Art
The Reign of Charles II THE delightful loan exhibition illustrating the reign • of Charles II., which has been arranged at 22 and 28 Grosvenor Place for the benefit of H. e Young Women's Christian Associa- tion, forms a pendant to the great French Exhibition at Burlington House. For it was at the Restoration that French influence became potent in England, in the domestic arts as well as in politics, and introduced the ordered grace which was the note of Versailles. The furniture, ornaments and pictures with which the rooms are crowded make this fact very clear, even if there were not the original of the Secret Treaty of Dover, lent by the Hon. Charles Clifford, to remind one that Charles II was a pensioner of the Grand Monarque. Mignard's bold portrait of Hortense Mancini looks very much at home here among the Lelys and Knellers, just as Lely, for all he was Van Dyek's pupil and successor, would be in place among the late seventeenth-century Frenchmen at Burlington House. The cabinets and tables and bracket-clocks, of which there are some superb examples, are definitely French in style, dignified, rather ponderous, but relieved by a pleasant fancy in inlay or in lacquer or in ormolu, such as the Court of Louis XIV loved.
Every aspect of a reign that marked a new epoch in English history is illustrated here. The portraits are remarkable. The King has lent two of Lely's best, and best-known, works, Elizabeth Hamilton and Frances Stuart, and from other owners come many portraits of Charles himself and his Queen, his pretty sister. Henrietta (` Minette '), and his statesmen and courtiers—Clifford, Arlington, Halifax, Shaftesbury, Lauderdale, Buckingham, and the rest., It is interesting to find examples of English painters like" old" Stone, and of the solid painstaking Dutchman Iluysman, whose large portrait of the King and Queen is a considerable performance. From the purely artistic standpoint the case of miniatures by Samuel Cooper, greatest of English painters in little, should be noted ; he at any rate owed nothing to France.
Charles's adventures on his flight from Worcester are reflected in a roomful of pictures, prints and relics of all kinds. The Lambeth Delft plates showing the King's head peering out of the Royal Oak must have been common in every loyal household, and the views, painted or engraved, of Boscobe/ are morally characteristic. The King's interest in shipbuilding and in natural science is made evident by some fine ship models, including one of a fully-rigged yacht similar to that which the Dutch gave him, and by Boyles air-pump and other apparatus which delighted Charles's Royal Society. The early documents of the Hudson's Bay Company and Penn papers relating to the foundation of Pennsylvania are here, and there is a letter from Pepys to Evelyn. Again, the King, like Louis XVI, was a connoisseur of clocks and watches—is it not recorded that on his death-bed he warned his servants to remember to wind up a favourite eight-day clock ?—and, therefore, we have here a large and curious collection of examples of Caroline time-keepers. Nor is the lighter side of Court life forgotten, though the King probably did not use the pack of cards illustrated with pictures of the alleged Popish Plot.
For the collector the exhibition has nothing finer than the silver plate in the first room. It is a truly superb show of tankards, cups, dishes, candlesticks and so forth. These authentic and mostly dated examples of English silversmiths' work are thoroughly insular for the most part, like the Duke of Devonshire's exquisite carving in lime-wood of a point-lace cravat, a bird and a portrait medallion by (trifling Gibbons,
which is a technical masterpiece. EDWARD HAWKE.
Previous page
