Charles I - King and Collector

Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in Three Positions

One of the last things that King Charles I saw on January 30 1649 as he made his way through the Banqueting House to the scaffold outside was the glorious ceiling painting he had commissioned in honour of his father, King James. The work of Peter Paul Rubens, it was one of some 2000 works of art in Charles’s collection, and one of the few not sold off after his execution by Oliver Cromwell. This sumptuous exhibition at the Royal Academy reunites 140 of them, including more than 90 pieces rescued and returned to the Royal Collection by subsequent monarchs. Charles acquired a taste for art when in 1623 he visited Madrid to pay court to a Spanish princess. He returned to England without his prospective bride but with a number of paintings, including some by Titian and Veronese. Bitten by the collecting bug, he went on to acquire works amassed by the Gonzaga family of Mantua, who had fallen on hard times. Among them were paintings by Leonardo and Raphael, as well as many from Northern Europe, and some antique sculptures, including this Crouching Venus (2nd c AD).

By now he had married Henrietta Maria, sister of King Louis XIII of France. She had grown up in a court surrounded by art, and her sophisticated tastes are thought to have influenced her husband.

Anthony van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson, 1633

She commissioned van Dyck to paint the triple portrait of Charles (top) that graces the first room of the exhibition. It was to be the basis of a marble bust of the king by Bernini, and was sent to him in Rome. (He was too busy to travel to England.) Sadly, the sculpture was destroyed in a fire in 1698, but the portrait remains.

Anthony van Dyck, Charles I in the Hunting Field c 1636

Three other van Dycks are reunited to form the core of this exhibition – two equestrian portraits of the king, and the celebrated one of him hunting, on loan from the Louvre and back in England for the first time since the seventeenth century. (It’s thought that Queen Henrietta Maria took it with her when she went into exile in France after her husband’s death.)
Interestingly, not all the works reflect the king’s personal taste – many were gifts from ambassadors or other nobles. Mantegna’s monumental series, The Triumph of Caesar c 1484 – 92, which fills a dedicated gallery (below), might have been seen as somewhat old-fashioned when it arrived; it was displayed at Hampton Court, rather than Whitehall Palace.

It also seems Rembrandt was not held in the esteem he is today, which was reflected in the price fetched by an exquisite portrait of an elderly woman, probably his mother, in Cromwell's sale - just £4. However Titian's Supper at Emmaus, (below) went for £600, while Raphael's La Perla, now in the Prado, was valued at £2000.

Titian, The Supper at Emmaus, c.1530

The works the Stuart monarch amassed have been described as “the finest collection of pictures ever assembled in this country,” and are credited with changing the appreciation of art in England. It’s taken five years of planning and international negotiations, aided by the support of the Prince of Wales, to stage this exhibition. As well as the Royal Collection, major lenders include the National Gallery, London, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, and Mobilier National, Paris.

Among the treasures from Paris are the Mortlake tapestries of Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles, perhaps the most spectacular set of tapestries ever produced in England (above). The curators have been helped in understanding the importance to the king of various items by a working draft of a 1639 inventory (below) by Abraham van der Doort, the first Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.

In it, he describes the works and where they were hung. It reveals that the van Dyck painting in the background, showing the King and Queen with Prince Charles and Princess Mary, was known as the "Greate Peece" and was in the Long Gallery at Whitehall Palace. Sadly, around 1600 of the items listed have disappeared, lost, destroyed, or perhaps lanquishing unrecognised in private collections or archives. The curators are hoping that the interest created by the exhibition might prompt a closer look at works in storage, to see if they bear the tell-tale 'C' and crown.
Charles I, King and Collector. Royal Academy, London, until April 15 2018. £20 (concessions available)

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution.

This new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum opens with a huge painting showing the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Somewhere in the crowd of onlookers on that freezing winter day would have been a 15-year-old schoolboy, playing truant to witness the historic event. Samuel Pepys (below, age 33) lived in turbulent times and later, in 1660, began recording it all his famous diaries. Of the execution, he wrote: ”the words that I said the day that the King was beheaded.... ‘the memory of the wicked shall rot”’.

It’s a dramatic start  to an exhibition that brings Pepys’s era to life with a fascinating series of exhibits and paintings. We see the death mask of Oliver Cromwell and items relating to the restoration of the Stuart dynasty under King Charles II. (Pepys was at the coronation, though he records he had to leave early as he had “so great a list to piss.”) There are portraits of the many mistresses of Charles II, including a nude Nell Gwynn that would have been kept in a private room and hidden behind another painting. The curators have also brought together a selection of the lavish fashions of the day, including a court dress with costly Venetian needle lace collar and this embroidered velvet shoe.

Pepys records his disapproval of the debauchery and excess at court: “The King does mind nothing but pleasures and hates the very sight or thought of business.” However he was himself frequently unfaithful to his own wife and recorded his escapades (and occasional remorse) in his diaries in a form of shorthand.

Pepys lived through the devastation of the plague (the exhibition records he chewed tobacco in the belief it would keep infection away) and the destruction of the Great Fire of London in 1666 when he borrowed a cart to take away his money and valuables and buried his parmesan cheese in the garden. His house survived; we don't know the fate of the cheese. But perhaps his greatest physical challenge came in 1658 before he started his diaries, when he had a bladder stone the size of a billiard ball removed without anaesthetic or antiseptic. His survival was probably due to being the first on the operating table that day, reducing the risk of infection. Seventeenth-century medical instruments on loan from the Royal College of Physicians – and a similar stone – illustrate this extremely painful procedure.

During his lifetime Pepys was best known for his important work in running the naval affairs of England, which brought him wealth and power, and resulted in the creation of a truly professional navy. He also went to the colony of Tangier as compensation assessor during the deliberate destruction of the city’s defences (below) – the English were pulling out and didn’t want any rival nation to benefit from them.

In later years he became an MP and president of the Royal Society, though while matters discussed there interested him, he confessed to not always understanding what he heard. It was the dawn of the scientific revolution and on display are books, documents and instruments relating to the experiments and findings.

The exhibition ends with the events of the Glorious Revolution, which resulted in the overthrow of Pepys’s great patron, James II. With the accession of William and Mary in 1689, he stepped down from office and spend his retirement indulging his many interests.

Missing from the exhibition are the actual diaries, which he wrote from 1660 – 69. When he died these and his library of 3000 books went to Magdalene College Cambridge, where they languished on a shelf until in 1819, prompted by the success of the publication of diaries kept by John Evelyn, a scholar there began decoding and transcribing them into longhand English. Three years and 54 volumes later he finished, only to discover that a key to the squiggles was in a textbook on a nearby shelf. As a condition of the bequest, the diaries may not leave the college, but there are electronic images of them on display, with transcriptions now available at the touch of a finger (above).

Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, until March 28 2016
http://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/exhibitions-events/samuel-pepys-plague-fire-revolution-exhibition