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"And what were his pictures but to paint out his power?" Portraiture, Authority and Identity in Cromwellian England
Dr Helen Pierce (History of Art, Aberdeen)
In terms of art production and patronage, the 1650s have been cast as the dull decade of seventeenth-century England; with the glittering Caroline court replaced by the austere, Christmas-cancelling rule of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan-led government, this turn of authority was enough to lay the visual arts, in the words of John Evelyn, “in the dust”. Indeed, the current exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in London, Charles II: Art and Power, highlights a variety of ways in which this Stuart king sought to reassert his monarchical supremacy from 1660 onwards through a slick PR campaign of particularly visual splendour.
But were the 1650s really such a creative low-point for artists and their patrons? In this paper, Dr Helen Pierce will examine the role of image-making during this decade, with a particular emphasis on portraiture, the most common and familiar genre of art in mid-seventeenth-century England, and its contribution towards the construction of identity and authority in the novel context of a republican society. 