A Cultural Pedigree

Legend has it that sometime around 1630, at a lavish banquet for England’s King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, the duke of Buckingham presented her majesty with an enormous pie, inside of which a dwarf was hidden. The queen was delighted. Little Jeffrey Hudson became her constant companion, until the fateful day in 1649 when he killed an adversary in a duel over slurs about his stature and was banished from the realm. Hudson was captured at sea by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery. Eventually he escaped and made his way back to England, where he quietly lived out his life.

And you thought the shenanigans of Britain’s current royal family were odd.

An extraordinary full-length portrait of the regal queen, the adventuresome dwarf and an impish monkey commands the entrance to a complex and fascinating exhibition, “Great British Paintings From American Collections: Holbein to Hockney,” which opened Sunday at the Huntington Library’s Boone Gallery. Painted in 1633 by gifted Flemish portraitist Anthony van Dyck, the 7-foot-tall picture is a sumptuous display rendered in big chunks of red velvet, blue satin and yellow brocade--Mondrian for the Baroque era, as it were. The queen is the elegant epitome of porcelain-skinned serenity, an ideal beauty who quells the beastly animal nature of the monkey with a simple gesture from her firm if unobtrusive hand, while Jeffrey, his upturned face aglow, looks on in radiant admiration.

Van Dyck’s regal Henrietta Maria bears scant resemblance to a written portrayal once offered by her husband’s niece. Princess Sophia, quoted in the exhibition’s excellent catalog, carefully described her impression of the queen as “a little woman with long, lean arms, crooked shoulders and teeth protruding from her mouth like guns from a fort.” Van Dyck, a prodigy who had risen to become chief studio assistant in Antwerp to Peter Paul Rubens before he was 20, certainly understood his job as painter to the British court: Create an opulent Masterpiece Theater that its noble audience would adore.

“Great British Paintings From American Collections” is filled with remarkable paintings like this one. Its purpose, though, is not simply to assemble exceptional pictures, but to trace the history of American collecting in the area of British painting. Most American museums--especially in the Northeast, site of several of the original British colonies--have their share of British masterworks. Paramount among them is the Yale Center for British Art, which organized the show. The Huntington houses the other of the nation’s two great public collections of this material.

The 20th century is when pre-modern British painting came flooding into American collections, dominated in the 1910s and 1920s by Henry P. Huntington and from the 1960s on by Paul Mellon, benefactor of the Yale Center. That the so-called American Century would define itself partly by amassing the accouterments of British nobility isn’t exactly surprising. To the victor go the spoils. The exhibition catalog also notes a sharp turn-of-the-century rise in American heiresses marrying titled Brits, led by the wedding of the duke of Marlborough to the daughter of railroad magnate William Vanderbilt. Paintings provided ancestral foundation.

Huntington’s taste went to full-length portraits from the British Golden Age. When he bought Thomas Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy” (1770) in 1921 for the headline-making sum of $728,000--that’s more than $7 million in today’s currency, adjusted for inflation--it immediately became the most famous British painting in America. (It still is.) Together with “Pinkie” (1794), Thomas Lawrence’s rather sticky confection, the picture has been moved from its long-standing position of honor in the center of the Huntington’s main gallery to the current exhibition--a rare opportunity to examine the famous figure almost toe to toe. The paint handling is amazing, from the brooding sky in the distance to the silver lace at the young dandy’s throat.

In the show, “The Blue Boy” is in the company of other exceptional portrait examples by Gainsborough, as well as by Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Henry Raeburn and Gilbert Stuart, the American expatriate. (Stuart employed a symphony of gray tonalities to render his thoroughly un-British portrayal of William Grant, who is casually engaged in the informal pastime of ice skating.) The assembly is revealing. Two conventional observations are often made about the cultural history of Britain. One is that literary and theatrical narrative has been dominant--Shakespeare, Milton, et al--far surpassing the static imagery of visual art. The other is that, from Van Dyck onward, the essential genius of British portraiture has been found in its bravura handling of paint. In the show, these two conventions come crashing together.

The painterly brilliance of Blue Boy’s satin tunic or Pinkie’s gossamer dress, the creamy skin of Reynolds’ women and William Hogarth’s grinning children, the florid display of Queen Henrietta Maria and all the rest become effusive visual evidence of artistic performance. “The Blue Boy” is a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, 16-year-old son of a wealthy ironmonger, and he’s dressed in luxurious costume from an earlier century, like an actor playing a role. Yet, a complementary narrative also unfolds in the showy brushwork, where painting is cast as a riveting theatrical display.

The presentation of sumptuous material like satin and fur was obviously intended for the satisfaction of the aristocratic patron (and, later, to the satisfaction of American collectors). But painting per se is also an integral part of the show the artist puts on. Artists are performing for their public, and brushwork is the drama’s tracery. Think of the performance as “action painting” in the Grand Manner--painting as show biz.

The sumptuous Van Dyck tradition got pumped up into florid flash and theatricalized ostentation, which also characterized the dramatic animal narratives magnificently rendered by George Stubbs and soon spilled over into the flickering landscape pictures of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner (all well represented here). A societal change had occurred in the 18th century. The birth and expansion of a middle class created a new market for art, and art changed in response.

Before, the greatest painters were imported to England, like Hans Holbein from Germany and Van Dyck from Antwerp. Now, home-grown talent filled the need. Tellingly, not a single still life--sumptuous or spare--will be found in the exhibition, until 20th century abstraction found a use for still life as a structural armature. Simple images of glassware, abundant food and silver were not enough to satisfy the new market’s tastes. Middle-class patrons wanted their artists to perform for them, and the animate quality inherent in pictures of people and nature provided the best vehicle for their painterly song and dance.

Due to space limitations the show has been trimmed by 17 pictures from its debut at Yale, which has resulted in the unfortunate loss of a recent monumental nude by terrific young painter Jenny Saville. A few omissions are also surprising, such as anything by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the intellectual force behind the 19th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as are a few odd inclusions, like a full-length figure of a quasi-Grecian maiden by obscure Victorian idealist Albert Moore.

Still, the inclusion of Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781), a haunted picture of an evil incubus astride a sleeping beauty and the artist’s single greatest work, would be reason enough to see the show. Or Hogarth’s luscious double portrait of two noble children idly torturing a puppy, which gives the lie to our gilded modern mythology of sunny childhood innocence. Or Stubbs’ positively surreal vision of an African zebra standing stock-still and radiant within a leafy British woodland. Or John Singer Sargent’s sequel to his scandalously erotic picture “Madame X”--a monochrome, Velasquez-like portrait of “Mrs. Albert Vickers” (1884), whose lush range of brooding grays pierced by flashes of white conveys, like fellow American expatriate Stuart’s earlier stunning portrait of the ice skater, all the quiet drama of a thunderstorm. Or--well, you get the idea.

A lot of terrific paintings will be found among the 64 canvases on view. The only real misstep is the small, generally weak and seemingly haphazard selection of 20th century paintings. Modern British painting is at any rate no match overall for what came before, and there may be revealing irony in this. As Huntington, Mellon and other American collectors began buying up British art in the last century, the mighty power of the marketplace shifted once again.

Timing was important. Against a backdrop of the movie industry getting underway in Los Angeles, Huntington began the trend in the era when mass culture was first consolidating as a force. And Mellon started collecting around 1960, at the moment pop culture was going global. That both great collectors should be attracted to an art that was powerfully theatrical--in subject and in substance--seems apt.

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“Great British Paintings From American Collections: Holbein to Hockney,” Boone Gallery, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, (626) 405-2100, through May 5. Closed Mondays.