she-philosopher.com: Gallery exhibit (Lely's Psychological Portraiture)

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© March 2005; revised 11 January 2007

Gallery Exhibit, Catalog Nos. 41 & 42 & 43 & 44 & 45 & 46 & 47 & 48 & 49 & 50

NOTE: A new (revised & expanded) edition of this Gallery Exhibit is forthcoming.

Richard Lovelace on Sir Peter Lely’s Talent for Psychological Portraiture, 1647

PETER LELY WAS BORN, under the name of Vander Faes, in Westphalia (Soest), to Dutch parents. His father hailed from a house in de Lelye on the western side of the Noordeinde of The Hague, and it was from this location of the family house that, by 1637, he acquired the name Peter Lely — and along with it, the identity of a great landscape painter and portraitist.

In 1641, Lely visited England, where he would reside until his sudden death in 1680. Already by 1650, while still in his thirties, Lely (heavily influenced by Anthony Van Dyck in London) had achieved great acclaim and was considered by many to be England’s finest portrait painter. Appointed principal painter to the king in 1661, and knighted in 1679, Lely achieved his greatest prominence after the Restoration, under the royal patronage of Charles II.

Charles I, with his second son, James, Duke of York, in 1647
Painted by Peter Lely (1618–1680).

View an enlarged 1000 x 802 pixel JPG image (174KB)

With his large studio of assistants, Lely brought the mass production of portraiture in England to a new level.

While modern art critics have noted the “mass-produced quality” of some of Lely’s output — for example, his portraits of women (in the style of Van Dyck) show his female sitters in loose-fitting dress, usually made of satin, before standard backgrounds of fluted columns and drapery — at least one of his contemporaries was struck by Lely’s skill at psychological portraiture, given the right subject. In verses dated ca. 1647, the poet-painter, Richard Lovelace, praised Lely’s unique ability to “dr[a]w a Minde.”

RICHARD LOVELACE (1618–1658) was described by his contemporaries, John Aubrey and Anthony Wood, as “one of the handsomest men in England” — and also as a casualty of the civil war. Lovelace spent his entire fortune (as heir to great estates in Kent) in support of the Royalist cause, and was twice jailed for his political activism. He died in abject poverty — lodged in “obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants,” and wearing “ragged cloaths (whereas when he was in his glory he wore cloth of gold and silver)” — of a consumption brought on by debilitating melancholy, the psychosocial response of a “prowd” and inflexible man to the Royalists’ changed condition.

The following verses conclude a “famous piece of ecphrastic poetry” written by Lovelace after viewing Lely’s portrait (painted sometime between the end of August and middle of November 1647) of Charles I with his second son, the future James II. Lely’s painting and Lovelace’s verses pre-date the Regicide (Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649), but both texts are the work of artists trying to come to terms with the crumbling Royalist position at the end of the First Civil War (May–June 1646), and with Charles I’s subsequent imprisonment and declining fortunes throughout 1647.

In particular, Lovelace’s verses compliment Lely on his moving account of unbowed royalty, painted “with so bold a spirit / And soft a grace”:

Not as of old, when a rough hand did speake

A strong Aspect, and a faire face, a weake;

When only a black beard cried Villaine, and

By Hieroglyphicks we could understand;

When Crystall typified in a white spot,

And the bright Ruby was but one red blot;

Thou [Lely] dost the things Orientally the same,

Not only paintst its colour, but its Flame:

Thou sorrow canst designe without a teare,

And with the Man his very Hope or Feare;

So that th’amazed world shall henceforth finde

None but my Lilly [Lely] ever drew a Minde.

Lois Potter’s sensitive reading of both texts emphasizes Lovelace’s fascination with paradox in Lely’s painting: “the emotional charge which it creates between king, prince, and spectator, while apparently suppressing all emotion” (Potter 1989, p. 67).

To drive home his point about the hidden powers of Lely’s psychological portraiture, Lovelace relies on an orientalist metaphor — “Thou dost the things Orientally the same” — thus invoking a cultural commonplace among virtuosi concerning oriental unities. In juxtaposing the unity of signifier and signified found in the Chinese (Oriental) character with the crude visual hieroglyphs “of old” emphasized in emblematic picturing, Lovelace constructs an eastern frame for Lely’s western art, thus enlisting yet another principle of the well-entrenched doctrine of the coincidence of opposites. Later in the century, Samuel Butler would write in Hudibras of how “The extremes of glory and of shame / Like east and west become the same.”

The unusual human and psychological dimension of Lely’s visual rhetoric in the 1647 portrait of Charles I and son is most apparent when set against what Lois Potter describes as “the old-fashioned iconic royal portraits of Queen Elizabeth I.” Lovelace is most struck that, as perceived through Lely’s empathic eye and brush, “the king needs no crown to express his innate royalty” (Potter 67).

Robert Hooke’s portable camera obscura
(designed in the early 1660s)

Of note, Robert Hooke apprenticed briefly with Lely, ca. 1648/9, shortly after his father died (when Hooke was 13), leaving young Robert £100 for this purpose. But Hooke incurred such severe headaches from the paints at Lely’s establishment that he soon removed himself to the more congenial atmosphere of Dr. Busby’s Westminster School, where he flourished under Busby’s tutelage. A maturer Hooke would return to Lely’s studio in 1675 to demonstrate the use of a portable camera obscura he had designed during the 1660s, and to discuss with the celebrated artist additional means “of helping the sight.”

Artwork for January page of 2002 Peace Calendar from the Syracuse Cultural Workers

A modern appreciation of “the China Character” and its conceptual art

This popular portrait print of Elizabeth, published by Sudbury & Humble during the early years of the 17th century, shows the Virgin Queen in full royal regalia — holding sceptre and orb, bejeweled in a triple chain of pearls — all recognizable icons of Elizabethan power and rule.
And just in case the viewer does not hold a monarch so represented in sufficient awe, a 2-part, 3-line gloss is added at the bottom of the print:

[on the left]

Th’ admired Empresse through the worlde applauded / For supreme Virtues rarest Imitation: / Whose Scepters rule fames lowde-voyc’d trumpet lawdeth.

[on the right]

Unto the eares of every forraigne Nation / Cannopey’d under powerfull Angells winges / To her Immortall praise sweete Science singes.

Engraving of Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Engraved by William Rogers after Isaac Oliver.
View an enlarged 1190 x 1496 pixel JPG image (424KB)

This portrait engraving of the House of Stuart also popularized the symbols of royal power, here closely associated with the “divine right” of kings.

The 2-part gloss at the bottom of the print takes a less rhapsodic tone towards the royal sitters than did Sudbury and Humble’s print of Elizabeth I:

[on the left]

“The most High and Mighty Monarck JAMES by the grace of God king / of Great Brittaine, France, and Ireland. Borne the 19 of June. 1566.”

[on the right]

“The most excellent Princesse ANNE Queene of Great Brittaine, / France, and Ireland. Borne the 12 of October. 1574.”

Engraving of James I and Anne of Denmark, King and Queen of England.
Engraved by Renold Elstrack, for publication by Sudbury & Humble.
View an enlarged 1180 x 1470 pixel JPG image (397KB)

Leona Rostenberg has documented the considerable influence of the portrait engraving — “which enjoyed a popularity similar to that of the cabinet photograph of the Victorian age” throughout the Stuart period — within the 17th-century world of professional image-making and socio-political commentary.

As the distributors of portrait prints, Sudbury and Humble and the growing rival firms of the Hollands and Peakes not only benefitted from the increasing sales but also stimulated artistic productivity in this particular field. Actually the early Stuart specialists nurtured a new business commodity and forseeing its future growth and success they, like any modern entrepreneur, cultivated it carefully and shrewdly.

(Rostenberg 1963, p. 3)

The prosperity enjoyed by the printseller was based not only upon a knowledgeable pursuit of his trade but also upon the response of an enthusiastic public which could purchase at a relatively reasonable price a handsome, decorative and useful item. The specialist dealer had become an entrepreneur in mass production. The medium of line-engraving in its reproductive process had become for many financially limited Englishmen the substitute for an original limning in oil. A plate of Delaram and a mezzotint of Browne satisfied the artistic cravings of the English collector who could not afford a Van Dyck or a Peter Lely. Since prints and maps in many instances could be acquired for less than certain household staples and articles of dress, the enthusiast could readily satisfy his aesthetic and practical needs in portrait and view, local and foreign maps.

(Rostenberg 1963, p. 92)

The prevalence of prints within the middle-class home, where they had multiple uses including interior decoration, grew along with the picture-sellers’ trade. For example, mountable prints were advertised in 1680 as

useful Pieces for Closets, Chimneys, Stair-Cases over Doors and Screens

by Richard Thompson, mezzotint dealer of the Sun in Bedford Berry.

And a full range of 17th-century conduct books and graphic design manuals instructed amateurs and professionals alike in the art of self-presentation, learned by studying “the best prints cut in copper.” The heroic posturings of 17th-century celebrities — mostly royals and aristocrats — were widely enough disseminated by way of portrait prints to have saturated Stuart-era visual culture.

That made Lely’s painting of Charles I with son, James, in 1647 remarkable in its picturing of royalty as a human, psychological state. Earlier portraits of Charles I by Van Dyck were heavily iconographic, showing the king, with crown and orb, in the full regalia of the ceremonial Order of the Garter:

Charles I, in 1636.
Painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641).
View an enlarged 470 x 712 pixel JPG image (77KB)

In her 2002 biography of Sir Christopher Wren (On a Grander Scale), Lisa Jardine argues that Order of the Garter artifacts were potent symbols, psychologically and politically, for royalists like Wren and his friend and colleague, Robert Hooke. As Dean of Windsor prior to the civil wars, Wren’s father had held a regal appointment as Registrar of the Order of the Garter. After the deanery at Windsor was ransacked, and the treasures and records of the Garter Order pillaged, Dean Wren and his family were evacuated to Bristol. Dean Wren took what Garter records he could safeguard with him, and later passed them on to Christopher, whose first responsibility after the return of Charles II to London on 29 May 1660 was to hand over to the new Dean of Windsor the Garter record books which his father had saved from destruction during the civil war.

The annual celebrations of the Order of the Garter recommenced with the restoration of Charles II, and Garter ceremonies were described in full by Elias Ashmole — one of the earliest Fellows of the Royal Society (with which he was associated as early as 1661) who founded the first university chemical laboratory at Oxford — in his book on the subject published in 1672.

But even during the royalists’ years of exile, Garter symbolism was still in play. For example, William Cavendish was given a Garter by Charles II on 12 January 1650, despite the fact that traditional Garter ceremonies could no longer be held at Windsor Castle, and it would take over 10 years before he could be invested. The investiture finally took place on 15 April 1661, with William’s son, Henry, serving as his proxy.

Another ceremonial portrait of Charles I (ca. 1630s–1640s), highlighting the insignia of the Knights of the Garter.
Painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641).
View an enlarged 860 x 1096 pixel JPG image (180KB)

Regalia of the Order of the Garter, with the St. George medallion (said to be the one Charles I wore on the scaffold), at bottom center.
Engraved plate by Wenceslaus Hollar from Elias Ashmole’s The institution, laws & ceremonies of the most noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672).
View an enlarged 870 x 692 pixel JPG image (164KB)

When he later painted a middle-aged Charles II, restored to monarchical splendor and his inherited legacy as Stuart autocrat, Lely reverted to the more traditional visual idiom associated with kingship. Charles II is shown in Garter robes, with crown beside him.

Charles II, ca. 1675.
Painted by Peter Lely (1618–1680).
View an enlarged 1060 x 1474 pixel JPG image (90KB)

from Carol Wax, The Mezzotint: History and Technique (1990):

“Tompson was among the first printsellers to recognize the commercial potential of mezzotint, and he specialized in promoting the art form. With his help, mezzotint evolved from an amateur pastime to a professional engraver’s art. Although Dutch artists were creating original as well as copied images in mezzotint and exporting them to England, Tompson’s grasp of the British print market’s demands for popular imagery pushed mezzotint further in the direction of becoming a reproductive medium. Tompson realized that portraits were the most lucrative subjects and that prints by professional engravers reproducing portraits by well-known painters of personalities of interest to the British people sold especially well. Among the printed portraits being collected at this time were those of people belonging to or connected with the royal family, lesser nobles, famous clergy, landed gentry, and the growing population of wealthy businessmen and their family members.”

Mezzotint of Charles II, King of England (late 17th-century).
Unknown mezzotinter, after painting by Peter Lely, for sale by Richard Tompson, the first active (ca. 1669-1693) London mezzotint dealer.
Richard Ollard points out that the softness of the mezzotint medium “mellows” the asperities of Charles II’s character, which are more pronounced in the Lely portrait of Charles II.
View an enlarged 1180 x 1710 pixel JPG image (204KB)

Other artists would copy Lely’s style, giving Charles II an imperious, almost disdainful air. Something of the man’s less-than-ideal human character is revealed in his face.

Charles II, ca. 1680.
Attributed to Thomas Hawker.
View an enlarged 410 x 539 pixel JPG image (105KB)