Abstract
DOIIn terms of art production and patronage, a long-held line of thought established at the Restoration cast the 1650s as the dull decade of seventeenth-century England, with a glittering Caroline court replaced by the austere rule of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan-dominated government. This turn of authority was enough to lay the visual arts, in the words of John Evelyn published in 1662, firmly “in the dust”, and this sentiment threaded persistently through the subsequent historiography of the period. But were the 1650s really such a creative low point for artists, patrons, and audiences? This article contributes to recent and emerging research into the art of the Interregnum, which challenges that perspective, through an examination of the prevalent genre of portraiture during this decade. Taking the observations of James Fraser, a Scottish visitor to London, as its starting point, it considers a series of encounters with printed, painted, and sculpted portraits by a range of viewers with different political and religious inclinations. The broader cultural contexts into which these artworks were placed, both in London and beyond, are acknowledged, with artists and writers shaping the ways in which pictorial likenesses were encountered and understood. Far from incidental, portraits continued to play an important role as markers of identity and status, and as objects of aesthetic interest and appeal, during the 1650s.
The Pictorial in Interregnum London
DOIOn 1 July 1657, James Fraser of Kirkhill, near Inverness, arrived in London for the first time. Fraser was en route to mainland Europe, and to a circuitous pilgrimage of self-improvement and cultural engagement, which would take him three years to complete. A decade later, as he began to carefully construct a three-volume journal of what he termed his Triennial Travels, Fraser considered his initial experience of London to have been a beneficial and necessary one:
he who would see these present times their greatest glorie, could not find a better Scene then London, Cromwels Court and army, it being clearely the greatest Concourse of mankind in these times and perhaps that hath beene in our age.1
Fraser’s detailed journal entries for July 1657 provide a rare insight into the daily life, rituals, and spectacles of Interregnum London from the perspective of a curious outsider. The city is alive with activity, from the multiple languages heard at the Royal Exchange, to the commerce of the numerous booksellers set up in St Paul’s Churchyard, and the various entertainments encompassing sports and performances held periodically at the Inns of Court.2 The cultural diversions of lawyers and their students are not the only unexpected observations which emerge from Fraser’s description of a city under Puritan governance. At its political heart in Westminster Hall, the site of the recent treason trial of King Charles I, a balance is implied between judicial process and commercial frivolity:
this house is seldom or ever shut; & in ye voids and sids all creamrie ware is sold. all curious rarities, pictures, cuts, boxes, bables, & what yow can desire, and women sitting as thick as in a faire or market selling all necessaries.3
Perhaps it was in Westminster Hall that Fraser acquired a small, engraved portrait of Oliver Cromwell, which he subsequently pasted into his journal (Fig. 1). Certainly, the Scotsman was struck by the ubiquity of the Protector’s likeness:
his picture in tortisheal caskets, In talliduce, in Colloures, nay in silver, and gold, meddalls: nor was he in fassion yn that had not the Protectors picture one way or other in his Company, to satisfie the reader I have set a compendious one of them here in the margen. & truly it is lively enugh in so small a Circle it suffises to content the Curious in after-ages and what were his pictures but to paint out his power.4
Fraser’s observations appear unaffected by pro-Cromwellian bias; conversely, much of his description of London is informed by royalist sympathies, which, at their strongest, are expressed in highly emotive terms. Visiting the Royal Exchange, he notes that a statue of Charles I had been destroyed on official orders, to be replaced by an inscription in gold letters: “Exit Tyrannus Regum Ultimus”. It is a sight which openly brings him to tears.5
The specific nature of Oliver Cromwell’s public image, and its relationship with Charles I’s enduring eikon, has been addressed in a number of studies, most notably in terms of contesting and complementary iconographies of leadership and rule.6 Yet Fraser’s words also speak more broadly to the presence of the pictorial within the Interregnum capital, constructing a London of viewers and consumers investing thought and intention, as well as money, in visual images: a bustling Westminster Hall filled with pictures and baubles; an engraved portrait of the Lord Protector which was as fashionable and commercial as it was conventionally powerful; emotive responses being provoked by defaced likenesses of the old order of rule.
DOIAs well as the images themselves, ideas about images and especially portraiture, that most acceptable genre of art in post-Reformation England, informed both contemporary discussion and action. In a pamphlet of 1645, one Leonard Lee addresses the mayor and aldermen of London, highlighting the then-miserable circumstances of the poor in both the capital and beyond during this period of civil war and unrest. His opening statement presents an interesting analogy: “The Character set upon our English Nation by Strangers is, to have excellent Lawes, but no execution; like Pictures curiously drawne, well faced, and limn’d, but want life, and motion.”7 Such a comparison would resonate strongly with a readership aware of the often close relationship between an individual and their likeness as set down on panel, canvas, paper, or in stone. Similarly, in the later decades of the seventeenth century, Brian Fairfax set down a curious story of a portrait hanging at Denton Hall in Yorkshire, of his kinsman Captain William Fairfax, who had died at the siege of Frankenthal during the 1620s in defence of the Elector Palatine. Upon commandeering Denton during his march to York in 1644, Prince Rupert saw the portrait, and ordered that the house should not be damaged by his troops.8 These examples of the mimetic qualities of a drawn or painted likeness as encountered during the 1640s reinforce James Fraser’s subsequent consideration of the impact of Cromwell’s printed portrait and its capacity to engage with the viewer.
DOIIn what follows, this article will examine the ways in which visual images were understood, employed, and interpreted in England between the late 1640s and 1660. Fraser’s observations resonate with the findings of recent scholarship, which continues to unpick a once-accepted version of England during the Interregnum as artistically indifferent, purged of both practitioners and patrons in the aftermath of the Civil Wars (1642–1651).9 The “picture” which emerges has proved to be far more complex, as this article will demonstrate in its consideration of the work of professional and amateur artists, of different formats for pictorial likenesses, and of the reception of portraiture by a socially and politically diverse audience.
Barbarous Rebels and Unhappy Differences Reconsidered
DOIHorace Walpole, writing a century on from the Restoration, opined that “the arts were in a manner expelled with the Royal Family from Britain” during the 1640s, stressing what he perceived to be the subsequent incompatibility between religion and a rich visual culture:
What the fury of Henry VIII had spared [at the Reformation], was condemned by the Puritans: Ruin was their harvest, and they gleaned after the Reformers. Had they countenanced any of the softer arts, what could those arts have represented? How picturesque was the figure of an Anabaptist?10DOI
In Walpole’s view, the Puritans of the mid-seventeenth century were insensitive iconoclasts with no interest in what he termed “ostensible enjoyments”. However, it is now evident that multiple levels of non-conformist belief, including early modern Puritanism, must be acknowledged when considering responses to English art of the period. As Nathan Flis has observed,
by the late 1650s, although there were still concerns about “idolatry” among fanatics, it is more accurate to say that most members of the new government were in fact interested in preserving and patronising the art of painting, and, in Oliver Cromwell’s case, using it to promote his cause.11
David Farr’s research into the cultural interests of John Lambert has revealed a key participant in the establishment of the Protectorate, who was both a keen collector of art and an amateur painter, guided in these respects by the Flemish artist Jan Baptist Gaspars, who had arrived in England from Antwerp during the early 1640s.12 Although Lambert’s personal religious beliefs have been summarised by Farr as “obscure”, many within Oliver Cromwell’s circle were, like their leader, members of the godly elite.13 The Puritan convictions of the parliamentarian officer and regicide John Hutchinson are well established. Described by his wife and biographer Lucy as a man whose “whole life was the rule of temperance”, Hutchinson was also lauded by her for his interest in the visual arts and apparent skills in connoisseurship and aesthetic appraisal:
He had great judgement in paintings, engraving, sculpture, and all excellent arts, wherein he was much delighted and had many curiosities of value in all kinds; he took great delight in perspective glasses, and for his other rarities was not so much affected with the antiquity as with the art of the work.14DOI
These observations do not sit comfortably with an acceptance of Interregnum indifference towards the visual arts, which gained traction at the Restoration. Horace Walpole may have been writing at some historical distance from his subject, but his sentiments echo and reinforce earlier perspectives. William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues, published in 1686, describes the simple, linear process of a splendid, court-based visual culture flourishing, then stalling, in the shift from monarchical to parliamentarian rule:
[King Charles I] had once Enrich’d our Island with the noblest Collection that any Prince outside of Italy could boast of: but those Barbarous Rebels, whose Quarrel was as much to Politeness and the Liberal Arts, as to Monarchy and Prelacy, dissipated and destroyed the best part of it.15
Aglionby’s sentiments recall John Evelyn’s earlier assertions in Sculptura, his 1662 treatise on printmaking:
we may not yet boast of such multitudes [of engravers] by reason of the late unhappy differences, which have disturb’d the whole Nation, endeavouring to level Princes, and lay the Mecænas’s of This, and all other Arts in the dust.16DOI
Evelyn’s words are based around a wholly royalist perspective, and his decision to consign a decade of republican rule to the cultural scrapheap is understandable: all the better to emphasise the positive impact of a Restoration court on the visual arts, and Evelyn’s own virtuoso presence within that environment. The same may be said of Aglionby, several decades later. However, there is a subtle irony present in the fact of Evelyn’s own periods of self-imposed exile from, and return to, Civil War and Interregnum England (1643–1647 and 1649–1652). His activities mirror the subsequent path of many contemporary artists, drawn away from Continental Europe and finding work in the English capital, during the 1650s.
DOIThe Edinburgh-trained painter John Michael Wright returned to London, his city of birth, in 1656, following over a decade of overseas work and study. In May 1655, Wright had been issued a passport, signed by the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Leopold William, granting him permission to travel to England to purchase art and antiquities; less than a year later, he had settled in the capital and began to establish himself as a portraitist.17 The London-based miniaturist David Des Granges followed King Charles II to Scotland in the early 1650s but was back in the English capital by July 1658, with his services advertised in a charmingly disparaging manner, as the practitioner of “the Art of Miniature or Limning, by the Life or Copying, approved to be none of the worst, if not answerable in some measure to be the best.”18 Printmakers Wenceslaus Hollar and William Faithorne departed London for the Continent during the 1640s, the former appearing to be motivated by diminishing patronage in England, the latter banished following his support of the Crown and involvement in the siege of Basing House; however, both men had returned to the city by 1652 to continue their trades.19
DOIOther artists saw commercial potential in England for the first time during the Interregnum, such as the French engraver Pierre Lombart, who signed his plates with a London imprint from 1651 until his departure back to Paris in 1663.20 Peter Lely’s arrival from Haarlem in around 1643, into a country locked in internecine conflict, and the “unhappy differences” of John Evelyn’s memory, is all the more surprising given the success he encountered long before his Restoration appointment as Charles II’s Principal Painter in Ordinary. During the 1650s, Lely’s work for English patrons ranged from conventional portraiture and genre scenes to idyllic pastoral landscapes with erotic overtones.21 Lely’s name also appears alongside the painter George Geldorp, and the artist and art dealer Balthazar Gerbier, on a proposal delivered to Parliament in 1651, in which the trio offered their services to produce a series of history paintings to be displayed in the main rooms and galleries at Whitehall. Although such a project, “Concerning the representing, in Oil, Pictures of all the memorable Atchievments since the PARLAMENT’S first sitting,”22 did not come to fruition, it demonstrates the clear ambition of Geldorp, Gerbier and Lely to familiarise English audiences at an elite level to a genre of painting increasingly recognised as pre-eminent in Continental cultural circles. It also highlights the purported availability of artists both willing and proficiently able to work across a range of specialisms, in order to undertake this commission, “All which may bee most compleatly performed by choice Artists, expert both in the representing of Personages, Battails and Land-skips.”23
Cultural Capital: The London Market for Reproductions
DOIThe diary and notes of Richard Symonds provide further evidence of contemporary artists active in London during the early 1650s. Symonds fought for the royalists during the 1640s, before undertaking a period of self-imposed exile in France and Italy between early 1649 and December 1651. Subsequently returning to England, he spent time in London pursuing interests already established in Rome: visiting artists’ studios, pressing those artists for information on their materials and techniques, and committing the details to several notebooks today preserved in the British Library.24 Symonds also carefully recorded the presence of a remarkable range of contemporary and Old Master artworks in various studios, warehouses, and private residences across the capital. This was a consequence of the recent dispersal of much of the royal collection by the Interregnum government, some items were provided as payment for debts incurred by the late king’s household, others were auctioned off to dealers and collectors in England and beyond.25
DOIWithin this novel environment, Symonds found London’s artists busy, working not only on original compositions but also engaging in the production of copies after paintings previously displayed in courtly contexts. He notes the presence of “Divers Ritrattos coppyes” at a merchant’s house in St Swithin’s Lane, and further “Abundance of copyes of Ritrattos of Van Dyke etc.” at George Geldorp’s residence in Archer Street.26 Artists identified by Symonds as working on such reproductions included the recently deceased Jan van Belcamp, a native of Antwerp “who kept the Kings picture a p[e]rson or paynter good at copying”, and Mrs Boardman, an otherwise unidentified female professional artist with premises near Gray’s Inn, who painted a version of Titian’s Venus Putting on her Smock, the original then being in the possession of the portraitist Robert Walker.27
DOIWalker himself sought to profit from the demand for reproductions of visually engaging artworks; in Symonds’ words, “he demands 50ts for ye copy of Titians woman naked & a man playing on the organs. Hutchinson has the original.”28 Titian’s erotic Venus and Music was initially purchased by John Hutchinson following the regicide, and represents an unusual acquisition for a man of strong and committed godly beliefs; perhaps his motivation was for profit as well as pleasure, as hinted at by the recollections of Hutchinson’s wife:
he laid out about £2,000 in the choicest pieces of painting then set to sale, most of which were bought out of the King’s goods, which were given to his servants to pay their wages; and to them the Colonel gave ready money for them, of whom he bought so good pennyworths that they were valued much more worth than they cost.29
This particular “choicest” painting did not remain in Hutchinson’s possession for long; although he had taken his purchases from the royal sale “down into the country, intending a very neat cabinet for them”, by the end of 1651, Venus and Music had passed through the hands of several Spanish ambassadors and ministers, into the collection of Philip IV, with significant profits for Hutchinson.30
DOIWith transactions originating with the sale of Charles I’s collection by the Interregnum government, high-quality artworks were being used as collateral to pay off debts; however, the production of so many copies also highlights these reproductions’ own complementary status as desired commercial objects, being produced for a local market keen to acquire such items. This demand is further underlined by the wider dissemination of reproductions of these artworks in printed form. Following its sale to Hutchinson, and before its departure for Spain, Francis Barlow was given access to Venus and Music, and copied the composition into a now-lost drawing. This design was then worked up into a printing plate by Barlow’s frequent collaborator, Richard Gaywood, with the subsequent etching pairing Titian’s composition with a lengthy dedication to John Evelyn in a flowing, calligraphic script (Fig. 2). Responding to Barlow and Gaywood’s creative endeavours in a letter of encouraging words (but no financial acknowledgement), Evelyn self-deprecatingly noted “the honour which you have conferred upon me … which might better have become some great and eminent Maecenas to patronise, than a person so incompetent as you have made choice of.”31 Evelyn’s suggestion that Barlow and Gaywood turn their attentions to alternative, and albeit nameless patrons and collectors of art, for support and promotion, alludes further to a London-based market for sophisticated visual culture, in original and reproduced formats.
Texts and Images
DOIRichard Symonds’ observations of the early 1650s imply that, during the initial years of the Interregnum, there was an active demand for “art” focused upon and emanating from London; however, was this simply an anomaly, which could be credited to the sale and dispersal of the royal collection? One printed source that suggests otherwise is William Sanderson’s Graphice, or the Most Excellent Art of Painting, published in 1658, the year of Oliver Cromwell’s death. Part handbook on art appreciation, including a section on the display of paintings in a domestic context, and part technical manual, Sanderson’s book is addressed “to Lovers of this Art, not to Masters.”32 Sanderson, like Richard Symonds and John Evelyn, was a man of strictly royalist sympathies, but unlike Evelyn, Sanderson writes enthusiastically about the possibilities of engaging with art during the Interregnum. He also directs his work to an audience whom he anticipates are familiar with and interested in the visual arts but who are lacking in the theoretical and intellectual understanding to appreciate what they see. Within Graphice, Sanderson guides his readers by listing key artists, historical and current, across a range of genres; when considering contemporary art, his claims contrast sharply with the subsequent critiques of Evelyn and Aglionby:
These [artists] now in England are not less worthy of fame then any forraigner; and although some of them be strangers born, yet for their affection to our Nation, we may mixe them together. Our Modern Masters [are] comparable with any now beyond Seas.33DOI
A notable focus is also placed in Sanderson’s text upon portraiture. Three engraved portraits are bound into the volume, all by William Faithorne, who by November 1652 had returned to London from France following a brief period of exile; he now operated as both printmaker and seller near Temple Bar, dealing in his own work, and that of Wenceslaus Hollar, as well as a “great store of Italian, French [and] Flemish prints.”34 Reflecting both Sanderson and Faithorne’s royalist sensibilities, these illustrations consist of the likenesses of Charles I, and of Anthony van Dyck’s wife, Maria Ruthven, after a painting by her husband, the king’s Principal Painter in Ordinary (to which Sanderson dedicates several pages of frothy praise as an ideal template for female portraiture), together with a portrait of Sanderson himself after Gilbert Soest. The assertion is also made that, by the late 1650s, the practice of reproducing faces and likenesses surpassed all other genres of painting in England:
For Life, Titian, Holben, Antonio More; but now it becomes the bold adventure of all, as the ordinary practice that most men apprehend, of common Use and Sale. In which Vandik was excellent; and now in England the most Painters profess it.35DOI
Sanderson also reveals that he had harboured ambitions to enhance his book with further illustrations, but fine prints for this purpose, imported from overseas, were plundered by pirates when he was en route to London; to compensate, the reader is instead directed in the first instance to Faithorne’s shop, to be “furnished … with such cuts and prints as may serve his own private use for this whole Book.”36 Whether Sanderson’s tale of high-seas robbery represents the truth, or a more cynical attempt to promote Faithorne’s business, the reader is made aware of a range of readily available visual material to aid their personal development as connoisseurs of art. Additional evidence of access to printed portraiture in Interregnum London is found in the rare survival of an advertisement, which can be dated to 1654, detailing stock published and sold by Peter Stent, at the White Horse in Guiltspur Street.37 Portraits dominated Stent’s extensive holdings, with a section dedicated to “Sir Anthony Vandyke’s”, listing engraved likenesses including ones of the late king, the Earl of Arundel and Prince Rupert, after paintings by Charles I’s court painter. The depth and range of pictorial material available from Stent’s shop was testament to his common practice of buying up the plates of rival printsellers following their deaths; now republished with his own imprint, an array of images that had been in circulation over several decades, including high art reproductions, continued to reach broader audiences during the 1650s and beyond.
“To Express the Life with the Pensil”
DOIAs well as advising its readers on the appreciation of art, William Sanderson’s Graphice also provides practical instruction; presented as a work in two volumes, the second, shorter volume consists of a treatise on “The Most Excellent Art of Limning”, that is, detailed guidance on painting in watercolour. This section heavily plagiarises Edward Norgate’s Miniatura, offering detailed instructions on miniature painting which were originally written between 1627 and 1628, and subsequently circulated in manuscript format across the seventeenth century.38 Sanderson’s pirated publication of Norgate’s text was its first appearance in print. Limning, the name given to the technique of producing small-scale paintings, on vellum or paper using pigments suspended in water, was lauded as a gentlemanly pursuit, this method setting the practitioner apart from professional painter-stainers, who commonly worked in oils on panel, canvas, or linen. During the mid-1650s, the engraver Daniel King produced a presentation copy of Miniatura, for which he claimed authorial credit, and dedicated the work to Mary Fairfax, daughter of the former commander of the English army, Thomas Fairfax, intimating the status of limning as an appropriate pastime for the Interregnum elite of either sex.39
DOIThe studious limner is directed in Graphice, via Norgate’s Miniatura, to focus upon portraiture and landscapes, since “You shall rarely see History in Limning to be done in any largeness”, and is given detailed instructions on preparing and modelling their portrait from the life.40 Through a number of sittings, the face, costume, drapery, and background will emerge, and the amateur artist may feel satisfied that “with ordinary diligence and practice, you may likewise attain to express the Life with the Pensil.”41 Despite Sanderson’s assertion that portraiture was now “the ordinary practice that most men apprehend”, there is, however, a clear demarcation in the two parts of Graphice, between commercial and private artistic endeavours.
DOIA more exploratory approach to portrait painting, in terms of materials and techniques, was adopted by the poet George Daniel. A manuscript volume of Daniel’s writings, assembled between the mid-1640s and his death in 1657, is notable for its focus on Daniel’s interest in the sense of his own identity; this focus is enhanced by the inclusion of a number of self-portraits, painted in oils on paper and interleaved with Daniel’s text. This is not the gentlemanly limning in watercolour promoted by William Sanderson and takes something of a philosophical as well as representational approach to the artist and author’s likeness. An early poem within Daniel’s manuscript is accompanied by a head-and-shoulders self-portrait of the author in an elaborate cartouche frame, surmounted by a heraldic shield (Fig. 3). Two complementary markers of societal identity—one representational, one symbolic—are accompanied by verses which dwell on the difficulty of being entirely honest when constructing that identity, in both words and images:
…only Men
Can draw their inward selves, with their owne Pen:
But our Pens flatter; and wee stranglie raise
False beauties, in the mind; as in the face
The mercinarie Hand; and sometime put
A gracefull mole, for a dull morphew’d Spot…
…Thus wee deluded are: yet, let me say:
If wee know not, our selves; none other may.
The irony exposed by Daniel is to suggest that although only you can paint (or write) an entirely honest picture of yourself, it is human nature to flatter and disguise your imperfections.
Further images interspersed in this volume of poetry see Daniel adopting and exploring different guises. He presents himself as an Arcadian poet composing his work in an idealised landscape, and as a stoic griever of Charles I, with compositional echoes of Van Dyck’s portrait of circa 1633 of Sir Kenelm Digby in mourning, which Daniel may have known through its engraved reproduction by Robert van Voerst for Van Dyck’s Icones Principum Virorum series.42 Throughout the volume, Daniel develops his understanding of himself and his identity through both poetry and painting, and this is an idea most touchingly evident in the double portrait of the author-artist and his brother Thomas, an officer in the royalist army (Fig. 4). Once again, Daniel references the compositional tropes of royalist paintings, in particular the friendship portraits which were developed into a distinctive sub-genre in England by Anthony van Dyck, and later William Dobson. According to the accompanying poem, he hopes that this image of a filial bond will last as a memorial to them both, long after they have died: “perhaps, these figures, may/Us, to a Time unheard of yet, convay.” George Daniel’s appreciation of the portrait’s potential to act as a substitute for the real person, both now, and in the future when they are gone, is clear.
This idea resonates with the observations made by James Fraser about the modest likeness of Oliver Cromwell pasted into his journal, which “is lively enough in so small a circle it suffices to content the curious in after-ages.”43 It also anticipates the sentiments of the poet Thomas Flatman, who in 1658 provided a dedicatory poem, “On the Noble Art of Painting”, to preface Sanderson’s Graphice, noting how “The Pensill’s Amulets forbid to die, And vest us with a fair Eternity.”44 Four years later, Flatman would similarly compose verses to introduce William Faithorne’s practical manual on printmaking techniques, The Art of Graveing and Etching. Flatman’s words praise Faithorne’s work, and the power of an engraved frontispiece portrait to posthumously preserve the presence and reputation of the individual:
For my part I prefer (to guard the dead)DOI
A copper-plate beyond a sheet of lead…
A Faithorne sculpsit is a charm can save
From dull oblivion, and a gaping grave.45
The purpose and potential of a portrait to preserve both a likeness and a reputation, and to persuade the viewer as to an individual’s character, status, and achievements, could work in both positive and negative ways. In May 1653, London’s Royal Exchange, the site at which James Fraser had wept as he observed the remains of Charles I’s statue, hosted an unusual, temporary art installation. As described in a number of contemporary letters and reports, a full-length portrait of Oliver Cromwell was deposited in the open courtyard of the Exchange by a mysterious “grave and wel-habited Gentleman”, who then swiftly departed the scene. Both text and image were incorporated in this display: “over the head of the Picture were three Crownes, and above them these words written:
DOI
It is I
And underneath these verses:
Ascende three Thrones Great Captaine, and Divine,
By th’will of God (ô Lyon) they are thine,
Come Priests of God, bring oyle, bring robes, bring gold,
Bring Crownes and Scepters, tis high time t’unfold
Your cloystered baggs, you State Cheat’s, least the rodd
Of steele and iron, of this King, of God,
Pay you in’s wrath with interest; kneele and pray
To Oliver, that Torch of Syon, Starr of day.
Shoute Merchants Cittizens and Gentry singe,
And all bare-headed cry: God save the King.
the fower last word in Capitall gold letters; after it had been gazed at for a long time it was taken downe and brought to the Mayor…”46
Between 1649 and 1653, a series of ineffective parliaments had operated in England, yet this experiment in republicanism, with no clear singular ruler (as per the established model of monarchy) was failing; in December 1653, after some resistance, Oliver Cromwell was given the title of “Lord Protector”, and assumed many of the powers he and his fellow parliamentarians had sought to curb in King Charles. This action appeared to appease a public demand for a figurehead ruler, as represented in the Royal Exchange portrait some seven months earlier, which calls upon the middling and affluent population of London to support a divinely appointed leader possessing the accoutrements, if not the dynastic pedigree, of a king. The picture disappeared without a trace, but the wide reporting of this episode suggests that its brief presence was of public interest, a novelty, perhaps, but also a catalyst for the positive development of Cromwell’s monarchical persona.
Curious Portraits
DOIYet the very act of placing the image of an authority figure on open and accessible view could invite negative responses. In April 1655, John Evelyn and his brother viewed the warship Naseby, several days before it was launched from Woolwich Dockyard. Affirmative news reports praised its size and naval prowess, being “a most glorious Vessel, framed purposely for war”, and highlighted its apparent superiority to Charles I’s great ship, the Sovereign of the Seas, now in republican hands, with Naseby wanting “little of her strength”.47 The transom carvings on the stern of the Sovereign of the Seas were dominated by an effigy of the English King Edgar, whose tenth-century maritime prowess had provided Charles with a historic exemplar of a monarch as rex marium, fulfilling this ship’s name, and reflecting Charles’ own aspirations.48 Evelyn, however, was not impressed by the comparison provoked by the elaborate carved figurehead placed at the prow of Naseby: “Oliver on horseback trampling six nations under foot, a Scot, Irishman, Dutch, French, Spaniard and English as was easily made out by their several habits. A Fame held a laurel over his insulting head; the word God with us.”49 Perhaps Evelyn was unaware of the physical response which Cromwell’s effigy had incited during Naseby’s construction, as the newsbook The Faithfull Scout had recounted months earlier, in January 1655: the statue “was in the night time exceedingly defaced, by having the Nose of this rich and glorious structure cut off; which is now again carved out, and very curiously p[r]efixed upon the face”.50
DOIThe implied speed and nature of the response to the effigy’s damage, with the removed nose promptly restored, albeit “curiously”, points to the symbolic importance of Cromwell’s unsullied face as part of a wholly outward-looking image of both maritime and martial power. The very action of cutting off the Lord Protector’s nose at one level represents the simple mutilation of a vulnerable part of a wooden sculpture; however, this damage to the likeness of an authority figure can also be interpreted in highly symbolic terms. Just as certain reports on the destruction of Charles I’s statue at the Royal Exchange claimed that the figure had been decapitated, so too the treatment of Cromwell’s nose reflected more than basic vandalism.51 Garthine Walker has noted how, as a form of sanctioned punishment in early modern England, “Noses, like ears, were cut off or slit as avenging acts upon those who had unworthily assumed authority”, and for critics of the man recently elevated from general to king in all but name, this response would be entirely fitting.52 The prominence of Cromwell’s actual nose already presented satirists with an easy target. James Fraser observed in his journal the prevalence of “Satyres that raled and flouted him [Cromwell] these comming out daylie in print”, and his physical appearance, based around a prominent proboscis, provoked a critical commentary in newsbooks, pamphlets, and manuscript verses.53
DOIDuring the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–1654, satirical engravings published in Amsterdam soon reached London, manipulating Cromwell’s body into physically ridiculous circumstances: as a curious hybrid of man and beast with a scaly tail covered in coins; vomiting crowns and coins as his tail, now that of a fox, is pulled; and cavorting and entertaining crowds as an acrobatic rope-dancer.54 Nor was print the only medium through which such critiques circulated. A Dutch medal, struck in both gold and silver in 1655, depicts on one side a conventional portrait in profile of the Lord Protector, in armour with laurel wreath; on the reverse, however, Cromwell kneels with his head in the lap of Britannia, as the French and Spanish ambassadors jostle to kiss his exposed buttocks, a sharp comment from the United Provinces as to the efforts of France and Spain to court English favour (Fig. 5).55
A further medal struck in the Dutch Republic shows on the obverse a crude profile portrait of Cromwell, and on the reverse Sir Thomas Fairfax, who in June 1650 resigned from his long-standing position as commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, to be succeeded immediately by Cromwell (Fig. 6). With either side of the medal turned 180 degrees, a different face appears in profile: Cromwell assumes the identity of a devil, Fairfax that of a fool, the implication here being that through his actions, Fairfax has gullibly assigned further power to Cromwell, possibly through the latter’s persuasion.56 A clear measure of insulting humour is tied up in these dual identities, but there is also a deeper meditation upon the duplicity of the individual depicted, and the potentially deceptive nature of the portrait, which casts further aspersions on both men. Pictures with the capacity to trick the eye were a novelty of the early modern period, with the manner of their viewing connected to discussions around natural philosophy and scientific pursuits. In 1649, the educationalist Samuel Hartlib noted in his diary an exchange between two of his close friends, Walter Charleton and Theodore Haak: “Dr Charleton showed Mr Haack a very curious Picture on the outside nothing but Charities and Vertues were seene. But looking upon the said Picture through a little glasse King Charles face appeared.”57 By the following year, Hartlib had identified a London-based artist engaged in the production of such anamorphic images, possibly the creator of the aforementioned portrait of the late king, who was about to broaden his oeuvre:
May-huy one of the best Limners or Painters about the Towne a french-man living in Morefields, who is the same also for making of the Conical sections in Looking-glasses or burning-glasses. Hee promised to shew feates when the sun is hotter. Hee doth also in Perspective and hath done yet but the King’s Picture and no body’s else. But hee is about to doe my Lord Groves etc. the Lord General Fairfax and Dr Gurdain. Hee is full of all manner of Ingenuities etc.58
The distortion and blurring of Charles I’s portrait within royalist visual propaganda of the 1650s is known through painted and printed examples.59 These anamorphic images appealed to the royalists on several levels; they reinforced the idea of a continuing monarchy hidden in plain sight, accessible only to those who were invested in its secrets. Furthermore, the correct use of the perspective glass enabled the viewer to set the portrait and, by extension, the image of monarchical authority “right”. However, Hartlib’s suggestion that an artist was also about to produce “ingenious” anamorphic likenesses of Thomas Fairfax, and of Dr Aaron Guerden, appointed master of the Commonwealth Mint in 1649, points to broader interests in perception and viewing, of the nature of sight and the agency of the viewer, framed around portraits of prominent sitters.
“Heads Chiefly of the Famous Warriors”
DOIBy the early 1650s, perhaps reflecting the nature of these hidden, and potentially duplicitous images, Thomas Fairfax’s reputation as one of Oliver Cromwell’s chief allies was becoming far less clear-cut. Following the regicide, which he had been notably in opposition to, Fairfax refused to lead a proposed invasion of Scotland in summer 1650, and subsequently resigned from his command of the army. He withdrew from public life, spending time chiefly at Nun Appleton, his country estate south of York, engaging in breeding horses and writing poetry, employing Andrew Marvell as tutor to his daughter Mary.
DOIThe former commander of the English army also assembled a personal collection of portrait engravings, coins, and medals. At Fairfax’s death in 1671, these items were acquired by John Thoresby of Leeds, a merchant who had formerly served in Fairfax’s regiment, and were subsequently inherited by Thoresby’s son Ralph, forming the nucleus of his own extensive cabinet of curiosities. In 1715, a list of the contents of the so-called “Musaeum Thoresbyanum” were included in Ralph Thoresby’s topographical survey of Leeds, the Ducatus Leodiensis; here, the portrait prints are described as “a Volume collected by the Lord Fairfax, containing about 150 Heads chiefly of the famous Warriors in foreign Parts that were his Contemporaries at large”.60 Further details on these portraits is frustratingly scarce. In 1764, the contents of Thoresby’s collection were sold at auction in London. Horace Walpole, who upon the publication a year earlier of the third volume of his Anecdotes of Painting, had been notably disparaging of the art of the civil wars and Interregnum, made a successful bid for Lot 66: “A Parcel of Prints, Drawings, &c. and sundry odd things.”61 It must be assumed that Fairfax’s volume of portraits of his martial contemporaries formed part of this lot, and was subsequently dispersed among Walpole’s own collection of works on paper at Strawberry Hill.
DOIDOI This interest in “heads” has certain parallels in Fairfax’s earlier practice of rewarding members of his army for excellent service through the provision of a medal bearing his own profile.62 Fairfax’s role in the decisive victory over the royalists at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, which subsequently gave Cromwell the name for his exceptional warship, was also acknowledged through pictorial means. He was presented with a gift commissioned by the House of Commons, who provided £800 for the creation of an elaborate “jewel” containing two enamel roundels painted by Pierre Bordier, set in a locket by Francis Allen, then a member of the House, but previously a liveryman of the Goldsmiths’ Company.63 One of the enamels depicts the House of Commons in session; the other, two sided, represents the Parliamentarian victory at Naseby on its reverse, and on its obverse an equestrian portrait of Fairfax which lauds his military prowess (Fig. 7). Clearly based upon Van Dyck’s triumphal painting of Charles I with M. de St Antoine, this element of the Fairfax Jewel both mirrors, and develops, the visual language of authority established by Charles, now personalised to a new ruling elite.
DOIFollowing his victory at Naseby, Fairfax was also painted in military garb on several occasions by the English artist Edward Bower, with a large, jewelled locket prominently placed upon his breastplate, continuing this dialogue between martial authority, portraiture, and display.64 His equestrian portrait by Bower was reproduced in engraved format by William Marshall, and was further circulated through the engraving’s use as an illustration within Joshua Sprigge’s Anglia Rediviva, published in 1647. Among other printed versions of Fairfax’s likeness is a half-length portrait of circa 1646, engraved by William Faithorne after a painting by Robert Walker (Fig. 8). This was one of four portrait engravings initially published in London by Thomas Rowlett, together with the Prince of Wales, Prince Rupert, and Endymion Porter, after paintings by William Dobson. With Faithorne imprisoned in London, following his arrest at Basing House, it has been suggested that the engraver’s production of this print, unusual in its parliamentarian rather than royalist focus, would appeal to its subject from the perspective of a print collector, and that it was through Fairfax’s intervention that Faithorne’s incarceration was commuted to what would become a temporary banishment.65
Thomas Fairfax was a man of strong godly convictions; however, in common with John Hutchinson, his beliefs do not appear to have precluded his appreciation of visual imagery, much of it highly encoded with symbolic meaning, within his immediate environment. Following the siege of York in 1644, in which Fairfax played a prominent role, he took particular care to protect the city’s churches from damage, iconoclastic or otherwise, by the victorious Parliamentarian forces. As Ian Gentles has observed,
For Fairfax there was no contradiction in protecting the Bodleian Library and intervening to save the largest collection of medieval stained glass in England at York Minster on the one hand, while on the other holding that the appetite for material things was one of the devil’s snares.66DOI
One major project to which Fairfax directed his time during the 1650s was the building of a residence at York. His chosen architect for this townhouse was Edward Carter, who had served as an assistant to Inigo Jones, and succeeded Jones as surveyor-general in 1643. Built upon land in the Bishophill area of the city, it fell into disrepair following the death of Fairfax’s daughter and son-in-law George Villiers, from which its familiar name of Buckingham House was derived; described by Francis Drake in 1736 as “the skeleton of a large mansion house”, it was subsequently demolished.67 Upon its completion by the 1660s, however, this was a significant structure boasting twenty-nine hearths—an immense number for a private, urban residence.68 The Ancient and Loyall Citty of York, an etched panoramic view of York of 1678 by William Lodge, depicts the “Dk of Bucks Pallais” as a prominent building within the city walls, with an impressive number of chimneys, again reflecting the status of its original patron (Figs 9–10).69 Letters of February 1651 sent by Fairfax to his London-based cousin, James Chaloner, suggest a proactive patron for this venture, highly involved in the development of plans for his townhouse, commenting on models of the proposed building and regretful of his own perceived lack of architectural understanding and vocabulary: “I have writ to Mr Carter though I have not skil enough to express my selfe so fully as I should…”70 Fairfax’s financial temperance is also revealed, in contrast to Carter’s ambition: “I perceave his model is for a larger & a costlyer house than I intende though I shal be wiling to doe somthing to make it faire as wel as convenient…”71 One particular point of consideration was the appeal, although not the necessity, of a gallery in this townhouse:
I like a Gallery in a house … though it takes up lodging roome yett in a citty they may best be spared I would not bestow above £2000 more may make a statly house but this as convenient & hansome.72DOI
With his collection of printed portrait heads bound up in a volume, one can only wonder at the artworks which might have been displayed in this putative space, had it been realized rather than resisted for reasons of cost and practicality. It is tantalising to conjecture whether Fairfax might have taken guidance from the royalist William Sanderson’s observations in Graphice, concerning the appropriate environment for different genres of paintings: “Graver stories; Histories your best figures, and rarest worke becomes Galleries; here you Walk, Judge, Examine, Censure.”73 Speculation aside, histories and figures were neatly brought together at Fairfax’s York townhouse, in the form of antique sculptures. Ralph Thoresby acquired for the Musaeum Thoresbyanum a piece which he described as “The Head of Seneca in Plaister; it is very large, a Yard within six Inches round, seems to be ancient and very agreeable to his Statue at Rome: This was amongst the Lord Fairfax’s Curiosities.”74 Furthermore, “two Roman figures” were originally set in the walls of the building’s courtyard, reportedly placed there by Fairfax himself.75 These details of a now-lost residence, housing a now-lost collection of antiquities and, potentially, contemporary art, again challenge long-standing perceptions casting the godly elite of Interregnum England as indifferent to the appeal and enjoyment of visual culture.
Conclusion
DOIIn January 1658, John Campbell, son of Sir John Campbell of Glenorchy, in the Scottish Highlands, wrote to his father from London. Having married in the previous month, Campbell sent greetings from his English wife, Mary Rich, who had yet to meet her new father-in-law; his words reveal sentiments which could be described as both timeless and universal in terms of the function and significance of a pictorial likeness, and its potential to influence:
my wyf taiks it for a great complement that your honour should demand hir picture. The season is so extream cold with frosts & great snowes that it puts ladyes in ane ill mode to be drawn houever shee promises to send it with all convenience, but shee is thairby feared to be dislyked befor shee be seen houever she determine to leave this to judgment of the censurer.76DOI
This temporary and fragmentary window into Rich’s concerns reveals nothing about the Laird of Glenorchy’s eventual appraisal of his daughter-in-law. However, as this article has demonstrated, the responsibility placed upon Sir John Campbell to use his judgement in assessing an individual, essentially a stranger, through their portrait was a familiar one. Both the request and its anticipated response gesture once again to the ways in which Interregnum artists, patrons, and viewers were all engaged in using pictorial likenesses to further their understanding of their place in the world. It was a world into which professional artists had arrived, or returned, in notable numbers, following the political and cultural uncertainties which the regicide had provoked for many. Guidance was also available to those amateurs who were moved to explore their own identities in self-painted or limned format. Portraits acted as surrogates which might appease or incite the viewer, and physical responses to pictorial likenesses in two and three dimensions were not unknown. Portraits were constructed to inform and instruct future audiences; they might reveal or conceal something of the sitter’s character through ingenious methods of representation, requiring the viewer to look more closely. Whether as political polemic, or for remembrance, a record of status and achievement, or sheer aesthetic pleasure, William Sanderson’s confident assertion of 1658 that portraiture was now “the bold adventure of all” is now gaining sustained recognition and re-evaluation.
Acknowledgements
DOII am grateful to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, for providing funding which enabled my initial research for this article. Many thanks must also go to the audiences at research papers delivered at the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article, and suggestions on all things Interregnum.
About the author
-
Helen Pierce is Lecturer in British Art at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008). She is currently working on two projects: a history of British political caricature for Reaktion Books; and a study of the artistic activities and cultural networking of the late seventeenth-century gentlemen known as the York Virtuosi.
Footnotes
-
James Fraser, Triennial Travels, containing a succinct and briefe narration of the journay and voyage of Master James Fraser through Scotland, England, all France, part of Spain, and over the Savoyan Alps to Italy (1667–1670), Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen, Library and Special Collections Ms. 2538, fol. 2. On Fraser’s manuscript, see Peter Davidson and Carol Morley, “James Fraser’s Triennial Travels”, in Iain Beavan, Peter Davidson, and Jane Stevenson (eds), The Library and Archive Collections of the University of Aberdeen: An Introduction and Description (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 206–211; and Joad Raymond, “An Eyewitness to King Cromwell”, History Today 47, no. 7 (1997): 35–41.
1 -
Fraser, Triennial Travels, fol. 22.
2 -
Fraser, Triennial Travels, fol. 21; “creamrie ware” refers to cramery, a general word in early modern Scots for “merchandise such as is sold by a stall-holder or pedlar”: “Cramery”, Dictionary of the Scots Language, http://dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/cramery (accessed 7 February 2019).
3 -
Fraser, Triennial Travels, fol. 34–34v; “talliduce” is an approximation of taille-douce, a French term for metal plate engraving.
4 -
Fraser, Triennial Travels, fol. 18v.
5 -
Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Kevin Sharpe, “An Image Doting Rabble: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England”, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 25–56; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Helen Pierce, “Artful Ambivalence? Picturing Charles I During the Interregnum”, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism During the Interregnum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 67–87.
6 -
Leonard Lee, A Remonstrance Humbly Presented to the High and Honourable Court of Parliament: Touching the Insupportable Miseries of the Poore of the Land (London: E.G. for John Rothwell, 1645), sig. A3.
7 -
British Library, London, Ms. Egerton 2146, fol. 27.
8 -
Key examples of this new research discuss Interregnum artists and patrons both at home and in exile, see Emily Burns, Painting, Patronage and Collecting in England During the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1640–1660, (PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2018); Angus Haldane, “The Face of Civil War: Robert Walker (1599–1658): His Life and Portraits”, The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (Autumn 2016): 20–29; and Karen Hearn, “William Cavendish and the Fine Arts: Patronage Before Exile”, in Ben van Beneden and Nora de Poorter (eds), Royalist Refugees: William and Margaret Cavendish in the Rubens House, 1648–1660 (Schoten: BAI Publishers, 2006), 90–94. Their focus on the activities of the elite builds upon the work of Linda Levy Peck, most fully realized in her Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
9 -
Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England; with Some Account of the Principal Artists (1762–1780), 4 vols, III, 1–2.
10 -
Nathan Flis, From the Life: the Art of Francis Barlow (c.1626–1704) (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2012), 2 vols, Vol. 1, 39.
11 -
D.N. Farr, “John Lambert and the Roots of an Early Modern Art Collection”, Cromwelliana: The Journal of the Cromwell Association (2002), 46–55.
12 -
D.N. Farr, “Lambert [Lambart], John”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, latest version 8 January 2015, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15939.
13 -
Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, edited by N.H. Keeble (London: J.M. Dent, 1995), 30 and 19.
14 -
William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues (London: John Gain/Walter Kettilby and Jacob Tonson, 1686), Preface.
15 -
John Evelyn, Sculptura: or the History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (London: G. Beedle and T. Collins, 1662), 98.
16 -
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Rawlinson, Series A, vol.26, fol. 101.
17 -
Mercurius Politicus, 22–29 July 1658, 701.
18 -
Antony Griffiths and Gabriela Kesnerová, Wenceslaus Hollar: Prints and Drawings (London: British Museum Publications, 1983), 43; and British Library, London, Ms. Additional 19027, fols. 47r–47v.
19 -
For example, Lombart’s engraved frontispiece to William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With Other Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1651).
20 -
On Lely’s early career in England, see Caroline Campbell (ed.), Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012).
21 -
British Library, London, Ms. Stowe 184, fol. 283.
22 -
British Library Ms. Stowe 184, fol. 283.
23 -
British Library, London, Ms. Egerton 1635–36; transcriptions from these notebooks can be found in Mary Beal, A Study of Richard Symonds: His Italian Notebooks and their Relevance to Seventeenth-Century Painting Techniques (New York: Garland, 1984).
24 -
This episode is thoroughly covered in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Late King’s Goods: Collections, Possessions and Patronage in the Light of the Commonwealth Sales Inventories (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with Alistair McAlpine, 1989); Jerry Brotton, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection (London: Macmillan, 2006); and Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and his Courtiers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
25 -
Beal, A Study of Richard Symonds, 309 and 303.
26 -
Beal, A Study of Richard Symonds, 309 and 307. Together with Boardman’s presence in Symonds’ notebook, further evidence of female professional artists in Interregnum London is found in William Sanderson’s Graphice, or the Most Excellent Art of Painting: In Two Parts (London: Printed for Robert Crofts, at the signe of the Crown in Chancery-Lane, 1658), in which Joan Carlile, Mary Beale, and the unidentified Mrs Brooman (perhaps a misnomer for Boardman), and Mrs Weimes are acknowledged by Sanderson as proficient painters in oils.
27 -
Beal, A Study of Richard Symonds, 307.
28 -
Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 254–255.
29 -
Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, 255; and Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 86.
30 -
John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1862), 4 volumes, Vol. 3, 82.
31 -
William Sanderson, Graphice, Preface. On Sanderson, see Caroline Good, “A Royal Subject: William Sanderson’s Guide to Painting on the Eve of the Restoration”, in Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Myrone (eds), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735, Studies in British Art 24 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 457–476.
32 -
Sanderson, Graphice, 20.
33 -
British Library, London, Ms. Additional 19027, fol. 47v.
34 -
Sanderson, Graphice, 19.
35 -
Sanderson, Graphice, “Reader”.
36 -
Reproduced in Alexander Globe, Peter Stent, London Printseller, Circa 1642–1665 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985). On the dating of this broadside, see Anthony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–1689 (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 17, n. 20.
37 -
See Edward Norgate, Miniatura, or, the Art of Limning, edited by Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
38 -
British Library, London, Ms. Additional 12461; for the dating of this manuscript, see Norgate, Miniatura, 217.
39 -
Sanderson, Graphice, 73.
40 -
Sanderson, Graphice, 62.
41 -
On Digby’s portrait, see Susan J. Barnes, Noora De Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 505.
42 -
Fraser, Triennial Travels, fol. 34v.
43 -
Thomas Flatman, “On the Noble Art of Painting”, in William Sanderson, Graphice, or the Most Excellent Art of Painting: In Two Parts (London: Printed for Robert Crofts, at the signe of the Crown in Chancery-Lane, 1658).
44 -
Thomas Flatman, “To my ingenious Friend Mr. Faithorne on his Book”, in William Faithorne, The Art of Graveing and Etching Wherein is Exprest the True Way of Engraveing in Copper (London: William Faithorne, 1662), sig. A3.
45 -
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Clarendon 45, fols. 398v–399; see also Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Tanner 52, fol. 13; British Library Thomason Tracts E.697[17]; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 66–67; and Pierce, “Artful Ambivalence?”, 82–83.
46 -
Mercurius Politicus, 5–12 April 1655, 5260; Perfect Proceedings of State-Affaires in England, Scotland and Ireland, 5–12 April 1655, 4589.
47 -
Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 5, n. 17.
48 -
Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence, Vol. 1, 323.
49 -
The Faithfull Scout, 12–19 January 1655, 1668.
50 -
Pierce, “Artful Ambivalence?”, 67.
51 -
Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 92.
52 -
Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Noll’s Nose or Body Politics in Cromwellian England”, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds), Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 21–44.
53 -
Elizabeth Staffell, “The Horrible Tail-Man and the Anglo-Dutch Wars”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63 (2000), 169–186.
54 -
There are examples of this medal in the collections of the British Museum and the Museum of London. One found its way into Horace Walpole’s possession: “A satirical silver medal struck in Holland. On the obverse, the head of Oliver Cromwell laureated in armour. On the reverse he is kneeling in the lap of Britannia, with his breeches down; the French and Spanish ambassadors are contending which shall kiss first: the former says to the latter Retire toy, l’honneur appartient au Roi mon maitre Louis le Grand. Very scarce; from Lord Oxford’s collection.” from A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill, 1774), 52.
55 -
Philip Attwood and Felicity Powell, Medals of Dishonour (London: British Museum Press, 2009), 43.
56 -
M. Greengrass, M. Leslie, and M. Hannon, The Hartlib Papers (Sheffield: The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, 2013), https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/.
57 -
The Hartlib Papers. I have been unable to identify the artist “May-huy” any further.
58 -
Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Imagining the Death of the King: Milton, Charles I, and Anamorphic Art”, in Elizabeth Jane Bellany, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (eds), Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 151–170.
59 -
Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, or, the Topography of the Ancient and Populous Town and Parish of Leedes (London: Printed for Maurice Atkins, and sold by Edward Nutt, 1715), 496.
60 -
Musaeum Thoresbyanum: A Catalogue of the Genuine and Valuable Collection of that Well Known Antiquarian the Late Ralph Thoresby, Gent. FRS (London, 1764). An annotated copy of this sales catalogue in York Minster Library, shelfmark Y/017.2 THO, Copy 2, details the successful bidders for each lot.
61 -
See, for example, the medal and accompanying letter awarded in August 1647 by Fairfax to John Sharpe, “in remembrance of his faithfull service under my Command, in the Year 1645”, British Museum inventory number 2005,0309.1.
62 -
Journals of the House of Commons, Volume 4 (London, 1803), 320; and National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual 2010 (London: Apollo Publishing, 2011), 38–39.
63 -
See, for example, Bower’s three-quarter-length portrait of Fairfax, signed and dated 1646, which was sold at Christies London, 8 December 2017, Lot 141.
64 -
Antony Griffiths, “Faithorne, William”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, latest version 3 January 2008, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9102.
65 -
Ian J. Gentles, “Fairfax, Thomas, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, latest version 3 January 2008, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9092.
66 -
Francis Drake, Eboracum, or, the History and Antiquities of the City of York (London: W. Bowyer for the Author, 1736), 269.
67 -
Andrew Hopper, “Black Tom”: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 126, n. 41.
68 -
This building is given the number 17 in the panorama’s key.
69 -
British Library, London, Ms. Additional 71448, fol. 5.
70 -
British Library Ms. Additional 71448, fol. 3.
71 -
British Library Ms. Additional 71448, fol. 5.
72 -
Sanderson, Graphice, 27.
73 -
Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, 487.
74 -
Stukeley Family, The Family Memoirs of the Reverend William Stukeley, MD (Durham: Andrews & Co for the Surtees Society, 1882–1887), 3 vols, Vol. 3, 283–284.
75 -
National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh, Ms. GD112/39/103/2.
76
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Imprint
- Author
- Helen Pierce
- Date
- 30 June 2020
- Category
- Article
- Review status
- Peer Reviewed (Double Blind)
- Licence
- CC BY-NC International 4.0
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- Cite as
- Helen Pierce, "“The Bold Adventure of All”: Reconstructing the Place of Portraits in Interregnum England", British Art Studies, Issue 16, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-16/hpierce