Equestrian Portrait of Charles I

Anthony van Dyck built the image of Charles I that history remembers, and few pictures do it as grandly as this. The king rides a great horse through a wooded English landscape, in gleaming armour, calm and commanding, a tablet hung on a tree naming him King of Great Britain. Van Dyck, Rubens's brilliant Flemish pupil, had been brought to London to make the Stuart court look magnificent, and he did just that. What the painting cannot show is how fragile all this was. Within a few years, around 1638, Charles would be at war with his own Parliament, and in 1649 that same head would be cut off outside his palace at Whitehall. Charles himself was a short man, and the towering horse and the low angle we look up from were partly there to lend him a height he did not have.