised, but she continued with her writing, novels, poetry, Music, pamphlets and so on. There is a vibrant Belle de Zuylen community that is helping bring her history back to life.
• Portrait: This sketch is based on a painting by French artist Maurice Quentin de La Tour (5 September, 1702 – 17 February, 1788). He painted the portrait in 1766 in Utrecht, when De Zuylen was 25. La Tour was 64 years of age. Among his other portraits were those of Emelie du Chatelet, Louis XV, Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau. See La Tour’s Wikipedia page.
• See La Tour’s original painting of Belle De Zuylen on the website of the Geneva Museum of Art and History (where the painting lives).
• Website
  • Association Madame de Charriere
• Books
  • Scott on Zelide: Portrait of Zélide by Geoffrey Scott (ed) Richard Holmes (2004)
  • Portrait of Zélide, Geoffrey Scott (1925)
  • Boswell in Holland 1763-1764, Frederick A Pottle (1952)