Elizabeth Goldring

A passion for painting at the early Stuart courts

Charles I’s patronage of the arts, in particular, inspired his courtiers to commission their own family portraits and spend fortunes on acquiring Venetian masterpieces

Henry, Prince of Wales, by Robert Peake, 1610. [Alamy] 
issue 04 March 2023

Four years ago Roy Strong – one-time director of both the National Portrait Gallery (1967-73) and the V&A (1973-87) – published The Elizabethan Image: An Introduction to English Portraiture, 1558-1603, in which he returned, after more than a 30-year hiatus, to the subject with which he first made his name: the imagery of Queen Elizabeth I and her court. Now 88, the indefatigable Strong has produced a follow-up volume charting the fate of portraiture (and painting and the visual image more generally) at the courts of Elizabeth’s Stuart successors, James I and Charles I.

Charles I would travel by barge to Van Dyck’s studio to pass the time with him and watch him paint

The format of – and thinking behind – The Stuart Image is the same as in the previous book. Strong has revisited his own landmark research from the 1960s to the 1980s and knitted it together with the findings of subsequent generations of art historians to create an accessible, jargon-free introductory text for the general reader.

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