Overview
In this collection of essays on aspects of the arts in Stuart England, fourteen distinguished scholars pay tribute to Sir Oliver Millar, whose pre-eminence as an authority on the visual arts in seventeenth-century England is well known. The essays concern themselves primarily with aspects of portraiture from Van Dyck to Sir Godfrey Kneller, a genre in which Millar's discoveries have been invaluable, but they also embrace a wide range of subjects which are crucial to our understanding of the arts during the period: the theatre, the masque, stage design, town planning, tomb sculpture, prose portraiture, the patronage of writers and the politics of the years of Personal Rule under Charles I. The essays provoke interesting comparisons with one another, and all reflect the recent trend of Early Modern studies in England in relating art history to the wider concerns of Stuart culture.