Yesterday a new exhibition of Rubens oil sketches opened at Somerset House. Among many other exquisite works it includes four particularly fluent studies for monumental decorations to the ceiling of the great hall of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, commissioned directly from Rubens by Charles I to commemorate the reign of his late father, James I. Since this year also happens to mark the four hundredth anniversary of James I’s accession to the throne, I have chosen one of them as today’s picture.
Rubens’ swirlingly exuberant study for The Apotheosis of James I represents his first thoughts for one of the principal panels of the Banqueting House ceiling. It was painted vigorously and, to all appearances, very quickly, on a canvas measuring roughly three feet by two. The monumental finished work that would eventually result from it can still be seen, in situ, together with the other paintings extolling the virtues of the monarch furnished by Rubens and his studio. But the sketch has been rarely seen in this country since the eighteenth-century, when it was sold by the impoverished heirs of Sir Robert Walpole to Catherine the Great of Russia. Nowadays it is owned by the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
The Banqueting House, designed by Inigo Jones, was a grand assertion of the power, glory and ambition of the Stuart dynasty. The building’s name is misleading, since it served not only for “festive occasions, for formal spectacles, and for the ceremonials of the British court” (as an inscription of 1621 expresses it), but also as the royal presence chamber, where the monarch, magnificently enthroned, would receive foreign ambassadors and members of the two Houses of Parliament. The Apotheosis of King James I gives visible form to the principal article of faith of the Stuart monarchy, namely the divine...
