RICHARD II.
Our first picture is a portrait of Richard II. on his coronation day
in the year 1377, when he was ten years old. It is the earliest one
selected, and the eyes of those who see it for the first time will
surely look surprised. The jewel-like effect of the sapphire-winged
angels and coral-robed Richard against the golden background is not
at all what we are accustomed to see. Nowadays it may take some time
and a little patience before we can cast ourselves back to the year
1377 and look at the picture with the eyes of the person who painted
it. Let us begin with a search for his purpose and meaning at least.
The picture is a diptych--that is to say, it is a painting done upon
two wings or shutters hinged, so as to allow of their being closed
together. You have no doubt been wondering why I called it a portrait,
for the picture is far from being what to-day would commonly be
described as such. Richard himself is not even the most conspicuous
figure; and he is kneeling and praying to the Virgin. What should we
think if any living sovereign, ordering a state portrait, had himself
portrayed surrounded on one side by his predecessors on the throne,
and on the other side by the Virgin and Child and angels? But, in the
fourteenth century, it was nothing strange that the Virgin and Child,
the angels, John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor, Edmund the Martyr,
and Richard II. should be thus depicted. When we have realized that
it was usual for a royal patron to command and an artist to paint such
an assemblage of personages, as though all of them were then living
and in one another's presence, we have learnt something significant
and impressive about a way of thinking in the Middle Ages. Richard
II. thought of himself as the successor of a long line of kings,
appointed by the Divine Power to rule a small portion of the Divine
Territories, so what more natural than that he, as the newly reigning
sovereign, should have his portrait painted, surrounded by his holiest
predecessors upon the throne, and in the act of dedicating his kingdom
to the Virgin Mary?
In an account given of his coronation we read that, after the ceremony
in Westminster Abbey, Richard went to the shrine of Our Lady at Pewe,
near by, where he made a special offering to Our Lady of eleven angels,
each wearing the King's badge, one for each of the eleven years of
his young life. What form this offering of angels took, we know not;
they may have been little wooden figures, or coins with an angel stamped
upon them; but it is reasonable to connect the offering with this very
picture of Our Lady and the angels. The King's special badges were
the White Hart and the Collar of Broom-pods which you see embroidered
all over his magnificent red robe. The White Hart is pinned in the
form of a jewel beneath his collar, and each of the eleven angels bears
the badge upon her shoulder and the Collar of Broom-pods round her
neck. One of the King's angels gives the Royal Standard of England
with the Cross of St. George on it to the Infant Christ in token of
Richard's dedication of his kingdom to the Virgin and Child.
Edward III. died at Midsummer 1377 and Richard succeeded him in his
eleventh year, having been born on January 6, 1367. It is necessary
to note the exact day of the year when these events took place, for
it can have importance in determining the saint whom a personage
chiefly honoured as patron and protector. In this instance St. John
the Baptist, whose feast occurs on June 23, near to the day of Richard's
accession, obviously stands as patron saint of the young King. Next
to him is King Edward the Confessor, the founder of Westminster Abbey,
who was canonized for his sanctity and who points to Richard II. as
his spiritual successor upon the throne. In medieval art the saints
are distinguished by their emblems, which often have an association
with the grim way in which they met their death, or with some other
prominent feature in their legend. Here Edward holds up a ring, whereof
a pretty story is told. Edward once took it off his finger to give
it to a beggar, because he had no money with him. But the beggar was
no other than John the Evangelist in disguise, and two years later
he sent the ring back to the King with the message that in six months
Edward would be in the joy of heaven with him. William Caxton, the
first English printer, relates in his life of King Edward that when
he heard the message he was full of joy and let fall tears from his
eyes, giving praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God.
[Illustration: RICHARD II. BEFORE THE VIRGIN AND CHILD
From a picture by an unknown artist in the Wilton House Collection]
St. Edmund, who stands next to Edward the Confessor, is the other
saintly King of England; after whom the town of Bury St. Edmunds takes
its name. He was shot to death with arrows by the Danes because he
would not give up Christianity. If I could show you several suitably
chosen pictures at once, you would recognize in the arrangement of
the three Kings here (two standing, one kneeling before the Virgin
and Child) a plain resemblance to the typical treatment of a well-known
subject--the Adoration of the Magi. You remember how when the three
Wise Men of the East--always thought of in the Middle Ages as Kings--had
followed the star which led them to the manger where Christ was born,
they brought Him gold and frankincense and myrrh as offerings. This
beautiful story was a favourite one in the Middle Ages, often
represented in sculpture and painting. One King always kneels before
the Virgin and Child, presenting his gift, whilst the other two stand
behind with theirs in their hands. The standing Kings and the kneeling
Richard in our picture, are grouped in just the same relation to the
divine Infant as the three Magi. The imitation of the type is clear.
There was a special reason for this, in that the birthday of Richard
fell upon January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, when the Wise Men did
homage to the Babe. The picture, by reminding us of the three Wise
Men, commemorated the birthday of the King as well as his coronation,
the two chief dates of his life.
You have some idea now of the train of thought which this
fourteenth-century painter endeavoured to express in his picture
commemorative of the coronation of a King. A medieval coronation was
a very solemn ceremony indeed, and the picture had to be a serious
expression of the great traditions of the throne of England, suggested
by the figures of St. Edward and St. Edmund, and of hope for future
good to the realm, to ensue from the blessings of the Virgin and Child
upon the young King. Religious feeling is dominant in this picture,
and if from it you could turn to others of like date, you would find
the same to be true. The meaning was the main thing thought of. When
Giotto painted his scenes from the life of St. Francis, his first aim
was that the stories should be well told and easily grasped by all
who looked at them. Their beauty was of less importance. This
difference between the aim of art in the Middle Ages and in our own
day is fundamental. If you begin by picking to pieces the pictures
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries because the drawing is bad,
the colouring crude, and the grouping unnatural, you might as well
never look at them at all. Putting faults and old fashions aside to
think of the meaning of the picture, we shall often be rewarded by
finding a soul within, and the work may affect us powerfully,
notwithstanding its simple forms and few strong colours.
Nevertheless, after the painter had planned his picture so as to convey
its message and meaning, he did try to make it beautiful to look upon,
and he often succeeded. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
it was beauty of outline and a pleasant patching together of bright
colours for which the painters strove, both in pictures and in
manuscripts. If you think of this picture for a moment as a coloured
pattern, you will see how pretty it is. The blue wings against the
gold background make a hedge for the angel faces and look extremely
well. If the figure of Richard II. seems flat, if you feel as though
he were cut out of cardboard and had no thickness, then turn your mind
to consider only the outline of the figure. It is very graceful. Artists
in the thirteenth century sometimes made their figures over-long if
they thought that a sweep of graceful line would look well in a certain
position in their picture; the drapery was bent into impossible curves
if so they fell into a pretty pattern.
In the fourteenth century, beauty of outlines still prevailed, even
when they contained plain masses of brilliant colour so pure and
gem-like that the pictures almost came to look like stained-glass
windows. In fact probably the constant sight of stained-glass windows
in the churches greatly influenced the painters' way of work. The
contrast of divers colours placed next one another was more startling
than we find in later painting, whilst an effort was made to finish
every detail as though it were to be looked at through a magnifying
glass.
In this picture which we are now learning how to see, the Virgin was
to be shown standing in a meadow of flowers. A modern artist knows
how to paint the general effect of many flowers growing out of grass,
but the medieval painter had not the skill to do that. He had not learnt
to look at the effect of a mass of flowers as a whole, nor could he
have rendered such an effect with the colours and processes he
possessed. He knew what one flower looked like, and thought that many
must be a continued repetition of one. But it was impossible to paint
a great number of flowers close together, each finished in detail,
so he chose instead to paint a few as completely as he could, and leave
the rest to the imagination of the spectator. That was his way of making
a selection from nature; thus he hoped to suggest the idea of a flowery
meadow, since he could not hope to render the look of it.
Likewise, all the details of the dresses are minutely painted. The
robes of Richard and of Edmund the Martyr are beautiful examples of
the careful and painstaking work characteristic of the Middle Ages.
No medieval painter spared himself trouble. Although he had not
mastered the art of drawing the figure, he had learnt how to paint
jewellery and stuffs beautifully, and delighted in doing it. The
drawing of the figures you can see to be imperfect, yet nothing could
be sweeter in feeling than the bevy of girl angels with roses in their
hair surrounding the Virgin. Most of them are not unlike English girls
of the present day, and the critics who say that this picture must
have been painted by a Frenchman may be asked where he is likely to
have found these English models for his angels.
Possibly the face of Richard himself may have been painted from life,
for the features correspond closely enough with the large full-face
portrait of him in Westminster Abbey, and with the sculptured figure
upon his tomb. He certainly does not look like a child of ten, for
his state robes and crown give him a grown-up appearance. But if you
regard the face carefully you can see that it is still that of a child.
The gold background in the original shines out brilliantly, for after
the gold was laid on, it was polished with an agate, which gives it
a burnished effect, and then the little patterns were carefully punched
so as not to pierce the gold and thereby expose the white ground beneath.
There is a jewel-like quality in the colour such as you can see in
manuscripts of the time, and it is possible that the painter may have
learned his art as an illuminator of manuscripts. Artists in those
days seldom confined themselves to one kind of work. We do not know
this man's name, and are not even certain whether he was French or
English.
Before, as in the time of Richard, painting had been mainly a decorative
art, and the object of making pictures was to adorn the pages of a
book, or the walls and vaults of a building. The most vital artistic
energies of Western Europe in the thirteenth century had gone into
the building of the great cathedrals and abbeys, which are to-day the
glory of that period. Most medieval paintings that still exist in
England are decorative wall-paintings of this kind, and only traces
of a few remain. In many country places you can see poor and faded
vestiges of painting which adorned church walls in the thirteenth
century, and occasionally you may come upon a bit by some chance better
preserved. These old wall-paintings were done upon the dry plaster.
The discovery, or rather the revival, of 'fresco' painting (that is,
of painting done upon the wet surface of freshly plastered walls, a
more durable process) was made in Italy and did not penetrate to
England.
Richard II. was not the only art-loving King of his time. You have
read of John, King of France, who was taken prisoner at the Battle
of Poitiers by the Black Prince, father of Richard. During his
captivity he lived in considerable state in London at the Savoy Palace,
which occupied the site of the present Savoy Hotel in the Strand; he
brought his own painter from France with him, who painted his portrait
which still exists in Paris. This King John was the father of four
remarkable sons, Charles V., King of France, with whom Edward III.
and the Black Prince fought the latter part of the Hundred Years' War;
Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; John, Duke of Berry; and Louis,
Duke of Anjou. In this list, all are names of remarkable men and great
art-patrons, about whom you may some day read interesting things.
Numerous lovely objects still in existence were made for them, and
would not have been made at all if they had not been the men they were.
It was only just becoming possible in the fourteenth century for a
prince to be an art-patron. That required money, and hitherto even
princes had rarely been rich. The increasing wealth of England, France,
and Flanders at this time was based upon the wool industry and the
manufacture and commerce to which it gave rise. The Lord Chancellor
in the House of Lords to this day sits on a woolsack, which is a reminder
of the time when the woolsacks of England were the chief source of
the wealth of English traders.
After the Black Death, an awful plague that swept through Europe in
1349, a large part of the land of England was given up to sheep grazing,
because the population had diminished, and it took fewer people to
look after sheep than it did to till the soil. Although this had been
an evil in the beginning, it became afterwards a benefit, for English
wool was sold at an excellent price to the merchants of Flanders, who
worked it up into cloth, and in their turn sold that all over Europe
with big profits. The larger merchants who regulated the wool traffic
were prosperous, and so too the landowners and princes whose property
thus increased in value. The four sons of King John became very wealthy
men. Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, by marrying the heiress of
the Count of Flanders acquired the Flemish territory and the wealth
obtained from the wool trade and manufacture there. Berry and Anjou
were great provinces in France yielding a large revenue to their two
Dukes. Each of these princes employed several artists to illuminate
books for him in the most splendid way; they built magnificent chateaux,
and had tapestries and paintings made to decorate their walls. They
employed many sculptors and goldsmiths, and all gave each other as
presents works of art executed by their favourite artists. In the
British Museum there is a splendid gold and enamel cup that John, Duke
of Berry, caused to be made for his brother King Charles V.; to see
it would give you a good idea of the costliness and elaboration of
the finest work of that day. The courts of these four brothers were
centres of artistic production in all kinds--sculpture, metal-work,
tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and pictures, and there was a
strong spirit of rivalry among the artists to see who could make the
loveliest things, and among the patrons as to which could secure the
best artists in his service.
These four princes gave an important impulse to the production of
beautiful things in France, Burgundy, and Flanders, but it is needless
to burden you with the artists' names.
In the fourteenth century an artist was a workman who existed to do
well the work that was desired of him. He was not an independent man
with ideas of his own, who attempted to make a living by painting what
he thought beautiful, without reference to the ideas of a buyer. Of
course, if people prefer and buy good things when they see them, good
things will be likely to be made, but if those with money to spend
have no taste and buy bad things or order ugly things to be made, then
the men who had it in them to be great artists may die unnoticed, because
the beautiful things they could have made are not called for. To-day
many people spend something upon art and a few spend a great deal.
Let us hope we may not see too much of the money spent in creating
a demand for what is bad rather than for what is beautiful.
It was not unusual in the fourteenth century for a man to be at one
and the same time painter, illuminator, sculptor, metal-worker, and
designer of any object that might be called for. One of these many
gifted men, Andre Beauneveu of Valenciennes, a good sculptor and a
painter of some exquisite miniatures, is sometimes supposed to have
been the painter of our picture of Richard II. In the absence of any
signature or any definite record it is impossible to say who painted
it, but it is unnecessary to assume that it must have been painted
by a French artist, since we know that at the end of the fourteenth
century there were very good painters in England.
It was by no means an exception not to sign a picture in those days,
for the artists had not begun to think of themselves as individuals
entitled to public fame. Hand-workers of the fourteenth century mostly
belonged to a corporation or guild composed of all the other workers
at the same trade in the same town, and to this rule artists were no
exception. Each man received a recognized price for his work, and the
officers of the guild saw to it that he obtained that price and that
he worked with good and durable materials. There were certain
advantages in this, but it involved some loss of freedom in the artist,
since all had to conform to the rules of the guild. The system was
characteristic of the Middle Ages, and arose from the fact that in
those troublous times every isolated person needed protection and was
content to merge his individuality in some society in order to obtain
it. The guilds made for peace and diminished competition, so that a
guildsman may have been less tempted to hurry over or scamp his task.
The result was much honest, careful work such as you see in the original
of this picture. We are told by those who know best that there has
never been a time when the actual workmanship of the general run of
craftsmen was better than in the Middle Ages.
This picture of Richard II. has not faded or cracked or fallen off
the panel, and it seems as though we may hope it never will, for it
was well made and, what is even more important, it seems always to
have been well cared for. If only the nice things that are produced
were all well cared for, how many more of them there would be in the
world!