DON’T MISS

The Annual Open Exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre opens this weekend, showcasing the talent of the diverse range of artists that call Orkney home. There is everything here, from sculpture to video work, pottery to textiles, with works ranging from fine art to craft. Everything is for sale and the whole exhibition is worth a browse, given the season that is forthcoming...

Annual Open Exhibition, Pier Arts Centre, 28 Victoria Street, Stromness, Orkney, 01856 850209, www.pierartscentre.com, until Dec 22, Tues-Sat 10.30am-5pm

with what poet Alexander Pope called “The sleepy eye, that spoke the melting soul,” are painted superbly in lavish yet informal clothes – indicating their high status and evoking, as Clarke points out in the equally lavish catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, “the sensuous and luxuriant atmosphere of the Restoration court”.

If Charles relied on reclamation to furnish his empty palaces, he also relied on goodwill gifts, which included works by Italian masters from Da Vinci to Veronese and Gentileschi.

Then too there was the famous

“Dutch Gift” from Holland and West Friesland, and vast libraries of books, lavishly bound where he could afford, to demonstrate both his cultural and scientific interests, many examples of which are shown here.

There is another vein, too, to this exhibition, in the works that immortalise the martyrdom of Charles’ father, sometimes explicitly, sometimes more symbolically. In his bedroom at the old palace at Whitehall, Charles II hung Carlo Dolci’s painting, worked in contemporary 17th-century clothes, of Salome with the Head of John the Baptist.

It brings a sharper edge to this ostentatious tale with its dark beginnings that is reflected at the end of the exhibition in two small books which belonged to Charles’ brother and ill-starred Roman Catholic successor, James II/VII. In one, like his father before him, he writes down instructions for ruling to his infant son – instructions, as he probably realised, that would never be put into practice, for in the aftermath of the 17th century, all the art in the world could not put a Catholic on the throne.

Charles II: Art and Power, Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Canongate, Edinburgh, www.rct.uk, until June 2, daily, 9.30am-4.30pm, £7.20/concessions available