Every Englishman – at least those who paid attention in primary school history
lessons – knows the story of Sir Francis Drake and his navy routing the
dastardly Spanish Armada in 1588 (after a quick game of bowls on Plymouth
Hoe, and possibly a sneaky smoke – he is said to have introduced tobacco to
these shores, after all).
The defeat – which, by the way, wasn’t really a defeat at all, but let that
pass – quickly became such a potent symbol of English naval supremacy that
in 1592, Lord Howard of Effingham, who had served as Drake’s Lord High
Admiral, commissioned a series of ten tapestries, depicting scenes from the
battle, to commemorate the great victory. Howard sold the tapestries in 1616
to King James I for £1,628 (about £214,000 in today’s money), and they
eventually became a celebrated fixture in the House of Lords – they can be
seen in the background of several paintings of the chamber.
On October 16, 1834, however, a huge fire destroyed nearly all of the old
Palace of Westminster, and the tapestries were lost. The only record of
their appearance was a set of ten engravings, made 100 years earlier by John
Pine, a contemporary of Hogarth. It is these engravings that the modern-day
artist Anthony Oakshett is working from to recreate six of the scenes as
paintings. These are to be hung in the Prince’s Chamber of the House of
Lords. It is a commission that dates all the way back to Queen Victoria’s
husband, Prince Albert.
Oakshett – tall, bearded and cricket-mad – has been successfully copying great
paintings since he left art school, when a friend who worked at Sotheby’s
asked him to reproduce a Sargent for a client. But even with his uncanny
talent, this is not an easy project. The House of Lords paintings each
measure about 12ft by 14ft; the engravings are not even A3 size.
“By reducing something done on a very large scale down to a much smaller
scale, you’re going to lose quite a lot. You’re going to lose accuracy,
you’re going to lose a lot of detail, you’re transforming colour into black
and white – you’re going to lose a lot of information,” he explains at the
vast studio that he and his team are using in an outbuilding of the English
Heritage property Wrest Park, near Bedford.
“Of course, that wasn’t Pine’s intention, he was simply making a monochromatic
homage – he had no idea that it was going to be the final record.”
Recreating these images on a large scale, in colour, is tricky to say the
least, and the process is complicated by the fact that one of the six
paintings did get completed during the Victorian era, before Albert’s death
and the subsequent cancellation of the commission.
This work, thought to be by Richard Burchett, whose Tudor-style paintings
grace the lower part of the Prince’s Chamber walls, must now be matched
exactly in style and tone, so that it can be included as part of the set.
It’s a splendid lesson in how to make something as difficult as possible.
Oakshett is taking it all in his stride. “When they approached me, they asked
how I would do it, and I said, ‘Well, I’d use computers.’ ” The process is
laborious but it is also ingenious. “We started by using electronic tablets
to trace round the outlines of images. Engravings are full of lines, they
are constructed with lines. The majority of those are for tone, so what I
had to do was extract the shapes of objects: the cannons, the doorways, the
sails, all the pennants and flags and the shapes of the sea – just simplify
it.”
Oakshett scanned the engravings on to a grid of coloured blocks to identify
which section of the painting he was working on. He then printed them all
out individually at A4 size, and hand-traced around all the important edges.
“It’s time-consuming. You have to learn to look in a different way. You are
making a judgment as to what’s a light bit and what’s a dark bit, but it’s
not always that straightforward. You correct things as you go, like a bit of
rigging that doesn’t go anywhere, but using a very unforgiving CD marker, so
that you’re left with a black line.”
Each A4 section was then blown up to A3, taped on to a gridded canvas then,
using carbon paper, the design was pressed through on to it. As many as
possible of the base colours that Burchett used have been matched and given
a name – I particularly like “sea monster grey” – and
using these, Oakshett and his current assistants, Colin Failes and Ruijin
Hu, are filling in the shapes to create what looks rather like a
Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the Armada.
“You modify it as the painting develops, it becomes more subtle, more
painterly,” Oakshett says.
Since the team started work on the paintings, new challenges have presented
themselves, among them the weather. “We had a seminar with a load of
experts, and there was a meteorologist who told us exactly what the weather
was each day [of the battle].” The idea is to change each scene according to
what is now known about the weather, as much as possible, but not so much
that it looks out of place.
“In Burchett’s painting there are two factors explaining why the sky is so
dark. One is that that day, I don’t know whether he knew it, was pretty
murky – bad visibility, choppy water, etc,” Oakshett says. “The other
reason is that it complies with the way that skies were depicted in
tapestries. A design had to balance, like an abstract painting. If you’ve
got pale blues right at the top, then the bottom’s going to look odd. So a
lot of the colours that are used in the action are also used in the sky.” He
laughs. “What I’ve got to achieve, for instance on niche 1
[the first painting of the series, Burchett’s being the second], is the
first sighting of the Spanish Armada, just off the Lizard [Cornwall’s most
southerly point]. It’s a lovely sunny evening in late July, so I’ve got to
make the sky conform to that.
“The sea has got to look nice, but it will appear slightly dark. I’ve got to
get the sense of brightness, but using enough dark tonality to conform to
Burchett. It’s got to look as if Burchett painted it.”
There is a wide variety of experts attached to the project, and Oakshett is
making a supremely patient effort to please all of them. Apparently, the
ships in Pine’s engravings are the wrong shape – they look more
like Dutch ships, and they appear to sit on top of the water rather than in
it. Moreover, the proportions are all wrong – Oakshett shows me the
figures on the shore in niche 6, which are enormous.
A spokesman for the Armada project, Adrian King, tells me there was also a
heated exchange at the seminar concerning the level of the horizon and the
accuracy of the coast-line depictions. Oakshett seems well equipped to
traverse this academic minefield, however, patiently awaiting clearance on
small but significant details, such as the colour of the Spanish pennants
(inexplicably white in Burchett, red and gold in reality).
The project is due to be finished in January 2010, when the paintings will be
put on show in their new home at the House of Lords. Until then, Oakshett
and his team are beavering away at Wrest Park, where members of the public
can request to visit the studio and see the work in progress.
But in these times of credit crunch, who’s paying for all this? Fortunately
it’s not the British taxpayer who is picking up the bill, but a private
donor, the Anglophile American businessman Mark Piggott, the Seattle-based
chairman and chief executive officer of PAC-CAR, which owns British Leyland
and DAF Trucks.
“The canvases were brought here in a DAF lorry!” laughs Oakshett. “They had to
look far and wide, well, not far and wide, but they had to make sure that
the lorry that turned up was a DAF one. I love that detail. And when it
arrived here, you know there was a photographer and everything and it was a
beautiful lorry. Sparkling.”
A TORTUOUS TAPESTRY TALE
1588 The Spanish Armada retreats “defeated” from action off Plymouth.
1592 Lord Howard of Effingham commissions the Armada Tapestries
from the Dutch maritime artist Hendrick Vroom. They are woven in Delft by
Frans Spiering.
1616 Howard sells the tapestries to James I.
1739 John Pine is commissioned to make engravings of the tapestries.
1834 The tapestries perish in a fire.
1841 Prince Albert establishes the Fine Arts Commission to manage the
production of art work for the new Palace of Westminster. The Armada
paintings are commissioned during the following years and one is completed
by Richard Burchett.
1861 Prince Albert dies, the commission is dissolved because of lack of
funds and the project shelved.
2008 Anthony Oakshett is invited to complete the commission.
Oakshett’s works in progress can be viewed at Wrest Park, Silsoe,
Bedfordshire (www.english-heritage.org.uk
01525 860152). Call before visiting
