Baroque court portraits: how the kings and queens of the 1600s were painted

In the 1600s, kings in Spain, England and France employed favourite painters and used their portraits to decorate palaces and to send abroad as gifts. This page looks at how the Baroque courts portrayed their rulers: the painters who served them, the queens and regents they painted, and the palaces the portraits were made for. The art style of the century, with its strong light and movement, is explained in what Baroque art is. Here the subject is the ruler in the picture. For the full story across the centuries, start at the guide to European royal portraits.

The palace and its rooms

A Baroque royal portrait was made to hang in a palace, and the palace itself was built to show power. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London says the buildings and gardens of Versailles, near Paris, were planned to glorify King Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715, and to hold the pomp and ceremony that revolved around him. Rulers across Europe copied it.

The rooms of a palace were arranged by rank. The V&A explains that every palace was divided into apartments, suites of rooms in a line, from a guards' hall to a state bedchamber. A visitor's rank was shown by how far through the rooms he was allowed to go. At Versailles, the museum says, a bust of the king stood at the centre of the great Ambassadors' Staircase, just as he stood at the centre of court life, and the whole court gathered in the Hall of Mirrors every day to watch him pass to the chapel.

Portraits did the same job on canvas. Tate, writing about the Baroque in Britain, says a portrait in this style showed that the sitter was a person of wealth and importance. It says commissioning a portrait acted as a seal of one's power and a record of one's success, and that the more elaborate the painting, the greater the illusion of power.

Van Dyck and the court of Charles I

The National Gallery in London says Charles I was crowned King of England in 1625 and beheaded outside the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall in 1649, and that he was an important patron of the arts and a notable collector. Tate says he built one of the greatest royal art collections and appointed the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck "Principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties", his principal painter.

Charles brought other painters too. The National Gallery says he invited Gerrit van Honthorst to England in 1628, and that Honthorst painted several royal portraits there before returning to The Hague.

Van Dyck's best-known image of the king shows him on horseback. The National Gallery dates this Equestrian Portrait of Charles I to 1638 to 1639 and says it is over 3.5 metres high, the largest of Van Dyck's portraits of the king. The pose, and what the horse and reins meant, is explained on the page about royal portrait poses. The chain and badge that mark the king's rank are explained on the page about symbols of royal power.

Velázquez and Philip IV

In Spain, one painter recorded a king across most of his reign. The National Gallery says Diego Velázquez served Philip IV as court artist from 1623, and painted the king and his family over four decades.

The portraits built a picture of a dynasty. The National Gallery says Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver, from 1631 or 1632, was recorded in the mid-1600s in the library of the Escorial, the royal monastery near Madrid. There it formed a group of four portraits with the king's predecessors, Charles V, Philip II and Philip III, placing Philip in the line of the Habsburg family.

The gallery's late portrait of the king, painted in the mid-1650s, shows a different man. Philip, who came to the throne at 16 and reigned from 1621 to 1665, looks tired and middle-aged, with sagging flesh and puffy eyes. He wears his usual black, with the gold chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece. The gallery says Philip seems to have approved of the picture. Velázquez's pupils made many copies of it, which were given as gifts to members of the court and to visiting dignitaries, and it was engraved for a book about the Escorial in 1657. A year later, in 1658, Velázquez was made a Knight of Santiago, an honour the gallery says he had always wanted.

Queens, widows and regents

Two portraits in the National Gallery show royal widows. When Philip IV died in 1665, his son Charles was too young to rule, so his widow Mariana ruled as regent until 1677. The National Gallery's portrait of her by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, from 1666, shows her in the widow's black habit and white wimple, seated on a throne-like chair in the royal palace in Madrid. She holds a petition, which the gallery says points to her official duties. Mazo was Velázquez's son-in-law and principal assistant, and he became court painter after Velázquez died in 1660.

In the Dutch Republic, Honthorst painted another royal widow. Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I of England, had been crowned Queen of Bohemia with her husband Frederick V in 1619, but they were deposed in the winter of 1620 and went into exile in The Hague. She became known as the Winter Queen. The National Gallery says Honthorst's portrait of 1642 is near life size and was the first time she was painted in the open air. Viewers of the time, it says, would have judged her status from the picture's size and from her lace and silks.

Tate points out that portraits were one of the few ways in which women of the court could exercise power. It names Peter Lely, a Dutch painter who spent his career in England, as a painter commissioned by women of the royal court.

Rubens and the nobleman

The great painters also portrayed the nobles around the king. The National Gallery says Peter Paul Rubens met Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, in England in 1629 and 1630. Arundel was Earl Marshal of England from 1621 and built up a collection of drawings and ancient sculpture. Rubens painted him three times. In two portraits Arundel is a man of action, in armour, looking straight at the viewer. In the third, in the National Gallery, he sits looking away with a focused expression, and the gallery says his status is underlined by the Lesser George, a badge of the Order of the Garter, on a blue ribbon at his neck.

Restoration England

Tate says the Baroque period in Britain began with the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, and that artists were commissioned to sell the idea that the crown was secure and order had returned. In Antonio Verrio's Sea Triumph of Charles II, painted in the 1670s, the king rides into the centre of the picture, above everyone else and just below the angels celebrating his return. Tate says the monarch was seen as appointed by God, and that the painting re-establishes Charles as the rightful ruler.

The V&A holds a marble bust of Charles II made in 1684 by the sculptor Honoré Pelle. The museum says his head is turned to one side and an elaborate wig falls over his lace cravat and billowing drapery. It adds that such grand Baroque images of monarchs were more common in France than in England, but Charles had spent much of his youth in mainland Europe and favoured European artists.

Louis XIV and the portrait of 1701

The century ended with Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV, painted in 1701. The Château de Versailles says it became an emblem of absolute monarchy by divine right across Europe, and that it still influences the official portraits of French presidents today. The National Gallery calls Rigaud the most prestigious portraitist in France in his time.

The Louvre tells the story of the picture. After the king's grandson became King Philip V of Spain in 1700, Louis ordered a portrait of him from Rigaud, and the young king asked for a portrait of his grandfather by the same hand. When it was finished, Louis and his whole court admired it so much that he kept it and ordered a second version for Madrid. The first version hung over the fireplace in the Salon d'Apollon, the throne room at Versailles. It was seized during the French Revolution and moved to the Louvre in 1814. The Louvre says Pierre Drevet engraved it between 1714 and 1716, and that Rigaud's records list a great many reduced copies.

The Baroque Aristocrat style

Purrealism's Baroque Aristocrat style takes its look from these courts. The gallery shows it on a Siamese cat, two English bulldogs and an Australian shepherd, so you can see the wigs, lace and silks before you choose. You can pick the style in the portrait studio. The century that followed, with its lighter colours and softer poses, is covered on the page about Rococo court portraits.