Portrait of King Charles I (1600–1649), in Armour, After Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641); Anglo-flemish School, Probably C.1670–1720

This handsome and unusually intimate image of King Charles I brings one of Sir Anthony van Dyck’s most commanding royal inventions into a scale ideally suited to private display. Against a restrained brown background, the King emerges with remarkable immediacy: his pale face framed by luxuriant dark hair, his polished armour catching flashes of silvery light, and the gold chain and badge of the Order of the Garter providing the principal note of splendour. Stripped of the architectural and ceremonial apparatus found in many royal portraits, the composition concentrates instead upon the qualities that made Van Dyck’s image of Charles so memorable — refinement, chivalric authority and an almost melancholy elegance. The present painting is particularly interesting because the accumulated visual and comparative evidence points not towards a much later historicist copy, but probably to the later seventeenth century, when memories of Charles I, the Civil Wars and the restored Stuart monarchy remained powerfully alive.

The composition derives from Van Dyck’s celebrated portrait of Charles I preserved in the collection of the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel Castle, a work generally dated to about 1635–36.

Charles is shown almost frontally, his head turning only slightly while his eyes look quietly to one side. This subtle displacement is crucial to the portrait’s effect: it prevents the image from becoming rigidly heraldic and gives the sitter an unexpectedly introspective quality. A gold chain crosses the breast and supports the insignia of the Order of the Garter, whose badge — the Lesser George — represents St George overcoming the dragon. Charles was Sovereign of the Order, and its insignia was more than decoration: it identified him with the ancient chivalric traditions of English monarchy.

The prototype of the present portrait was created during the most outwardly magnificent, but politically dangerous, years of Charles’s reign. On 30 January 1649 he was executed outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The execution also helps explain why portraits such as the present work continued to be produced. During Charles’s lifetime important royal likenesses were necessarily replicated. Portraits were instruments of government, diplomacy, dynastic identity and patronage; approved images were required for royal residences, aristocratic houses, ambassadors and foreign courts. A successful composition by Van Dyck could therefore generate studio repetitions, independent copies and engravings while the original sitter was still alive. Professional copyists formed an important part of this visual economy. Henry Stone, for example, is specifically recorded as a portrait painter and copyist who frequently copied Van Dyck, while the Flemish-born Remigius van Leemput produced reduced copies of important royal pictures; his celebrated 1667 copy of Holbein’s Whitehall mural was made for Charles II and preserved a composition subsequently destroyed in the Whitehall fire.

After 1649, however, the meaning of such copies altered. Charles’s death generated an extraordinarily powerful culture of commemoration.

The portrait is presented in a substantial carved and gilded wood frame of Baroque character, enriched with dense scrolling foliage, floral and shell-like ornament, pronounced corner elements and a narrow leaf-moulded sight edge.

What makes this picture particularly appealing is the unusual combination of historical importance, manageable scale and visual authority. More than three centuries after it was probably painted, the portrait still performs the function for which such images were created: it makes the absent king vividly present. It combines the romance of the Caroline court, the tragedy of the Civil War and regicide, the culture of Royalist remembrance and the enduring prestige of Van Dyck’s portraiture in a single highly evocative Old Master painting.

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