Martin Gayford

Crown jewels | 25 January 2018

Martin Gayford is overwhelmed by the sheer concentration of visual splendour amassed by this collector-king

issue 27 January 2018

Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters,’ he wrote from London in 1629, ‘I have never seen such a large number in one place.’ In Charles I: King and Collector the Royal Academy has reassembled only a fraction of what the king once owned, yet even so this is a sumptuous feast of an exhibition.

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