Exhibitions
British Baroque: Power and Illusion Tate Britain 5th February to 19th April
The later Stuart period, from 1660 to 1714, divided culturally as well as politically in 1688.
It might be expected that the principal influence on British art and architecture under the French-leaning Charles II and Catholic James II would have been French, and that after the Dutch invasion it would have been Dutch, but, generally speaking, the reverse was the case. As youths, the brothers had spent most of their exile in the Netherlands, which had formed their tastes, while Dutch William brought numerous French Huguenot artists and craftsmen in his wake.
In Roman Catholic Europe, the baroque was the art of the Counter-Reformation, but it was also a tool of political, in particular monarchical, power. Swirling apotheoses, horrifying martyrdoms and throbbing ecstasies used high emotion to capture believers’ hearts.
For the Sun King and his Stuart admirers, classical mythology more obliquely projected the divine right of kings, while also suggesting stability and prosperity. This last was despite the fact that the principal ingredient of the style, in painting and architecture – and perhaps also music – was the illusion of movement. For the aristocracy as well as the monarchs, in the words of the curators, ‘Mythological mural paintings, which frequently carried contemporary political messages, were designed to overwhelm spectators and impress upon them the power, taste and leadership of their owners.’
Just as their father had used Rubens and Van Dyck to advertise the glory of the dynasty, so his sons brought in foreign masters such as the mural painters
Verrio and Laguerre, the portraitists Lely and Kneller, and the marine-painting Van de Veldes as the advertising agents of their regimes.
This exhibition examines the different artistic expressions of the religions. It also presents less obviously baroque themes, such as still life, a glory of the Dutch 17th-century Golden Age. It must be remembered here that ‘still’ means not unmoving, but silent. More obviously, baroque is trompe l’oeil and there are magnificent examples, such as carvings by Grinling Gibbons and Sir James Thornhill’s designs for the paintings in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The great palace and country-house murals cannot be there. But there are models, designs and pictures of buildings (including Bifrons Park, pictured above) in what was one of the greatest periods of British architecture. It was a period of warfare, continuously after 1688, and so much attention will be paid to baroque as propaganda in heroic portraits and battle scenes.
As in politics, so in art, the Hanoverian succession in 1714 marks a turning point, from royal to aristocratic parliamentary rule and from baroque to rococo and neo-palladianism.