Rubens’s Landscape with St George and the Dragon: Relating Images to their Originals and Changing the Meaning of Representation at the Court of Charles I

Abstract

This article argues that the least studied and understood of the works that Rubens painted at Charles I’s court, Landscape with St George and the Dragon (1629–30), is in fact the most important for understanding Charles’s strategies for representation during the period of his personal rule. The article shows that the painting identifies St George as the original and the King as his exact image. In this way, the article suggests, Rubens endorsed Charles’s anti-Calvinist policies, especially his reform of the Order of the Garter. The article also shows how Rubens’s painting took from masques both the license to represent the King as someone else, as well as a new narrative structure that figured Charles as the herald of peace. It concludes by suggesting that Rubens’s painting reinvigorated court masque performances in the early years of Charles’s personal rule.

Notes

2 David Jaffe, ʽCharles I: King and Collector’, The Court Historian 23 (2018), pp. 293-313, 230-2.

3 Exciting recent work on Rubens in London includes: Karen Hearn, Rubens and Britain (London, 2011); Gregory Martin, Rubens in London: Art and Diplomacy (London, 2011); Michael Auwers, ʽThe Gift of Rubens: Rethinking the Concept of Gift-Giving in Early Modern Diplomacy’, European History Quarterly 43 (2013), pp. 421-41; John Adamson, ʽPolicy and Pomegranates: Art, Iconography and Counsel in Rubenss Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy of 1629–30’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe (Turmhout, 2016), pp. 143-79; Gregory Martin, ʽRubens, Painter and Diplomat’, in Desmond Shawe-Taylor, et al. (eds), Charles I, King and Collector (London, 2018), pp. 149-71; J. Vanessa Lyon, ʽA Psalm for King James: Rubens’s Peace Embracing Plenty and the Virtues of Female Affection at Whitehall’, Art History 40 (2017), pp. 38-67.

4 R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987), p. 249; Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (New Haven and London, 2004), p. 121.

5 William Harrison, The Description of England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), p. 104.

6 Peter Heylyn, The Historie of That Most Famous Saynt and Souldier of Christ Jesus St. George of Capadocia (London, 1631), p. 21.

7 Roger de Piles, Dissertation Sur Les Ouvrages De Plus Fameaux Peintres (Paris, 1681), pp. 115-23.

8 Jerry Brotton, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (London, 2006), p. 151; see also Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and His Courtiers (New Haven, 2013), p. 47.

9 Donovan, Rubens and England, p. 123.

10 The image is reproduced in Timothy Raylor, The Essex House Masque of 1621: Viscount Doncaster and the Jacobean Masque (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2000), pp. 65-6.

11 Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge, 1989), p. 187; David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 72; Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London, 2010). The quote is from Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 197.

12 I am indebted to Gordon Higgot for making this connection. See G. H. Chettle, The Queen’s House, Greenwich (London, 1937), pp. 74-5.

13 Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (London and New Haven, 2015), p. 90.

14 Van der Doort’s inventory records that ʽThe great St George … Was plist a while sins inde kings brekfast chamer’ but that by 1639 it was stored in a passage between the Banqueting House and Privy Lodgings. See Oliver Millar, ʽAbraham Van Der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collections of Charles I’, The Walpole Society 37 (1958), p. 171. It was probably moved to make way for Van Dyck’s Five Eldest Children of Charles I (1637; Royal Collection Trust, London). See Millar, ʽAbraham Van Der Doort’s Catalogue’, p. 35.

15 BL, Harley MSS 390, f.501 r. Mede is often spelt Mead but for all names I have retained the spellings used in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The date is not in Mede’s hand: see Per Bjurström, ʽRubens’s “St George and the Dragon”’, The Art Quarterly 18 (1955), pp. 27-43, p. 36.

16 Allen Hinds (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Venetian 1629–32 (London, 1919), pp. 293-313.

17 Hinds (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Venetian 1629–32, pp. 293-313.

18 Christopher White, The Later Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London, 2007), pp. 219-22.

19 The quote is from White, Later Flemish Pictures, p. 219; for the sketch associated with the painting, see Bjurström, ʽRubens’s “St George and the Dragon”’.

20 White, Later Flemish Pictures, p. 219.

21 Hinds (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Venetian 1629–32, p. 272.

22 Joseph Mede to Martin Stutevile, 7 November 1629, from Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles the First (London, 1848), p. 41.

23 The phrase is Richard Cust’s: Richard Cust, ʽCharles I and the Order of the Garter’, Journal of British Studies, 52 (2013), pp. 343-69, p. 349.

24 I am grateful to Gregory DiPippo for this information.

25 Susan Powell, ʽMirk, John (Fl. C. 1382–C. 1414), Augustinian Author’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

26 See Floris Prims, Geschiedenis Van Sint-Jorisparochie En -Kerk Te Antwerpen, 1304–1923 (Antwerpen, 1924); Jeffrey M. Muller, St. Jacob’s Antwerp: Art and Counter Reformation in Rubens’s Parish Church (Leiden and Boston, 2016), p. 68.

27 Harrison, The Description of England, p. 109.

28 Cited in Heylyn, Historie, pp. 315-16.

29 Heylyn, Historie, pp. 298-9.

30 On Charles’s reforms, see especially Cust, ʽCharles I and the Order of the Garter’.

31 Cust, ʽCharles I and the Order of the Garter’, p. 351.

32 For Heylyn’s Historie, see Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2012), pp. 29-32.

33 Heylyn, Historie, p. 28.

34 Heylyn, Historie, p. 42.

35 Heylyn, Historie, p. 72.

36 Heylyn, Historie, pp. 64-5.

37 Heylyn, Historie, p. 70.

38 Heylyn, Historie, p. 72.

39 Heylyn, Historie, pp. 77, 81.

40 Heylyn, Historie, pp. 82-3.

41 Heylyn, Historie, p. 66.

42 Heylyn, Historie, p. 87.

43 Heylyn, Historie, pp. 87-91.

44 Heylyn, Historie, p. 85.

45 Martin, ʽRubens, Painter and Diplomat’, p. 160.

46 J.S.A. Adamson, ʽChivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 161-97; Cust, ʽCharles I and the Order of the Garter’.

47 Cust, ʽCharles I and the Order of the Garter’, p. 348; Heylyn, Historie, p. 345.

48 For contemporary interpretations of the Hesperides, see George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished … By G.S (Oxford and London, 1632), p. 167.

49 Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (London, 2003), p. 119.

50 John Peacock, ʽThe Visual Image of Charles I’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 176-239, p. 232.

51 Heylyn, Historie, p. 85; on Charles’s role in Albion’s Triumph, see John Peacock, ʽThe Image of Charles I as a Roman Emperor’, in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (Manchester, 2006), pp. 50-73, pp. 59-68.

52 Thomas Carew, ʽCoelum Britannicum’, in David Lindley (ed.), Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 166-93, lines 378-81; 895; for Coelum Britannicum, see also Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (London and Berkeley, 1973), pp. 566-97.

53 Carew, ʽCoelum Britannicum’, lines 891-3.

54 Carew, ʽCoelum Britannicum’, lines 967-72.

55 Heylyn, Historie, pp. 70-2; the quotation is from p. 70.

56 Martin, Rubens in London: Art and Diplomacy, p. 91.

57 Carew, ʽCoelum Britannicum’, lines 967-8, 985-6.

58 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 50, 51.

59 Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969).

60 Charles Stuart, The Kings Majesties Declaration to His Subjects, Concerning Lawfull Sports to Bee Used (London, 1633), p. 11.

61 For Rubens’s Kermis, see Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (London and New Haven, 1995).

62 Carew, ʽCoelum Britannicum’, lines 1013-14.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas Grindle

Nicholas Grindle

Nicholas Grindle is Senior Teaching Fellow at the UCL Arena Centre for Research-based Education. He was guest curator of the exhibition George Morland: In the Margins, at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, in 2015.