The 18th century Saatchi

Zoffanyâ™s Roual Academicians is important document of art history

10 April 2012

Poor George III - six decades on the throne and all that most of us know of him is that he lost what was to become the USA, was nicknamed Farmer George for his interest in agriculture, and died a lunatic.

These are bald truths. Britain did indeed lose her grip on colonial America but this was far more the fault of his ministers than of George himself, and the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was deliberately in mischievous error when it enshrined the King as villain; he was indeed something of an expert on grass and hay and modern farming methods; and die a lunatic he did, but not of the conventional dementias or senility, nor of Alzheimer's disease, but of a hereditary metabolic disorder that we now identity as acute intermittent porphyria.

From this last he temporarily recovered, despite the formidable brutality of doctors ignorant of the disease, but in his last years it returned with a vengeance and rendered him totally deaf to the music that he continued to play on his harpsichord, and blind to the paintings, drawings and other aesthetic possessions that he had so diligently collected earlier in his reign.

Some five hundred of these form the new exhibition at Buckingham Palace, the house that as a young man he bought in 1762 for his 18-year-old wife, Charlotte Sophia, newly uprooted from the small German court of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Theirs was not a love match; love was something that he had learned to eschew when his tutorturned-friend and eventual Prime Minister, Lord Bute, forbade him to propose to Lady Sarah Lennox, a 15-year-old beauty for whom George felt passionate desire.

In contrast, Charlotte was thin and plain to the point of ugliness, sexually undesirable (though we would never guess so from the flattering portraiture of the day), and it was only out of a sense of duty to the state's requirement for an heir to the throne that she and George doggedly came together again and again to breed another and another child. A sane couple would have stopped at four or five, but 13 sons and daughters were alive for Gainsborough to paint in 1782-3, and two others died in infancy.

As George and Charlotte kept separate households the prurient may wonder how their bedding assignations were arranged, for though their shared interests in music, books, philosophy, botany and what was then contemporary art must have eased them into companionable states, they can hardly have engendered the blind lust required for coupling without mutual desire.

Both cared passionately for the children whom they pupped, both were severely Protestant and anti-Catholic, and both led lives that were as utterly proper in privacy as they were when going about their public duties - as they very frequently did.

It is easy to forget that George's reign, 1760-1820, was more or less concurrent with the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the decades of the 18th century when intellectual enquiry was a driving force for kings and gentlemen, when sciences were hand-in-hand with new philosophies, when all over Europe dictionaries, encyclopaedias and lexicons were published, when the origins of man and language were topics of drawingroom discussion, when new uses were developed for coal and iron, when the expansion of empire expanded industry too.

In Britain there were painters, architects, designers, poets and novelists in numbers hitherto unimaginable, the British Museum and the Royal Academy were founded, and the National Gallery was the brave intention of men both rich and wise.

In so fervid an intellectual and aesthetic atmosphere it is not altogether surprising that in pursuing many of these aims and interests George III became the Charles Saatchi of his day.

Looking back at him from the first years of a new century and seeing pictures by Zoffany, Gainsborough, Loutherbourg, Ramsay, Canaletto and West, it is essential to remember that these were as much George's contemporaries as Freud, Hockney, Lucas, Emin and Hirst are ours, and that in their 18th-century day some of these artists must have been the subject of something of the same excitement and anticipation.

Allan Ramsay's portrait of George III when he was 23, painted in 1761-2, perfectly illustrates contemporary descriptions of him as having handsome poise and presence, but an expression that, in suggesting a certain distance, a withdrawal from intimacy, is very different from the hauteur and arrogance of the French court portraiture that was in some sense Ramsay's model.

As a formal portrait of which replicas were to be sent to embassies abroad or exchanged with those of other monarchs (176 are known to have emerged from the studio), it had to speak, not only of the King's looks, but of his status, and it thus has all the conventional apparatus of grandeur and authority in clothes, robes, ermine, curtains, carpet and exaggerated height, sway and swagger in the pose - and yet one senses sympathy between the painter and the man.

It should surprise none of us that, when urged by a courtier to employ young Reynolds instead, George replied: "Mr Ramsay is my painter, my Lord."

Ramsay was nevertheless usurped by Johan Zoffany, a German painter who may, from deeply provincial Trier, have thought the Hanoverian court in London his best bet for professional preferment. Lord Bute was the first member of the court to become his patron, and it was probably through his influence that first the Queen and then the King came to know of him.

George III was the first of the dynasty to be born in England and to have English as his first language, but German was his second and he may have found gossiping with Zoffany, who never properly learned English, agreeable.

Ten years on from Ramsay's portrait, George had grown florid and heavy for a man of 33, but Zoffany countered this, not with flattery, but with a pose of such relaxed coiled energy as must have seemed astonishing in the context of traditional royal portraiture.

The King looks steadily out of the picture to the right, but leans to the left, seeming almost to recoil from what he sees, forming the main part of a pyramidal composition that is completed by a lively still life of sword, hat and console table.

The formal dress, that of a General Officer in scarlet and cream, is rendered informal by the energy of the pose, and the emphasis on the King's head that comes from his position unusually low on the canvas and against a plain dark ground that offers no distraction, is startling for any portrait of this period, anywhere in Europe - the most notorious critic of the day, Horace Walpole, found it "most disagreeable". The companion piece, a portrait of Queen Charlotte with all the conventional embellishments, emphasises by contrast the severity and plain richness of Zoffany's interpretation of her husband.

Not much attention has been paid to Zoffany since a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1977, but for this neglect Buck House now unconsciously makes amends with eight of his finest pictures, ranging from the conversation piece to the important art-historical document.

His first painting for Queen Charlotte was exquisite in detail and ingenious in idea, for he brought her dressing-table down to a ground-floor room in Buckingham House (as it then was), set it against a window onto the garden, and posed her so that we could see her profile in the mirror as well as, more or less, her full face; in depicting her with her first two children and surrounded by her finest possessions, Zoffany invests the portrait with the informality of the conversation piece, with charm and intimacy.

Almost at the far end of the social scale we see, in the highly finished portrait of John Cuff, a maker of scientific instruments, the same formula of a sitter surrounded by significant things and people: in this case the craftsman's tools and his aged assistant; it comes within the category, then still rare, of the painter portraying his peers at work and is more a German idea than English.

Painted in 1772, it is in astonishing contrast to the most celebrated record of the Grand Tour, painted the same year, in which Zoffany depicts a legion of English milords in Florence, disposed in intimacy with wonderful works of painting and sculpture in the Tribuna of the Uffizi; it is an imagined congress, but the portraits are true enough, some just short of caricature, and the picture confirms much that we know from the journals and diaries of the day.

Perhaps even more important as a document of art history is Zoffany's group portrait of all the Royal Academicians of 1771, gathered to discuss the proportions, musculature and grace of two nude male models; women Academicians were excluded from the Life Room, but Zoffany included them by proxy with two small portraits hanging high on the right.

The exhibition is, inevitably, a portmanteau show of china, silver, furniture, miniatures, jewellery, knick- knacks and sentimental memorabilia, together with a too-small taste of the paintings and drawings by old masters that George III bought from the British Consul in Venice in 1762 - a most perceptive purchase for a young man of 24, perhaps influenced by Bute. The art historian longs for more material of the high seriousness that he knows could be on view, but must be content with sublime drawings by Raphael and Guercino, fine paintings by Canaletto, and minor, but amusing, things by Longhi and Zucarelli.

The selection is perhaps ideal for devotees of the Wallace Collection, of Fabergé exhibitions (nothing of his is included - all far, far too late - but the aesthetics of useful beauty and beautiful uselessness are unrelenting here), and of - forgive me - the Antiques Roadshow. It now all looks antique, but, with a few exceptions, it was all new in George's day, the glossy, shiny, sparkling, gilded good taste of the time. To whom now could a monarch turn for matching skill and craftsmanship, such elegant vulgarity?

George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 9 January, 2005. Admission £7.50, open daily 10am-5.30pm.

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The 18th century Saatchi

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