Enigmas in the Royal Collection

Trying to catch up with something of a backlog of exhibitions on my “to see” list, I started with the “Northern Renaissance” show at the Queen’s Gallery, slotted in at the side of Buckingham Palace.   This was a lovely show but an oddly difficult one to write about.   There were lots and lots of beautiful pieces on display but it was hard to detect an overarching theme; it wasn’t quite about art created explicitly for English monarchs in the 16^th century or even art from that period acquired later (though both elements were present).   It wasn’t just about painting.  There were a couple of magnificently engraved suits of armour on display, for instance, one of them belonging to Henry VIII and showing signs of the work which the Royal Armouries of the day had had to undertake in what amounted to letting the seams out to accommodate the ageing monarch’s  bloated body in the 1540’s.   I suppose it could be seen as a kind of survey show and those are always quite hard to summarise.

There were some intriguing details.  There were almost as many portraits of Erasmus in the show as there were of Henry VIII.  The media superstar aspect of the Dutch humanist was if anything underlined by the fact that a couple were in fact contemporary copies of portraits produced by others; there was clearly enough of a market for paintings of the great man to generate this kind of second order production.   In educated elite circles Erasmus must have had one of the most instantly recognisable faces in Europe around 1510.   Clearly people wanted to hang his picture on their wall.  Ironically a couple of books I’ve read recently have taken a somewhat less than adulatory line on Erasmus, painting a picture of a dedicated and somewhat craven hunter for patronage, a flatterer who lapped up flattery of himself, a bitchy old queen who ruthlessly exploited his relationship with major printers to squeeze those who crossed him out of the book market and a satirist who tended to go for soft targets (mocking Pope Julius II wasn’t particularly brave when done from a jurisdiction whose ruler was hostile to that Pope’s foreign policy) but panicked when others took his criticisms of the church to their logical conclusion.   I’m not sure how far this led me to see a complacent smugness in the famous Erasmian smile on display in all the portraits which I hadn’t spotted before but I’m sure it’s there…..

The show’s highlights were many.  Predictably there were lots of those wonderful Holbein portraits which give the feeling (or possibly the illusion?) that the leading and not-so-leading figures in the court of Henry VIII are real people whom one could imagine appearing in TV politics shows to explain their policies- and would be as shifty and untrustworthy as their modern successors.   There was a good showing of Durer engravings and sketches; full of fabulous draughtsmanship and observation by also of fantasy and imagination.   The famous rhino from India is there but I found myself drawn to the wonderful greyhound at the top of this entry- a piece of genuine observation from life in a way that the rhino wasn’t.   On the fantasy side, the engravings of the Apocalypse are wonderful confections- even if the heads of the Beast of the Apocalypse (below, mounted side-saddle by a glamorous but quite respectably looking Whore of Babylon) are by turns quizzical, goofy and even quite cute rather than terrifying.

Rather than try to summarise the whole show, I’ve decided to focus on three paintings, all of which repay slightly closer examination (the versions I’ve posted on Flickr possibly work better if you want to see the details- though I imagine they’re the starting point for many visitors here).  The first is “Adam and Eve”, painted by Jan Gossaert.   Gossaert was clearly a bit of a problem personality; we’re told he was notable for his debauched life and (suitably enough in the eyes of moralists, no doubt) died relatively young.   He packed quite a bit of travel into his 30 odd years- in particular visiting Italy where he seems to have seen a lot of the latest art as well as picking up on the fashion for classical statues.  The impact of the latter can be seen in the muscular bodies of both Adam and Eve (is it just me that wonders what might be revealed if the strategically placed leaf was removed from Eve- and whether an artist would really have been allowed to get away with working with nude female models in the 1520s?).   There’s a kind of instability about the way they stand, almost as if they’re about to lurch out of the frame on top of the viewer- a kind of visible correlative for the Fall.   It’s been suggested, on rather tenuous grounds, that John Milton may have had this painting in mind when describing Adam in “Paradise Lost”(it was in the Royal Collection early enough for this to be feasible).   There were some details however which bothered the more biblically minded in 17^th century England.   Why were Adam and Eve depicted with navels given that they had been created and not born in the conventional way?   Who exactly built the rather elaborate fountain to be seen in the background?   One could suggest that God might have chosen to create Adam and Eve with navels to set the pattern for future humans and that some of the angels could presumably have run up a fountain and the associated hydraulics in a matter of minutes but perhaps that’s getting a bit too literal…..  It does however show how differently people might analyse a painting in the past from the criteria they use now- and how details which would pass unremarked now could raise major discussions.

The second painting is a very different piece.  The artist isn’t known, but it’s a very creative reworking of a piece by a Dutch artist called Marinus van Rymerswaele.   It’s conventionally called “The Misers” though the latest view is that the two protagonists are probably tax collectors or just possibly merchants with debts to collect (other versions are explicitly called “The Tax Gatherers”). There was clearly a market for this kind of painting in the wider Dutch/Flemish/Northern French world during the first half of the 16^th century as a number of variations on van Rymerswaele’s piece and ones derived from a now-lost original by Quenten Massys survive.   The painting has recently been cleaned and restored and no reproduction quite conveys the sheer vividness of its colours or the way which it draws you into its world.   Some of this is due to the changes made to the template by the artist, who only partially follows a tracing from the original work.   In the original and some of the workshop copies, the right hand figure was much more separated from the book keeper on the left and could even have been a client handing over money.  In this version the pair are clearly a team- and the viewer is placed in the position of the defaulting tax payer, no doubt being told that, regrettably, the figures don’t add up and unless he comes up with the balance of the cash they will have no alternative but to send the boys round.   The pet parakeet (an introduction to the scene) watches and not doubt has plenty of tales to tell.   There are some strange dissonances in the picture.   The two central figures are richly dressed- but in the fashions of the late 15^th century, a good sixty or seventy years before the date of the picture.   This isn’t a period piece either- it’s possible to read the writing in the ledger and the exchange rates being applied to the piles of coins from different jurisdictions are ones which were in force from 1547 to 1551.   In this version the text is in French; other versions are in Flemish- which shows that it was possible for the artist (or customer?) to customise what could be seen as production line efforts churned out by workshop artists on the basis of tracings.   Just why this sort of scene was popular in one of the most urbanised and commercially advanced (and heavily taxed) parts of Europe is unclear.   Perhaps there are jokes in here at the expense of the taxman which are now no longer legible to us- the archaic costume might be part of that.   Perhaps the moral lesson about the transitory nature of worldly riches implied by the guttering candle on top of the cupboard is the key.  I wonder how many purchasers of van Rymerswaele clones were themselves in the tax farming business….

If there’s an air of implicit menace in the tax gatherers, something a lot scarier is going on in the third painting- indeed it’s much more ominous than Durer’s slightly cartoonish view of the End Times.   On the face of it things are bad enough.  A snow-covered Flemish village is being comprehensively sacked by a composite military force with a core of heavily armoured lancers backed up with German infantry in their distinctive landsknecht costumes.   Villagers run to and fro, trying to escape.  Others plead with authority figures.   The pillage goes on unhindered; the Germans are smashing their way into locked houses and dragging booty out.   Close inspection however shows overpainting in certain areas and more sinister violence going on in the background.  For this is an early, more or less original, version of Peter Bruegel the Elder’s “Massacre of the Innocents”.   As with several of Bruegel’s major works this was to have a very long afterlife as it became the basis for production line workshop production using tracings from the original with versions being produced many years after Breughel’s death (years ago I wrote about an exhibition in Brussels which looked at this aspect of the Bruegel family business, though this wasn’t one of the paintings covered in that show).   The overpaints are old- they seem to have been done when the painting entered the collection of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II some thirty years after it was created  around 1565 (there’s a view that the wintry landscape reflects a particularly cold winter in 1564/5).  

Quite why the Emperor (or those seeking to sell the painting to the cultured but eccentric and somewhat reclusive ruler?) had the overpaints done is just one of several puzzles associated with this piece.   Most of the modifications substitute animals or goods being stolen for children being murdered and turn a very specific and ghastly bit of Christian mythology in the remote into a generic scene from the wars of a war-filled age.   Its understandable why Rudolf would have wanted the tabard of the herald (the man on the horse in the centre right, surrounded by peasants appealing for mercy) overpainted- in the original his tabard bears the double headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire (it’s not unusual for that symbol to stand in for the eagles of the original pagan Empire in medieval and Renaissance art but it was surely a bit too close to the knuckle in this context to imply that slaughter of children- or even the ravaging of a Christian village- was being done under Imperial auspices).   Perhaps he was uncomfortable with the overall subject matter as well- especially on one reading of the message which Bruegel was sending by placing the Massacre of the Innocents in a contemporary setting.   On this account, the biblical reference was itself cover for a protest against the repression visited on the Netherlands by the Spanish Duke of Alba and his army in the 1560’s when they were sent into the region by Philip II of Spain (the ruler of these territories- and cousin of the Holy Roman Emperor of the day) to repress Protestants and rebels against his authority.  

This interpretation was clearly current close to Bruegel’s own time and must have found favour with purchasers of workshop editions as many of these explicitly turn the face of the commander of the mounted unit into a portrait of Alba.  Bruegel’s own religious position is enigmatic and all sorts of claims have been made about him- not to mention attempts to find hidden meanings in other works.   It’s very tempting, even though there are some problems with it.  It’s not clear that the dates fit too well.   The painting is dated to 1565 or so.   Alba’s army only reached the Netherlands in 1567 in response to a Protestant uprising marked by violent image breaking the previous year; his army only really hit its repressive stride late in 1567-early 1568.  Bruegel died 1569.   If the painting is really a veiled comment on Alba’s exactions it has to be rather later than the date conventionally assigned to it.  There are other quirks.  The Imperial eagle doesn’t entirely fit - in a technical legal sense some of the provinces of the Netherlands were within the Holy Roman Empire but they hadn’t been treated as really belonging to the Empire for years and any herald working on behalf of Philip II in his role as ruler of the region would probably have carried the red knotty St Andrews cross of Burgundy on his tabard (admittedly not easy to work into a scene nominally set in the ancient world but the discrepancy would slightly weaken the message of the painting….).   On the other hand the rather washed out flag floating over the soldiers originally bore the arms of the Crusader of Jerusalem and Philip II was one of several 16^th century rulers who laid claim to that title- but so did others.  To my eye the soldiers look as if they belong in the 1530’s or 40’s rather than the 1560’s; landsknecht costume was going out of fashion by the later date, heavily armoured lancers were less common and Alba’s army was noted for its effective and disciplined infantry rather than its cavalry.   None of this entirely disproves the traditional “contemporary politics” reading of the painting but I wonder if it isn’t a bit too pat; Bruegel may well have been being deliberately somewhat generic about the horrors of war and the evil that powerful people can inflict on the powerless when he set out to paint the piece by making it both of his time and a bit timeless (the laws of anachronism aren’t entirely suspended- I can't see any firearms or even crossbows in the picture, for instance).

Have a wonderful Easter, folks.

 

Mughal Treasures

I’m afraid I’m getting back into bad habits over keeping up to date- though I can always blame the 6 Nations rugby for displacing my attention from more cultural events….

I did however manage to fit a visit to the British Library’s exhibition on Mughal India in.   Though supplemented by artefacts from elsewhere ranging from a massive green jade terrapin the size of an adult turtle to the crown of the last Mughal ruler Bahadur II, this was primarily built round the BL’s own collections of Indian manuscripts and book art- a dazzling show overall.

The Mughal dynasty were outsiders to India.   They claimed descent from Timur (better known as Tamerlane in the English speaking world) and, rather tenuously, from Chinghiz Khan himself- in other worlds they laid claim to the Central Asian Mongol/Turkic imperial heritage.  Their own first language was a Turkish dialect, with Persian as the language of high culture and administration.   The founder of the line, Babur, ended up in India only after three failed attempts to get control of Timur’s city of Samarkand in the chaotic succession struggles which filled the century after the great conqueror’s death and seems to have regarded Delhi as a consolation prize which might serve as a springboard for another go.   Well into the 17^th century Mughal rulers still cast covetous eyes northwards beyond the Afghan mountains and tried to assert control in their ancestral homelands- with very limited success.  The art they sponsored never ceased to stress their descent from Timur, though- as the piece below created in the early 17th century shows, with successive Mughal rulers seated at the feet of the old conqueror.

This had an impact on their court style and personnel.  The Mughal court was very open to well born or talented figures from across the wider Asian Islamic world- Afghans, Turks, Uzbeks, Persians and others all found positions there over the years.  Politically this posed problems- ethnically based factionalism was a permanent issue within the Mughal elite and contributed to the rapid collapse of the empire in the 1700s.    In artistic terms however it was a clear positive as styles from well beyond India got a foothold there and hybridised with each other- as well as with local styles and input from much further afield- to create a striking and distinctive artistic culture.

The dynasty nearly came to an end before it got properly started.  Babur died in 1530 just as he was consolidating his power.  His son, Humayun, was plagued by disloyal relatives and external foes; he was driven into exile in 1540 and only clawed his way back to power in Delhi with Persian assistance (always played down afterwards- the Mughals were at least nominally Sunni Muslims and sensitive to the charge that they owned their restoration to the heretical Shia Safavids).   He had just regained control in 1555 when he took a fall in his library and died (I rather warm to a man who appears to have died looking for a book on the top shelf of his massive library….).  Perhaps surprisingly, despite perennial succession issues, the dynasty then entered into its greatest period under the run of rulers conventionally known as the Great Mughals- Akbar I, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.  

Shah Jahan (see above) is the one who probably has most name recognition outside India because he was responsible for the construction of the Taj Mahal though Akbar was arguably an even greater builder- he had a whole new capital city built at Fatehpur Sikri near Agra which was used for little more than a decade before he moved to Lahore as a better base for campaigning in Afghanistan.  There were certain commonalities between the first three.   All were somewhat less than orthodox Muslims, prepared to conciliate the Hindu majority of the population with tax concessions and employ Hindu aristocrats in their administration.   This lack of fervour could take interesting turns.   Akbar was given to mystical revelations (the image at the very top shows him having some kind of spiritual revelation in the middle of a hunt and deciding to call the whole thing off- it’s not entirely clear whether this was a one-off or whether he gave up on hunting for good thereafter).  He gave patronage to sufi brotherhoods and Hindu ascetics alike and at times seemed to be working his way towards launching a new religion of his own devising- when not tinkering with the calendar.    Jahangir continued some of these trends but became increasingly addicted to a mix of alcohol and opium.  Shan Jahan was viewed by the Sunni establishment as soft on Shias- the wife for whom he built the Taj Mahal was Persian in origin.

In artistic terms too, all three men were major patrons of the arts and architecture.   Drawing on Persian and Central Asian precedents they sponsored the production of major illuminated manuscripts.  Their subject matter was a fascinating mix.   Dynastic chronicles and panegyric biographies of the rulers sat alongside new editions of Persian literary classics like the poetry of Hafiz or Nawani.   Manuscripts reproduced tales of a mythologised pre-Islamic Persian past which integrated Alexander the Great into the succession of Persian rulers as half-brother to Darius III and therefore also a legitimate ruler presiding over a dazzling court in which Aristotle and Plato bickered over the ultimate meaning of life until the latter became a hermit and (merging into the classical Orpheus) inventor of music on whom the rainbow-plumaged Simurgh bird swooped to carry him off over a countryside bustling with activity.

 Alongside lovingly rendered lives of sufi saints, Akbar sponsored the translation of key Hindu religious texts into Persian.  How far this was religious outreach to the majority population is less clear as the translation and editing process tended to accentuate the already-strong adventure story side of the “Mahabharata” and the “Ramayana” and turn them into fantastical epic tales of romance and battle and strange doings, losing any spiritual content in the process.    The painters working on these commissions were a mixed group.   The court workshop artists were predominantly Muslim but a number of Hindus worked there as well.   As noted above, they blended a wide range of styles into their work- including a surprisingly large European element.  

By the time the Mughals had consolidated their power in northern India, European merchants were frequent visitors to India ports and the Portuguese had established a toehold in Goa which lasted until the 1960’s.   European powers sent ambassadors to the Mughal court; James VI and I’s ambassador Sir Thomas Roe published his memoirs of his time there.  The relatively open religious environment- men like Akbar and Jahangir enjoyed religious debate and were happy to have learned Christian priests around their court- opened up opportunities which Jesuits and other religious orders were happy to take.  There was no Indian equivalent of Giuseppe Castiglione (the Jesuit who served as court painter to the Manchu ruler in China in then 18^th century) but a great deal of European art filtered into Indian artistic circles one way and another alongside the astronomical and mathematical texts prized by the court (in some cases the content had come full circle, with concepts first elaborated in India returning there in European form).  The main vector of influence seems to have come through engravings but it is, for instance, known that an English miniature by Isaac Olivier was much admired in India and influenced subsequent approaches to portraiture.  Mughal artists merged western approaches to perspective with the conventions inherited from Persian art and borrowed motifs wholesale.   This sometimes has strange results.  What is labelled as a Kashmiri village turns out to be a Flemish village (presumably lifted from an engraving) given a light makeover.  A church stands in the background of an Indian pastoral scene.  A cherub which has clearly escaped from a baroque heaven tugs interacts with Jahangir, who was the only person able to see this angelic presence (I wonder what he was on that day…).   The overall result is art of great beauty and sophistication, marked by extremely acute observation of animals and plants and reflecting a bustling, sophisticated court life- though the squrrel catcher below is probably not a courtier in disguise.

Artistically things began to go sour under Aurangzeb.   He fought his way to power in the final years of Shah Jahan’s reign when the old ruler was incapacitated by ill health.  Unlike his immediate predecessors, he played the orthodox Sunni Muslim card for all it was worth- no doubt reflecting a genuine piety (he had the Koran off by heart).   In power he re-imposed discriminatory taxation on the non-Muslim majority and fought endless wars to expand Mughal power into the deep south of the Indian peninsula.    There was precious little state patronage for artists under his reign- one suspects that he would have disapproved even of the portraits which depicted him as a conqueror.  

Since he ruled for some fifty years, the long term impact on court art was pretty devastating as artists drifted away into the service of local grandees with a more tolerant view of painting.   A sense of what got lost can be seen in some of the most exquisite portraits in the show, drawn from a book prepared for Prince Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb’s main rival executed in 1659. 

Politically his reign was the peak of the Mughal Empire- it never controlled more land than it did when he died in 1707.   Well before his death, however, the cracks were beginning to show.  He spent his final years campaigning deep in the south, far from the Mughal heartlands.  It wasn’t really possible to run the empire from a campaign tent on the remote periphery, however- especially as the crushing taxes imposed to fund the wars sparked protests across the Empire.  Over-extension loomed.   Outsiders- whether traditional rivals in Persia and Afghanistan or newcomers like the English East India Company- were beginning to circle menacingly (the exhibition includes some ill-tempered correspondence between Aurangzeb and William III over the depredations of English pirates on shipping in Indian waters).  

After his death things fell apart with astonishing speed.   Like his contemporary Louis XIV he had outlived his immediate heirs; unlike Louis, succession practices were fluid enough for there to be multiple potential candidates for power.   The empire had seen contested successions before but in this case none of the contenders were talented enough to halt the slide.   By 1739 the empire was so badly weakened that a Persian army was able to sack Delhi and loot the royal library as well as stealing the Peacock Throne of the Mughal rulers.   Though there was something of a revival of court art as the century wore on, many of the most interesting and innovative developments in art were being made at regional power centres like Lucknow, capital of Awdh (one of the intriguing aspects of the exhibition was meeting old friends from the Royal Academy Zoffany show like Colonel Polier in their Indian context). 

It’s perhaps predictable that a lot of the material which ended up in the British Library was commissioned in one way or another by British residents or other figures operating on the still-fluid margins between British and Indian society.   One of the major patrons of art in the early 19^th century was James Skinner, son of a Scottish soldier of fortune and a local woman, who made a career in his father’s profession.   Excluded from a formal East Indian Company commission by his origins, he nevertheless raised and operated a highly effective light cavalry unit kitted out in distinctive mustard coloured uniforms (hence their nicknames “The Canaries” and “The Yellow Boys”).   “Skinner’s Horse” still exists as a regiment in the modern Indian army (officially they’re the 1st Bengal Cavalry- I wonder if their tanks reflect the regimental heritage in their paintwork).  Skinner’s English was fragmentary and he corresponded with British officials in literary Persian- a hybrid figure in a short-lived but fascinating era when such individuals had a major role to play.  Indian artists for their part had become adept at creating art in whatever style the person paying for it wanted( the example below was commissioned by a British collector, for instance); as a result, the later exhibits possibly overstate the “Europeanisation” of Indian artistic practice. 

Politically Mughal power had gone beyond recall.  By 1800 the Mughal ruler controlled little more than the Red Fort in Delhi (see below) and survived on the sufferance of the dominant local powers of the Ganges plains, who claimed a faint sheen of legitimacy by pretending that they were acting as his representatives.   After 1803 this domination passed to the East India Company, whose representatives begin to pop up in pictures of court life and ceremonial in deceptively humble postures which can have fooled nobody- seated on one of the rearmost elephants in a noisy and colourful court procession, for instance.   The political reaction to this slow motion annexation was violent and, from the Mughal point of view, fatal.   When the Company’s sepoy regiments rebelled in 1856-7 they claimed to be seeking to restore the Mughal Empire to its former glory- how far this was a genuine goal rather than the latest example of aspiring political forces claiming legitimacy without the slightest intention of obeying any Mughal order they didn’t like is far less clear.   Bahadur II, a talented poet and a cultured man but not much of a politician, wavered uneasily between the rebel leadership and the British and ended up distrusted by both sides.  When British armies took Delhi he was taken into custody and deposed; the exhibition ends with photographs of the Red Fort taken after the British capture and of Bahadur himself, looking somewhat dazed by the turn of events.  He died in exile shortly afterwards.

Landscapes, sublime and picturesque

I took advantage of the gap in Six Nations rugby to pay a visit to the Royal Academy at the weekend.   I wasn’t going to the latest blockbuster Manet show however (I’ll catch up with that later) but catching a rather less vigorously touted exhibition before it closed.   This was entitled “Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and the Making of Landscape”.  

Like an awful lot of exhibition titles, this was a bit of a misnomer- some might say a bit of a cheat.   While there were some very striking works by the three big names on display, they only formed a small part of the show.  The “making of landscape” side of things also needed a bit of glossing.  Landscape art in one form or another was not exactly a novelty in Britain the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries- there had for instance for years been a lively, if lowish status trade, in producing more or less accurate depictions of country houses and estates for sale to their owners.   “Making” in this context meant a willingness to accord depictions or more or less idealised British landscapes the respect given to depictions of more or less fantastical Italian landscapes by the stars of the 17^th century artistic firmament as collected in Britain.  Even more relevant, however, was “making” in the simple physical sense of creation- not so much the creation of paintings, however, but the processes of engraving and reproducing those paintings for a much wider audience than would ever have seen the originals.  Indeed the bulk of the exhibition was made up of engravings and mezzotints rather than original oils (supplemented by a few watercolours- another relatively cheap and “popular” medium of the day).  

Some visitors may have been disappointed by this focus.   I found it fascinating- indeed I’d have liked rather more on the ways in which the “big name” artists and their less well remembered contemporaries interacted with the wider market for art and a bit less on “the Sublime” and “the Picturesque”. While these concepts clearly did inform art commentary in the late 18^th century and artists sought to conform to expectations in order to get the right sort of reviews, I began to get lost in the distinctions which the exhibition’s display material and little quasi-catalogue sought to make between different works and I’ve a suspicion that the artists themselves were apt to play games with the concepts.

After a bit of a false start of works by contemporary artists drawing (very loosely indeed in some cases) on the landscape tradition, the exhibition proper started with engravings of works by the stars I referred to above- Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa and “Poussin” (in fact 18^th century collectors had a lot of trouble distinguishing between the great Nicolas of that ilk and his prolific if somewhat less talented brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet and were apt to collapse their works together).   It’s well worth being reminded just how difficult it was even for professional artists to experience admired art works first hand.   There was no publicly accessible art gallery in Britain before Dulwich opened its doors in 1812.   Most of the works imported from Italy by returning Grand Tourists disappeared into private collections which might be hung in country houses spread out from Galway to Kent and from Aberdeenshire to Cornwall.   Even an artist with good connections to open doors for him would at best see a very limited selection of pieces, probably those in London and the Home Counties.   Even artists, therefore, relied heavily on engravings to get a sense for what this much-admired art looked like.  

Landscape figured prominently in this art- though in a rather specific way.   The landscape in question was a very idealised version on the countryside round Rome-with higher hills, more rugged rocks, larger and clearer lakes and cooler and lusher woods than the reality (and no sign of the malaria-infested marshes which filled the region until Mussolini’s day).   It was rarely the nominal subject of the painting.  That was usually drawn from classical mythology or, more rarely, from the Bible, though you sometimes needed a magnifying glass to see the figures involved in the action.   Its very artifice contributed to the Sublime aspect of such works as understood by contemporaries- a good going thunderstorm in the background or other weather-related light effects helped as well.   I suspect that the fact most critics would also experience a lot of art in engraving form may have shaped their appreciation of it- the darks and lights and shadings on a basically black and white colour range would tend to enhance the dramatic effects.

Given the cultural prestige of this art, it’s not surprising that British artists wanted to break into the market.   The first to do so wasn’t one of the show’s headline names but the much less heralded Welshman Richard Wilson (one of the great might have beens of British art- a man of great talent but very quarrelsome and far too fond of the bottle).   Jones was Roman trained and his breakthrough work (nominally based on the myth of Niobe) still refers to that tradition.  This was picked up for engraving by  the publisher John Boydell, who had spotted the market potential and was a man on a mission to compete with the high quality French imports which dominated the British market; in this venture he was fortunate to have the services of a top class engraver in the shape of William Woollett.   Wilson moved on from idealised depictions of Italian scenery with events from classical mythology as the nominal subject to idealised depictions of British (indeed often specifically Welsh) scenery with the odd reference to ancient Cambrian mythology- though this historico-mythological alibi became less and less important and eventually vanished.

As the exhibition demonstrates, Wilson was far from the only British artist feeding the market for engravings of domestic landscapes.   It’s worth being reminded that what is conventionally described as a Romantic taste for domestic tourism to more or less remote (preferably mountainous) parts of Britain considerably predates the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which are supposed to have stimulated it by making Continental Europe inaccessible.   I’d have liked to know a lot more about how the domestic market worked.  The assumption is that these prints served a wider (though still pretty well heeled) market than would have purchased original oils but it would have been nice to have a bit more detail on who was buying (subscription lists clearly still exist)?  How far was consumer demand shaping what artists like Wilson or local figures like Thomas Smith of Derby (who managed to make the Peak District look like the High Alps) created?  Or were the publishers setting the agenda and moulding demand to conform to their own preoccupations?   Boydell was clearly articulating a distinctly patriotic standpoint in his choice of works to engrave, and not just in the field of landscapes (he commissioned a major set of worked based on scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, for instance).

The three big names headlining the show responded to this market demand in different ways.  Gainsborough enjoyed doing landscapes as a relief from the treadmill of the bread and butter portrait work but did his own engravings almost on a hobbyist basis and with limited commercial sales.  His approach to landscape art tended towards “the Picturesque” rather than “the Sublime”- an artistic lineage going back to 17^th century Dutch work which valued the informal and irregular aspects of the countryside and largely eschewed overt dramatic gestures (his countryside is peopled by gypsies rather than heroes of classical mythology).   How far it was any more “accurate” and less idealising is another question…..  Turner (perhaps predictably) revelled in the commercial side of things, launching a subscription series of landscape engravings produced by a team of engravers bulled and badgered into meeting his quality control requirements.  Equally predictably he never quite delivered all the engravings promised in the series.  In some ways Turner emerges as rather conservative and “academic” in his practice, working up the final versions for engraving in the studio well after the original sketches had been made- and with a distinct air of the Sublime in the exaggerations he incorporated (hills are always that bit higher than the Ordinance Survey figures say they are, rivers that bit wider- as with the image of Norham Castle at the top of this piece).   Constable by contrast found one collaborator, Charles Lucas, who worked closely with him on making the engravings of the grand “six footer” paintings which made his name.  Constable’s oils manage to combine the grandeur of the Sublime with the apparently commonplace of the Picturesque, getting a full measure of spectacle and drama out of the flat and relatively featureless landscape of East Anglia (as in the picture of Flatford Lock below).   A very English fascination with the weather helped; the exhibition contained a couple of the innovative oil sketches of cloud formations which he made out of doors as an aide memoire when  it came to creating drama in the big skies over his landscapes.   Lucas in turn did a brilliant job of translating Constable’s dynamic view of every day life into the black and white shadings of engraving- at times the engravings are even more dramatic than the oils they popularise.  

The exhibition also contains a section on the work of lesser lights like the wonderfully named Michael Angelo Rooker (no doubt over the trade his parents expected him to follow…) and the development of sketching and water colour work as arts in their own right rather than purely preparatory stages for producing masterpieces in the studio- Constable’s clouds also fit into this model.   Here too, however, the wider social context remains (perhaps appropriately) a bit sketchy.  Clearly there was money and fame to be gained from fine art engraving- an important point in a world where traditional approaches to artistic patronage were shifting and artists had a very much higher view of their own social standing than would have been the case a generation or two earlier.  Being “His lordship’s most humble and obedient servant” was going out of fashion as top range artists presented themselves as gentlemen and even began to become part of the social elite themselves (knighthoods for Presidents of the Royal Academy like Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West pointing the way).   Ironically (or perhaps revealingly) the social recognition didn’t extend to the engravers and water colourists, who struggled to gain election as RA members in their own right and were very much second class citizens in the republic of arts.   The exhibition scarcely begins to examine the complex dynamics of that situation, where a “fine” artist’s fame outside the specialist art world, not to mention his revenues, were largely dependent on the work done by others who remained restricted to artisan status.  The discrimination has still not quite disappeared; I can’t imagine the RA getting sponsorship to stage an exhibition which majored on names like Woollett or Lucas any time soon.

The hermit of Bologna?

The Estorick Gallery is running a Giorgio Morandi show.   Morandi has becoming one of the gallery’s “anchor” artists; on my count this is the fourth show it’s done in the 15-odd years of its existence which has been based on his works.   Perhaps the most intriguing was one staged a few years back in which contemporary British artists revealed their interest in the Italian master’s work and showed how he had influenced them.   Apart from providing a Members’ Opening reception which was a name-dropper’s gift (David Hockey in one corner, Paula Rego in another….), it did bring home just how important and well regarded this apparently obscure and marginal Italian was amongst practicing artists.

It’s hard to wring much excitement out of Morandi’s life.   He was born in Bologna in 1890 and died there in 1964.  He lived most of his life at the same address in Via Fondazza with his three sisters and rarely travelled further beyond Bologna than the village of Grizzana (now known as Grizzana-Morandi- they obviously appreciate him there) in the mountains to the south of the city.   He didn’t serve in the First World War (discharged unfit due to a nervous breakdown) and his entire working life was spent in Bologna, first as a drawing teacher in the school system and then, after 1930, as professor of engraving in the local art college.   Though on the fringes of most of the movements in Italian art in the first half of the 20^th century (Futurism, Metaphysical, Strapaese, Novecento) he was never really a fully paid up member of any.  Perhaps the one he was closest to was the Metaphysical art of men like de Chirico and de Pisis (closest geographically as well as spiritually; the key Metaphysical figures had more or less close associations with Emilia-Romagna).

This rather placid and humdrum life, coupled with the narrow range of subjects which Morandi addressed (still lives with a particular fondness for vases and jars, landscapes of Grizzana and parts of the Bolognese suburbs- often places which could be seen from the upper windows of the Morandi home), has given rise to an image of Morandi as a kind of hermit obsessively seeking spiritual depths in the commonplace- one reviewer of the current show talks of his “Zen monk” reputation.   This is, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced by the way in which his art is currently shown in Bologna, where there’s a dedicated Morandi gallery as a self-standing unit within the main city art gallery complex.  Centrepiece of the presentation is a full scale reconstruction of Morandi’s workshop, complete with jars and vases familiar from his art all the way back to the 1920’s; a fascinating but slightly claustrophobic place with a hint of agoraphobia about it.   The atelier was gifted by his sisters; it’s very tempting to think that there may have been a slight sigh of relief at finally being able to get rid of all the junk Giorgio had accumulated over the years….

Though Morandi himself appears to have played up to the monkish image, it’s a somewhat misleading one.   For one thing, he can’t possibly have been a total hermit while holding down full time teaching jobs- by all accounts he was an unconventional but inspiring teacher in the art school.   He may not have travelled very far but people clearly came to see him and he apparently revelled in the attention; though he never married he was evidently a man of great personal charm and by no means inclined to shun company.   A position on the fringes of key artistic movements turned out to be a very good place from which to navigate the turbulent waters of 20^th century Italy.   Morandi managed to avoid committing himself too much to any position (no doubt the Zen hermit image was very useful here).    He exhibited alongside Fascist true believers and sounded pro-regime in the 1920’s (Mussolini owned a couple of his works) but had anti-Fascist connections by the 1940’s and was even briefly arrested in 1943.  Post war his art was prized by celebrity collectors like Sophia Loren- and Morandi was prepared to be very directive over what pieces he would sell to specific collectors.   Whether he’d have sought to dictate which pieces President Obama could have (the White House apparently acquired a couple of Morandis recently) is unclear, but he clearly was nothing like as unworldly and detached from the grim realities of the world as is often thought.

Obviously he had no problems in selling a significant number of drawings and engravings to Eric Estorick when he came calling in the 1940’s.   These items from the gallery’s permanent collection are teamed up with material from Bologna to create the present show.   The decision to focus almost entirely on graphic art no doubt fits with the view of Morandi as above all a master etcher and engraver (entirely self- taught in those genres too).   Once can hardly complain at the quality of the work on show, but it’s worth noting that this does give a slightly distorted view of the man and his art.   Having been introduced to Morandi by the Estorick’s holdings, it came as a genuine surprise to encounter the Bologna museum and discover gallery after gallery of water colours and oils.   In fact over 90% Morandi’s graphic work was created in a period of just over twenty years about 1912 to 1933; after the later date he only produced a tiny handful of plates (one wonders if his art college appointment paradoxically led him to turn away from engraving when expressing his own artistic personality).   The current exhibition makes a nod in the direction of his painted output; the Estorick permanent collection contains a late oil (more of his beloved jars and vases) and the Bolognese material includes four small watercolours but it’s all a bit token.  This is a pity as the watercolours which are included show how different his painted style could be from his later etchings; much freer and more impressionistic, with interesting reminiscences of the Futurist echoes in some of his earliest engravings (it may be rather hard to get an impression of intense dynamism and action out of a depiction of jars and vases on a shelf but Morandi managed….).

Still, one can hardly complain about the quality of what is in the exhibition.   Given Morandi’s narrow range of subjects, it is amazing just how much variety there is in the show.   The colour and tonality varies hugely, from very dark and close hatchings to something much lighter and more schematic.   Sometimes the approach is almost photographic, with intense detailed observation of even the tiniest objects like sea-shells or eggs.  In the still lives the objects appear to take on an autonomous life of their own.   The vases and jars sometimes hunch together for mutual support, like footballers lining up to defend a free kick, sometimes shuffle apart in mutual suspicion.   A bottle seeps to be eavesdropping on the jugs.  Occasionally the objects disappear altogether, left as dazzling white silhouettes against a deep dark wall.   The results are never predictable and strangely hypnotic.    Who would have imagined that images of domestic bric-a-brac could be so compelling?

The landscapes are at first sight a little more conventional.   I’ve never been to Grizzana so I’ve no idea what the place looks like now, but I’ve a very real sense of how it lived in Morandi’s eyes- a scatter of quite large, blocky, farmsteads spread out along a stream, shaded by high trees.   Roads wind off into the deeper countryside, heading for an unknown destination.    Mostly there’s a sense of calm and peace, though some of the “darker” handlings suggest bad weather in the offing and the calm shades into something more oppressive, even claustrophobic.   His Bologna is a marginal one, excluding the city’s trademark pair of medieval towers leaning towards each other for company or the grand square with the cathedral and palaces and baroque fountains.   It’s resolutely suburban (chimneys of industrial installations define the skyline) and intimate (gardens glimpsed from an upstairs window, a tennis court), reflecting the immediate surroundings of the Via Fondazza.   The striking aspect of both city and countryside is how empty of human life they are.   Nobody walks the country roads or plays tennis on the tennis courts.   Perhaps Morandi simply wasn’t very good at people (there are a couple of small portraits in the show but it’s fair to say they’re not his most compelling pieces).   Perhaps the random movement of human beings would have distracted from the eternal geometry underlying the scenes he depicted.   Whatever the reasons, the cumulative effect is slightly unsettling.   The world seen through Morandi’s eyes combines deep familiarity with a certain strangeness and alienation.   He may not exactly have been the hermit of myth, but can’t have been entirely comfortable company.

The King Who Never Was

How do you construct an exhibition around so someone who died before they reached their nineteenth birthday- particularly when that individual isn’t a modern rock star but a 17^th century prince?   The National Portrait gallery has taken up this challenge in pulling together a fascinating exhibition on Henry Prince of Wales, eldest son of James VI and I.

Henry’s life doesn’t take a lot of telling.   He was born in 1594 in Stirling Castle (so I suppose I ought to take an interest in him as a fellow Stirlingite) and died, probably of typhoid, in 1612.   His death was greeted with almost hysterical outpourings of grief, at least from the social and cultural elites; his funeral was a far grander affair than that accorded to Queen Elizabeth herself nine years earlier.   Clearly this response could not have been inspired by many concrete achievements.   In his lifetime Henry became the focus of a form of 17^th century media cult, a screen on which others projected their hopes and aspirations and fantasies.  In the years immediately following his death his memory was invoked by those who (against the policy of King James) wished to see direct British combatant involvement in the opening phases of the 30 Years War.  Later, as the country slithered inexorably towards civil war, memories of Henry were tinged with nostalgia for a lost Golden Age cut short by his death, with the implied sub-text that things would never have reached such a pass if he had lived to become Henry IX.   It is no coincidence that the first printed biography of Prince Henry was published in 1641, dedicated to Charles Prince of Wales (the later Charles II).

In other words, any exhibition dedicated to Prince Henry is going to be as much about image as reality, fantasy as achievement.  The actual flesh and blood young man upon whose shoulders so many grandiose dreams were hung risks vanishing beneath the ideal prince whose features were projected on to him.  

All eldest sons of kings had a certain innate charisma in the medieval and early modern period from the moment they popped out of the womb- it went with the knowledge that this howling infant would, if he was lucky with disease and the other accidents of childhood, one day be the king himself.  Henry however experienced a more than averagely strong investment in his person on the part of others, particularly after his father had come into his English inheritance in 1603.   A lot of this was to do with James’ shortcomings.  There was huge initial enthusiasm for his accession.   Indeed it’s hard to overstate just how much relief there was that God’s proper order had at last been restored and that England was again, after nearly sixty years in which the realm was ruled first by a minor then by two successive childless females, under the sway of an adult Protestant male whose succession was already settled (the obligatory adulation of Gloriana had worn very thin indeed by the time Elizabeth died and its very shrillness never quite overcame the niggling sense that a Queen Regnant was fundamentally unnatural).  Unfortunately on closer inspection James was less than ideal.   He was physically unimpressive (weak legs and an overlarge tongue) and thoroughly unheroic.    He was far too keen on projects which inspired little enthusiasm amongst the elites of both England and Scotland (promoting full union between the kingdoms, schemes for the reunification of Christendom) and not keen enough on ones which the English elites loved (fighting Spain, preferably through state-sponsored piracy, conducting an aggressively Protestant policy in support of his daughter and son-in-law after 1618).   He had a prodigious intellect- and made sure everybody else knew about it.   He was soft on Catholics, even after Guy Fawkes and his colleagues tried to blow him up (it didn’t help that his wide, Anne of Denmark, converted to Catholicism).  He had absolutist tendencies and could not bring himself to take Parliament as seriously as it took itself.   He was extravagant and had favourites (the latter being code for “was thoroughly bisexual and enjoyed the company of handsome young men, whose worldly interests he promoted at the expense of the traditional elites”).   He might not exactly be a Bad King but he wasn’t quite what those who had been counting the hours until the old queen died were looking for either.

It isn’t surprising to find that James’ reputation has been re-evaluated in recent years, usually in a positive direction.   Nowadays history is mostly written by professional academics who are more likely to be impressed by his intellectual capacities.   Things which were held against him in his own time - his relatively tolerant approach to religion, his reluctance to take Britain into the continental wars- are now seen either as positive virtues or at least-as in the case of his sexuality- are a matter of indifference.   His absolutist tendencies can be seen as an understandable response to a dysfunctional political and administrative system and don’t look quite so reprehensible in a world which has lost a lot of the knee-jerk reverence for Parliament which prevailed even fifty years ago.  Even his violent opposition to smoking has put him on the right side of history.

Posthumous vindication is all very well (and my own view is that the pendulum has perhaps swung a bit too far the other way on James) but it didn’t do much for James in his lifetime.   His shortcomings created a very visible space which Henry filled.   He was (obviously) young and physically active, keen on military training and very willing to participate in the neo-chivalric panoply of jousting and more or less staged combats within court theatrical performances which were so prominent in English court festivities.  Although church attendance wasn’t much emphasised, his household was suitably Protestant, staffed by military men and run on military lines- and a Catholic-free zone.   He was learned enough to keep his end up but not a bookworm or a clerk (his writing tutor made an acid comment about the quality of his penmanship in one of the doodle-covered princely exercise books displayed in the show).   He was a keen sponsor of ship building- the largest vessel in the royal fleet, the “Prince Royal” was built at his behest and a small ship for his own personal use was under construction when he died- and encouraged exploration voyages in search of the North West Passage.  He was also emerging as a keen patron of the arts when his life was cut tragically short.   In other words, he was ideally suited for the Protestant Prince role which so many in England- those who had done well out of Elizabeth’s wars and a younger generation full of half-digested chivalric impulses- were desperate to see filled.   At its most radical, he was viewed as the New Constantine who would lead a Protestant Crusade to crush the Papal Antichrist under the ruins of St Peter’s.

It’s not surprising that the myth has grown up that James and his son were very much at odds.   In its more extreme forms, the claim is that relations between them were as bad as those later routinely encountered between the Hanoverian monarchs and their eldest sons, with father and son running parallel, mutually hostile, courts.  This always looked a stretch; for one thing, the Hanoverian princes in question were men in their twenties and thirties when they fell out with their fathers.   The current view embraced in the exhibition catalogue is that this is simply untrue.   Henry was brought up according to the principles established by James himself (in excruciating detail) in his advice book “Basilikon Doron” (lots of martial exercises and no football).   His household was staffed by James’ nominees, answerable to the king rather than to Henry.   James, it is suggested, was self-aware enough to realise that he didn’t tick all the boxes for ideal kingship and was content to let his son cover areas where he was weak- being royal, then as now, was a family business.  It’s even suggested that James was prepared to allow people to think he and his son had differences of opinion as a way of keeping options open and avoiding irrevocable commitments.   Even if this may be a bit over-sophisticated, the reality is that there were few major areas of potential disagreement during Henry’s lifetime; the serious divisions over how best to support his sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick the Elector Palatine (first in the latter’s claim to the throne of Bohemia and then in trying to get his lands back after the Holy Roman Emperor confiscated them in the wake of the collapse of his Bohemian venture) only come after 1618.    Like any self respecting teenager Henry grumbled about his parents and their fuddy duddy ways while James was (quite reasonably) concerned that the adulation surrounding Henry would go to his head and make him vulnerable to bad advisors.  There was clearly considerable latent scope for discord had Henry lived- but he didn’t.

Some other aspects of the myth of Prince Henry don’t stand up to much close examination.  The “no Catholics need apply” rule only applied to his very immediate household.  He was happy to appear in masques designed and staged by Inigo Jones, who came from a Catholic background.    He worked closely with (and lavishly funded) a Tuscan special envoy to his father’s court in drawing up increasingly elaborate garden designs for the palace of Richmond which was in the process of being modernised to serve as his primary residence when he died.  In reality it was very difficult to do princely magnificence around 1610 without dealing with Catholics- be they Italian architects and garden designers or Flemish painters and tapestry designers.    The “warrior prince” image also requires considerable qualification.  He cultivated the companionship of military men and corresponded with major commanders like Prince Maurice of Nassau.  He appears to have enjoyed his participation in jousts and was happy to be depicted at pike exercise (though the pike he’s training with below clearly isn’t the 16 foot long monster carried by a common soldier).   He was certainly portrayed often enough in armour (a couple of particularly beautiful suits which he owned are in the show) and even in vaguely military settings.  Maybe he did dream of military glory and maybe he would have been a fine soldier if he had been put to the test.   The reality is that he never heard a shot fired in anger and we can never know whether in practice he would have been any more belligerent than his father.   For all the rather nagging insistence on his vigour and fondness for strenuous exercise the portrait record suggests a rather slightly built young man- just how robust was his health even prior to the illness which carried him off?  

So how in the end does one disentangle the man from the myth?  Does it even make sense to talk of Prince Henry’s own tastes and preferences, given the way in which others moulded the face he presented to the world?   I’m not sure- and I’m not enough of an expert on the period to be totally confident in my guesses. 

For what it’s worth, I think the naval interests were real.   While I don’t for one moment suppose that Prince Henry would have been pulling on the ropes or swarming up the rigging of his personal ship, the notion of a royal prince going pleasure cruising in English waters was genuinely novel. There was no precedent for royalty messing round in boats- even monarchs who took an interest in naval affairs rarely if ever took to the sea just for the pleasure of it.  Henry was engaged enough to form close links with his favourite naval architect, the talented but corrupt Phineas Pett (one of a dynasty of ship designers and dockyard administrators prominent in English naval affairs for generations- Samuel Pepys had repeated run-ins with another Pett seventy years later).   Indeed he turned up in person to put the frighteners on an inquiry investigating allegations of corruption against Pett, who was acquitted rather in the teeth of the evidence.   I think the art loving was genuine as well.  His father showed no interest in collecting (not even books).  While Henry didn’t live long enough to commission any significant art in his own right, he was dabbling in the art market by his death, using intermediaries well placed to be up with the latest trends in European painting and literature.  Most of the art which entered his possession came by way of presents and inheritances but presumably you don’t give a prince a present which he’s unlikely to appreciate.  It’s also intriguing that Henry inspired Robert Peake, the official Serjeant Painter to the King, to produce work quite unlike anything else he painted.  Peake’s portraits were normally in the very backward looking Elizabethan tradition, almost as rigid and static as Orthodox icons and revelling in the surface glitter and sheen of rich textiles and jewellery.   Henry inspired him to a much freer and more active style- and even to create the first full size equestrian portrait of an English royal, a strange allegorical piece depicting Henry in tilt armour pulling Father Time along behind him.   This very literal take on a young man in a hurry becomes almost unbearably poignant when one knows that its subject was dead within two or three years of its creation.

Which, perhaps, leads to the inevitable unanswerable question- would the reign of a putative Henry IX in fact have been the golden age of so many dreams?   I wonder.   On the positive side, Henry clearly had far more charisma than either his father or his brother Charles and (to the extent that the “Protestant Prince” image accurately reflected his real preferences) he was probably more in tune with the views of important elements of the English elite than either of them.   Perhaps that’s the problem.   It’s all too easy to see Henry, who appears to have been genuinely close to both of his siblings and liked his brother-in-law Frederick as well, deciding to undertake a full on military commitment on behalf of Elizabeth and her husband the moment he was at liberty to do so.   Would his charisma and the apparent popularity of the Protestant cause have persuaded the Parliamentary classes to put their hands in their pockets and vote for the taxes which would have been necessary to create and maintain a credible army in the field?   I have my doubts.  When Charles finally gave Parliament the war against Spain it had been baying for its response was grudging in the extreme.   The English parliament had a history stretching back to the 1370’s of believing war could be waged on the cheap and that royal resources were quite adequate for the job with minimal recourse to taxation if applied properly.  No amount of evidence to the contrary ever seemed to shake this conviction for long and the usual response to failure and inadequate funding was to cry corruption and start witch hunts aimed at whichever royal minister happened to be unpopular at the time (the corruption was usually real enough, but a red herring in the big scheme of things).   The Pett affair suggests that Henry was every bit as tolerant of corruption in favoured servants as his father had been.   He seems to have enjoyed the masques which have been very much held against his brother and cited as proof of how out of touch Charles was.  One suspects that his court would have been every bit as extravagant as that of his father- and the tendency of contemporary historians to take a more generous view of the kind of extravagance which can be labelled “discerning cultural patronage” was not shared by 17^th century commentators (unless of course they were the direct recipients of the patronage).     I suspect the sheen would have gone off the golden boy once he actually had to make decisions with real world consequences.   It’s easy to imagine him leading a typically under-resourced, under-equipped English army of raw recruits and village troublemakers forcibly enlisted to get rid of them to catastrophic defeat in Germany (like the Ile de Rhe fiasco of 1627, only without a fleet to evacuate survivors).    He might well have been killed (or, worse, captured) in the process.   Even if that worst case scenario had not materialised, it’s entirely plausible that his putative reign might have been as troubled as that of his brother, though for somewhat different reasons.   It’s quite tempting to create a dystopic alternative history in which the king whose head was chopped off on a chilly January morning in 1649 was the terminally discredited figure of Henry IX

In reality, of course, Henry didn’t live long enough to disappoint anyone and died with his aura intact.   The Peake canvas below has a rather different poignancy.   In this the Prince’s companion is Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex (and son of Elizabeth’s fallen favourite).   When the English Parliament raised an army to fight Henry’s brother in 1642, Essex (by then a seasoned soldier from the German wars) was appointed its commander.    I wonder if he remembered posing for the portrait over thirty years before……