'Remember, remember': James I as patron of the arts

Happily, the plotters didn’t have their way; one of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, was caught guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellar of Parliament and was arrested before being hanged, drawn and quartered along with his fellow would-be assassins.

 

Overshadowed by his predecessor Elizabeth I and son and successor, Charles I, James I is today popularly known mostly for the Gunpowder Plot and his epithet as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. The same can be said for his reputation as a patron of the arts. Elizabeth is known for her remarkable iconography as the ‘Virgin Queen’ and Charles is widely regarded as the most cultured and active collector of art in the history of the English and British monarchy – indeed, his acquisitions still form the basis of the Royal Collection today.

 

Despite his relative obscurity in the popular imagination, James I was a great and underappreciated patron of the arts. His reign (1603 –1625) saw great artistic achievements and progress, especially in the discipline of portrait painting, as James’ court attracted some of the greatest painters and architects to these shores.

 

At the start of James’ reign, the preeminent portrait painter in England was almost certainly Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561/62– 1632). Gheeraerts, who came to England from Flanders as a child, was described by Sir Roy Strong as ‘the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and Van Dyck’. Gheeraerts quickly became the most sought-after painter of the royalty and aristocracy of late-Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Known for his full-length portraits, and the remarkable detail with which he could render rich costume, Gheeraerts made Tudor art three-dimensional, as seen in the Ratton portrait above. He was also one of the first painters at work in England to properly convey the psychological intensity of his sitters, his portrait of Tom Durie, fool to James’ consort, Queen Anne of Denmark, being an excellent example.

 

This period also saw great artistic achievements on a far more diminutive scale. The miniature painters Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver both found fame in the reign of Elizabeth but continued to produce work of extremely high quality through much of James’ reign. Their portraits often took on a highly lyrical, even romantic idiom, never better typified than by Oliver’s cabinet miniature of the philosopher and diplomat Sir Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Chirbury.

 

James I’s artistic legacy wasn’t just painted, but architectural too. In 1619, James I commissioned the great Inigo Jones to build a banqueting house in part of the rambling complex of the Palace of Whitehall. Today it is all that survives of what was once the primary residence of the English monarchy; James II was the last king to live there before it was burned to the ground in 1698. James commissioned the great Inigo Jones who, a few years earlier, had built the first entirely classical building in England since antiquity: the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Jones had studied Vitruvian classicism in Italy and applied this to the Banqueting House. Built on two principal stories, the Banqueting House follows strict classical rules, with Ionic and Corinthian order pilasters, rusticated walls, swags, balustrades and pediments. It is hard to overstate how radically modern this would have looked in what was then a largely timber-framed London.

 

It is tragically ironic that in 1649, 27 years after Banqueting House was built, James I’s son, Charles, would step through a first-floor window of Inigo Jones’ masterpiece and onto a wooden scaffold erected for his execution by beheading. Whilst Charles is known for losing both the English Civil War and his head, he is also known as a great patron of the arts. Of all artists, Sir Anthony van Dyck is undoubtedly the painter most immediately associated with the unfortunate king. However, it was not in Charles’s reign, but rather during that of his father, that Van Dyck first came to England. In 1621, Van Dyck travelled from Antwerp to London at the behest of James’ court favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He stayed in England for a few months and it was here that he first encountered the work of his great artistic hero, Titian, some of whose works were held in the Earl of Arundel’s collection. During this brief visit, Van Dyck executed one of the most strikingly modern portraits painted in England to that date. His double portrait of a half-nude George Villiers and his wife, Lady Katherine Manners, in the guise of Venus and Adonis would have shocked a contemporary English audience. This quickly painted, racy depiction of the self-promoting couple shattered the stiff, meticulous English school of painting that had predominated up until James I’s reign.

 

Whilst James I’s reign doesn’t receive the attention it deserves artistically, it represents a crucial moment in English art history. His reign saw the culmination of the artistic conventions of the Elizabethan era, with artists like Gheeraerts, Hilliard and Oliver producing accomplished, mature work. His reign also ushered in entirely new, landmark moments in the artistic development of these isles, Inigo Jones’ classicism surely being the best example. Finally, it was James’ reign that saw the young Van Dyck come to London and begin his revolutionary upheaval of British painting, and in doing so, set the model for portraiture in England for centuries to come.