MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON HE Exhibition of the King's Pictures which is just opening I at Burlington House provides a panorama of British history and a display of superb works of art. In consenting thus to denude for many months the walls of his residences, His Majesty is according much pleasure to his loyal subjects and financial assistance to the Royal Academy. The first of these two purposes will meet with wide public appreciation, and I am confident that this exhibition will prove one of the most popular that London has ever seen. Those who are interested in pictures as pictures, irrespective of their origins or subject matter, will be delighted at having the oppertunity to examine these great works of art in comparatively convenient circumstances ; such visitors will be grateful for the admirable manner in which the pictures have been hung, and for the intelligence, labour and scholarship with which the catalogue has been compiled. And those to whom pictures are no more than illustrations will be fascinated by the vast span of history which-these pictures cover, by the dynastic continuity which they represent, and by the curious personal infor- mation which they provide. Our British monarchs have not all of them taken that personal and energetic interest in the arts which Richelieu inculcated into Louis XIII and which that dull monarch bequeathed to his successors. Yet it will come as a surprise to many people that, had not Cromwell dispersed and sold the pictures purchased by Charles I, our royal collection would be without equal in the world. It is strange to observe the unexpected variations of interest which our successive monarchs displayed. Until the sixteenth century the Kings of England were more concerned with architecture than with paintings and the walls of their presence chambers were hung with tapestries and armour. Richard II may have been an exception, but until Henry VIII's time it could not be said that an interest in painting was an outstanding feature at the British Court.
* * * * Henry VII, it is true, possessed the St. George of Raphael, which had been given him by the Duke of Urbino and which is now in Washington. But it was Henry VIII who summoned Holbein to England and who first hung pictures upon the walls of Hampton Court. It is questionable whether his taste for painting was so much aesthetic as political. A hidden political significance can generally be attached to the pictures which survive from his collection ; and the single surviving example of an overtly propagandist picture, in which the evangelists are represented as casting boulders upon a prostrate Pope, is scarcely above the level of ordinary political caricature. It is strange also to observe that Queen Elizabeth, who flattered herself that she was a most cultured woman, did not accord to art the same attention which she gave to clothes or masques ; Venetian painting in her lifetime reached a level of excellence that has never been surpassed, but no single Venetian picture entered her collection. James I also, who took much pride in his own erudition, showed• no real interest in the art of his contemporaries, but remained content with the weary iteration of the State portraits which Mytens painted. It was his son, Henry Prince of Wales, who was the first of our royal collectors. Under the influence of Lord Arundel, and perhaps also of Inigo Jones, he bought many pictures during his short lifetime and these became eventually the nucleus around which his brother' amazing collection was sub- sequently formed. One of the many revelations of this exhibition is the artistic energy displayed by Charles I. " Within the relatively short period of twenty years," we read in the catalogue, " he brought together a collection of works of art hardly to be paralleled by any other collector with similar opportunities." He possessed almost all the great Titians outside Venice, including the " Man with the Glove," the " Vierge au Lapin " and the Charles V portrait. He bought Giorgiones ; he induced Van Dyck to come to England. He was the greatest patron of the arts that this island has ever known.
* * * * The Commonwealth sequestered this collection. It is curious to learn that Cromwell retained for his own pleasure some of the religious, and presumably papist, pictures. But the Titians were sold to the King of Spain, to Cardinal Mazarin, and to the Archduke Leopold and are now in the Prado, at the Louvre or in Vienna. The Raphael cartoons and the Mantegna "triumphs" were fortunately retained in this country. After Charles I there ensues a great gap in royal collecting. It was George III, unexpectedly, who revived the fashion. He employed Gainsborough to paint his ever-increasing family; he allowed Zoffany to compose a series of royal interiors ; and he financed that interesting amateur dealer, Consul Smith, whose collection he eventually purchased. It was in all probability Consul Smith who aided Canaletto to come to England, and it is to him therefore that we owe the two fascinating pictures of London as seen from Somerset House. Under a most un-English sky the spires of Wren's churches, the solemn mass of St. Paul's, rise above the little pink warehouses beside the river. One gazes at these pictures with a certain nostalgia, realising how wantonly London has sacrificed her sky-line.
* * * And then came George IV, a monarch whom we associate with ostentation rather than with taste. It was he who enlarged the collection of Dutch pictures which his father had acquired from Consul Smith. It was he also who commissioned Sir Thomas Lawrence to paint the astonishing series of contemporary portrait, which hang in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor. Not all these portraits (many of which are of enormous size) are shown in the Burlington House exhibition. But a sufficient number have been brought up from Windsor to impress us with Lawrence's immense talent as a portait painter. I do not understand why the compilers of the catalogue should have gone out of their way to sneer at Sir Thomas Lawrence. " His best portraits," they write, " have great brilliance, but he suffered from over-facility." Surely the portrait of Sir Walter Scott, the portrait of Count Capo d'Istria, the portrait, above all, of Friedjich van Gentz, display something more than mere facility? These portraits were painted in circumstances of great inconvenience, when Lawrence had to snatch huried sittings from these august or busy people in London, at Aix-la-Chapelle or in Rome. Yet they display astonishing powers, not of painting only, but also of interpretation. The official Prussian portraits of King Frederick William III, for instance, convey no suggestion whatsoever of his insignificance ; yet in the Lawrence portrait one sees him as he was, a sulky, sullen, rather irritable major in a Prussian regiment of foot. Few collections of historical portraits can equal those of the Waterloo Chamber either in personal or artistic interest. In com- parison with them, the official portraits of the Victorian epoch (the Landseers and the Winterhalters) seem thin and vulgar. Yet we should be grateful to the Prince Consort for his interest in Italian primitives, for the Duccio Triptych and the Gentile da Fabriano. In securing such pictures he was certainly in advance of the taste and knowledge of his time.
* * * * The crowds who from now onwards will throng to Burlington House will gaze in wonder at this panorama of our history, spanning the centuries from the first birthday of the Duke of Connaught right back to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. They will see many pictures which until now have been lost to sight in the upper passages of Windsor or the more obscure recesses of Buckingham Palace. They will be surprised to find that monarchs whom they had regarded as narrow-minded, such as Charles I or George III, or only self- indulgent, such as George IV, were in fact men of active aesthetic interests. They will revise their previous conceptions of painters such as Lawrence and Winterhalter. They will be entranced by the Vermeers, the George Stubbses, the Zoffanys and the Canalettos. They will be interested by the nineteenth-century repaintings of some of the Italian primitives. And many of them, I trust, will be grateful to Their Majesties for having stripped their apartments in order to provide the public with so much interest and pleasure.
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