Meet the Ancestors: A Wills and Kate Special

Two weeks ago Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement. While the rest of the country were snapping up Issa dresses, ordering replica sapphire rings from QVC and placing bets on the wedding date, I was searching the Royal Collection catalogue for details on the full length ceremonial portrait hanging above the St James’s Palace photo call.

Which monarch would William align himself with on this most important of days? How about Henry VIII, famed for his matrimonial devotion and steadfastness? Or George IV who said of his wife Caroline of Brunswick that ‘it required no small effort to conquer my aversion and overcome the disgust of her person’? Maybe better to go with George III and Queen Charlotte who were married for nearly sixty years and had fifteen children together?

Prince William opted for a portrait of his namesake William IV by Sir Martin Archer Shee, the largely forgotten artist who succeeded Thomas Lawrence as president of the Royal Academy.  As matrimonial role models go, William is not the obvious choice. Before he came to the throne William IV spent twenty years living in sin with Mrs Dorothea Jordan, a comic actress with whom he had ten illegitimate children. 

The political satirists were merciless. ‘Actress’ was as bad as ‘prostitute’ and ‘jordan’ was slang for a chamber pot. A particularly vicious cartoon 'The Crack'd Jordan' by James Gillray has William disappearing headfirst into a large earthenware commode with much vigorous yahooing.  

William eventually settled down. At 53 he married the twenty five year old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. The couple had four children; none survived infancy. And so ended the Hanoverian kings. 

Shee's portrait of William IV was a strange choice for the engagement of William and Kate. The Jordan affair ended dismally with Dorothea, exiled to France to escape her creditors, dying alone and in poverty in a Parisian suburb. Adelaide and William suffered the death of two daughters and twin baby sons.

William and Kate might have done their homework. Both studied history of art at St Andrews (we’ll let Wills off because he did switch to geography) and should have been alert to any adverse symbolism lurking in their choice of backing painting.

I wish them well. I hope the satirists are kind to Kate, that their many strapping heirs inherit her hair and not his, and that when the time comes to announce the first Windsor/Middleton birth they’ll do it in front of something more appropriate. Court painter Johann Zoffany did a nice line in happy families. 

Savage Landscapes - Salvator Rosa at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

There is an embarrassing moment in Ann Radcliffe’s much-lampooned novel of 1794 The Mysteries of Udulpho when the author briefly loses track of her elaborate historical plot. The year, supposedly, is 1584 and the heroine Emily St Aubert is travelling through the sublime Midi-Pyrenees. The narrator provides a panoramic voice-over:  ‘This was such a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed for his canvas.’

It’s a clumsy anachronism. Salvator Rosa won’t be born for another thirty years. Radcliffe never went to Italy, never made it further south than the Rhine. The Italy of Udulpho, The Italian and A Sicilian Romance is a fantasy cribbed from engravings after Rosa’s paintings bought from a print shop in Bath.

The artist is there in Radcliffe’s wild and rugged landscapes, in the villainous banditti lurking beneath storm-blasted arches, the wiry ascetics meditating in the mountains, and in her crumbling bridges, precipitous passes, and subterraneous caverns.

Radcliffe wasn’t the only writer to rely on the Rosa effect. The first of the Gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, reads like a series of set pieces from Rosa’s greatest hits. Walpole acknowledged the debt when he gushed in his alpine travel journal: ‘Precipices, mountains, wolves, torrents, rumblings – Salvator Rosa.’ The quote is etched on the walls of the Salvator Rosa exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The exhibition explores the darkest recesses of Rosa’s macabre imagination. His heroes are outlaws and outcasts, naked witches and men of the hills. His paintings are haunted by brinded cats and wingéd skeletons, fenny snakes and gutted toads, strange hybrid rat-newts and owl-bats as big as a man.

His craggy landscapes provide the backdrop to the more strange and mystical events from the Bible and ancient history. Rosa revisits the grim fate of Atilius Regulus: imprisoned inside a barrel, struck through with nails, and launched down a hill. He takes a morbid pleasure in the tragic suicide of the philosopher Empedocles as he leaps from the jagged lip of Etna into the teeming, spitting lava below. In Rosa’s version of the prophetic Dream of Jacob the angels brawl on Jacob’s ladder, having a punch up over who stepped on which rung first.  

Technically, Rosa is not one of the greats. His female nudes are ill-proportioned. Their breasts sit either squintingly close together or practically under the armpits. They sport enormous biceps, manly hands, and hobbit toes. He’s more at ease with the dry, sagging, crepey bodies of his witches than he is with a nubile life-model posing for Fortuna.

Rosa is the original Goth.  He paints his sitters with sallow, graveyard skin and relishes the dirt under their fingernails. If there is a bridge to be crossed it may collapse at any moment, if there’s a path through the mountains it is lined with armed bandits, and if there’s a distant, hopeful light in the darkening woods, you can bet your last match that it comes from beneath a cauldron.