In her first address to Parliament on March 11, 1702, Britain’s Queen Anne famously declared “I know my own heart to be entirely English.”
Portrait of the Princess
When Kneller painted his portrait of Princess Anne (1690), the English court was in the middle of an abrupt and dramatic shift in culture, politics, and morals. From 1660 to 1688, Anne’s uncle (King Charles II) and father (King James II) had ruled over England’s Restoration Era, which began when the monarch replaced the various non-monarchical forms of government. This experimentation had been enacted since the English Civil War (1642–1651), the beheading of King Charles I (1649), and the sudden overthrow of James II, forcing him into exile during what was called the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.
Culturally speaking, Charles II and James II took their lead from Latin people of Europe. Their parents Charles I and the French Henrietta Maria had been the most important patrons to introduce Italian Renaissance and Italian influenced Flemish Baroque art into England. Both spent much of their exile in France and Spain. Charles II was married to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza, and the Italian Mary of Modena was the second wife of James II.
Modest Princess to Chaste Monarch
In Kneller’s 1690 portrait of Anne—one of 74 documented portraits of the queen—she chose to display a mixture of royalty and understatement. Her dress (cut on the high side by the standard of her day) and robe are, respectively, tan and light brown with white trim rather than the more opulent reds or blues often used to depict royalty. Her jewelry demonstrates rank and wealth but are themselves of neutral colors and few enough to accent her appearance rather than create the sense of splendor of the more extensively jeweled garb common among the 17th-century elite. Her hair is arranged in a small pile on her head to heighten the image of chaste beauty. A small, relatively simple crown on a table or small pillar at her side serves as an unobtrusive indication of royal status.
It’s hardly surprising that Anne would return to this portrait 15 years later as reference for another portrait as queen—despite the several others painted during the intervening years. In a portrait by Kneller, circa 1702–1704, Anne had aged and become a stolid 40-year-old matron—the consequences of 17 pregnancies, 12 miscarriages, the deaths of her five surviving children, and a sedentary lifestyle due to recurrent gout.
For her most significant portrait as England’s ruler, Anne wanted to be depicted with the same youthful, chaste qualities of the 1690 portrait, but with more vibrant color and explicit representation of her status. Kneller’s disciple Dahl captured that image perfectly. Anne’s face, hair, pose, and background are almost identical to Kneller’s, but she wears a shiny gold dress with white and blue trim and a deep purple robe. Instead of painting her left hand pointing across her body (as seen in Kneller’s princess portrait), Dahl painted the queen’s right hand crossing her body towards a regal, monarchical crown, scepter, and orb.
Aside from Queen Anne helping to establish Britain’s 18th-century golden age, her reign marked the rise of high-quality art in painting, theater, poetry, and music. Her adopted motto “semper eadem” (“always the same”)—used by Queen Elizabeth I—reflected her vocation to return England to its former values and traditions before France and Spain’s influence.
In honor of her refinement and patriotism, an architectural and furniture style were named after her. The Queen Anne style reflects her artistic aesthetics to abandon the flamboyant qualities of baroque in favor of the more chaste, neoclassical designs.
