He is handsome. Self-absorbed. Black cloak. White cravat. His hair, parted down the middle, falls around his face in dark and buoyant ringlets. Big moustache. Trendy goatee. You can imagine him as a singer-songwriter of the hippy era or perhaps, more weirdly, as a model for Jesus in a Rembrandt painting.
Certainly, there is sorrow in his eyes, a powerful sense of looking inside himself rather than out. Note, as well, the size of those eyes. So big. So open. His mind is elsewhere and our job, as his audience, is to imagine where his thoughts might be wandering.
Painted in the late 1630s by William Dobson (1611-46), court painter to Charles I, it is a self-portrait that stands out in myriad ways. Some artistically significant. Some central to the history and soul of Britain. The first thing to celebrate here, though, is that the picture has just been acquired jointly by Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery. No longer will it remain a private pleasure. Pop the poppers and dust off the vuvuzelas. Britain has bought a Dobson.
The two institutions plan to share the showings and to tour the nation with the picture, raising interest in Dobson and his critical times. For now, it is still in the conservation studio, but in the autumn it will go on display at Tate Britain where it will hang alongside the portrait of Dobson’s wife, Judith, which the gallery already owns.
Another cause for celebration is that it cost the NPG and the Tate just £2,367,405. The Tate director, Maria Balshaw, revealed the exact sum to me when I pressed her about the purchase. Rumours had been circulating of a sum closer to £5 million. In my book, that makes it one of the bargains of the century. For the price of an average print by Andy Warhol, the nation has got its hands on a crucial bit of its heritage. So let’s all dance the conga.
Certainly, it is a much more reasonable cost than the ridiculous £50 million spent recently by the NPG in partnership with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles on the Portrait of Mai (Omai) by Joshua Reynolds. The money for that outlandish purchase was raised with one of those “save it for the nation” circuses that used to be a regular feature of museum life in Britain. Today, tech bros and oil merchants are doing the big buying in art.
It is also true that the reasons why the Dobson is so desirable and special are chiefly local. He is fully a British painter, whose achievements are glued firmly to these shores. So much so that some readers will be wondering: who the hell is this guy? One thing William Dobson is not is a household name.
You never see him listed alongside Turner, Constable, Hogarth or Gainsborough in the premier league of national artistic achievements, although he deserves to sit there. Dobson may have been the first native-born genius of British art — as the historian John Aubrey put it in his famous Brief Lives, “the most excellent painter that England hath yet bred” — but his career was spent on the wrong side and his “sins” were the kind a nation does not forgive quickly. If ever.
His tragedy was to be associated intimately with the court of a king whose love of art was seen as a popish indulgence by the surrounding Cromwellians and Puritans. Charles I’s lavish spending on art, all those Titians and Veroneses he collected, most of which were sold off cheaply after his beheading and can now be found in the Prado in Madrid, was anathema to the English psyche. It wasn’t the only reason the king was murdered, but it was certainly a factor.
We don’t know exactly how Dobson entered the service of the first Charles. Facts about his life are sparse and only a handful of documents mention his name. They say he was a pupil of Charles I’s official court painter, Anthony Van Dyck, but that’s probably wishful thinking. Somehow or other, this London boy, born and baptised in Holborn, managed to acquire a decent art education, so decent that sometime in his mid-twenties he was already good enough to paint that self-portrait.
The most special thing about it is what we might call its un-English mood. Until Dobson arrived, British art was in the hands of skilled miniaturists and detailed technicians. Its most recognisable international quality was its stiffness. Think of all those beautifully bejewelled portraits of Elizabeth I.
That beautiful stiffness is a world away from what we get from Dobson. Using a thick brush heavy with paint, oozing romantic self-absorption and futuristic me-ism, he gives us an extraordinarily dark and personal picture. It’s as if British art has leapt forwards 200 years. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we have a native Caravaggio on our hands.
The self-portrait is one of only two or three examples that survive of Dobson’s output before he entered the service of the king. We don’t know the circumstances. But the Fates, wicked so-and-so’s that they are, clearly played a part because in 1641, just as England was readying itself for its civil war, they arranged for Van Dyck to die abruptly, leaving the post vacant for the local boy, Dobson.
Over the next four years, while civil war raged and the court transferred itself to Oxford, it was Dobson who was on hand in the embattled royalist headquarters to paint the portraits of the fighting Cavaliers; Dobson whom the Fates entrusted with putting a face to the English Civil War. He did it gloriously.
His portraits of the court, scattered today about the stately homes of Britain, barely known to a wider public, are some of the most precious surviving documents of a conflict that tore the nation apart and that ended, unbelievably and scarily, with the beheading of the king. That the main artistic witness to these terrors should be a native talent from Holborn, that he should be such a fluent and wristy painter, that the Fates put him in exactly the right place at exactly the right time is more miracle than art history.
The newly acquired self-portrait is the face of a man who can know nothing yet of the national traumas ahead. But is it just me, or is there not some awareness here already of the upcoming darkness?