Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painters; Art. “Charles I.”
In the work styled “Art and Artists,” by Dr. Waagen, there is a full and most interesting account of all Charles’s collection.
It was during the residence of Buckingham in Paris that he became acquainted with Rubens. Eventually he bought the whole of the collection of statues, paintings, and other valuable works of art, which that master had formed at a cost of about a thousand pounds, and which he sold to the Duke for ten thousand. But it was not often that Buckingham increased his stores so easily; so early as the year 1613, he had in his household Balthazar Gerbier d’Ouvilly, of Antwerp, a sort of amanuensis, or, as Sanderson styles him, a “common penman,” whose transcribing the decalogue for the Dutch Church was one of his first steps to preferment. Gerbier became a miniature painter, and in that ostensible capacity went into Spain with the Duke; he painted, amongst other portraits of the family, a fine oval miniature of his patron on horseback, which, in Walpole’s time, belonged to the Duchess of Northumberland; the figure, dressed in scarlet and gold, is finished with great care--and the horse, dark grey, with a white mane, is very animated; underneath the horse is a landscape with figures, and over the Duke’s head is suspended his motto, “_Fidei curricula crux_.” It was in allusion to the well-known talents of Gerbier that the Duchess of Buckingham wrote to the Duke, when in Spain, begging him, “if he had leisure to sit to Gerbier for his portrait, that she might have it well done in little.”
Gerbier seems at that time to have been a special favourite with the King and Queen, who supped once at his house--the entertainment, it is said, costing the painter a thousand pounds.[154] Gerbier, like Rubens, was employed in delicate diplomatic missions; he was also an architect and an author, and the founder of an Academy for foreign languages, and “for all noble sciences and exercises,” as he expressed it. As a diplomatist, Gerbier negociated in Flanders a private treaty with Spain:--as an architect, his fame rested, in the reign of Charles, chiefly on a large room built near the Water Gate, at York Stairs, in the Strand, which was commended by Charles I. almost as much as the Banqueting House. Encouraged by this encomium, Gerbier wrote a small work on magnificent buildings, proposing to level Fleet Street and Cheapside, and to erect a fine gate at Temple Bar; a plan of which was presented to Charles II., in whose reign Gerbier died. He was the rival, or believed himself to be so, of Inigo Jones. Hempstead-Marshal, the seat of Lord Craven, long since burned down, was Gerbier’s last effort: he died before it was completed, and was buried in the chancel of the church at that place.