Pyramids of piffle: Tate Britain’s British Baroque reviewed

British Baroque: it was never going to fly. Les rosbifs emulating the splendour of le Roi Soleil? Pas possible. Still, we had a go and the evidence is assembled in British Baroque: Power and Illusion, Tate Britain’s survey of the art of the Stuart court from the restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714.

An awful lot happened in those 54 years — the Glorious Revolution, the union of England and Scotland, endless wars in Europe, the rise of party politics — but through it all the Frenchified taste for ‘Wonderful Figures and Whirligigs… that are of no manner of use but to laugh at’ in the contemptuous words of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, remained constant, and sitters in the portraits of the period kept any signs of change under their wigs.

Oh the wigs! The swags! The fluttering draperies! The flying cherubs! The shepherdesses! The sheep! To judge by the number of baa-lambs littering their paintings, portraitists’ studios must have had petting zoos attached. Even in a royal portrait by Jacob Huysmans, the newlywed Catherine of Braganza is upstaged by a pair of sheep and a family of ducks. No wonder she looks utterly miserable. Welcome to Britain: we love animals; papist princesses from Portugal, not so much.

Foreign artists were OK, though. By room two one begins to realise that almost none of the artists in British Baroque is actually British, and to suspect the foreigners — the Italians especially — of taking the piss. The tone is set in ‘The Sea Triumph of Charles II’ (c.1674) by Antonio Verrio, whose depiction of the British monarch as Neptune is the definition of a pyramid of piffle — though in some ways less ridiculous than the French painter Henri Gascar’s portrayal of his brother James, Duke of York (1672–3) as Mars in a gold cuirass tied with a royal blue ribbon and sky-blue silk leggings teamed with jewelled lilac sandals.