The Stuart age and the Baroque
Charles I collected the finest art in Europe and had Rubens and Van Dyck paint his power – before the Civil War cost him his head and Wren built a new London from the ashes.
When James VI of Scotland became king of England in 1603, a century of great conflict began. Art followed politics closely. The architect Inigo Jones introduced the pure classicism he had studied in Italy, and Charles I collected paintings by Titian, Raphael and Mantegna and employed Anthony van Dyck as court painter. The court became one of the most refined in Europe, but also increasingly cut off from a country in which Puritan ideas were growing strong.
The Civil War of the 1640s ended with the king's execution in 1649 outside his own Banqueting House. His collection was sold off and scattered across Europe, and in the churches many of the images that had survived the Reformation were destroyed. After the Restoration of 1660 the monarchy returned and with it the court portrait, now painted by the Dutchman Peter Lely. Portraits became lighter, more sensual and more attuned to fashion, in step with the lifestyle of the new court. At the same time the gentlemen of the English countryside took up the portrait as a way of showing their place in society.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 gave Christopher Wren the chance to build a new city. His St Paul's Cathedral and fifty new churches gave London a Baroque skyline of domes and spires. Around 1700 vast palaces such as Blenheim and Castle Howard were built, and Greenwich received a painted hall by James Thornhill. When Queen Anne died in 1714, England and Scotland had been united as Great Britain. The calm classical order would shape the Georgian age to come.