Stop and Look: Henri IV and the Spanish Ambassador by Richard Parkes Bonington

In his brief lifespan of twenty-five years, Richard Parkes Bonington was enormously prolific. He attained an international reputation that grew after his death and became one of the leading stylistic inspirations for artists of the Romantic decades (1810-40). In all these respects he had a striking opposite number at the other end of the nineteenth century: Aubrey Beardsley too, died at the age of twenty-five having been enormously prolific, and in his chosen medium of pen and ink also a virtuoso, developing a distinctive style that was influential all over Europe.

The two artists could hardly be more different, but in addition to these parallel circumstances, they both had strong links with France. Beardsley illustrated Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, which was written in French (translated into English by Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas) and died in France. Bonington passed nearly all his career in France and became a close friend of Eugène Delacroix, on whom he exerted very significant influence. 

These Romantic decades were in fact a time when the future of painting was being forged as a joint project between the two countries. Bonington, the son of a view-painter and lace-seller in Nottingham began as a topographical landscape watercolourist, influenced by a Frenchman living in England, Francois Louis Thomas Francia. Francia had learned his art from a Londoner, Thomas Girtin, the close early friend of Turner. When Bonington senior moved to France following the exigencies of the lace business, his son went too, and became the centre of a lively circle of young artists. He was almost at once recognised as a prodigy and his prolific output, largely but not exclusively of coastal scenes, was collected on both sides of the Channel.

He and Delacroix evolved a new kind of subject: intimate scenes of figures in historical costume – figures from actual history, but in situations often remote from the seriousness of recorded events. The idea came from a new fashion in French painting known as the Troubadour style, a way of presenting history in scenes of a sort of dressing-up box invention. Bonington had by this date enlarged his repertoire to include oil painting as well as watercolour, and he proved a virtuoso in both media. Many of his subjects appeared in both forms, as did this delightful scene based on a report by the Spanish Ambassador of his visit to the popular French king Henri IV and found him playing on the floor with his young family. 

The small scale of cabinet pictures like this one contrasts with the grandeur of Delacroix’s more famous historical subjects, but both come from the same impulse, to humanise a type of subject matter that had become overblown and stiff in the hands of the neo-classical masters of the Napoleonic period. Bonington, with his English naturalism and informality, brought exactly the spark of real life that French painting needed to revitalise itself for the challenges of the new century, which was to end so differently in the very dissimilar virtuosity of Beardsley’s decadence.

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