Art patronage and court influence, 1660-1714

This thesis will investigate the influence of the court on art patronage in the later Stuart period. Through a series of case studies of individuals, couples and one club, associated with or linked to the court, it will seek to understand how court, public and private spheres interacted in the commissioning and collecting of the visual arts, including painting, architecture and interiors. Taking into consideration questions of style, fashion, and the emerging concept of 'taste', it will take an interdisciplinary approach to look beyond art history to the nexus between art and politics, and ask how far artistic patronage reflected a shift in political power in this period of significant upheaval.

Art historians as recently as 2012 have considered the patronage of the later Stuart courts as a period of decline. New scholarship, including James Winn's biographical survey of Queen Anne's patronage, the Tate research project and associated publication Court, Country, City, and David Solkin's Art in Britain 1660-1815 have demonstrated the vitality of the arts in the later Stuart period, integrating them into their political, social and cultural context. However, more research is needed into art patronage, specifically, the question of court influence. As the locus of power shifted away from the court, did patronage follow suit? Helen Jacobsen's Luxury and Power, surveys the patronage of diplomats and their use of display and connoisseurship as a political tool, but is restricted to this one group. Many detailed surveys of individual patrons, genres and buildings exist but these are either single discipline, or focus on one individual or period only.

Art patronage is also intimately linked to questions of style, fashion, connoisseurship and aesthetic philosophy. The V&A's 2009 exhibition Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence challenged the association of Baroque with the Counter-Reformation or absolutism and defined it as a style of magnificence and expressiveness. Nevertheless, it has been argued that the emerging notion of taste, with its associations of moral superiority, and an alternative, more democratic aesthetic, exemplified by the Kit-Cat club, mounted a challenge to the leadership of the court, both culturally and politically.

This thesis will investigate the degree of influence exercised by the later Stuart courts on the art patronage of key individuals associated with the court. Drawing on network theory, it will consider how patronage was exercised in the overlapping spheres of court, country, parliament, party and private interests, and will question what this reveals about the locus and exercise of power. Considering artistic style and aesthetic theory, it will question whether the transfer of power during this period from a Catholic- and absolutist-leaning monarchy, to a more meritocratic aristocracy and parliament, was paralleled by a change in the role of the court as a source of inspiration and arbiter of taste.

This thesis will use case studies selected to achieve a broad representation of time periods and corresponding courts; of men and women; of political affiliations; of noble and ordinary birth. The particular issues interrogated in each case study will be brought together by a common analytical focus on the relationship between political power and art patronage. Addressing the visual arts, principally painting, sculpture, architecture, interior decoration and furnishing, it will use correspondence, inventories, contemporary accounts and publications, and the artworks themselves to identify not only what art was commissioned and collected, but how and why.

Co-supervised by Tate under the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme, the research undertaken for this thesis will also contribute to the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain, 'English Baroque, 1660-1714'.