A Reflection of the Sun: The Duke of Marlborough in the Image of Louis XIV

Abstract

This article investigates the influence of Louis XIV imagery on medals and tapestries commissioned by the first duke of Marlborough and his supporters from 1703 to 1711. To commemorate the martial ascendency of Britain, Marlborough and his allies employed models of representation developed for the Sun King by his image-makers to document his history visually. Here this is argued to be an act akin to spoliation — the theft of artefacts by a victor as symbolic enslavement of the vanquished enemy — ironically revealing the abiding influence of French culture on British material histories of the early eighteenth century.

Notes

1 Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban's fortifications at Tournai were begun in 1668, while the bust in question is after Jean Warin's famous marble portrait produced in competition with Gianlorenzo Bernini in 1665. On Vauban's fortifications, see Jean-Denis G.G. Lepage, Vauban and the French Military Under Louis XIV: An Illustrated History of Fortifications and Strategies (Jefferson, 2009). On Warin's bust, see Robert Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts For a Future Past (Aldershot and Burlington, 2015), ch. 6.

2 On the ‘great men’ model of history, see Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History; Six Lectures Reported, with Emendations and Additions (New York, 1859); and Robert A. Segal, ed., Hero Myths: A Reader (Oxford, 2000).

3 The first medal with a sun emblem that Warin produced for Louis XIV was struck in 1658, bearing the inscription NEC POTIOR NEC PAR [‘neither better nor equal’]. A jetton with the same image as this medal but with the inscription NEC PLURIBUS IMPAR appeared the same year. Hendrik Ziegler has shown that an emblem that appeared Julius Wilhelm Zincgref's book of 1619 likely inspired this device. Louis XIV took a radiant sun over a globe with the inscription NEC PLURIBUS IMPAR as his emblem for the grand tournament in Paris in 1662. This device was subsequently used for the reverse of several medals struck in the 1660s and 1670s and for many of the King's commissions. See Hendrik Ziegler, Louis XIV et ses ennemis. Image, propagande et contestation (Paris, 2013), pp. 29-35; Sylvie de Turckheim-Pey, Médailles du grand siècle: histoire métallique de Louis XIV (Paris, 2004), pp. 24-5; and Robert W. Berger, The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV (University Park, PA, 2003), p. 15, n. 22.

4 On the history of spolia, see Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney, eds., Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham and Burlington, 2011).

5 The point was well made by Beat Brenk: ‘When someone removes the hide of a building or tears out its innards, he resembles a cannibal. A cannibal does not devour his enemies mainly because he wants to nourish himself but because he hopes that in so doing he will acquire his destroyed enemy's strength. Therefore, he eats human flesh not so much because he is hungry or because he prefers human flesh to a sirloin steak but rather for ideological reasons. Consequently, ideology plays a far greater role with cannibals than aesthetics.’ Beat Brenk, ‘Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics Versus Ideology,’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 41 (1987), pp. 103-09.

6 Jean-Baptiste Colbert was Surintendent des Bâtiments du Roi from 1 January 1664. He was supremely influential in every discipline of the arts, as the building and maintenance of the King's palaces, royal spectacles, fêtes and carousels were all part of his remit. See Jules Guiffrey, ed., Comptes des bâtiments du roi sous le règne de Louis XIV, 5 vols (Paris, 1881–1901), 1:ix. See also the catalogue of the exhibition held to celebrate the tercentenary of Colbert's death: ‘Colbert: 1619–1683’, Hôtel de la Monnaie (Paris, 1983). On Colbert's political influence, see Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, MI, 2011).

7 See Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV.

8 Ibid., pp. 39-44.

9 Ibid., pp. 52-5.

10 As Roger Mettam persuasively argued, the notion of the monarch's absolute power gives a false impression of the political reality of Louis XIV's France that was, in fact, governed by a variety of interested social, political, and ecclesiastical groups. Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV's France (Oxford and New York, 1988). Nevertheless, Louis XIV's image-makers ensured that he was always represented as the absolute authority. On this see Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV, pp. 52-5.

11 Louis Marin ‘Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince,’ Anna Lehman, trans., Yale French Studies, vol. 80 (1991), p. 171.

12 This famous formulation is borrowed from the title of Peter Burke's monograph: The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992).

13 On the topic of the influence of French culture in Britain in the eighteenth century, see Marc Fumaroli, When the World Spoke French, Richard Howard, trans. (New York, 2011); and Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748–1815 (Basingstoke and New York, 2000). See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 87-8, 165.

14 Of the many biographies written about the first duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill's remains the most complete account of his life published to date: Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 2 vols, 3^rd ed. (London; Sydney; Toronto; Bombay, 1947).

15 Ibid., p. 90-91.

16 Ibid., p. 164-5.

17 On Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, see Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford, 1991); David Green, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (London, 1967); and Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, vol. I, chapters 7 & 11.

18 Green, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, pp. 46-7.

19 Churchill, Marlborough, p. 377.

20 Ibid., pp. 355ff.

21 Ibid., p. 352.

22 On these offices see Harris, A Passion for Government, pp. 87-8.

23 Churchill, Marlborough, pp. 891-2.

24 Report of the Genoese envoy: Relazioni di Ambasciatori Sabaudi, Genovesi e Veneti, 1693–1713, cited in Churchill, Marlborough, vol. I, p. 300.

25 Harris, A Passion for Government, p. 96.

26 On this topic, see Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV; and Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV.

27 See Matthew Hargraves, ‘The Public Image of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, 1702–1708’, in Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn, and Martin Monroe, eds., Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 (New Haven, 2016), pp. 133–46.

28 See Linda Colley, Britons.

29 Churchill, Marlborough, vol. I, p. 882.

30 Ibid.

31 On this medal see Hargraves, ‘The Public Image of John Churchill’, pp. 133-6.

32 John Churchill to Sidney Godolphin, 26 July 1703, cited in William Coxe, Memoirs of John, Duke of Marlborough, 3 vols. (London, 1847), vol. I, p. 127. See Hargraves, ‘The Public Image of John Churchill’, p. 133.

33 On the medals of Louis XIV, see Josèphe Jacquiot, Médailles et jetons de Louis XIV d'après le manuscrit de Londres, 4 vols. (Paris, 1968); Mark Jones, Medals of the Sun King (London, 1979); Sylvie de Turckheim-Pey, Médailles du grand siècle: histoire métallique de Louis XIV (Paris, 2004); Yvan Loskoutoff, ed., Les médailles de Louis XIV et leur livre (Rennes, 2016); and Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV, chapter 2.

34 See Hargraves, ‘The Public Image of John Churchill’, pp. 135-6.

35 Cited in ibid., p. 135.

36 Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV, pp. 53-4.

37 As Lydia Hamlett has persuasively argued, the choice to depict Marlborough as a good soldier in the melee of battle as a riposte to his critics would be used again later by Louis Laguerre for the murals at Marlborough House. Hamlett, ‘Rupture through Realism: Sarah Churchill and Louis Laguerre's Murals at Marlborough House’, in Hallett, Llewellyn and Monroe, eds., Court, Country, City, pp. 193-214.

38 It has been estimated that Blenheim cost approximately £300,000 to build, £60,000 of which was paid for by the Marlboroughs. Marian Fowler, Blenheim: Biography of a Palace (London, 1989), p. 71.

39 The sets of Alexander Tapestries produced at the Brussels workshop of Judocus de Vos included the five main panels design by Charles Le Brun and two supplementary pieces. Another weaving of this series was ordered by Marlborough's ally, General William Cadogan, in the early eighteenth century, and was later hung in the Queen's Gallery at Hampton Court Palace. It may have been this set of tapestries that were used for the set of Nicolo Grimaldi's opera Cleartes when it was staged at the King's Theatre in March 1717. On the Alexander tapestries purchased by Marlborough, see Jerry Bapasola, Threads of History: The Tapestries at Blenheim Palace (Oxford, 2005), pp. 42-9; and Thomas P. Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (New Haven and London, 2007), p. 451. On the Alexander Tapestries in the Royal Collection, see Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Wolf Burchard, The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy, 1714–1760 (London, 2014), p. 85. The decoration of the set of Cleartes was advertised in the Daily Courant (London) on 23 March 23 1717.

40 On Le Brun's Alexander series, see Donald Posner, ‘Charles Lebrun's triumphs of Alexander’, Art Bulletin, vol. 41 (1959), pp. 237-48; Louis Marchesano and Christian Michel, Printing the Grand Manner: Charles Le Brun and Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV (Los Angeles, 2010), pp. 58-77; and Peter Fuhring, Louis Marchesano, Rémi Mathis and Vanessa Selbach, A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715 (Los Angeles, 2015), pp. 64-5.

41 For the Alexander Tapestries, see Maurice Fenaille, Etat général des tapisseries de la Manufacture des Gobelins depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, 1600–1900, vol. 2 (Paris, 1903), pp. 167-85; Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Baroque, pp. 347, 365-72; and Charissa Bremmer-David, ed., Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV (Los Angeles, 2015), pp. 101-13.

42 These prints were regularly listed in newspaper advertisements for auctions and booksellers in London. See for example adverts in the Flying Postmaster for Mr Jean Beaulieu, a French bookseller (1 December 1702), and the Daily Courant for a sale at Powell's Coffee-House (8 March 1703).

43 William Parsons, The Tent of Darius Explain'd; or The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander. Translated from the French of Mr. Félibien by Collonel Parsons (London, 1703), n.p.

44 On Farquar's reference to the Alexander series, see David McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Military Fiction (Newark, 1990), p. 72; and Hamlett, ‘Rupture through Realism’.

45 George Farquhar, The Beaux’ Stratagem, Ann Blake, ed., 2^nd edn (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney, 2006), p. 86.

46 For Van der Meulen, see Isabelle Richefort, Adam-François Van der Meulen, 1632–1690: peintre flamand au service de Louis XIV (Paris, 2004). The little that is known about Jan van Huchtenburg (also Huctenberg or Hugtenburg) appears in an early eighteenth-century dictionary of artists by Arnold Houbraken: De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen… (Amsterdam, 1721), vol. III, pp. 251-2. The attribution to Huchtenburg was made by Horace Walpole, see Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Baroque, p. 471.

47 For the Histoire du Roi tapestries, see Fenaille, Etat général des tapisseries de la Manufacture des Gobelins, pp. 99-127; Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Baroque, pp. 349-50, 374-89; and Richefort, Adam-François Van der Meulen, pp. 73-83.

48 There were many precedents for the chorographic composition in depictions of siege warfare in the seventeenth century. See Robert Wellington, ‘The Cartographic Origins of Adam Franz van der Meulen's Marly Cycle,’ Print Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2 (2011), pp. 142-54.

49 See Martha Pollack, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2010), p. 149.

50 Walpole's study was based on the notebooks of engraver and antiquary George Vertue (1684–1756), who was active when the Marlborough tapestries were commissioned, and is a fairly reliable source of information. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England: With Some Account of the Principal Artists, and Incidental Notes on Other Arts; Collected by the Late Mr. George Vertue; and Now Digested and Published from His Original MSS., vol. 3 (Strawberry Hill, 1763), p. 158.

51 The most notable example being Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I with his riding master and equerry Pierre Antoine Bourdon, Seigneur de St-Antoine of 1633, Royal Collection, UK.

52 Campbell, ed., Tapestry in the Baroque, p. 476.

53 Anon., ‘On the King of France his statue brought over by the Duke of Marlborough and plac'd before Blenheim house’, in a commonplace book, ca. 1712, Osborn C170, James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 On the various versions of the legend of the theft of the Palladium in ancient and modern times, see Arthur Milton Young, Troy and Her Legend (Pittsburgh, 1948).

57 On Louis Laguerre's murals at Marlborough House in London, see Hamlett, ‘Rupture through Realism.’

58 See in particular the Blenheim Saloon at Blenheim Palace, where Laguerre borrowed the balcony devise from Le Brun's decorations for Louis XIV's ambassador's staircase at Versailles.

59 See Fumaroli, When the World Spoke French; and Eagles, Francophilia in English Society.

60 Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, pp. 4-5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Wellington

Robert Wellington is a lecturer in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University. His research focuses on the role of material culture in history making, the topic of his monograph Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past (Ashgate 2015). This article is part of a broader project titled ‘Louis after Louis: Appropriations and Reinventions of Louis XIV Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century’.