William Dobson: the Cavalier Chronicler

Tide, time and weather have not yet permitted me to go over to St Michael’s Mount to look at the mysterious miniature, so I have been a little remiss in this latest blog post. 

But in the meantime – this Dobson chap. 

William Dobson was described by the diarist John Aubrey as “the most excellent painter that England hath yet bred”. 
He was born in 1611, the son of another decorative artist called William Dobson, and died in poverty after what is tactfully described as “an irregular life” at the age of 35, buried on 28^thOctober 1646 in St Martin in the Fields. He married twice: once to Elizabeth, who was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields on  26^thSeptember 1634 (bearing in mind that at the time of her death Dobson would have been twenty-three years old. That’s no age to be a widower -) and then to Judith Sander, of whom he painted a rather lovely portrait, in December 1637. She survived him, to re-marry: there is a record in the church of St Bartholomew the Great, London, of a little girl, Katherine, daughter of a William and Judith Dobson, christened 16 April 1639. 

Apprenticed to the younger William Peake, and thought to have then joined the studio of the German-born painter and tapestry designer Francis Cleyn, it’s interesting that unlike his mentors Dobson seems to have been exclusively working in paint. 
Cleyn was described in his heyday as “a second Titian” and as “il famossisimo pittore, miracolo del secole” – most of his employment was in decorating the mansions of the gentry, including Somerset House, Carew House, and the Gilt Room at Holland House in London. With the civil war his patrons were forced to cut back in their spending, though, and most of Cleyn’s prosperity came from engraved book illustrations and etchings 
William Peake was credited with making a gilded staff for the effigy of the young Prince of Wales in 1612, and although no copies of his paintings still exist, there are various engravings either by him or published by him in the National Portrait Gallery – mostly of eminent courtiers like Lord Darnley and the Earl of Worcester. 

Master Dobson, though, painted: and so far as we know, nothing else. There are no surviving engravings, sketches, sculptures – nothing but a substantial body of some sixty pieces of art, which, given that Dobson died at the age of thirty-five, and assuming that the majority of his work displays an adult maturity, must have represented aphenomenaloutput. We know nothing of any apprentices, and his death in reduced circumstances would suggest that he had not been in a position to train a younger artist for some time previous to this: I am surmising, therefore, that all his work was done by himself, not – as was often the case with many of the fashionable artists of the Stuart era – merely the face and hands, and the background filled in by a journeyman. 

During the 1630s he made a modest living – presumably as a portrait painter – and but when Charles I’s court painter Anthony van Dyck died in 1641, Dobson became serjeant painter to the King and groom of the privy chamber. (There is a story that Van Dyck himself introduced Dobson to the King when he saw one of the young artist’s paintings in a shop window.) 
When civil war broke out, he followed the King to Oxford 

He was, in effect, the King’s chronicler, and so it was no surprise that towards the latter end of the war when the Royalist star was waning, that poor Dobson’s popularity - and commissions -declined with it. 

Now I have to say, from a personal point of view, I love his paintings: they’re not formal, posed artworks, but real flesh and blood people – not all of whom I would like to be in a small space with, to be fair: Endymion Porter looks like a beery old toper and there is a twinkle in his pouchy eye best described as lewd.Carry On Cavalier, in his full glory. 

copyright Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

My own personal favourite is the portrait of a family, probably that of Richard Streatfeild, c. 1645. 
Mum looks as if she wants to laugh, and is stroking the curls of a very impish young miss in a pink frock, who appears to be playing peep-bo with the artist. 
Dad is looking sternly into the middle distance, whilst being poked in the belly by his youngest with a handful of coral. 
It is a very real, and very tender, family portrait, with real – and not very beautiful – people in it. 
(If it is the Streatfeild family, and if you’re curious, the children would be Alice, who would have been about 18 months old, William, who would have been a few months old, and six-year-old Henry. William and Henry lived into the first quarter of the 18^thcentury, and Alice went on to marry William Woodgate, the Sherriff of Kent, in 1664. Richard and Anne Streatfeild had another three children after these three, and amazingly, every single one survived to adulthood. Don’t you love happy endings?) 

So. William Dobson. Fantastic painter, not as well known as he should be, a short but tragic life. 
Dead at 35, dying in debt in 1646 back in London. 

How did he manage to paint a miniature of King Charles for Sir Bevil Grenville, when he wasn’t a miniature painter –so far as we know?

The mysterious miniature of St Michael's Mount plays a part in my new book The Serpent's Root, available for pre-order at mybook.to/TheSerpentsRoot

To PENTHESILEA the Amazonn Queen, on the Occasion of Her Slaying the King of The Tribe of Cynick

Fair queen! When thou shall slay thy foe
With fatal dart from amber eye
When thou with honour lays him low
To submit his sorry self, or die

When gently thou with slippered foot
Will press thine enemy's neck
And make his heart thine arrow's butt
And call him at thy beck

Thy CYNICK must love from afar
Without hope of return
As distant from thee as the star
To be forever spurned

I die,  pierced by Penthesilea's lance-
No wit, no hope, no charm - no chance.

Attributed. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1665)

Later evidence suggests the poem was written by the little-known Parliament!entarian poet Lucifer Pettitt in an attempt to discourage Wilmot's unwanted attentions to his niece, Thomazine Russell, the "Penthesilea" of the poem.

The Mystery of the Miniature on the Mount - St Michael's Mount and the Grenville Miniature

And it's not one that I have an answer to, I fear.... yet.

So, then, I guess this will be the first of a series of blogs on the matter of the mysterious miniature.

A little background!

As part of my research for "The Serpent's Root" I discovered that the erstwhile King's General in the West, Daphne du Maurier's dashing hero Richard Grenville, was imprisoned on St Michael's Mount in spring 1646. Now at the end of the Civil War in Cornwall, the Mount was one of the last loyal Royalist strongholds in the West.  

-It wasn't bought by the Parliamentarian colonel Sir John St Aubyn, whose family are the present owners, until around 1650. Sir John was appointed Governor of the Mount in 1647, when it became a prison, and it seems he liked the place so much he decided to make it his family seat! An interesting little family titbit, Sir John's mother Catherine was the daughter of John Arundell of Trerice.... the governor of Pendennis Castle until August 1646, and last man standing for the King in the West. That particular dynamic is, I think, one which merits further exploration.... by the sword divided, indeed. Poor Catherine must have been in an untenable position. 

Anyway, Sir Arthur Bassett - and his indomitable wife - held the Mount successfully against Parliament until April 23rd 1646 - surrendering, it is said, on the advice of th Duke of Hamilton. Sir Arthur was allowed to depart with his retinue to the Isles of Scilly, leaving behind 30 pieces of ordnance, 3 murdering pieces, 80 tuns of wine, 100 barrels of gunpowder, 500 muskets and 100 pikes. (From the State Papers of 1646) 

Yes, of course she will get her own blog post. Anne Trelawney Basset deserves her own book, never mind her own blog post!

But before that, Ralph Hopton, commanding the King's western Army, had put Richard Grenville into custody on the Mount, on grounds that - as per usual - Sir Richard was stirring up trouble as fas as go could he, and refusing to accept the authority of any other commander but himself in the West. 

Not an unreasonable course of action: the last thing you want when you're on the back foot anyway is an insubordinate infantry commander playing power games with a force that's already starting to break up due to pay arrears, mutiny, hunger, deprivation, and demoralisation. The garrison at Truro was close to mutiny; which would have been unfortunate, given that the Mint was located there. Shipping Grenville off to an island only accessible from the mainland at low tide by a narrow causeway probably sounded like a great idea - after all, how much trouble could he cause there?

To which the answer was, sufficient that the Prince of Wales shipped him off to France after the surrender at Tresillian in March, rather than see him fall into the hands of Parliament.

So far, so interesting, so what?

Well, Sir Richard seems to have left a little something behind when he left.

The thing is, it’s something that he shouldn’t have had – a miniature painting that appears to be inscribed to the wrong Grenville brother, and that shouldn’t exist for another three years.
And on that mysterious note, I will leave you to ponder until next week!

Touching the Past

Image copyright V&A Museum

I'm a re-enactor, a writer, and a social historian.

You knew all that anyway, right? It says so in my bio, right there, along with the stuff about cats and cake and cavalry backswords (All of which is true.)

Because as I've said before, I don't just want my readers to read a story. And I'm thrilled to say that a lot of my reviews - oo, get me - do actually say that they feel like they know my boys, feel like they're there with them.
Because history isn't just about dates and battles, it's about people, and I don't think people have ever changed. We all want, basically, the same things, to a greater or lesser degree. We want to be warm and dry at night, we want something to eat and something to drink - and possibly, if you're Thankful Russell circa 1644, not in that order. It's called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It goes - once you have realised one level of need, you can move onto the next - called actualisation:

1. Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, stability, freedom from fear.
3. Love and belongingness needs - friendship, intimacy, affection and love, - from work group, family, friends, romantic relationships.
4. Esteem needs - achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, self-respect, respect from others.
5. Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.

The level one and two needs, well, they are simple needs, aren't they? The sort of things no one should be without in a civilised world. (She says, channelling her inner Leveller.)

Level three, we're starting to get complicated. (Aren't we. Hollie. Russell.) But this is all by the by, it's stuff for another post. What I'm talking about is embroidery, and re-enactment, and a bit of hands-on history.

I'm making a rather pretty polychrome embroidered coif at the moment. Just for fun, to give myself pleasure, a small, portable bit of embroidery that I can pop in a workbag and take around with me and work on when I've got a spare few minutes. It's based on Margaret Laton's early 17th century embroidered linen jacket and it's trimmed with gold needle-lace and it's got parrots and snails and caterpillars and all kinds of silliness on it. But, as George Wingfield Digby says in his 1963 book "Elizabethan Embroidery", it is "....the integrated expression of a society still creative and joyful about the things it could make and use."
So - it's a thing that gives me pleasure, because I am a competent, creative needlewoman, and because it has some silly little figures on it like the marvellous snail and the chicken, things for the sheer joy of putting them on. And, you know, a woman sat there in 1620-ish and did likewise. She drew on silly bugs and beasties with a fine-nibbed pen and she embroidered them in not-always-realistic colours for the pleasure of owning a pretty thing, and for the joy of wearing something that had given her pleasure to create. (Some of the jackets that survive have been carefully crafted by artisans, professional needlewomen. Just as many weren't - made at home by skilled amateurs. In the case of some of them. not even that skilled, but enthusiastic.)

And so, you know, I've got this little project on the go, and it's pretty, and sparkly, but it also feels nice to the touch. The thing with the embroidery is that it's all textured and nubbly, it's got braid stitch and detached buttonhole stitch, and the peapods open up to reveal three-dimensional peas, and the parrot's head is padded. And that's what it's for. It's for touching, and stroking, and moving in so that the braid sparkles and the sequins shimmer. It's a thing to be worn, not to be looked at. It's a thing that I would expect children at a re-enactment to touch, and look for the animals on, and hold to the light.
I read an interesting article recently about how museums are increasingly becoming glorified playgrounds in an attempt to attract families and although I hate the idea that history is being mass-produced to make it palatable, I love the thought that maybe it will make the past real to more people. Believe me, my coif - 4 hours and counting and I've not even finished drawing up the pattern or putting on the needle-lace yet - it's not a thing that I would treat casually. But I would happily give it to an interested little girl (or an interested little boy, or his dad, or her grandmother, for that matter) to hold and turn over and stroke, no matter how grubby hands are or how rough baby fingers might be with my embroidery. Because that's what it's for. You can't touch Margaret Laton's jacket, because it's 400 years old and fragile, but you could play with my coif, and stroke the snail, and lift the peapods, just like I imagine that long-ago lady's little nieces and nephews once did, laughing at the little golden peas inside as they sparkled in the sunlight.

Margaret Laton's jacket is a distinct level 5 - a lady realising her personal potential, self-fulfillment, personal growth and peak experiences. Impossible to tell if it was made by a professional embroiderer or a competent, accomplished amateur. A lady four hundred years ago, loving being herself, loving the skill of her fingers, probably loving the way it sparkled and shimmered and the way her Hugh might look at her at dinner when she was wearing it. A real person, who had a best jacket that she put on for dressy occasions. Who maybe had little sticky-fingered nieces and nephews admiring her birds and bugs. I imagine her jacket probably smelt of rose-water, or lavender water, and maybe a little bit sweaty under the arms, maybe a little bit of the ghosts of half a hundred suppers. But a woman you could probably sit down and talk to comfortably enough, a woman with whom you might have things in common - who might talk knowledgeably about gardens, and orderly households, and the cost of a loaf of bread. (Her Hugh was a merchant, you see, in the City. A wealthy lady, but one of not the nobility.)

So I'm embroidering my little coif, and embroidering what I imagine Margaret Laton was like, and hopefully, one day, at a re-enactment - this summer, next summer, some time - people will touch that embroidery and think about what sort of lady might wear it, and take pleasure in it.
A lady a bit like me and you, really. Black velvet gown, whitework apron. Looking a bit awkward to have her picture made, but a bit shy, and a bit proud, like a lot of young women on formal occasions, all done up in her finery. Creative and joyful. Not a pretend-person out of a history book, not a formal pretty jacket on a dummy inside a glass case. 

Making museums into children's play areas is a terrible thing, in so many ways. It demeans our history, it patronises its audience. But we all have a right to play - to touch, to engage, to dream. To learn through doing, what it might be like to be someone else. 

So. If you happen to be at the Fairfax Battalia event at Wallingford in late June, come and help me find my bugs and beasties.

Hidden: An Unseen Portrait of Oliver Cromwell at the National Portrait Gallery

Hidden: An unseen portrait of Oliver Cromwell

10 July 2014 - 19 October 2015
Room 5
Free

Sir Arthur Hesilrige
by Unknown artist
circa 1640
NPG 6440



Oliver Cromwell
by Robert Walker
circa 1649
NPG 536

Recent investigation of the portrait of Sir Arthur Hesilrige, using the latest infra-red technology, has revealed what appears to be a hidden portrait of the Parliamentarian commander Oliver Cromwell underneath. The reasons for this change are obscure. Was the artist re-using an old canvas that he had been unable to sell? Or did Hesilrige, a Parliamentarian army officer and committed republican, have Cromwell’s portrait repainted as one of himself when the two fell out over Cromwell’s assumption of the role of Protector? This display puts the Gallery’s portrait of Cromwell alongside that of Hesilrige and, for the first time, shows the infra-red image of the hidden portrait.



© National Portrait Gallery, London