The Leeuwarden Series: Members of the House of Nassau The only son of Willem II and Mary Stuart, Willem III was born eight days after the death of his father. His childhood was solitary and joyless. He suffered from asthma, and his upbringing was a major source of contention between his mother and his grandmother, Amalia van Solms.46 The present portrait is related to a number of replicas of a lost original by Gerard van Honthorst showing Willem III as a hunter.47 As in those replicas, the young prince is here shown wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter, which he received from his uncle Charles II in 1653. Although not an original work, the Portrait of Willem III in the Leeuwarden Series was probably executed around 1653, for after that date a more recent portrait of the prince – and many were made – would have been copied. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 372.