PROPERTY, POWER, AND THE BRITISH BAROQUE

Tate Britain’s recent exhibition British Baroque: Power and Illusion was an opportunity to explore the way in which art gave expression to the transition from revolutionary Commonwealth to a new stability and confidence in Late Stuart England.

In the centre is the King, who is dressed like a Roman emperor but unmistakably Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’ whose accession in 1660 had marked the end of the revolutionary era. Matters could hardly be more over the top. Antonio Verrio, an Italian artist who had been painting aristocratic interiors since his arrival in England in 1672, was eager to secure a position at Court. His Sea Triumph of Charles II (c.1674) seems to have been a trial piece, so he was especially eager to win the approval of his prospective patron. The image probably commemorates the Treaty of Westminster, which had ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War in February 1674. The English claimed this as a victory, which must have surprised the Dutch, who had won all the battles under the inspired leadership of Admiral de Ruyter and thereby prevented a French invasion of their country. Charles II had participated in the war under the terms of a secret treaty with Louis XIV of France – an ignominious arrangement whereby the English had ganged up against their Dutch co-religionists in alliance with the absolutist Catholic bully who dominated Europe at the time: a late 17th-century version of ‘appeasement’. The English Court, it should be said, wanted vengeance for the Battle of the Medway, in 1667, during a previous AngloDutch War, when de Ruyter had sailed up the river to Chatham and burned the English fleet at anchor.