3. The History Painter
Everyone knew what a real painter was like. You just took a look at the knights: Sir Peter Paul Rubens or Sir Anthony van Dyck: cavaliers with libraries. They sat high in the saddle but were also steeped in poesy ancient and modern: Virgil to Tasso and everything in between. Somehow, too, they managed to be personally nonchalant and expressively passionate all at the same time. They had Giambattista della Porta on their shelves, so they were versed in the many ways in which the affetti, the emotions, were written on the face. Horror and pathos, lust and guile, were their mood music. They knew how to make a Mary grieve so inconsolably you would well up at the sight of her blue gown of sorrow. Violence was second nature to them. They would sketch you a red-eyed eagle lunching on the liver of Prometheus and their workshop would fill in the details four feet high and six wide. Their silks and satins were waterfalls, the women who wore them opulently formed, hospitably spilling from their bodices. The painter-cavaliers were fastidious connoisseurs. Lodged in Rome or Naples, they would venture into dangerous alleys to seek out men with dirt-packed nails who would unwrap an oily rag to reveal a cameo of a patrician woman from the time of Diocletian, her hair piled and pinned at the back of her head. They would give the man what he wanted, take the beauty back home to Antwerp, settle her in a cabinet of inlaid rosewood and send word to friends to come and share the pleasure.
Contemporaries wrote of them as princes of the arts; familiars of popes and kings, receiving admirers at the correct hour, in houses that were like little courts. They were at ease in the company of sovereigns, trod the precarious line between informality and presumption with scrupulous precision. When Van Dyck painted his own face suffused with the reflected light of a great sunflower, understood to signify the particular favour of the King, it was no vain boast.
But who now would be to King Charles II what Van Dyck had been to his father? Though Charles, who had spent much of the Interregnum in Holland, continued to favour foreigners – Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller – Isaac Fuller, as home-grown as they came, saw no reason why the Serjeant Painter to the King should not be him. Though his detractors pictured him as a drunken, ham-fisted boor, he could trade Martial and Juvenal with the best of them; yes, and the schoolmen, too. Had he not served an apprenticeship with François Perrier in Paris, the artist famous for making etchings and paintings after antique busts and statuary? It is possible, in fact, that Fuller might have been in Perrier’s studio at the same time as Charles Le Brun, who would go on to be the premier history painter for Louis XIV at Versailles and the author of the most influential text on the physiognomic expression of emotions since della Porta. In emulation of his teacher, Fuller himself published a book of instruction on etching after the antique style. So it was not entirely deluded for him to imagine that he had all it needed to become the first truly native history painter of England. Surely the time had arrived when the country could wean itself from those Flemings and Dutchmen, Germans and Huguenots, who had all but monopolized Britain’s art?
The irony is that the Fuller who loftily condescends to us from a life-size, heroic self-portrait, his face composed into something not entirely unlike Van Dyck’s Charles I, owes everything to Dutch and Flemish prototypes well known in England. The frontal pose, the figure brilliantly illuminated in the darkness, the theatrical props, the extravagant costume – red velvet pillbox cap jauntily worn to one side; the thespian striped silver scarf knotted at his throat – all evoke the Dutch followers of the Caravaggio style: above all, Gerard van Honthorst’s fiddler. The paragones, the great exemplars marching through Fuller’s ambitious vision, might have included Frans Hals, his Haarlem follower Jan de Bray and, without question, the parade master of a thousand poses in the mirror: Rembrandt van Rijn. Fuller knew that he was considered a merrymaker in the reign of the merry monarch: a decorator of taverns, a painter of stage sets. Very well, he did not deny it; a man must earn his bread, but had not the great Rembrandt also portrayed himself as a carouser in his cups, a ruffian and a bravo, and been none the less noble an artist for all that? The Dutchman had demonstrated there was more than one way to show your learning when he set the philosopher’s palm on the head of Homer; now Fuller placed his on the brow of his muse, Athena, while the other clutched a bronze figurine of her foster-father, Triton, who ploughed the seas with his trident and blew away despoilers with the trumpet of his conch. Isaac, too, was a good father to his boys, Isaac and Nicholas. One of them is here depicted looking, with a trace of anxiety as well as respect, at his father.
The heroic art-ego, prone to sink into the abyss of low spirits before ascending to the summit of inspiration, was first unveiled a century before in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, especially in his account of Michelangelo, and in Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, a threnody to the liberated, periodically homicidal demiurge. Self-portraits of the virtuosi – Dürer, Leonardo, Titian – escaped profane self-congratulation only by virtue of surrounding themselves with an aura of sacred wisdom, their bearded faces closely resembling saints’ or, in Dürer’s rather shocking case, that of the Saviour himself. The irascibly uncompromising Michelangelo made an unpersuasive gesture towards Christian humility by depicting himself in The Last Judgement as St Bartholomew, carrying his own flayed hide. In Fuller’s own time, there were other artists who, like Salvator Rosa, who painted himself in an attitude of majestic loftiness, were notorious for scorning their patrons.
Like all the rest, Fuller never meant to bite the hand that fed him. But his self-portrait, painted towards the end of his life, is the epitome of a brave face, an unapologetic retort to the scoffers. The first chronicler of a specifically English art, Bainbrigge Buckeridge, writing in the early eighteenth century, marvelled at Fuller’s success, given the ‘rawness of Colouring’, but conceded his ‘great Genius for Drawing and Designing History’. Buckeridge makes it clear that Fuller was well enough respected in the 1660s to receive commissions for the decoration of at least three Oxford college chapels, at Magdalen, All Souls and Wadham, where, in a virtuoso exercise he executed a painting on cloth in two colours. It seems likely that Fuller was thought of as a dependable royalist and thus a suitable candidate for the re-ornamentation of Oxford sites which, after Charles I’s court had been evicted from the town, had been punitively purged of decoration. He embraced the opportunity with the hearty gusto that was his trademark. At All Souls, fragments of his Last Judgement survive which make Fuller’s ambition to be the English Michelangelo all too glaringly obvious. He has, in fact, mastered the radical foreshortening needed for ceiling painting, so that powerful feet and hands appear to project into the space below. And there are some other details, too, which suggest that Fuller was not altogether a dud when it came to inventing a native English baroque. The head of one of his recumbent figures is a thing of wide-eyed beauty; juicy-lipped; blonde tresses blown in the wind. But the overall effect is damaged by Fuller’s less secure modelling of arms and legs, which seem surgically reattached to shoulders and hips. If anything, Buckeridge was understating the effect of the massively meaty if dislocated thighs and rippling biceps when he remarked that the ‘muscelling’ was ‘too strong and prominent’.
To later taste, at any rate, Fuller’s style was too profanely heroic for sacred decoration. When John Evelyn saw the All Souls paintings he commented that the fact that there were ‘too many nakeds’ in the chapel meant they were unlikely to last. In reality, it was less Fuller’s propensity for importing Renaissance mannerism into Oxford than his painting them in oil straight on to unprimed wooden panels which doomed the pictures. By 1677, five years after his death, they were so badly degraded that there were already plans for their replacement, eventually effected in the next century by Sir James Thornhill. But there was also the sense of Fuller’s work being incongruously earthy and vernacular for a grandly dignified setting. Buckeridge commented that his designs were not executed with ‘due Decency, nor after an Historical manner, for he was too much addicted to Modernize, and burlesque his Subjects’. Somehow this was to be expected from an artist who was known for his partiality to low life. The ‘Extravagancies’, Buckeridge sniffed, were of a piece with ‘the Manners of the Man’.
Ultimately, the critics thought Fuller was better suited to painting taverns than churches. And this other line of custom was, in fact, an important part of his work. The Great Fire of London in 1666 had made work for artists when city alehouses destroyed in the conflagration were rebuilt (still in timber), incorporating indoor paintings to entertain their patrons. Dan Rawlinson’s Mitre in Fenchurch Street was one of those taverns which catered to sociable men about town and in government, such as Samuel Pepys, who regularly took his friends there. Rawlinson commissioned from Fuller a spectacular display, covering his walls and ceiling with the full complement of gods and satyrs disporting themselves with brimming goblets – Silenus, Bacchus, Dionysus and the rest – as well as a comely boy riding a goat and wearing a devilish grin. At the centre of the boozy rout was an enormous mitre: the high Church surrounded by low acts.
It was this promiscuous mixing of genres that damaged Fuller’s reputation with the critics of the next century – after which he was forgotten. A few surviving portraits – notably, a fine one of the political ‘arithmetician’ Sir William Petty – make it clear that, when he had a mind to, Fuller was perfectly capable of producing polished formal portraits. In fact, however, the folksy genre pieces which, notwithstanding those years in Paris, came more naturally to Fuller were used to demonstrate what an unapologetically English history-painting style might be.
In 1660, the lexicographer Thomas Blount (aggrieved that his dictionary had been supplanted by a Commonwealth book called New Words which had plagiarized many of his entries) published a popular history, Boscobel: or, the History of His Sacred Majesties most Miraculous Preservation … a History of Wonders. The epic yarn (still a good read) had everything: a loyal band of six brothers, the Penderels – servants, caretakers, a miller, and the like, devoted to saving the King; the intrepid Jane Lane, with whom Charles, going by the name of Wil Jones, one woodcutter, carrying a bill-axe, shares a horse. Moreover, the hero of the tale was famous for telling it, over and again, at the drop of a hat, not least to Samuel Pepys, aboard the ship bringing Charles back to England from his Dutch exile. In later editions of Boscobel, Pepys’s account was added to Blount’s version of the escape narrative.
In the early years of the reign, Blount’s book became Restoration scripture, and someone commissioned Isaac Fuller to make an epic cycle of paintings relating some of the ‘marvels and wonders’ of the story: the royal slumber in the branches of the great oak of Boscobel Wood, the donning of a woodman’s disguise, the wearing, as Blount describes it, of a worn leather doublet and green breeches, stockings with the embroidered tops cut off, ‘old shoos, cut and slash’d to give ease to the feet, an old grey, greasy hat without a lyning, a noggen shirt of the coursest linnen, his face and hands made of a reechy complexion by the help of the walnut tree leaves’.
The role reversal between King and commoner, complete with costume exchanges, was an ancient folk tale. The gestes of Robin Hood were full of it; Shakespeare’s and other Jacobean comedies drew heavily on the same motif, and often with the same purpose of a fallen or exiled prince discovering the virtues of the common people, a natural nobility much to be preferred over mere accidents of birth. But if it is impossible to imagine Charles II’s father rubbing his cheeks with walnut-leaf dye, that is because the whole thrust of early Stuart ideology had been to remove the monarchy as far as possible from the common sort: to translate James and Charles into ‘little gods on earth’ accountable to no one except the Almighty himself. For that purpose, the great baroque flying machines of ceiling gods painted by Rubens and the imperial horses of Van Dyck were perfect.
But now, after the trauma of the Interregnum, something else was needed. Charles II was probably not a whit less autocratic than his father, and the ceiling of his bedchamber at Whitehall was also painted with a densely allegorical programme of the return of the Golden Age. But the new King’s common touch was not altogether a myth; and it was a staple of Restoration history that his accession answered to a deep popular yearning in the country, a romance seemingly supported by the vast, genuinely joyful crowds greeting his return. So without altogether sacrificing the courtly iconography of divine right, it might have been timely for a painterly accompaniment to the Blount book to make the most of Charles II’s closeness, whether enforced or not, with his rescuers.
Enter Isaac Fuller. Since the five paintings he made are enormous – some seven foot by eight – it seems likely that they were done at the behest of a royalist aristocrat, possibly the Earl of Falkland (as they ended up in that estate), with some sort of great hall in which to display them. They constitute a kind of fustian version of Rubens’s immense cycle for Marie de’ Medici, the Dowager Queen of France, who was also obliged to make a hasty escape from Paris. And Fuller’s undoubted gift for roughing up royal imagery till it was part of common folklore was exactly suited to the task.
Fuller goes for it. He depicts the handsome face of the King very much as he was in 1661 rather than ten years earlier, when he was a youthful twenty-one, the better for people to identify the story with the Charles they now knew. But stripped of any semblance of royal attire, Charles and the woodman look plausibly alike. The woodman had shorn the royal locks and dirtied up the royal cheeks. And what Fuller lacks in high style he makes up with a real gift for popular storytelling. Hidden in the famous ‘royal oak’ of Boscobel, Charles sleeps with his head in the lap of his faithful Colonel Careless, who (especially given his name) has to take care the King doesn’t fall out from the branches. Fuller paints the colonel, anxiously wide awake of course, with his arms wide, ready to catch Charles, just in case, knowing he would never have dared to hold the King directly. Fuller considers the King’s varying sense of indignity, sometimes humoured; sometimes not. The mill-owner’s nag he was forced to ride is plainly overdue for the knacker’s yard, and Fuller gives Charles an expression of appalled mortification at the humiliating absurdity of his position. Famously, he asked Humphrey Penderel, the miller, why the ‘dull jade’ trotted so slowly, to which the honest man replied it was because it was carrying ‘the weight of three kingdoms on his back’.
Behind the horse-jokes was, of course, the stupendous grandeur of Van Dyck’s equestrian portraits of Charles I. So when finally his son Charles II heads off to Bristol (still slowly, dodging Cromwellian patrols) on the back of Jane Lane’s mount, Fuller gives the grey more spirit and vigour. In fact, he overcorrects, making the horse lift its front legs in the posture of the levade, almost always reserved in paintings for great generals and sovereigns, and certainly impossible to execute with two pillion riders. Jane Lane, the sister of another royalist colonel, had herself become something of a popular heroine in history lore, eventually escaping herself to Paris, where she was close enough to the young king for the predictable stories to surface.
King Charles II on Humphrey Penderel’s Mill Horse, by Isaac Fuller, 1660s
We have no idea how Fuller’s history cycle was received; but the very fact of the paintings’ survival means they could not have been a complete disaster. If the Charles cycle was also a long way from what Le Brun would do for Louis XIV at Versailles, it did indeed have a distinctively English tone. In the pictures’ earthiness, their closeness to popular history prints, in their twinship with literary narrative, their vernacular humour, they are an anticipation of the visual storytelling that in the much more gifted hands of Hogarth would become the English way of picturing their past.
He would never be Sir Isaac Fuller. Dutch and German artists, in their awkwardly grandiose style, would still define what histories were supposed to be. Fuller himself sank into a tank of drink in the pubs he had painted. No wonder, then, that in his flamboyant self-portrait towards the end of his career, the bravura self-promotion is shadowed by at least a touch of mournful regret.