British Art of the Seventeenth Century
One of the best features of our art course is the ability of our tutor to place a period in art in context, be that social, philosophical or in the case of the Stuarts political.
Charles I was unrivalled as as an art collector whatever his failings that led to the loss of his head.
Whatever political and military judgment he lacked he certainly appreciated art.
He began his collection with seven Raphael cartoons in 1623 and Peter Paul Rubens, who visited London as a diplomat to the Spanish Court after having worked for the Gonzaga family, resulted in the acquisition by Charles from them of paintings by Titian and Mantegna.
Sadly Oliver Cromwell ordered the break up of the collection. The monarchy in diluted form was restored under Charles II.
Peter Lely, who arrived in the 1640s, became principal painter to the Court of Charles 1 and Charles II for whom Orazio Gentileschi – father of Artemia – also worked.
One of the ironies of British art at this time was that the three most famous artists of the period – Rubens, his pupil Anthony van Dyke and Peter Lely were Flemish.
Indeed Rubens, a catholic, adopted the more Spanish approach to portraiture though ground-breaking in his diagonal composition.
He was quite a man, an international diplomat who could speak 12 languages fluently, he had an enormous studio often only adding his signature to a work.
Personally those huge canvases and the biblical subject matter do not do it for me.
Conversely Van Dyke’s work has stood the test of time and provided a visual dimension to knowing the great figures of the Age.
By the end of the 17th Century a new form of constitutional monarchy (no longer by divine right) emerges, England superseded Holland in trade and the Great Fire of London, which destroyed 70,000 of the homes of the City’s 80,000 inhabitants, generated an urban renaissance but we had to wait for Hogarth -and after him Gainsborough, Reynolds and Constable – for truly English artists one might term great.
