A dream of ruffles and lace ARTS
ROY STRONG
I always wanted to be a cavalier even before long hair came back into fashion. Being lowered one minute on a cardboard cloud glistering in silver and carnation ready to foot it in Inigo Jones's latest court masque, the next belting across country bearing crucial dis- patches through the enemy lines to one's heleaguered king. The cavalier cult has all the a glamour and romance of the losing side, and, what is more, deep down one ,knows it wasn't really the losing side because two decades later, in 1660, everybody was back making whoopee again just as in the palmy days of the Martyr King. And one of the reasons why we think it was all gorgeous, elegant, relaxed and so utterly civilised is because we see it through the eyes of a great myth-making artist, Sir Anthony van Dyck.
The new exhibition at the Queen's Gallery entices us with this vision of lost loveliness smashed The by Old Noll and his lay- abouts. The sad-eyed Charles I in robes of velvet and ermine, in armour astride a horse or in rose-coloured silk, is shown by Van Dyck, in the monarch's own words, as 'the happiest King in Christendom.' Nearby is his Queen, Henrietta. Maria, a, fragile beauty rustling in silvery whiteness, her hair entwined with pearls and pink ribbons. Their children are adorable poppets, in tiny cavalier suits and dresses, dwarfed by gigantic columns standing incon- gruously around the nursery St Bernard. The vision spills over to, embrace the court circle:. the .poet, Thomas Carew, and the Queen's Captain of the Guard sit in contemplative sadness beneath a broken pillar; an unknown lady enveloped in rose satin trails through ,a dim twilight landscape enlivened only by the trickle of water from a nearby fountain; and the Duke of Buckingham's tots are every bit as super little darlings as the king's own children.
It is hardly surprising that up until the collapse of the academic tradition at the end of the last century the English aristocracy and gentry have had a positive obsession about Van - Dyck, Not content with his portraits of Charles I, his Queen and court being endlessly cribbed • as a source for their own, they went further and wanted to be depicted actually wearing Van Dyck clothes. The mind boggles at the results, which range from Devis's groups of spindly eighteenth century landed gentry sit- ting at tea in the grounds, all dressed as though the clock of fashion had stopped at 1640. to the wonders of Gainsborough's 'Blue Boy' dressed cap-a-pie as an infant Charles II. Van Dyck created this archetypal English upper class dreamworld.
Unfortunately, the camera's click has put an end to these painterly visions. If it shattered Winterhalter's glossy image of Victoria's court, it would have blasted that of Charles I to the ground. It doesn't need much digging in the written sources to find the discrepancies be- tween idea and reality. Apart from. Inigo Jones's Whitehall Banqueting House and a few other scattered fragments, the grandiose scenic architecture of the Van Dyck portraits did not exist. And the amazement expressed . on Henrietta Maria's arrival in Holland in 1642, after she had been visualised through Van Dyck, was terrific. She was, we know, a tiny woman, with shrunken features and teeth that projected. And we also know now just how small actually was the circle touched by this arcadia with which the court deluded itself for a decade before civil war broke out. Moreover, the backwoods gentry and' bourgeoisie were still addicted to the old two-dimerisional icon images of the' great Eliza's reign and firmly categorised the newfangled court baroque as leading to wantonness and, even worse, to popery and idolatry.
Although the period now reels beneath the pickaxe of relentless historical research, nothing can diminish Van Dyck's status as one of the great masters Of 411 time. I cannot remem- ber ever having seen such a concentration of cleaned, sparkling English period Van Dycks. And' the majority are autograph work with broad sweeps of brushwork in the draperies and glittering highlights. For sheer beauty of painting look at his 'Cupid and Psyche,' Cupid bounding towards his beloved with such.eager- ness that the ribbon that holds his sheath of arrows has snapped. And the pictures are crammed with delicious detail, ranging from the perfunctory areas of creamy paint that map in the glories of the crown jewels to the few• swift brush strokes that. create a little dog romping at the feet of, a child. Confronted by Van Dyck's own- painting, one realises how deadening is the effect on his reputation of the endless copies of his works with which the country houses of. England are stuffed.
In order to appreciate the exhibition to the full it. is important to grasp just how artis- tically avant-garde the court of Charles I in fact was. It is difficult for us now to think of Van Dyck as novel and sensational, since he seems the source of every cliché in the history of English portrait painting: columns, drapes, distant landscapes, cascades of flowers, trickling fountains, noble horses and attendant servants as trappings to enhance an ultimate affectation of pose. Yet, at the time, he revolu- tionised the art of painting in England by introducing the sweep, thrust and swirling high drama of the baroque as evolved by his master, Rubens. Under Van Dyck's auspices the picture frame became a proscenium arch through which the eye passed into another refined and ideal world. The art he replaced was that of the Elizabethan court, flat, two- dimensional, anti-naturalistic, in which the Virgin Queen appears in her votive images not as a human being but as a collage mysteriously composed of face and hands, gauze and jewels, ruff and chairback.
This is not wholly Van Dyck's show for there are some ravishing miniatures by both Olivers and by Hoskins, but these are over- shadowed for me this time by the work of a less widely acclaimed artist, the engraver Wenceslas Hollar. Just as Charles I imported Van Dyck, so the Earl of Arundel, the King's compeer as collector and connoisseur, brought back Hollar from his travels; and Hollar tells us more about seventeenth. century England than Van. Dyck, by very dint of his medium. He opens a window into the heart of Stuart England: ..vieWs 'of -Atimder4 toitiliotise, low- lying and shambling; and of MS 'poor cottage,' at Albury with a coach and six sweeping towards it; jostling crowds of"City- men in the courtyard of the Royal Exchange; citizens afloat on• the Thames making their way to Whitehall Stairs or up river to the Queen's newfangled house at Greenwich.
He records, too, great and terrible events: the trials of Strafford and Laud, the mainstays of Charles's personal rule, and the patlin mentary general, Essex, before the battles'. df Edgehill and Newark. All the' great persona* ties of the court are there: Inigo Jones, Fait Dyck, Rubens, Junius,. the Pembrokes and Arundels. Btit my prize goes to two frames full of tiny engravings by Hollar of ladies muffs: Sometimes he amasses a group of muffs *Itli hands snugly in them or about to be plunged in; on other occasions they might part a little group of items tossed off by a lady on arrival home entangled with her fan, her mask and lace collar. Stich delicious muffs they are, in two contrasting sorts of flit or prettily gar- landed with fluttering ribbons. Above them hangs Hollar's lady of easy virtue representing Winter, her mask and muff hinting at all'torts of naughty bewitchments. • - As óhe descends the staircase to IeVe *th'i exhibition one is confronted by the work Of a powerful primitive, Edward Bower's porhiait of Charles I at his trial. The King, sits; his features. sunken, his hair streaked with grey:i great hat on his head and a Walking stieriii his hand (the fist two vestiges of the 'symbcilt of royal power). 'No rose;coloured silk bid shabby black hangs On him. Here the fairy story ends quite suddenly and terribly. One wonders whether' Van Dyck, dead eight yeiis by then, would have been equally successfitt'fil depicting majesty in misery.
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