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Description: | Oil on canvas. King Charles I is depicted wearing a ruff, a grey doublet (close fitting, buttoned jacket), gauntlet gloves, knee-length breeches and turquoise-blue stockings. An inscription on the painting indicates that he was 29 at the time it was painted. Mytens and his studio painted several similar portraits of Charles I between 1629 and 1631 and together they show Charles's development into a confident monarch. Variations in the different versions are chiefly limited to the background and clothing of the King.
Charles I was the second surviving son of James I. He married Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), sister of the French king Louis XIII, in 1625. His reign was marked by increasing hostility between himself and Parliament. He retained the intensely unpopular Duke of Buckingham as his chief minister and dissolved Parliament in 1626, 1628 and 1629. He then ruled for eleven years without a Parliament, before summoning two in 1640 when urgently in need of funds. It was his relationship with the second of these, the Long Parliament, which led to the English Civil War and to his own eventual capture in 1647. In 1649 he was tried in Westminster Hall, charged with high treason and beheaded on a scaffold erected in Whitehall. He was succeeded by his son Charles II. | Subjects: | 17th century costume ruff gauntlet carpet king robe curtain royal portrait ribbon beard glove doublet badge moustache King Charles I shoe man | Temporal: | 1629 | Source: | Government Art Collection | Creator: | Daniel Mytens | Identifier: | http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/work.aspx?... | Go to resource |
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