The Portrait
Soon after John Bankes junior had matriculated at Oriel, parliamentary forces under their Captain General, the Earl of Essex, established a forward post in the village of Wheatley, almost within sight of Oxford. Cavalry skirmishing went on for days while the defenders knocked down houses to open a line of fire for their artillery stationed at Magdalen Bridge. Judging that his forces could not take or even blockade fortified Oxford, Essex retreated to a position from which he hoped to intercept the queen’s munitions convoy. Prince Rupert thought the situation ripe for an evening’s entertainment at rebel expense. He sallied forth across Magdalen Bridge at 4:00 p.m. on 17 June, savaged a few rebel outposts before dawn, and drew units of Essex’s army into battle around 9:00 in the morning. After a hard fight in which John Hampden, the veteran of the cold war against ship money, was fatally wounded, Rupert could declare victory and return to Oxford in time for a late lunch. Report of the wounding of his old enemy Hampden struck a chord in Charles’s concert of civility. He sent Hampden a minister and offered to add a doctor; but Hampden had need only of the minister.78
The high probability of dying from disease or wounds suffered in sallies caused cavaliers who wished to leave their likeness to posterity to have their portraits painted. Several accomplished artists set up in Oxford, drawn by business opportunity and the hope, perhaps, of filling the top slot vacated by Van Dyck’s death in 1641. One of these adventurers was Hollar, by then attached to the court as drawing master to the Prince of Wales. Although portraiture was not his line, he drew a few royals, including Henrietta Maria and Prince Rupert, and, what was of greater value, Oxford itself, as it appeared in 1643 (Figure 50). He soon dropped from the competition, however, to go to his patron Arundel, who had not returned from his conveyance of the Queen and Princess Mary to the Continent.79 The legacy of Van Dyck fell to Cleyn’s only known student besides his own children. This anomaly, William Dobson, had worked for an alert lady in Mortlake who noticed that he could draw. She recommended him to Cleyn, who taught him technique enough to enter the king’s household as instructor in painting to the princesses Mary and Anne, and, perhaps, to join in decorating Ham House. From his master, Dobson learned what one authority depreciates as a “ponderous,” another as a “somewhat pedestrian version of the international mannerist style,” which, tradition has it, was improved by some exercise in the studio of Van Dyck.80 Dobson then set up for himself in London, where he made his name as a portraitist with his arresting depiction of Endymion Porter (Figure 51). Late in 1642, while still in his early thirties, he went to Oxford.
Figure 50 Wenceslaus Hollar, Oxforde (c.1643).
Figure 51 William Dobson, Endymion Porter (c.1643).
The evidence of Cleyn’s influence on Dobson lies in symbolic figures and reliefs in some of Dobson’s portraits and especially in an early canvas, The Four Kings of France, a satirical rendition of Charles IX, Henris III and IV, and François II, in which two crowned dogs wearing collars reading “Cathol[ic]” and “Hugu[enot]” fight over the prostrate body of France, the whole contained within a border recalling Cleyn’s tapestries. This complicated conceit arose from the brain of Sir Charles Cotterell, the royal Master of Ceremonies, to illustrate a history of the French civil wars that King Charles, facing one himself, wanted translated. Dobson portrayed Cotterell along with himself and Lanier in a picture said to show the “resoluteness, weariness and stress of a beleaguered existence,” or, perhaps, music, painting, and literature coping with their wartime situations. The painter is the only one courageous or curious or impudent enough to direct his gaze at the viewer.81
Dobson’s first commissions at Oxford included Prince Rupert. Thereafter lesser aristocrats, mainly officers of the king, sought him out. He portrayed them, even the bravest, in appropriate melancholy, apprehensive, anxious, even anguished.82 He tried to place in his portraits symbols indicative of the client, appealing to a taste downplayed during Van Dyck’s dominance, but quite in keeping with Cleyn’s narratives; and, although the press of people demanding his attention caused him to cut corners, he escaped the censure that Norgate directed at Van Dyck for a similar fault. “Vandike…[in Italy] was neat, exact, and curious in all his drawings, but since his coming here, in all his later drawings was never judicious, never exact.” With his quick talent, vigorous poses, and Venetian colors, Dobson became the new star, “the English Tintoret,” in the expert opinion of his sovereign.83 Demand increased. To help meet it Dobson took an assistant and may have called on, or joined forces with, his former instructor Cleyn. He had a studio on the High Street near St Mary’s and, it seems, lodging in St John’s; as a painter patronized by the king, Dobson could find accommodation in crowded Oxford.84
Despite his reputation as a portraitist in Denmark, Cleyn’s work for great people in England had centered on painting their houses rather than their persons. However, an album of his drawings that has recently come to light shows that he continued to sketch portraits. It contains several well-drawn heads, including those of Henrietta Maria and the young woman who became the Hero of his tapestries.85 When he returned to formal portrait painting in Oxford, it was not for long; only two examples, both owned by the National Trust, are known. One is of Williams and Bankes, the other, once attributed to Dobson, is of Sir John Crump Dutton, who had a large estate at Sherborne some 20 miles west of Oxford.
Sir John was a crotchety rich lawyer who had not been keen on the king. He had opposed forced loans, refused ship money, and served in the Long Parliament. Nevertheless, he went, or, as he later asserted, was taken by force, to wartime Oxford, given an honorary degree, and made a colonel in the Royal Army. This commission cost him £5,200 when he later had to compound with parliament for his estates (worth £60,000); he remained nimble enough, however, to ingratiate himself with Cromwell and support the Commonwealth. His portrait, hanging in the lodge he built at Sherborne, is similar in palette to the Kingston-Lacy picture, but without the deep melancholy; it exhibits a confidant, quizzical sitter, knowing his place in the world and not discontent with it (Figure 52).86 Why did Dutton choose Cleyn? Perhaps at Sir John Bankes’s suggestion. The lawyers knew, or knew of, one another. Attorney General Bankes had assisted the House of Lords when it heard a petition against Dutton arising from a family quarrel.87
Figure 52 Francis Cleyn, John Dutton (c.1643).
Cleyn’s painting of young Bankes and Williams has a naturalness that might have recommended it even to Prynne and his fellow pious logicians who reckoned that portraiture belonged to the genre of cosmetics. To them the deceit practiced by women who painted their faces and dyed their hair differed negligibly from the counterfeiting of cavaliers on canvas. Portraiture misleads by the cunning use of light and shadow, foreshortening and perspective; it turns daubs into icons. To ascribe reality to such fakery is to make a meal of a still life. Yes, no doubt, replied such connoisseurs as Norgate and Wotton, cozening is indeed the point of painting: a good picture gives pleasure to the extent that it deceives, its truth being in proportion to its falsity (Norgate); indeed, it is an “Artificial Miracle,” which can work miracles itself by prompting viewers to recognize the truth in caricature (Wotton).88 The picture of Sarpi Wotton distributed might serve as an example; the serene face marred by an assassin’s attempt illustrated both the evils of popery and the fortitude needed to overcome them—a message, if not a medium, entirely acceptable to Prynne’s faction.
Another reason for the pious to distrust pictures was their connection with the stage. Masques, declared Jones, downgrading Jonson, are “nothing else but pictures with light and motion.”89 A tragedy with a strong plot, said Aristotle, is like a well-conceived painting, ut pictura poesis. With deceitful colors applied con amore, portraitists can “catch the lovely graces, witty smilings, & sullen glances which passe sodainly like lightning” across the faces of their sitters and can claim a place on Parnassus alongside epic poets. Like poets, painters must bring out the universal in the individual, which, if
successful, must involve some distortion. Prynne was right, a portrait is a selective caricature, and therefore deceitful; but wrong in condemning the result as necessarily untruthful. Skillful portraitists reveal character economically, indeed, with the discipline of the most spare and retrograde Puritan. For good painters, again like poets (and also politicians), should not complicate their counterfeits with gimmicks; the multiplication of novelties in portraiture, as of neologisms in literature, shows not power to improve, but inability to master, an art.90
Cleyn’s portraits observe this sophisticated naturalism. Williams is convincing as a healthy sober man of middle age, perceptive, reliable, and sympathetically attentive to young John, whom he is trying to interest in the wider world represented by the carefully chosen items on the table. John is depicted more subtly. No doubt he is a perfect rendition of a listless adolescent, apparently indifferent to his studies and more interested in striking a fashionable melancholic pose with his splendid dark clothes and the awkward, if not impossible, posture of his left hand, a device Cleyn may have taken from Isaacsz or Van Dyck (see Figure 1).91 But the boy’s melancholy may also be of the genuine intellectual kind, as indicated by the approach of his right hand toward the table, his outsized head, and averted gaze. Is he suffering from the effort of thought? Is he sick, proud, miserable?
Williams may be recognized as a physician by his jewelry, if, as appears, his ring is of topaz, a gemstone reputed for its curative properties, and his ruff tie is of turquoise, known to promote healing. The objects on the table of cosmology are perhaps not entirely what they seem. The item that might be taken for a rolled-up nautical chart is a telescope with drawtubes. Surviving examples usually have a tooled leather covering or other decoration of the main body of the instrument; Cleyn’s version without decoration, perhaps a German or English model, improves the confusion of nautical chart and perspective glass.92 It does not resemble the conventional representation in his series on the Five Senses or the Seven Liberal Arts. The telescope in the liberal art “Astronomy” (see Figure 48) resembles the flute in “Music,” both being slender cylindrical wands; that in “Sight” (see Figure 41), aimed by a putto at grotesque work, is slightly more realistic; but, in contrast to the model in our picture, both belong to Cleyn’s world of make-believe. As we know, the telescope, alias perspective, prospective, or Galilean glass, had many meanings; and, although here its fundamental note might be a metaphor for travel or instrument of investigation, its overtones—clarity of vision, perception of truth, guide to life—would have been heard by educated viewers of Cleyn’s picture.
The telescope and its companions, the globe and books, do not have the sort of claim to reality as do the items carefully rendered in The Linder Gallery and many other contemporary depictions of studios and Kunstkammern.93 In contrast, the vagueness of the props in Cleyn’s double portrait enhances the real-life story of Williams and Bankes. The telescope can be mistaken for a rolled-up chart; the compass, though rendered delicately, may be for measuring or drawing; the books have no titles; and the globe has no features definite enough to fix a destination, although the portion of the globe facing the viewer suggests the North Atlantic as depicted in English maps of the 1630s.94 Sir John Bankes was familiar with this geography, from charters and grants he had drawn up when Attorney General, and so perhaps was Cleyn, from his association with the former Virginia Company’s former treasurer Sandys. If the landmass facing the viewer is North America, the brass pointer at the globe’s pole would indicate Europe as the likely destination of young Bankes’s travels.
A famous painting by Van Dyck of Lord and Lady Arundel sitting by a large globe (Figure 53) suggests another possibility. Arundel is pointing toward the island of Madagascar, whose colonization the Arundels were promoting. Endymion Porter had urged Charles to send an expedition to this tropical paradise under the direction of Prince Rupert (then, in 1637, only 17) to remove the French and Portuguese, and in 1639 the Arundels, as usual needing ready money and worried about possible enforcement of the recusancy laws against them, obtained royal approval to make the attempt. The earl contemplated going himself. So did Davenant: “I wish’d my Soule had brought my body here ǀ Not as a poet, but as a Pioneer.” In Davenant’s poem, the pioneers led by “the first true Monarch of the Golden Isle”—that is, Prince Rupert—destroy an unidentified enemy to open Madagascar to the English.95
Figure 53 Antony Van Dyck, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and his Wife Lady Alethea Talbot. The couple are caught considering a trip to Madagascar (c.1649).
That was poetry. In prose nothing happened until 1643, when a disaffected former employee of the East India Company, a surgeon named Walter Hamond who had visited Madagascar in 1630, advertised that the island groaned with gold and gems and boasted a soil so fruitful and water so plentiful that the “sluggish and slothful” natives lived off them without planting or sowing. Among their other merits was ignorance of navigation, which had almost ruined England with drunkenness from Germany, fashion from France, insolence from Spain, Machiavellianism from Italy, and pox from America. Hamond’s short account ends with the allurement that its women went naked, which at first “made our eyes unchast.” After a week the gallants could gaze where they pleased without quickening their pulse, “as we behold ordinarily our Cattell,” and had discovered that “the dresse of women, allures more than their nakednesse.” Inspired into rare agreement, parliament and king both authorized an expedition, which sailed, with 145 people, early in 1643. The adventure proved a disaster, as anyone who had read Heylyn’s Mikrokosmos would have foretold. “The people are treacherous and inhospitable,” he had written, ignorant, without religion or a calendar, “onely laudable…[in] restraining themselves to one wife.”96 The British expedition came to grief owing to fever, hunger, malaria, and the natives’ “barbarous shriekings, which they term singing.”97 News of the disaster would have scuttled any plan Sir John might have had to enroll his son in Arundel’s project to colonize Madagascar.
The compass John Bankes holds so listlessly, as if reluctant to measure the distance to Madagascar or Newfoundland or somewhere else he did not want to go, seems to be a pair of single-handed dividers convertible into a drawing compass. Although the basic design goes back to the sixteenth century if not earlier, no exemplar has come to light.98 Presumably Bankes would use it in his studies, if he devoted his Saturnine energy to them. Mindful of Wotton’s observation, “[e]very Nature is not a fit stock to graft a Scholar on,” we should think that Williams wanted not to make a mathematician or an astronomer of young Bankes, but only to have him learn cosmography to the extent Peacham and Fuller recommended for a gentleman of average capacity.99 If, however, the imperturbable boy was a true melancholic intellectual, he had easy access to a complete education in the mathematical sciences. John Greaves lived at Merton across the street from Bankes’s rooms at Oriel.100 Since Greaves had every reason to serve Sir John Bankes, to whom, as an elector, he owed his chair, we might reasonably conjecture that he did instruct young Bankes, and that the telescope, globe, and the Galilean book in Cleyn’s painting came from the cabinet of the Savilian professors. It had everything needed: Savile’s library, globes and telescopes, and a copy of the Latin translation of the Dialogue, the Systema cosmicum, in the first edition of 1635.101
Several colleges also had copies of the Dialogue. Payne gave his to Christ’s Church in 1642. The Bodleian has copies associated with Savile and Selden. Those now at Queen’s and St John’s, acquired in the 1650s, might have belonged to members there in the 1640s. Balliol, Greaves’s college, has a copy of the Dialogo of 1632 bound together, most appropriately, with Sarpi’s posthumous Historia della Sacra Inquisitione.102 Another would have been present if anyone at Oxford bought the copy or copies offered for sale in London in 1639.103 A reprinting of the Systema in Leyden in 1641 brought more copies, five of which would now be on deposit if one had not been stolen from Christ’s Church in the 1990s. The publisher of the reprint of 1641 misst
ated its content and purpose in a blurb that deserves preservation as unusually nonsensical: by returning the sun to its rightful place, Galileo’s Systema defeated the ancients and suppressed quarrels among astronomers.104 The only unidentified item among the props is the heavy book holding the Dialogue open. A guess at its identity will be made in due course.
Having the props and the people, Sir John had only to procure a painter. He could not commission his own portraitist, Gilbert Jackson, who had died soon after finishing his lifeless image of the Chief Justice.105 Perhaps Sir John invited Cleyn, whose work at Mortlake he knew, to work in Oxford; perhaps he found him there, in Dobson’s studio. Cleyn was ready for the work and eager to give of his best. His income had plummeted with the idling of the tapestry works and he still had children to educate. Three wanted to become artists. They were to make modest reputations, the girl, Penelope, as a miniaturist and the boys, Francis and John, as draftsmen. Evelyn saw pen drawings the sons made after the famous Raphael cartoons copied by their father, “where, in fraternal emulation, they have done such work, as was never yet exceeded by mortal man, either of the former, or the present age.”106 Nothing securely attributable to either of the sons seems to have survived.
Cleyn drew young Bankes seated on the chair on which Dutton had sat, the same sort of chair that Rubens and Van Dyck had used for some of their portraits.107 The posture thus imposed challenged the painter’s ability to depict the character of a melancholy sitter in the manner prescribed by Italian authorities. According to Alberti, “a sad person stands with his forces and feelings as if dulled, holding himself feebly and tiredly on his pallid and poorly sustained members.” Lomazzo arrives at the same place (a melancholic should be rendered as pensive, sorrowful, and heavy) after reviewing eleven delineable passions of the mind and bodily expressions of humoral imbalances. But Lomazzo concedes that slavish adherence to these rules does not produce a great work of art; which “cannot be attained unto, by the mere practice of painting, but by the earnest studie of Philosophie.”108 Lomazzo was an authority worthy of attention, another Aristotle in the opinion of his English translator, for the depth and extent of his “most absolute body of the [rules of the] Arte.”109 Cleyn knew the rules. It was by combining them with an “earnest studie of Philosophie” that he was able to portray a heavy melancholic young man, “holding himself feebly and tiredly” in a chair.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 33