On Mytens the office of his Majesty’s “picture-drawer in ordinary, with a fee of 20l. per annum, was conferred in 1625, procured by the agency of Endymion Porter, who was the servant and relative of Buckingham, from the Duke.”[[169]]
Incited by the example of the Earl of Arundel, who employed a Mr. Petty to collect antiquities in Greece, Buckingham despatched for the same purpose Sir Thomas Roe, telling him, in explaining his wishes, that “he was not so fond of antiquity as to court it in a deformed or unshapen stone.”[[170]] Lord Arundel had begun to “transplant old Greece into England.” His agent, Petty, was indefatigable, “eating with Greeks on their work days, and lying with fishermen with planks,” so that he might obtain his ends. This valiant antiquary lost all his curiosities on returning from Samos, and was imprisoned as a spy, but, regaining his liberty, set forth again to his researches with the energy of a Layard.[[171]]
The principal medallist in the time of Charles I. was Andrew Vanderdort, a Dutchman, also patronized by Prince Henry. Upon the accession of Charles, Vanderdort was made keeper of the King’s cabinet of medals, with a salary of 40l. This cabinet or museum was contained in a room in Whitehall, running across from the Thames towards the Banqueting-house, and fronting the gardens westward. By Vanderdort the coins of the realm were designed; and to the commission to perform that work was added an injunction that he should superintend the engravers. To Vanderdort was once confided the preparing of the catalogue of the Royal collection, written in bad English, and preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford. It is related of him, that, being entrusted with a miniature by Gibson, the “Parable of the Lost Sheep,” he laid it up so carefully, that, when asked for it by the King, he could not find it, and hung himself from grief.[[172]]
It was owing to the suggestions of Buckingham that the great portrait-painter, Gerard Honthorst, was invited by Charles I. to England. Honthorst of Oxford. was a native of Utrecht, but had completed his education at Rome. He had many pupils in painting of high rank, and amongst them were Elizabeth of Bohemia and her daughters, the Princess Sophia, mother of George I., and the Princess Louisa, afterwards Abbess of Maubissen, being the most apt scholars of that family. It was owing to the early culture of the arts which both the sons of James I. had enjoyed, that it became an easy task for Buckingham to incite Charles to the patronage of great masters in afterlife. Solomon de Caus, a Gascon, was the instructor of Prince Henry, and probably of Charles, who inherited the pictures and statues which his brother had collected. Honthorst probably improved by his lessons the taste that had been already so well cultivated. At Hampton Court, a large picture on the staircase sometimes rivets attention, without conferring pleasure--for the taste for allegorical paintings has long since been extinct. It delineates Charles and his Queen as Apollo and Diana in the clouds; the Duke of Buckingham, as Mercury, is introducing them to the Arts and Sciences, whilst genii are driving away Envy and Malice. This, and other paintings, were completed by Honthorst in six months; the King giving him three thousand florins, a service of silver plate for twelve persons, and a horse. He also painted portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham, sitting with their two children; and it was likewise the Duke’s fancy to have a large picture by him, representing a tooth-drawer, with many figures introduced around the operation.
Horatio Gentileschi, a native of Pisá, was one of those who contributed alike to the collection of Charles and to the glories of York House, which, long before Buckingham’s death, had, we are told, become the admiration of the world.
Gentileschi was treated with a degree of liberality that was quite congenial to the feelings of Buckingham: he was invited to England, and rooms were provided for his use, and a considerable salary advanced to him. Some of the painted ceilings in Greenwich Palace were his work; and he ornamented York House in a similar manner. When it was dismantled, one of the ceilings was transplanted to Buckingham House, in St. James’s Park, the seat of Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. He also painted the Villiers family, and, by the Duke’s order, a Magdalen, lying in a grotto, contemplating a skull--a strange subject for the worldly and high-spirited Buckingham to select. But the delight of Charles and of his favourite was Nicholas Lanière, meritorious as a painter, engraver, and musician. It was Lanière who composed the music for some of Ben Jonson’s masques, in recitative. Lanière, after the death of Charles, set to music a funeral hymn written by Thomas Pierce. As a composer, he was salaried by Charles with two hundred a-year. He had, however, also painted pictures for King James; and it is stated that Buckingham, not being able to induce that monarch to reward him adequately, gave Lanière three hundred pounds at one time, and five hundred at another, from his own means.[[173]] Lanière had been instrumental in the negociation for the Mantua collection. After the death of Charles he was one of those painters who viewed with deep concern the dispersion of the Whitehall collection; and bought several pictures at the sale of what he had contributed to enrich.
Whilst ceilings were painted, pictures distributed on richly-carved panels, and in spacious galleries, there was even an attempt in those days to decorate with frescoes the exterior of houses, as in Bavaria, where even the dwellings of superior farmers are sometimes adorned in that manner. Francis Cleyn, a Dane, was called to England in the reign of James I., in order to improve also the manufacture of tapestry at Mortlake, to which James had contributed two thousand pounds. Hitherto, Sir Francis Crane, the proprietor, had worked only on old patterns; Cleyn brought new and original designs to the aid of the tapestry-workers. Five of the cartoons were sent by Charles to be copied. Cleyn also painted the outside of Wimbledon House in fresco; he designed one of the chimney-pieces in Holland House, and gave the drawings for two chairs, carved and gilt, with shells for backs, still there. In every possible department art was called into play. Drawings for the great seals were made by Cleyn. He published books for “carvers and goldsmiths.” Nothing was to be tasteless, clumsy, or inappropriate; and, with this spirit abroad, it is not surprising that the little that the Rebellion spared should be models for our own conservative generation.
Whilst Villiers employed portrait-painters on himself and on his family, he did not forget the old man at Brookesby, long since gone to the grave. Cornelius Jansen, by his order, painted a portrait of his father; probably from some family picture. It was in the possession of Horace Walpole, “less handsome,” he says, “but extremely like his son.”
The patronage extended by Charles I. to architects[[174]] was often directed by Buckingham; for the King and the favourite had but one soul between them. To exalt and improve the art of painting, they summoned foreign architects as well as painters to England, remunerated them liberally, and treated them with the courtesy due to one of the noblest of professions. Charles delighted to dabble with his brush on the canvas, his hand directed by the master, with whom he sat for hours. Buckingham’s few leisure days were devoted to his buildings and paintings. Amongst the English builders who worked at the Banqueting-house, under Inigo Jones, was Nicholas Stone, who was in 1619 appointed master-mason to the King, at the usual salary, of twelve pence a-day; but the extra work he executed for Charles was amply paid; and his salary during the two years he worked at Whitehall amounted to four shillings and tenpence the day.[[175]] Nicholas Stone designed four of the dials at St. James’s and Whitehall.[[176]] He rebuilt the fountains at Theobald’s and Nonsuch; his drawings are, it is to be feared, lost. He was the statuary employed by the Countess of Dorset to set up at Westminster the monument of Spenser the poet, for which he was paid forty pounds. His great talent lay in tombs; amongst others, he erected one for the Countess of Buckingham, the Duke’s mother, three years after her son’s death, in 1631, in Westminster Abbey, for which he received 560l. Doubtless, therefore, he was continually employed by Buckingham, and Stone’s various performances must have been just what the Duke required. He was the modest architect, who did not disdain to form and chisel the piers for gates--Inigo Jones designing them,--at Holland House. He built the great gate of St. Mary’s Church at Oxford, and the stone gates for the Physic Garden in that city,--also designed by Inigo. The figure of the Nile at Somerset House was by Stone; his skill, like that of Inigo, is familiar to us, though we may almost have forgotten the hand that had so much “cunning.” At York House, at Wanstead, New Hall and Burleigh, his fine face, with his love-locks, his plain collar, and tight doublet, were, we may be sure, often to be seen before ruin and desertion darkened those once splendid homes of Villiers.
Few men, it must be acknowledged, in so brief a space, have done more for the arts in this country than George Villiers. By Charles, his friend and sovereign, who survived him twenty years, much more was effected. Without their unceasing efforts, without even the almost pardonable extravagance that was directed to purposes so refined, England would almost have been devoid of paintings by the greatest masters, and, what would be almost worse, destitute of the love and reverence for high art which has come down to us from the time of Charles I., and which is now cherished, though unconsciously, in the breast of the poor artisan, as in that of the richest peer or commoner. The crowds who not only throng, but enjoy, the galleries of Hampton Court--and, still more, the humble visitors from the Faubourg St. Antoine and the Marais to the Louvre, on Sundays, in Paris--prove that a love of what is true and holy, and even sublime, in pictures, exists intuitively in the uncultivated mind, as well as in the highest intelligence of the soul. Those who called from its latent recesses this love of art in the seventeenth century are greatly entitled to the gratitude of that age to which the luxuries of music and painting are become necessities.