Pomp and propaganda

Jeremy Musson explores the glorious detail unveiled in a new exhibition devoted to the late Stuart Age

THE frenetic output of art after the restoration of 1660 tells us much about the courtly patronage, relationships and influences of the later Stuart age (1660–1714).

In its first survey exhibition of the period since the 1960s, Tate Britain’s ‘British Baroque: Power and Illusion’ puts art alongside furniture, silver and architectural drawings, including some items never shown in public before, to give a select and subtle—and at times dazzling—insight into a world quite as complex as our own confused age.

In the later Stuart decades, power ebbed away from the monarchy towards the great landed proprietors who dominated Parliament. Money men and merchants grew rich in a newly global world; Britain— and Europe—would never be the same again. One of the first paintings on display is Dirk Stoop’s depiction of Charles II passing through temporary triumphal arches in a cavalcade through the City, in 1661. An equestrian portrait towards the end shows a Lord Mayor of London with a pearl-encrusted sword, a figure so unbelievably grand that the subject was long thought to be the Grand Dauphin of France.