Lely painted both Charles I, and Cromwell, who desired his painters to omit 'no pimple or wart,' but to paint his face as they saw it.
Among less notable personages Lely painted Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and his rough Duchess, once a camp follower, according to popular rumour, and named familiarly by the contemptuous wits of the day 'Nan Clarges.' It is with not more honourable originals than poor 'Nan Clarges' that Lely's name as a painter is chiefly associated. We know what an evil time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty detestable.
At Hampton Court also there are several of the eleven portraits of Admirals whom Lely painted for James II, when Duke of York.
Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, incorrectly Canaletti, was born at Venice in 1697. He was the son of a scene painter at the theatre. In his youth he worked under his father; a little later he went to Rome, and studied for some time there. Then he came to England, where he remained only for two years. I have hesitated about placing his name among those of the foreign painters resident in England, but so many of his works are in this country that he seems to belong to it in an additional sense. He is said to have 'made many pictures and much money.' He died at Venice when he was seventy years of age, in 1768. As a painter he was famous for his correctness of perspective and precision of outline (in which it is alleged he aided himself by the use of the camera), qualities specially valuable in the architectural subjects of which he was fond, drawing them principally from his native Venice. But his very excellence was mechanical, and he showed so little originality or, for that matter, fidelity of genius, that he painted his landscapes in invariable sunshine.
The great wood-carver Grinling Gibbons deserves mention among the artists of this date. He was a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in 1648. He came to London with other carvers the year after the great fire of London, and was introduced by Evelyn to Charles II., who took him into his employment. 'Gibbons was appointed master carver in wood to George I., with a salary of eighteen-pence a day.' He died at his house in Bow Street in the sixty-third year of his age, in 1721. It is said that no man before Gibbons 'gave to wood the lightness of flowers.' For the great houses of Burghley, Petworth, and Chatsworth, Gibbons carved exquisite work, in festoons for screens, and chimney-pieces, and panels for pictures, of fruit, flowers, shells, and birds.
Sir Godfrey Kneller was born at Lübeck in 1646, and was the son of an architect. He is said to have studied under Rembrandt; but if this be true, it must have been in Kneller's early youth. It is more certain that he travelled in Italy and returned to settle in Hamburg, but changing his plans, he came to England, when he was about thirty years of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait. Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to paint—not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter of Russia.
William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled more in his conversation than in any originality of observation displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to undertake the wigs, draperies, &c. &c., the amount of work in portrait painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman, but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year, in 1723.
As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing, and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden, Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by Kneller are what ought to be, in their designation, the Hampton Court Beauties. These are still, like the other 'Beauties,' at Hampton. The second series was proposed by William's Queen Mary, and included herself, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary Bentinck. To Sarah Jennings men did award the palm of beauty, but poor Queen Mary, who had a modest, simple, comely, English face as a princess, had lost her fresh youthful charm by the time she became Queen of England, and was still further disfigured by the swelling of the face to which she was liable. Her proposal to substitute the worthier women of her court for the unworthy beauties of her uncle King Charles' court was not relished, and helped to render Mary unpopular—among the women, at least, of her nobility. Neither was Sir Godfrey Kneller qualified to enhance the attractions of Mary's maids of honour and ladies in waiting, who, to complete their disadvantages, lived at a period when it had become the fashion for women to crown their persons by an erection on their natural heads of artificial 'edifices of three heads.'