CHAPTER V

ART

IF on the Continent the high tide of painting was in the seventeenth century already beginning to recede, in England the enthusiasm for art was at its highest. The refined and kingly tastes of Charles I. included a great love for pictures and a high idea of the duty of royal patronage of painters and right royal collections of art treasures. His predecessor, if he had a less discriminating taste, was fond of encouraging painters, and treated Rubens with distinguished honour, presenting him with a magnificent diamond hat-band. This, however, may have been an attention intended rather for the ambassador than for the painter, for Rubens, as many did in his day, combined politics and painting, and represented the Court of Spain in this country.

In the anxious days which preceded the outbreak of the war, Charles was believed to make use of the pretext of picture-buying to send his emissaries abroad on more delicate diplomatic negotiations. This idea probably arose from the fact that two of his most faithful servants, his Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Mr. Endymion Porter, and Mr. Nicholas Laniere, Master of the King's Music, were both great connoisseurs; indeed, Mr. Laniere was himself also a painter, and they frequently went abroad to secure some treasure that the king desired for his collection. Neither were in the least given to dabbling in politics: Mr. Porter's correspondence betrays no trace

of any diplomatic confidences, in fact his attitude towards politics was, for such a time, amazingly detached ; and Laniere, though he might possibly have conveyed letters, never took any part in public affairs; his name survives as musician, painter, picture-buyer; in history he has left no record. However, when in 1628 Porter was abroad buying pictures for the king, the suspicions of the popular party became very acute. He was always more or less a persona suspecta with them, being the friend and protégé of the great Duke of Buckingham, whose kinswoman he had married.

The Duke shared to the full his royal master's taste for art, and when in 1632 Rubens came again as ambassador to London he was entertained in the house of Gerbier, who was attached to the Duke's household as Painter-in-Ordinary. It was on this occasion that Rubens undertook to decorate the new banqueting-hall at Whitehall for the sum of £3000. This payment was sent through Porter, and by him transmitted to two Catholic merchants named Wake, his agents at Brussels. Rubens was treated with most distinguished honour, knighted, and loaded with magnificent gifts. A little later, Gerbier was made English Resident at Brussels, and when in 1634 Mr. Porter was sent on a mission thither, he stayed in his house and made acquaintance with his 'large family of handsome sons and daughters.' But it is Rubens' great pupil Van Dyck whose name is most closely associated with the Court and Charles, and it must have been on an earlier visit that Porter made his acquaintance and purchased his 'Rinaldo and Armida' for the king, as by 1632 he was settled in England and had been made Painter in Ordinary to his Majesty.

The three great rival collections of pictures - the king's, the Duke of Buckingham's, and the Earl of Arundel's were growing apace. In 1627 Laniere had succeeded in securing for the royal galleries the whole collection of the Duke of Mantua, which included twelve

Emperors by Titian, the 'Mercury instructing Cupid' by Correggio, now in the National Gallery, a Madonna by Raphael, and paintings by Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, and Tintoret-a treasure well worth the £15,000 which it cost, though one can understand Parliament looking askance on such an outlay at a time when money was so scarce, and imagining some deep-laid scheme to lurk beneath.

It was not only pictures which excited the zeal of collectors; every day fresh treasures of Greek art were being unearthed in Italy or in the islands of the Archipelago, and the agents of the Earl of Arundel were ever on the watch ready to pounce upon them and carry them off before they should be absorbed into the overflowing galleries of the Roman cardinals. Mr. Petty, his principal agent, was busy searching for precious marbles among the Greek Islands, but on one occasion Sir Peter Wych was too quick for him, and secured two statues which 'Mr. Petty desired infinitely,' and shipped them off from Scio for his Majesty's collection, announcing at the same time that he had nineteen more on their way from Smyrna, some of them very rare peeces.'

Mr. Evelyn was also a collector in a smaller way, and something of a connoisseur. When in Holland he was much struck by the cheapness of Dutch pictures, and made large purchases, 'chiefly Landskips and Drolleries, as they call these clownish representations.' They were on sale at the annual mart or fair at Rotterdam, and it was said to be usual for farmers to lay out quite large sums in them as a good investment, land being scarce.

To the enlightened appreciation of such men for the precious things of antiquity England owes, not only the possession of a vast amount of art treasures, but also the fashion which was set in high places of caring for these things. There may have been ostentation, especially among those who followed the fashion for novelty's sake and because it was the thing to do, rather than because

they shared the whole-souled enthusiasm of Arundel, but it resulted in the enriching of the great houses all over the country with treasures which not even the widespread destruction of the war wholly scattered or destroyed.

Van

This collecting craze was, however, a thing for the great ones of the land alone to indulge in. It needed a long purse, and was beyond the reach of the average well-to-do Englishman; but for him there was the special fashion of the age-his own or his wife's portrait by the king's prime favourite, Van Dyck. Portrait-painting had already become popular in the preceding reign. Somers had left many stiff records of the worthies of his time, which have the air of being staringly like, and in which every detail of the dress, still Elizabethan in fashion, is painstakingly given. His portrait of Lady Tanfield in her stiff stomacher, thickly plaited ruff, and rouged cheeks, gives a vivid idea of that redoubtable lady. William Dobson, too, was highly thought of by King James, and dubbed the English Tintoret. Janssen was another portrait-painter who was much esteemed, and his picture of Lettice Lady Falkland, might almost be taken for a Van Dyck. The fame of the English painter, Robert Walker, stands deservedly high, but he for some reason seems to have been more popular among the Parliament men than with the Royalists. However, the loyal John Evelyn sat to him, as he records under date July 1, 1648: -'I sat for my picture in which there is a Death's head, 'to Mr. Walker that excellent painter.'

But it was reserved for Van Dyck to portray for us a whole generation in their habit as they lived; to give us their grace, their dignity, their beauty, their plainness, the seemly fashion of their clothes, almost their very souls. Hardly any one since Titian has ever seen so deeply into the character of his sitters, so caught for us the aroma of their life, as has Vandyck. It was no wonder that the whole fashionable world flocked to 'the 'Beauty Shop' at Eltham to be immortalised.

on the

His gift is the more striking as, unlike the great portrait-painters of the Venetian school, when he strayed from his especial line and essayed subject-pictures he became at once cold, mannered, and artificial, partaking of the decadence which so quickly followed renaissance in Continental art. This is more particularly noticeable in his sacred subjects: his Crucifixions, Entombments, Pietas, are conventional and entirely devoid of religious feeling. His mythological subjects, too, are as artificial as eighteenth-century pastorals, but when we stand before such a canvas as his Lord Wharton, from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, we feel that the subject lives and breathes before us. And this is not only the case when he had a handsome sitter; such a portrait as that of Lucius, Lord Falkland, with keen, eager glance, plain-featured face, yet beautiful countenance, exercises the same sort of charm as the man himself, short in stature, with his rough hair and harsh-toned, eager voice, always did upon his contemporaries. It may be easy to make the beholder admire the 'lovely sweet-turned face' of a Venetia Digby or the three beautiful children who lean on the Duchess of Buckingham's knees; but when we are made to feel the charm of one who had only the inward beauty of mind and character, then we know the painter for a true revealer of men.

Certainly he was not a flatterer; he painted Lady Sussex for her friend Sir Ralph Verney, and she is very amusing about the result. She was to be painted in a 'blew gowne with pearl buttones,' and it was to be a full length. When at length it arrives, she remarks,1 'The pictuer is very ill-favourede, makes mee quite out of 'love with myselfe, the face is so bige and so fate that it pleses mee not att all. It lookes lyke on of the windes 'poffinge-but truely i thinke it tis lyke the original.' For this she was to pay fifty pounds, a copy to cost eight pounds. Perhaps it was the copy that was for Sir Ralph.

1 Letters of the Verney Family.