Tag Archives: Stuarts

April 16, 2024

Jacobean Style

By daseger

Has anybody been watching Mary & George? So much texture! Dark and rich. I’m not sure what I think of the whole presentation in terms of its storyline and representations, but the ambiance and environment seem evocative to me, while also exaggerated: in the very first episode Julianne Moore’s Mary snares her second husband wearing a hat embellished by pheasant feathers and rabbit ears! Not being an art historian, I’m never sure whether or not the “Jacobean” style I admire is authentic or revived/amplified. But I like it. To me, it’s as if the early Stuarts ramped up everything Elizabethan—and then added their own more luxurious and whimsical touches. I love the very clever Anne of Denmark in this series: and she is the living, breathing clotheshorse I always thought she was. I’m not sure where the costume designer found her/his inspiration, but if I were charged with the task I would go right to a contemporary visual source: a portfolio of watercolor renderings of Royal, military and court costumes of the time of James I, “probably by an Italian artist.” I’ve been using these images in my classes for years, and while they certainly have a continental/Italian gaze, I still think they are representative of the age. Most of the experts seem to think that these images were made for a contemporary friendship album, called an album amicorum.

I assume these first three images are the King, the Queen, and their eldest son Henry Frederick, who died of typhoid in 1612—if they date from after that date, I guess that’s Prince Charles draped (like his mother) in fleur-de-lis, as the Stuarts were still claiming French sovereignty.

So many courtiers, or are these also the King and Queen? I can’t quite tell.I know those two never went riding around on one horse together, or cuddled under a tree by a big hat and a small castle.

These carriage scenes are great, but the most compelling images in this portfolio are those at the table—for meals and cards, or both. There’s just something about them: I love out-of-scale depictions and those are very BIG cards and wineglasses. The bright colors against the dark walls and the floor! The people somehow look both happy and wooden at the same time.

Julianne Moore is certainly not wooden in Mary & George and below she is in her big-eared hat: could it be a Jacobean variation on hearing all, as depicted by the more subtle (human) ears (and mouths and eyes) on Queen Elizabeth’s dress in her Rainbow Portrait and envisioned by a 21st century eye?

Queen Elizabeth, Julianne Moore, and Royal, military and court costumes of the time of James I, Folger Shakespeare Library.

5 Comments | tags: Art, Clothing, Costume Design, Cultural Representations, Customs and Manners, English History, ephemera, Stuarts | posted in Culture, History

April 3, 2024

Spring 2024 Reading List

By daseger

I have been reading! I intend to read more! So much writing and so much teaching over the past few years, I’ve had very little time for general reading, as opposed to targeted reading, trying to find the answer to some very specific question in as little time as possible. That’s not really reading, so I’m trying to get back into the “practice”. We have our Salem’s Centuries manuscript in now, and the semester is winding down, so I’ve ordered up a stack of books and am digging in. If you’re familiar with my reading lists you know there’s never a lot of fiction: novels cannot retain my attention unless I’m on a plane. Otherwise, I put them back in the stack and generally forget about them. I do have one novel on this list, Richard Harris’s Act of Oblivion, which is about the manhunt for two regicides in seventeenth-century New England, a topic I can’t resist. I haven’t started it yet, and I’ll be thrilled if I finish it. I like the idea of reading novels and I hope to return to fiction at some point, but that time is not now; I’m just too hungry for information, even when reading for pleasure. Most of these books are adjacent to some of my scholarly interests, but not spot-on, although I could have written this first one and wish I did!

This first batch of books (above) could be generally classified as early modern cultural history and I’m kidding, I certainly could not have written Jill Burke’s great book about beauty culture in Renaissance Italy. I included a few recipes for cosmetics in my book, The Practical Renaissance, and made both a mental and actual note (in one of my writing notebooks) to dig a little deeper into that realm but then forgot all about it. Burke’s book is both scholarly and accessible and if you’re interested in learning more about her topic check out the Wellcome Collection’s “Cult of Beauty” exhibit. Ulinka Rublack is another early modern historian whom I admire and her latest work is on the shifting patronage environment in that era, through the perspective of Albrecht Durer’s career. Like Burke, Rublack really opens what has been/could be a much more contained “world”. Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild. People and Animals after 1492 is also global in its orientation and focused on a topic which I explore in several of my courses (now that I think about it, ALL of my courses): how Europeans viewed the New World/ how the New World impacted the Old. In this case, all about animals. Spycraft is not quite out yet, but soon, and I really want to read it so I put it on this list. I just finished The Wisest Fool, a very engaging biography of King James I and VI, as I wanted to be all ready for the debut of Mary & George this week! Victoria Finlay’s Fabric: the Hidden History of the Material World, is one of those sweeping “commodity histories” which are always on my lists—I haven’t read this yet, but I enjoyed her last book on color.

The last three books are a bit more local: as noted above, Act of Oblivion is historical fiction, largely set in New England, Flee North is about the African-American shoemaker//abolitionist/author/ liberator Thomas Smallwood, and A House Restored is about the restoration of a Massachusetts house. Flee North is the only book on this list with any sort of Salem connection: Smallwood worked with Charles Torrey, former minister at the Howard Street Church in Salem, to organze escapes of enslaved men and women from the Washington-Baltimore region. I believe that Lee McColgan, whose restoration of the first-period Loring House in Pembroke, Massachusetts is detailed in A House Restored, is going to be one of the speakers at Historic Salem’s annual meeting next month, so I will be reading his soon-to-be released book in advance.

6 Comments | tags: abolitionism, Art, books, Reading Lists, Renaissance, restoration, Stuarts | posted in books, Culture

February 20, 2019

Really Rubbish Royal Relics

By daseger

Sometimes, no all the time, I think that I’m devoting too much time to social media, but occasionally you find yourself in the middle of some very interesting exchanges. The other day a really funny thread about the sheer dreadfulness of English delftware coronation plates from the late Stuart era unravelled on Twitter, and I couldn’t help but jump in, as I had just seen this William & Mary plate in a Sotheby’s auction and I needed some context and “conversation”!

William and Mary Sotheby's 2

Oh no, poor William, and even poorer Mary, with so much exposed. Neither looks very happy–or dignified. These crude plates started to appear with the Restoration, when people apparently sought them as symbols of a revived and “colorful” monarchy after years of dour Cromwellian rule. Many of the images of King Charles II in his coronation robes appear naive but charming, but by the time his niece and nephew were crowned, it looks like aesthetic standards have deteriorated quite a bit—or perhaps the potteries could not keep up with demand. When we look at these items now, they look comical, rather than reverential. The curatorial contributors to our Twitter exchange labeled these plates “Really Rubbish 17th-century Royal Memorabilia” so I am following suit, but I can’t help but also notice a distinct differentiation of display by gender in these plates: after Queen Mary’s untimely death (from smallpox, at the age of 32 in 1694), King William is depicted in a more stately fashion alone, and after he is succeeded by (poor) Queen Anne, we once again see the return of extensive decolletage. Why such excessive immodesty?

Coronation Plate Collage

William and Mary Charger BM

William and Mary Winterthur

editrs365881_603191-lpr_0

Queen Anne V and A

Delftware Queen Anne Ashmolean

William and Mary Coronation plates, c. 1690-94 from (clockwise): Samuel Herrup Antiques; Sotheby’s; and the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Queen Mary does come off a bit better (or at least more covered up) in SOME of the coronation plates in which she and William are standing, but it varies, as these two examples from the British Museum and Winterthur illustrate (and occasionally he is handing her the orb, which is good). It’s hard to make Queen Anne look good, but I don’t understand why she has to display such extravagant cleavage in these delftware plates from the Victoria and Albert collections and the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University.

7 Comments | tags: Antiques and Collectibles, Auctions, Decorative Arts, Gender, Memorabilia, Pottery, Royalty, Seventeenth Century, Stuarts | posted in Design, History

December 12, 2014

Anne of Denmark, Queen of Style

By daseger

We are used to queens, princesses, duchesses and first ladies being scrutinized for their sartorial splendor (or lack thereof), but this is really nothing new: public women, deemed so by their proximity to power or in some cases their own power, have always been subject to the fashion police. Queen Elizabeth’s projected image seldom escaped the notice of her contemporaries, and so too did that of her successor’s wife, Anne of Denmark, who was born on this day in 1574. When I first started studying English history I formed a perception of the Queen Consort of James I as sort of an English version of Marie Antoinette, concerned more with her dresses, jewels, and court life than her subjects. This was the historical view, formed by generations of historians who no doubt (at first) disliked Anne’s conversion to Catholicism, and easily perceived her clear delight in the staging of elaborate masques at court during a time of intensifying scornful Puritanism. And then there are her portraits, projecting an image of a lady that was not particularly beautiful, but certainly very well-dressed, all the way up until her death in 1619.

Anne of Denmark as Queen of Scotland, Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen, Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh; Anne of Denmark, 1614, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (c. 1561-1636); Anne of Denmark, 1617, Paul van Somer, both Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.

After she became Queen of England in 1603, Anne was able to dip into the Great Wardrobe of her husband’s predecessor as well as the caskets of royal jewels, but she also fashioned her own style by acquiring lots of new things: consequently you see an evolution from the “stiffer” Elizabethan style to a more elegant Jacobean appearance, so well illustrated by this last hunting portrait. But this transition came at great cost, noted by contemporaries and historians alike: in her article “Text and Textiles: Self-Presentation among the Elite in Renaissance England”, Jane Stevenson observes that “Against Elizabeth’s Great Wardrobe expenses of £9,535 in the last four years of her reign, we may set expenses of £36,377 annually for the first five years of James’s reign (a figure which does not include Queen Anne’s bills, though it does include clothes for [their sons] Henry and Charles). Towards the end of her life, Anne of Denmark had a wardrobe grant of £8,000 a year; additional, presumably, to what she chose to spend out of her general income, which was considerable.” James actually spent more than his wife on clothes, though she might have spent more on jewels: there is ample indication that she saw herself as a patron of the arts and collector, so this might have been rationalized as a national contribution rather than a personal extravagance. After all, upon his succession to the English throne, her husband proclaimed the crown jewels to be “individually and inseparably for ever annexed to the kingdome of this realme”. Whether for queen or realm, one great source–in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum– that gives us an insight into Jacobean style is the “Book of Jewels” of Dutch jeweler Arnold Lulls, a catalog of styles he presented to Anne, who clearly loved her brooches.

Queen Anne and her brooches, including one similar to the sacred “IHS” Christogram pictured in the Lulls book.

1 Comment | tags: Art, England, Fashion, jewelry, Stuarts | posted in Culture, History

July 7, 2014

Boscobel (American)

By daseger

A few more road-trip posts—then it’s back to Salem and work: I’m prepping for two summer courses and have several scholarly projects on the back burner. Every time I am in the Hudson River Valley visiting my brother, I go to see one or more of the grand estates in the region. On this particular trip, I was looking forward to seeing two Gothic Revival houses in the southern part of the Valley: Washington Irving’s Sunnyside, and nearby Lyndhurst. However, I presumed too much; I happened to be passing through on a dreaded Monday when most museums are closed, these two house museums included. Next time. Proceeding north toward my brother’s house in Rhinebeck I passed by the grounds of another estate which I had not seen–and the gate was open, so to Boscobel I went. I have to admit to a certain snobbiness on my part regarding Boscobel; it’s never been high–or even on–my “must visit” list for several reasons. First of all, it’s a Federal house, built between 1804 and 1808 by Loyalist States Dyckman (actually he died just after the foundation–his wife Elizabeth oversaw its completion). Now of course I love Federal architecture, but being from Salem I always assume that we have the best Federal houses right here: it’s Samuel McIntire or nothing for me! And as an English historian, the word “Boscobel” means only one thing to me: the English house where Prince Charles/Charles II hid out from Cromwell’s troops following the Battle of Worcester in 1851. So this Boscobel could only be a pale imitation–of either McIntire or the original. I also have a slight prejudice against historic houses that are transplanted, as this American Boscobel was: it was originally built in the slightly-more southern Hudson hamlet of Montrose, but moved to its present location in Garrison in 1961 (in pieces!) after it was threatened by demolition by a Federal construction project. But all of these “reasons” were stupid: Boscobel is well worth seeing: it has been meticulously reconstituted and its present site is simply stunning, with beautiful grounds and one of the most striking Hudson views I have seen–just across from West Point.

Boscobel: front, back (entrance from street), views from the house and river’s edge; herb garden and orangerie.

The interpretation of the house was also interesting–how it came to be and how it was reconstituted–particularly in regard to its furnishings. As a Loyalist, Mr. Dyckman had spent the Revolution in England and had bought lots of pieces while there, but Mrs. Dyckman seems to be have been more devoted to American furniture makers–including Duncan Phyfe. As all the furnishings were dispersed when the house went into decline from the late nineteenth-century on, its recreators had to either find original pieces or choose appropriate substitutes. It has been an ongoing process, but the house’s interior certainly gleams in perfect Federal fashion. I couldn’t take any pictures but the website seems to feature all of the rooms. The grounds were adorned with sculptures, the herb garden (though decidedly not in the right place) was in full bloom, and I got some more clues for my evolving research into in the relationship between English Royalists of the seventeenth century and American Loyalists of the eighteenth: altogether a very enlightening visit.

Boscobel in pieces, c. 1960; the grounds today.

2 Comments | tags: Architecture, Decorative Arts, Gardens, great houses, Loyalists, Stuarts, travel | posted in Culture, History, Travel

March 26, 2014

Monarchs and Monkeys

By daseger

When you teach with a lot of images, as I do, you’ve got to be ready to answer all sorts of questions, because students will notice every little thing and be much more interested in the margins than the focal point. I have been rendered answer-less on more than one occasion, so I always try to be prepared. When discussing queenship in my Tudor-Stuart class, for example, I would never, never, never show them two of my favorite portraits of queens, Katherine of Aragon by Lucas Horenbout and Henrietta Maria by Anthony van Dyck, because I know that their attention would almost immediately move away from the women and turn to the monkeys. Why would these two dignified Queens have their portraits painted with monkeys? Well, it varies with the Queen, so let’s start with Katherine, the first wife of Henry VIII, whose miniature portrait by Lucas Horenbout was painted in 1525, just about the time that Henry began the long process of attempting to annul their marriage, a desire that would eventually result in the severing of ties with Rome and the English Reformation.

I’m featuring several versions of this image: the original miniature (from the Duke of Buccleauch Collection), doubled for effect, and a later and larger copy on wood panels, featuring a younger Katherine and a clearer view of her monkey and its message–because there is a pretty obvious message here. Like her father-in-law, Henry VII, and several other contemporary royals, Katherine probably enjoyed having a monkey as a pet (and it was said to hail from her native Spain), but the pet has a purpose in this image: he (or she?) holds a Tudor rose in one hand and is reaching for Katherine’s crucifix rather than the coin she is offering to him. While medieval monkeys could represent all sorts of negative things–the Devil himself, foolishness, vice–the monkey of Katherine’s time was more likely a symbol of exotic worldliness and an imitator of man. A tethered monkey, like Katherine’s, can therefore represent ascetic discipline, which is reinforced by his gesture towards the cross: faith over greed. This is the message Katherine is sending out there, just as (and after) Henry is replacing her.

So now let’s look at two other depictions of royals and their monkeys: Daniel Mytens’ posthumous portrait of Katherine’s sister-in-law, Margaret Tudor, the Queen Consort of Scotland (Royal Collection), and Anthony Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, with “her” dwarf Jeffrey Hudson and a monkey (National Gallery of Art). What a contrast between these two royal portraits, which were painted at about the same time (1620s-1630s, though Mytens’ painting harkens back to an earlier era). The monkeys have lost their message and been reduced to mere exotic pets, especially in the extravagant depiction of Henrietta Maria: here the monkey is still tethered, but to the dwarf rather than the Queen. This is a woman whose extravagance (and Catholicism) would contribute to the intensifying division between the King and Parliament, a division that would soon lead to the English Revolution. So perhaps I can teach with these particular portraits–if the depictions of monkeys can open up a larger discussion of events as significant as the English Reformation and the English Revolution, why not?