British Baroque: Power and Illusion review – mind-boggling and sublime

You go through the door into this exhibition and – boom! In front of you is a two-and-a-half-metre square painting in which a colourful pile of naked gods and goddesses, tritons, angels and white-maned hippocamps surges up to bear aloft the coarse-featured, black-bewigged figure of Charles II in Roman military gear, his pink mantle draped across the sky by naked cherubs. It’s breath-taking, and quite absurd: a statement by the imported Italian artist Antonio Verrio of the restored King Charles’s dominion over the oceans, painted a few years after one of England’s most crushing naval defeats, by the Dutch.

He surrounded himself with a court that was also an embodiment of those liberties. The next room is awash with gorgeous ladies, their lusciously evoked flesh and shimmering satins effectively set off in this display by warm, dark wall-colours. Many are the work of Peter Lely, who had come from Holland some years earlier and was appointed his personal painter by the King. One seductively smiling portrait, of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, mistress (one of many) to the King, is shown with her son (one of many) as none other than the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child.

These themes come together in a display of house portraits, a genre that had come from the Low Countries with landscape painters like Jan Siberechts, portraying not simply a building but its whole economy, with parterres, espaliered walks, kitchen gardens, stables, and the husbandry of the surrounding countryside.

Now emerges the first native English historical and decorative painter, James Thornhill, who rose to the challenge of one of the most ambitious of all interior decorative schemes: the great banqueting hall at Wren’s Greenwich Hospital. Here, on a colossal ceiling and vast walls, British  naval achievements are once again celebrated, and William and Mary the monarchs accorded their apotheosis. These achievements can’t of course appear on the walls of the exhibition, but there is a good selection of Thornhill’s lively drawings and oil studies. Likewise there are modelli  by Verrio for the Heaven Room at Burghley, by the Huguenot Louis Chéron for Boughton, and by Louis Laguerre, another Frenchman, for the staircase at Petworth. On the more intimate scale of portraiture, an artist like John Closterman could group children with style and charm to create a lively and decidedly ‘Baroque’ ensemble – more convincing, in fact, than his opposite numbers in Amsterdam.