ART
Squire Porter
PAUL GRINKE
Anyone leaving the Tate Gallery's splendid exhibition of Elizabethan painting with mad- rigals spinning round in his head, and sated with satin and baubles, should pause for breath at a small, almost impromptu, ex- hibition in the corner of Gallery One. It celebrates and amplifies in great detail the Tate's acquisition of William Dobson's por- trait of Endymion Porter. Where it came from I know not, but I assume that it is the same portrait which appeared in Christies in 1821. the property of `Mr Woodburn, Senior, retiring to the country' who was, as everyone knew, a highly successful dealer; and it was described then in no uncertain terms as 'equal to Van Dyck or Titian'.
It is a fascinating portrait on account of the personalities of artist and sitter, for the uncertain situation in which they both found themselves at the time of its execution. and as a great painting within the framework of early English portraiture. Endymion Porter was born with a dual allegiance, which was decidedly odd at the time and would have been fatal a few years earlier. His father married a Spanish woman and Endymion was brought up as a child in Spain, a page in the household of Olivares. Back in England, given the current political volte- face, his knowledge of Spanish and intimate connections with court circles in both countries gained him ready admittance to the Marquis of Buckingham's household. He was quickly enmeshed in the secret negotiations over the projected 'Spanish Match' and travelled, in ludicrous incognito and disguises of transparent theatricality, to Madrid with Buckingham and Prince Charles in 1623 on a jaunt as romantic and hopeless as Rudolf Hess's abortive solo flight to Scotland.
Under Charles, both as Prince and King. Endymion flourished with his ear so close to the royal mouth that at the civil war the Commons placed him unanimously among the 'eleven great delinquents' who were ex- empted from pardon. Circumstances found him at the beleaguered court at Oxford at the same time as the brilliant young painter William Dobson, another protegee of Charles I who had been brought to the king's atten- tion by Van Dyck. Dobson's view of Endymion Porter is of a country squire out with his fowling piece, verging on the portly —no longer the irrepressible romantic who accompanied the young prince to Spain and hustled like mad among his vast european diplomatic acquaintanceship to get works of art for the King or the Earl of Arundel, but a slightly disillusioned man who knows that his command of a royalist regiment is as much shadow-play as his dabbling in the soap monopoly or the East India trade, and that the whole gilded charade is soon to end. Endymion was also a patron of the arts. Dekker, Donne and Herrick all hastened to give versified thanks to him in their books.
and Aubrey's bland statement that Davenant `gott a terrible clap of a Black handsome wench that lay in Axe-yard, Westminster ...
which lost him his Nose' omits to tell us that Endymion nursed him through it. Deservedly the ageing Squire Porter has a bust of the laureated Apollo behind him and an antique frieze of the arts at his feet.
On a megaton scale, the Royal Academy offers no less than a '1000 years of Art in Poland' as its winter exhibition. Well pre- sented and undeniably. full of good things. it is still, to my mind, an enterprise that could usefully have been scaled down. No one can be expected to absorb a millennium of national culture within the scope of an ex- hibition presented in a handful of rooms.
and it hardly does justice to a country which is, artistically, as distant as the hereditary Tartar enemy. What is surprising is the way in which Polish art, in all its aspects, slides in and out of the European tradition; the mediaeval works are part of a common Euro- pean way of thought, and as fine as anything produced in Chartres, Canterbury, Paris, or any other centre of learning. Again, in the eighteenth century, Polish art is thoroughly frenchified, full of fete champetres, gardens landscaped by expatriate Englishmen. stylised cavalry actions, noblemen and ladies. Between the two epochs comes a fascinat- ing, slightly barbaric, period of very Eastern influence, full of skinhead noblemen with luxuriant moustaches, armour with great curved wings of feathers (the sound of which was presumed to strike terror into the enemy in a cavalry charge), and shields decorated in a manner that is decidedly oriental. Altogether it serves as a reminder that Poland, like Russia, is only European by a tenuous mediaeval cultural heritage, and that, when given the chance, it will produce works of art which are totally indigenous and, if anything, look east rather than west.
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