The Lost Genius of British Art: William Dobson

# Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

# Old time is still a-flying

# And this same flower that smiles today

# Tomorrow will be dying. #

In 1642, a terrible civil war broke out in England.

Brother attacked brother.

Friend betrayed friend. The nation was torn in two.

To ensure this dark moment was never forgotten,

Britain needed an artist

to step forward and witness her turmoil.

Fortunately, such a man was found.

History doesn't often feel

graspable, does it? Touchable. Under your nose.

It's something that takes place far away, out there...

in the past.

You can read about it in books,

you can learn about it from David Starkey on the telly...

but where it really counts, in here, you can't really feel it.

Unless, that is,

something, or somebody manages to bring it to life for us...

make it tangible... give it flesh.

There's only one way that can be done - with art.

It's what art's really good at. Capturing the moment.

Taking you there.

If an artist is eloquent enough, talented enough,

then even an event as chaotic and unruly

as the English Civil War

can be brought back to life, and felt again.

This is a film about a lost genius of English art,

a painter of deep and real talent,

who was there, and who put a face

to a particularly traumatic moment in our history.

His name was William Dobson.

He's the one in the middle.

The handsome one with the Cavalier ringlets and that combative stare.

Dobson was the first truly great British painter -

our first native genius.

If you've never heard of him before, don't beat yourself up about it.

Most people haven't.

History isn't always fair to its heroes.

And William Dobson was certainly one of those.

DOOR CREAKS

Dobson had an exciting life, to go with his exciting talent.

It was short and fateful

because these were not relaxing times.

Dobson was born in London in 1611,

and baptised in this fine city church -

St Andrew's, Holborn - on March 4th.

The register of his birth has survived.

It's one of just half a dozen documents of the times

that bear his name.

We know that his father, also called William Dobson, was prosperous.

'A gentleman' it says here.

But he frittered away the family fortunes

on what his contemporaries called 'licentious living'.

Dobson senior, it seems, wasted his estate on women.

And you know what they say about the sins of the father,

how they're visited again upon the son.

Well, that certainly seems to have been true in this case.

Our William Dobson, the first great English painter,

would also gain a reputation for loose living.

We don't know exactly what went wrong

with the Dobson family fortunes,

But something did. And in around 1625

Dobson junior was forced to start making his own living.

So he decided to become something rather ungentlemanly

and un-English...

He decided to become a painter.

Mind you, William Dobson could not have picked a better time

to become an artist

because there hasn't been a better time.

The English king, Charles I, was an unusually cultured monarch.

Charles loved art with a passion

that England had never seen before in a king.

Look how superbly he rides into history in this fine Van Dyck

that now hangs in Buckingham Palace.

Buckingham Palace hadn't even been built in Dobson's time

and the king didn't think much of this place, either - Windsor Castle.

He allowed it to fall into ruin.

Instead, the king preferred to reside in another of his

sumptuous palaces, one which isn't even there any more,

at Whitehall in London.

Whitehall Palace was the largest palace in Europe.

Located roughly where 10 Downing Street is today,

it burnt down in 1698.

Bigger than the Vatican, bigger than Versailles,

It stretched all the way down to the river.

Whitehall was gigantic.

It had 1,500 rooms. Yes, 1,500.

And the plushest of them were filled to the rafters with great art.

If you think Windsor Castle looks impressive today,

you should have seen Whitehall Palace in around 1630,

when William Dobson must first have encountered it.

All these Mantegnas were in Charles' collection - nine of them.

The first Rembrandt ever to leave Holland hung in Whitehall

in the longest gallery.

And naughty Veroneses, displaying such un-English nudity.

And this famous Leonardo, now so popular in the Louvre in Paris.

Then there were all these Raphaels showing the Gospels of the Apostles,

the finest cycle of Renaissance art ever to leave Italy.

What an education a young painter starting out on the road of art

would have received in here just by wandering about and looking.

Dobson must have done more than that.

Somehow, he got the opportunity

to study the royal collection in depth.

And he studied it so fiercely that he ended up as good as this.

This is such a revolutionary image.

You have to remember

that Charles believed in the divine right of kings.

That he's been put on Earth by God to command the English,

and educate them.

Charles lavished all this money on art

because he thought it was his divine duty to do so.

It's what God wanted him do, whatever the cost.

But Dobson didn't paint a divine monarch. That wasn't his way.

Dobson gives us a small and troubled man,

so nervous, so unsure.

These are sensitive insights

and they're completely new in British art.

The question is, how did William Dobson get to be this good?

Not knowing the exact details of Dobson's apprenticeship

is very annoying.

I've stomped through the stately homes of Britain,

but the information just isn't there.

You'd have thought an artist of William Dobson's importance,

a man who changed British art,

would have had everything about him noted down.

But these are turbulent times he was living through.

And when history swallowed up William Dobson,

it swallowed up his past as well.

One exciting story about him is that he worked for

the royal tapestry works at Mortlake in London

and was somehow involved with the design of these stunning hangings.

Another story about Dobson doing the rounds is that he was actually

a pupil of Van Dyck, the king's official painter

who came over to London from Antwerp in 1632.

And who proceeded to lord it over Charles' great Golden Age.

Van Dyck was the king's flatterer-in-chief,

the official improver of the Royal image.

This is his portrait of Charles' detested Queen,

Henrietta Maria, a Catholic from France whose teeth,

according to the Venetian ambassador,

stuck out like the guns on a battleship.

But that was in real life, not in Van Dyck's portrayals of her.

But if Dobson really was Van Dyck's pupil,

he was headstrong enough to see things very differently

and become his own man.

For one thing, Dobson could not, or would not, flatter.

He just couldn't do it.

Instead, his art makes a bee line for character and truth,

for plainness, bluffness and even ugliness.

Telling it like it is is a uniquely British talent.

And to show it off properly,

you need a uniquely British situation.

So, having finally found an artist who could paint with the best,

the Fates decided to test him mightily

by dumping him in the middle of some of the most traumatic events

in British history.

There are many complicated reasons why, in 1642,

a savage civil war broke out in England,

why Parliament took on the king, Royalist took on Roundhead

and Cavalier took on Puritan.

# In 1642 I knew what I had to do

# Leave my home and family, too And fight for good old Charlie

# Toorah loorah loorah ley... #

Charles had become a deeply irritating monarch.

People didn't like his Catholic wife.

They didn't like his foreign policy, his taxes were unpopular.

They really didn't like that immodest claim of his

to be God's representative on Earth.

But, perhaps what galled them most,

was his extravagant appetite for art

and the huge amounts of money that had been spent on it.

# Many men died to uphold the law

# Fighting for old Charlie

# Toorah loorah loorah ley

# Toorah loorah loorah ley... #

Art was an affront to Puritan thinking.

The second commandment actually bans the making of it.

"Thou shalt not make any graven image," it says,

"of anything that is on Earth, or in the sea below."

So for the Puritans on parliament's side,

art wasn't just immodest, and Popish,

it was actually sinful.

# I thank God I'm still alive Fighting for... #

The most notorious of all the Puritan art-haters, William Prynne,

published a thousand-page book on the subject,

in which he stamped on dance, theatre, painting

and men with long hair.

"The gates of heaven," spat Prynne,

"will always be closed to the Morris dancers."

# He's come too late Fighting for old Charlie... #

The extravagant years of Charles I

had found a magnificent witness in Van Dyck.

How effortlessly he seemed to capture

the elegance and swagger of Charles's court.

# But we'll fight on for Charlie... #

Van Dyke was the perfect painter to record Charles's Golden Age.

The days of elegance and extravagance.

But when the Civil War broke out,

somebody up there realised

he was no longer the right artist for the job.

And with a sense of symmetry that's almost scary,

in December 1641,

just a few weeks before the Civil War broke out,

the Fates arranged for Van Dyck to die

and for a vacancy suddenly to appear for the king's painter.

Dobson took over Van Dyck's job

and became Charles I's serjeant painter.

It should have been a cushy job, a job for life.

Painting royalty for royal wages.

But history had other plans.

# Roundheads, they were after me

# For we were on a winning spree

# Fighting for old Charlie

# Toorah loorah loorah ley

# Toorah loorah loorah ley

# Toorah loorah loorah ley

# Fighting for old Charlie. #

The first pitched battle of the Civil War was fought here,

at Edgehill, on 23rd October, 1642.

A Sunday.

The king's forces were gathered up here on Edgehill itself,

so they had the advantage from the start.

The cavalry, commanded by the king's dashing nephew, Prince Rupert,

charged down on the Parliamentarians,

coming in from over there,

the south-west, and sent them scattering.

But the Parliamentarians fought back

and the battle was to splutter on all day long,

ending uncertainly with a small advantage,

perhaps, to the Royalists.

Charles's eldest son, the Prince of Wales,

the future Charles II, was at Edgehill with his father.

He was just 12 years old

and he watched the opening cavalry charges

with a schoolboy's excitement.

The Prince narrowly escaped death

when an enemy cannonball just missed him.

And he was nearly captured, as well,

in a frenzied Parliamentarian counter-attack.

Afterwards, to commemorate the Royalist successes at Edgehill,

and the presence there of the Prince of Wales,

the King commissioned a portrait of his son

from his new official painter.

The Englishman born and bred into whose hands the Fates

had unexpectedly thrust the English Civil War.

This is Dobson's first Great War painting.

And look at the explosion in him of colour, confidence, bravado.

A new mood has entered Baroque art

and it's unmistakably an English mood.

Direct, four-square, in your face.

Young Charles stands commandingly at the front of the battle,

as Edgehill rages behind him.

His page holds up his helmet, and the king-to-be fixes us

with a forceful stare.

But this isn't just a portrait.

It's a picture loaded with symbolic meaning. Packed with it.

In the end, it's not even a picture about war, really,

but a superb slab of Royalist propaganda about peace.

The Prince of Wales, the future Charles II,

represents England's best hopes for the future -

the nation's salvation.

See down here,

the madly grimacing Fury with the snakes in her hair.

She represents the strife and chaos in the land.

But look how firmly Charles commands her to stay.

He's like a man ordering a dog to sit.

And in the background, above the stormy skies gathered over England,

a break in the clouds has appeared.

The storm is abating.

Peace is at hand.

It's a great painting, but a lousy prediction.

Parliament was in control of London so the king needed a new base.

He chose Oxford.

It was excellently located, easy to guard and all those rich colleges

could be transformed into makeshift palaces.

So, for the next four years of the war, this was to be home

for the king and his court,

including the new royal painter, William Dobson.

Dobson's job was to paint the king

and all the other court worthies who turned up in Oxford.

He was, if you like, artist in residence to the Royalist cause.

He painted the king's diplomats, come hither to serve their monarch.

The haughty administrators working in the king's ramshackle new court.

A ship's captain who had lost his boat.

A musician who had lost his joy.

Poets, princes and family supporters.

But above all, Dobson painted the soldiers coming in from battle.

The Royalist heroes, the fighters. The Cavaliers.

Is this a picture that means something special to you?

This is one of the portraits I remember from childhood.

For the unartistic reason that the man in it has a long neck.

I remember being intrigued, was it real or artistic licence?

It is one of the earliest memories I have from the collection,

this portrait of Colonel Russell.

And when you began finding out abut who Colonel Russell was,

what sort of image did you create of him?

Well, I think the portrait shows a man who looks rather

self-important and without any form of humour.

But when you read about him,

he was in the vanguard of the great years of the Royalist cause.

And he was a hero of the cause and a great man in his own right.

And he was in charge of one of the crack regiments of the infantry

the Royalists had, so the more I delved in,

the more I realised this was not a courtier having his portrait painted

in a battle pose but a genuine soldier who saw some tough action.

You get such a sense of glamour from these Cavalier portraits of Dobson's.

We forget looking at these handsome men with ringlets

and swaggering air, really what tough times they have to go through.

It was a really brutal time, the Civil War.

You can glamorise it is much as you want but it was vicious.

And Russell's regiment, when they went hand-to-hand in one fight,

they were fighting with each other's muskets

and staving each other's heads in.

It wasn't lots of fancy cavalry charges,

it was brutal fighting.

And I think you can see in Colonel Russell's face

a sort of battle weariness already.

That is a lot for a painter to suggest. You sound like someone

who shares my admiration for the often-forgotten, unfairly-so, William Dobson.

I'm a great fan of Dobson and I think that he's very underrated and,

sadly, I think his name has no recognition around Britain today.

British people should know that he is the best painter that Britain had produced up until that point.

The king lived here at Christchurch -

Oxford's poshest college...

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

..and he brought with him the House of Commons.

which met over there in the Great Hall.

The Queen was here, at Merton College.

She took over all these rooms here

and they're now called the Queen's Rooms.

Dobson, meanwhile,

had to make do with lodgings in the town.

All we know is that he lived off the High Street, up against St Mary's church.

So that's somewhere around here.

Dispersed pleasantly about Oxford,

the Strangers - as the king and his court were called -

tried at first to pretend that all was well in the land.

In modern parlance, they were in denial. And this chap in particular,

Endymion Porter,

seemed determined to prove that nothing of significance had changed.

Porter was a pampered courtier. A royal favourite.

Before the Civil War, he'd been one of the king's main art buyers,

a friend of artists and poets.

There's a fine portrait of him in the Prado by van Dyck

in which the suave Porter and van Dyck himself

buddy up together in an elegant oval.

Porter saw himself as the king's Maecenas -

a fixer and tastemaker -

he's the embodiment of the smarmy royal lickspittle

clinging to the king's side like a barnacle to a ship's hull.

When he wasn't collecting art or writing egregious plays,

Porter loved to hunt.

And when Dobson came to paint him in Oxford,

it wasn't as a soldier or a dashing cavalier...

but as an English squire, out hunting,

as if nothing had happened.

Those people who admire William Dobson - and there aren't nearly enough of them -

will generally tell you that this is his finest painting.

Dobson's masterpiece. It is definitely one of them.

Porter stands there with his musket,

while his page brings him the hare he's just shot.

His loyal gundog looks up adoringly.

And to show what a fine patron of the arts Porter was,

Dobson has placed a bust of Apollo, the god of arts, at his shoulder.

If you examine the symbolic figures on which he leans,

you'll find embodiments of painting and sculpture and poetry.

So all this stuff down here, this busy collection of symbols,

has been put there to tell us what a cultured fellow Porter was,

to advertise his great love of the arts.

And all that's fascinating of course.

But what I find even more interesting about this picture

is what it tells us about the way Dobson actually painted -

the character of his art.

Since Van Dyck painted Porter as well,

we're in a position here to make a telling comparison.

Van Dyck makes Porter thin and elegant.

He brings out the greyhound in him.

Dobson, meanwhile, puts a stone or so onto him.

Maybe even a couple of stone.

He notices something English, beefy and robust about Porter.

Dobson nearly always used a square canvas,

and most of his sitters were painted from the knees up,

from about here,

which makes them look chunky and solid, like me.

Van Dyck, on the other hand,

was the master of the elegant full length.

He preferred elongated canavases that made you look finer and taller.

The Van Dyck approach is back here.

But the Dobson approach is here.

Dobson's fine portrayal of Endymion Porter

gives British art its first country gent. Red-faced and solid.

But the leisurely rural mood he captures here

couldn't and wouldn't last.

Back at the front line of the Civil War,

reality had returned from the hunt

and Oxford was too busy with its war effort

to pretend that nothing had changed

All Souls was where the arsenal was

where they kept the muskets and pistols and pikes.

New College was the magazine where they stored the gunpowder.

All the brass cooking vessels belonging to the townsfolk

were melted down and used as bullets.

Armies need uniforms,

so the Schools of Astronomy and Music were taken over by tailors

busily sewing buff coats and tunics.

And in the School of Logic

they stored the horse fodder for the cavalry

as Oxford gave its all for the Royalist cause.

Someone once said,

"The weak only repent",

meaning only weak people say sorry. Do you know who said that?

It was Byron. Lord Byron, the poet.

Now Byron was actually the 6th Baron Byron,

so he would have known something about a notorious ancestor of his,

the 1st Baron Byron.

John Byron, the man they called Bloody Byron.

Byron was one of Charles's most loyal supporters.

He fought bravely for the king at Edgehill, Marston Moor

Nantwich and here too, at Burford, on 1st January, 1643.

Byron was in command of a small Royalist garrison of 14 men

when 2,000 Parliamentarians from Cirencester

launched a surprise attack.

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

The 14 Royalists defended the town fiercely

and beat back the 2,000 rebels.

At the height of the battle, Byron was hit in the face with a halberd.

He was almost knocked off his horse, but he survived.

A few months later, the king made him a Baron

and Dobson commemorated this honour and the great defence of Burford

with a supreme piece of English Baroque portraiture.

We're in the presence of such a haughty warrior.

A black page brings him his horse.

While Byron himself points to the background

where the scene of his bravery at Burford is re-enacted.

Those big twisty columns that Byron's standing in front of

are called Salomonic columns.

Because people believed the columns that

stood in front of Solomon's great Temple in Jerusalem.

They were popularised in England by Raphael

in those superb tapestry designs in the royal collection.

And they were favoured too here in Oxford

in the porch of St Mary's Church

next to where Dobson was living.

These Salomonic columns had a big symbolic meaning.

They embodied Solomon's famous wisdom and steadfastness,

which is why Dobson put them in the backgrounds of several of his best pictures

to represent the wisdom and streadfastness of the king's men.

The Parliamentarians didn't like them, though.

They were too Popish.

And see the bullet holes up there in the statue of the Virgin and Child?

Those were made by Cromwell's soldiers,

shooting at this Popish porch.

The Parliamentarians didn't like the 1st Baron Byron either.

In fact they hated him with a rare vigour.

They called him 'The Bloody Braggadochio'.

The Braggart with Blood on his Hands.

He was notoriously arrogant and cruel.

And Dobson captures that, doesn't he?

I have an instinctive fondness for most of Dobson's cavaliers,

but not for this man.

He's too proud and showy.

Standing there like a Roman emperor.

Dobson's pictures tell us so much about the people who were here.

He really brings them to life.

But what about Dobson himself, what was he like?

And what sort of life did he lead?

Very little information has survived

We know that he came here with his entire family

because the church records here at the church

show that his little daughter, Judith, died here in 1644.

A year later, his father-in-law died

presumably, from one of the many plagues they had at the time.

Usually typhoid caused by the cramped and squalid living conditions.

We know when he got married

because the wedding records have survived.

And we also know what his wife looked like

because he painted her.

Her name was also Judith.

And she's exactly the kind of woman I imagine him falling for,

bold, brassy and magnificently bosomy.

Judith Dobson would look good in a tavern, wouldn't she?

She's the first such wench in British art

and her descendents are still pulling pints today

in the Rover's Return and the Queen Vic.

Dobson himself had what they call an irregular lifestyle.

He was certainly bad with money,

probably liked a drink,

and it seems he was fond of bad company. As for his looks,

well, there we don't need to speculate

because he's left us a dramatic and swaggering self-portrait.

I think it's my favourite self-portrait

in the whole of British art.

It hangs at Alnwick Castle

in far off Northumberland

surrounded by great Van Dycks

and dramatic Canalettos.

But when I come to Alnwick, what I head for is this.

Before Dobson appeared,

British painters didn't generally do self-portraits.

Their task was to paint others, not themselves.

And they certainly didn't consider themselves to be artistic heroes.

That would have seemed un-English, immodest,

and perhaps even a touch Pope-ish.

But not to William Dobson.

See those cascading ringlets, that unwavering gaze,

with its delightfully British soupcon of nervousness.

He rates himself, doesn't he, and strikes me

as the type of chap who checks himself in the mirror.

This is first truly cocky British self-portrait,

the first attempt by a British painter to make himself

the hero of his own art.

But as you can see, there are two others in the picture.

So who are they and what are they here for?

The fellow on the left - Mr Chubby in satin -

is Nicholas Lanier, Charles I's musical supremo,

the first Master Of The King's Music.

-STRING MUSIC PLAYS

-Hear that tune playing around me.

That's by Lanier.

He was a skilled composer and musician,

and also a collector and an art dealer.

It was Lanier who pioneered the collecting

of Renaissance drawings in Britain,

which is why Dobson has stuck a drawing of Venus in his hand

and given him a bust of Apollo, the god of art, to lean on.

The other fellow, the thin one, is Sir Charles Cotterell,

who was Master of Ceremonies for the king in Oxford,

a friend and supporter of Dobson's.

So why has Dobson put the three of them in this picture

and huddled them up like this?

The answer lies in this sumptuous painting by Veronese

that's now in the Frick Collection in New York,

but which once hung in Britain,

in the palace of the Earl of Arundel,

where Dobson must have seen it.

The Veronese depicts a popular Baroque subject -

the Choice of Hercules.

Hercules - that's him in the middle -

has been forced to choose between two symbolic women

representing Pleasure on the left

and Virtue on the right.

He goes for Virtue,

as you'd expect Hercules to choose.

So Dobson has adapted Veronese's pose,

swapped the women for men

and turned it into this supremely cocky piece of self-promotion.

There he is in the middle,

the hero, the Hercules of Oxford -

loyal to his king, loyal to his country

and choosing Virtue,

represented by the lean Sir Charles Cotterell in black,

over Pleasure, represented by the plump Nicholas Lanier,

with his double chin, and his rich and expensive satin suit.

Of course, this isn't a real quarrel we're watching -

it's all symbolic.

The three temporary Oxfordians are pals in it together,

acting out a crucial Civil War choice

in which Virtue triumphs over Vice...

as it must also triumph in the nation at large.

And will you look at William Dobson at the centre of all this attention?

Isn't he just loving it?

# The glorious lamp of heaven

# The sun... #

Music played a crucial role in the Oxford court.

The Civil War was tearing England apart,

but the band played on.

The court was full of it - chamber music, psalms, masques.

The puritans may not have approved, but Charles adored English music

and was famed for encouraging the writing and playing of it.

So when the court came to Oxford, the royal music came with it

and did what it could to raise everyone's spirits.

We have very little information

about who was in Oxford playing what,

which is why a particularly mysterious Oxford painting

by Dobson has remained one of the biggest puzzles in his career.

It now hangs at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull,

and is called - oh, so unhelpfully - The Unknown Musician.

See the symbolic embodiments of music

gathered, in typical Dobson fashion, at the back of the picture.

A singing goddess,

and, if you look carefully,

the fragmentary remains of a shadowy lute player.

Who is this dark and sober figure in black,

this particularly mysterious musical Cavalier?

The answer began winking at me several years ago, back in 2002,

when a hitherto obscure English composer called William Lawes

was plucked out of the ether

and dangled tantalisingly before us.

2002 was the 400th anniversary of Lawes' birth.

Records were issued, articles written

and portraits dug up...

..including this one of the very young William Lawes

that's been in the music school at Oxford since the 17th century.

William Lawes and his more famous older brother, Henry Lawes,

spent almost all of their careers working for Charles I

as court musicians and composers.

Young William Lawes, a lute player,

was a particular favourite of the king's.

And I'm now pretty certain that The Unknown Musician in Hull

is a portrait of him when he wasn't so young any more.

# Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

# Old time is still a-flying... #

Some of Lawes' finest music was written for the church.

And this sad English tune, Gather Ye Rosebuds,

is his most famous lyrical setting.

# ..The glorious lamp of heaven... #

It's soppy, I know, but heartbreakingly lovely.

William Lawes fought for the king on the battlefield

as well as in his songbook,

and in 1645, just a few months after this was painted,

he was killed at Chester,

upholding the Royalist cause.

The king was devastated

and was said to have mourned him fiercely when he died.

He called William Lawes "The Father of Music".

So for me, the clearest evidence that this is William Lawes

is the mysterious bust on which he rests a caring hand.

Do you recognise him?

It's the king himself, Charles,

lightly disguised as a classical god,

seen from the side and crowned with laurel.

A particularly loyal musician

is swearing his allegiance to a particularly musical monarch

in a painting which, like so much of Dobson's Oxford work,

brings an unexpectedly personal touch

to this huge historic moment.

Fortune is a fickle friend

as the Royalists in Oxford were now discovering.

In the Cavalier skies, storms were gathering.

DRUMS BEAT, SWORDS CLASH

Over there, on that horizon,

is where the Battle of Naseby was fought,

on June 14th 1645.

Naseby was a disaster for the Royalists.

Outnumbered, out-fought, they were comprehensively routed.

A thousand killed, 5,000 captured.

In just three hours of fierce morning combat,

the hopes of the Cavaliers were crushed.

For Dobson, too, the end-game was at hand.

You can actually see his art changing...

..its mood darkening,

the canvases growing smaller, scratchier, gloomier.

The usual interpretation of this change in his art

is that it was part of a more monumental failure.

The Royalist cause was falling apart and so was Dobson.

But I prefer to see it as something more impressive than that -

as proof of his sensitivity,

this unique relationship he had with the times that spawned him.

Dobson was as sensitive to failure as he was to triumph.

'This is Rockingham Castle in Leicestershire.

'They have two Dobsons here and they're both late works.

'They're not always on show...' Basil!

'..but I know the archivist, Basil Morgan,

'and he's always welcoming.'

-Take me to those Dobsons!

-The Dobsons. This way.

Where are we exactly in the house now?

I find it confusing getting around it.

The actual Dobsons are in the wing

which was put on in the mid-19th century.

And there it is!

One of the last Dobsons painted, his celebrated portrait

of Lewis Watson, First Lord Rockingham.

What can you tell us about Lewis Watson, Basil?

Well, he'd been a courtier under James I and Charles I,

in his younger days. And when the Civil War came up in 1642,

he was very lukewarm as far as Royalists were concerned.

-So he wasn't a fervent Royalist?

-He wasn't an active Royalist, no.

And in 1643, the castle was taken by the local Parliamentarian commander.

And what is more, the king, who thought he'd been feeble

about defending Rockingham, carted him off to Oxford,

where he had to plead his case

for a couple of years to be let off punishment, basically.

So this castle, Rockingham Castle, was taken over

-by the Parliamentarians during the Civil War?

-In 1643, yes.

And Watson himself, he was here at that time?

No, he was in prison. He was captured by the Royalists, funnily enough,

who thought he'd been feeble about letting this place go.

Of course, you are very lucky, because not only do you have

this superb late portrait by Dobson,

but you have another one as well,

the picture of his wife, Lewis Watson's wife.

-Yes.

-What can you tell us about her?

She's a Manners from the Belvoir Castle family.

The family, traditionally, are Parliamentarian.

-She came from a Parliamentarian family?

-Yes, and so,

one of the charges against him was

that she had actually led Lord Grey in by the hand

when the castle was captured by Parliament.

You're saying that when the Parliamentarians

surrounded the castle, not only did the Watsons not put up a fight,

but that Lady Watson actually led them in by the hand?

That was the charge, yes.

Dobson's final paintings at Oxford are such sad and quiet things.

So small and almost see-through.

The fact is, he was running out of materials.

By the summer of 1645, Parliament's forces were closing in

on the city, and everything was in short supply.

No paints. No canvas.

The mood in Oxford had grown gloomier, too.

Even the most stubborn Royalist was having to accept,

they were losing the war.

This forlorn portrait of the king was painted round about now.

The royal confidence has drained away.

And the spirit of the times,

as always with Dobson, seems to guide the painter's hand.

They lasted the winter, but only just. After months of hesitation,

the king finally sneaked out of Oxford

in the small hours of April 27th 1646, disguised as a servant.

A few weeks later, the city fell to the Parliamentarians.

And those Royalist supporters who remained,

among them William Dobson,

slipped discreetly out of Oxford, and returned home.

CLOCK CHIMES

Dobson arrived back in London in the summer of 1646.

He seems to have made some sort of attempt to continue his career

because his name appears in the records

of the Painter-Stainers Company, the artists' guild.

But there was no point, really,

-because three months later...

-CLOCK CHIMES

..he was dead.

Don't ask me how or why. No-one knows.

There's no description, no evidence,

just the bare facts of his passing,

supplied curtly in the parish records.

October 28th 1646.

Before he died, Dobson was imprisoned for debt.

And according to a brief note from his first biographer,

he died very poor, at his house in St Martin's Lane just over there.

He was aged just 36.

They buried him here, in his local church, St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Although inside there's no record of him.

They're rather chuffed, though, that Nell Gwyn,

Charles II's notorious mistress, is buried here.

And that famous maker of English chairs, Thomas Chippendale.

But of William Dobson,

the man who put a face to the English Civil War, there's nothing -

which can't be right.

A century before Hogarth,

England had a painter who painted like an Englishman -

robust, earthy, in-your-face.

Destiny singled him out

and dumped him in the middle of the most tumultuous events

in British history.

He was there. He saw it. He recorded it.

In its tragic way, it's the perfect career.

There should be monuments to William Dobson

out there in Trafalgar Square.

His face should be on our banknotes,

his name on all our lips.

Instead, there's just me wandering about in this empty church,

banging on about him.

# In sixteen-hundred and 42, I knew what I had to do... #

But hang on. That's wrong. Of course there's more than that.

Out there, scattered about the land,

perhaps in a great house near you,

there's a handful of the finest paintings that any British artist

has ever produced.

# ..In sixteen-hundred and 43, those Roundheads they were after me... #

So go on. Find one. Admire it, love it,

and show you care.

# ..Toorah loora loora ley

# Fighting for old Charlie!

# In sixteen-hundred and 44

# We fought a battle at Marston Moor

# Many men died to uphold the law

# Fighting for old Charlie!

# Hey, toorah loora loora ley

# Toorah loora loora ley

# Toorah loora loora ley

# Fighting for old Charlie! #