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In 1632 Charles I of England, a king obsessed with the appearance of an authority he did not quite have in Parliament, brought the Antwerp painter Anthony van Dyck to London, knighted him, and gave him rooms at Blackfriars and a boat to ferry him up the Thames to the royal palace. Van Dyck had trained years earlier in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens, the leading painter of the Southern Netherlands, and had spent much of his twenties in Italy studying Titian's portraits in Genoa. What he brought back to England was a way of painting the aristocracy that made formal portraiture look relaxed, even intimate, without losing an ounce of grandeur.

For the rest of the decade van Dyck painted almost nobody but the king, the queen, and their circle, turning out image after image of a monarchy that recorded itself, in paint, exactly as it wanted to be remembered. Charles hardly sat for anyone else again. Those portraits are still the picture most people carry of the Stuart court, elongated hands, silk, ease, a king who looks entirely secure on his throne.

Van Dyck died in London in December 1641, a year before civil war broke out between Charles and Parliament. Charles was executed outside his own Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1649, reportedly wearing two shirts against the January cold so that he would not shiver and be seen to be afraid.