Exhibitions

The Winter Queen (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, till 4 October) William Gillies

(Royal Scottish Academy, till 11 October)..

Portraits of a lady

Martin Gayford

The Cavaliers, according to 1066 And All That, were 'Wrong but Wromantic'. Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of Charles I, was certainly romantic, but several other alliterations might also fit — Protestant but penniless, fecund but feckless, hale but harassed. Certainly hers was not an easy fate, as is revealed by the exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery devoted to her life.

Elizabeth was the eldest daughter of James I, or, as he is naturally thought of in Edinburgh, James VI and I. Her grand- mother was Mary, Queen of Scots, her younger brother Charles I. She was born, that is to say, in the centre of the killing fields of contemporary politics in an era as riven with murderous ideological chasms as the 1930s. The divisions of the day — most of all the iron curtain between Catholic and Protestant Europe — led to most of the dramas of her life.

It was a split which ran right through the Stuart (or Stewart, as the exhibition prefers to spell it) family. Elizabeth herself was firmly Protestant, appalled when one son married a Catholic, and a daughter became a nun. But her nephew James II lost his throne because of his Catholicism (and her brother Charles I's softness on the question played a part in his troubles). Ultimately, Elizabeth's grandson became king of Eng- land as George I, a safe, Protestant option.

Elizabeth lived in a precarious, danger- ous world, so it is to be expected that in the portrait by Robert Peake painted when she was only 14 she has already developed bags under the eyes. Before she was ten, Guy Fawkes and co. had attempted to blow up her father together with the rest of Parlia- ment, in order to put her on the throne an event that understandably unsettled her. `This poor lady hath not yet recovered her surprise, and is very ill and troubled,' wrote Lord Harrington, to whom her upbringing had been entrusted, months later.

At 16 she was married to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, ruler of a pleasant Rhineland principality centred on Heidel- berg. But after five years of married life in Heidelberg begun amid a spectacular man- nerist garden, her husband was elected king of Bohemia by the Protestant Bohemi- ans — an event that precipitated the Thirty Years War and devastated central Europe.

Elizabeth and Frederick were ejected from Prague in short order, though their reign lasted a little longer than the mere snowy season that the Jesuits predicted hence the jibe of the Winter King and Queen. (Frederick and Elizabeth were also nicknamed the King and Queen of Hearts, meaning cardboard make-believe monarchs, not the real thing.) The forces of Catholicism also overran the Palatinate, leading Elizabeth to spend almost all the rest of her life in exile in Holland. Her eldest son was drowned in a Dutch ship- Ping accident, her husband died young.

She survived all this, according to the many portraits in this exhibition, remark- ably unchanged. Her appearance is remarkably constant from her twenties to her fifties in the paintings of Gerard van Honthorst and Michael van Mierevelt she was lucky in her portraitists, though not quite as fortunate as her brother was in having his image created by Van Dyck. Elizabeth Stewart was a big, braw woman, tall like her grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, and evidently hearty, despite an understandably anxious look. She outlived her husband, brothers and quite a few of her children to die in Restoration London in 1662.

Her healthiness was the factor that gave her historical importance. It enabled her to give birth to 13 babies, an unusual number of whom survived into adulthood because of, or despite, her habit of hunting enthusiastically when pregnant. She was, like Victoria, one of history's great breed- ers, the kind necessary to keep dynasties going. And she resembled Victoria in another respect: the arranged marriage to a serious-minded German prince was also a love match. When Frederick died in 1632, she 'felt cold as ice, and could neither cry, nor speak, nor eat, nor drink, nor sleep for three days'.

Hers was a rackety, intellectual brood (Frederick and Elizabeth clearly had little political judgment, otherwise they would never have gone to Prague in the first place, an act of folly in the view of James I). Rupert of the Rhine — son number three Elizabeth of Bohemia by Robert Peake — was a dashing soldier and sailor, though his mother thought him 'stubborn and wil- ful'. One daughter became a correspondent of Descartes, who thought she had one of the most remarkable minds in Europe, another learned painting from Gerard van Honthorst — there is a creditable picture by her on display. But the youngest, Sophia, married the Duke of Brunswick- Luneburg, and produced a line of Protestant heirs that has not yet run out.

This is an excellent historical exhibition. Though essentially an array of state por- traits, few of which are in the absolutely top class aesthetically, it gives one a sense of intimacy with the subject and her times. Elizabeth was a much painted woman, partly because of her status as a Protestant heroine, but in the hands of down-to-earth Dutch painters her portraits are sometimes touchingly intimate. One by Mierevelt, with her hair loose, hand on heart, and — as, presumably, usual — a pregnant swelling beneath her embroidered jacket is especial- ly evocative. So, too, are documentary images such as the miniature by Adrian van de Venne of the Queen playing billiards with the Prince and Princess of Orange.

Another exhibition with a firmly Scottish theme — though a different one from the Royal Stewarts — is William Gillies at the Royal Scottish Academy. Gillies, who was born in 1898, was an important Scottish painter of the mid-century, and for many years head of drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art. Essentially, like Ann Redpath — a more consistent painter in my view — he was a successor to the so- called Scottish Colourists of the generation before.

Like them, Gillies was influenced by Parisian painting. But in his case it was a later, more modern type. He even flirted once or twice with abstraction, though clearly that was not for him. There are all sorts of influences on view, Braque and Bonnard in particular. But Gillies was at his best producing loose, intuitive, small- scale landscape paintings much less analyti- cal and intellectual than most Parisian art.

He could be a good painter, but he was Mauve Landscape, c.1950-55, by Sir William Gillies also a highly erratic one, and is not well- served by this show. There is far too much of it, and in the grand rooms of the Royal Scottish Academy — which last year housed the splendid Raebum show — it often looks derivative and scrappy. I sus- pect his reputation would have benefited far more from a small, tightly edited exhibi- tion focusing mainly on the landscapes of the 1930s and 1940s, which are his main achievement. There are few artists whose work can sustain a big retrospective show, and clearly Gillies was not one of them.