#284: THE PAINTINGS IN THE PALACE.  In February of 1626, Charles I ascended to the throne of Great Britain.  That wasn’t supposed to happen: Charles was the spare, the younger brother of the much beloved Prince Henry, who by all reports was Charles’s superior in physicality, personality and popular affection.   Henry had also cottoned on very nicely to one of the new ways of broadcasting political stature: he had shown great enthusiasm for the collecting of sculpture, tapestries, and paintings, especially the canvases of the European Renaissance masters.  Henry’s prospects were golden, until in 1612, he fell victim to “a corrupt, putrid feaver,” fatally worsened by incompetent treatment.  (Charles’s last gesture to his dying brother was to put into his hand a bronze statuette of a pacing horse, one of the older boy’s favorite possessions.)  Charles, hesitant, unhealthy, spindle-legged, waxen in pallor, afflicted with a stammer, began to understand that art—not only in the collecting, but in the public art of portraiture used as self-presentation, self-proclamation—could be of use as well as of pleasure.  By the time Charles was tried by Parliament in 1649 for a variety of crimes, including a royal absolutism that trod heavily on the toes of Parliament’s hard-earned powers, he had amassed a collection of paintings worthy of any European court: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Reni, Leonardo’s John the Baptist, and commissioned works by Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck, who had become the royal portraitist.  A very short while after Charles’s head fell to the block, so did his collection. 

       The Sale of the Late King’s Goods, by Jerry Brotton, is a sharp-eyed, knowledgeable and exceptionally well-written account of Charles’s life, reign, and demise, and, in its second half, the Byzantine business of the disposal and auctioning of the King’s possessions, and, with the restoration of Charles II and the monarchy, the hurried scrabble to get all this very fine stuff back to the palace (Brotton notes that only a relatively small percentage of the works failed to be retrieved).  The story here is not about art as the mastery of craft and the accomplishment of revealing in pigments and canvas the beauties of man’s existence, or the venturing out to the edges of human aesthetic experience: it’s about art as currency, coinage, political prestige, courtly power, in-house hard bargaining, methods of (frequently delayed) payment, monarchical showing off and, as it turns out, private ownership of some of the finest creations of European and British art.  The book has a clear eye for the cast of royals, courtiers and artists, and the painfully conflicted loyalties of the Civil War; some mouth-watering details of the paintings involved; and one chapter, “The Italian Job,” which is a bravura piece of reporting on the acquisition of a collection from a cash-strapped Mantuan court.  Brotton is far too canny to hammer at the ironies: he lets us find them for ourselves as the narrative goes smoothly and absorbingly along.

        Hold out if you can for the paperback edition, which has Brotton’s well-pointed afterword, where he tackles that ticklish issue of private ownership.  He points out that “The revolutions that swept away so many of Europe’s monarchies from 1789 also gave birth to the great public art collections like the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna  that inherited the royal art of the Bourbon, Medici, Romanov and Habsburg dynasties.”  With the Restoration, Charles I’s collection got hovered back into, in effect, private hands—with later acquisitions, 7,000 paintings, 500,000 prints and 30,000 watercolors and drawings, according to the collection’s website, much of it still haphazardly catalogued.  If gifted to the public, it would constitute, Brotton suggests, the greatest national collection in the world.  The afterword records the slow scuttling of any hopes this might take place, and, in a recent email, Brotton told me “the royal collection continues to hold onto its art for ideological rather than aesthetic grounds.”  The story of the late king’s goods is a fascinating one, very well told, but as for getting a peek at the goods themselves, the message remains: don’t hold your breath.