An equestrian portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628),
oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 50 x 41.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Maria Galen for suggesting an attribution to Abraham van Diepenbeeck (’s-Hertogenbosch 1596–1675 Antwerp) for the present painting.

This elegant portrait shows the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most notorious characters of Charles I reign, on horseback as Lord High Admiral of the fleet. The swashbuckling bravura that captivated Buckingham’s admirers – and inspired Alexander Dumas’ romantic depiction of him in The Three Musketeers – is evident.

George Villiers was a favourite of both King James I and King Charles I. He was raised to the peerage as Viscount in 1616, quickly becoming an Earl and Marquess within two years. Royal favour made him the richest and most powerful noble in the land and as Duke of Buckingham he amassed a huge art collection. He first encountered Rubens in Paris in 1625 on the occasion of Charles’ marriage-by-proxy to Henrietta Maria, sister of the King of France. Newly appointed to the post of Lord High Admiral, he commissioned an enormous equestrian portrait of himself in this role. Privately Rubens noted Buckingham’s ‘arrogance and caprice’ and predicted that he was ‘heading for the precipice’. History was to prove him right as the duke’s unsuccessful military campaigns against Spain and France were much resented, and in 1628 he was assassinated. The final large painting on canvas, measuring 307 x 337 cm, completed by Rubens was dispersed with the rest of the duke’s collection after his death. In more recent times, the painting entered the collection of the Earl of Jersey at Osterley Park, Oxford, before it was destroyed by fire in 1949.

The present painting is a seventeenth-century variant of a sketch Rubens produced for the painting that is now conserved in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (inv. no. AP 1976.08). Considerable research has been previously undertaken concerning the several known variants of the sketch of the Duke of Buckingham. The present version is an entirely new discovery, only having come to light recently, and is hitherto unpublished. It is close in size to the Kimbell original, but differs from it and the other known variations. For instance, the figure of the sea god Neptune with a trident and naiad in the lower left corner of the Kimbell version are omitted here. Instead, the focus is clearly on the masterly depiction of the rearing, muscular and twisting horse. Indeed, this may even indicate that the present sketch represents an earlier stage of the composition when it was used by the artist based on the model in Rubens’ studio.

The Osterley picture was Rubens’ earliest known use of the levade pose that he established through his studio in the so-called Riding School (circa 1615; formerly Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin), and which he subsequently employed in the portrait of the Cardinal Infante Ferdiand of Austria at the Battle of Nördlingen (circa 1634/35; Prado, Madrid, inv. no. P001687) and the now lost Equestrian portrait of King Philip IV (1628; formerly Madrid, Alcazar, destroyed by fire 1734). A grisaille by Diepenbeeck, in which he depicted the Cardinal Infante is most probably also based on Rubens’ Buckingham portrait and similar to the present painting in the depiction of the stance and angle of the horse (see sale, Christie’s, London, 17 April 2002, lot 7).

Rubens was the predominant source of inspiration throughout Diepenbeeck’s career. Indeed, several times he executed works initially conceived by Rubens: in 1627, following Rubens’ instructions, he drew the design for the Vitae patrum by Heribertus Rosweyde, and in 1636 he realised Rubens’ ideas for a print of Neptune and Minerva. After Rubens’ death, his work remained crucially important to Diepenbeeck’s artistic activity. Equestrian motifs frequently occur in Diepenbeeck’s oeuvre, such as the drawings for the famous Duke of Newcastle’s riding school, a series of forty-two engravings illustrating William Cavendish’s book on horse dressage, published in Antwerp in 1657. The first page shows the Duke of Newcastle on a rearing horse with a baton in a similar pose to the present painting (British Museum, London, inv. no. 1868,1212.462).