Portraits of Lucy and Colonel John Hutchinson - a relationship with art and Robert Walker

Abstract

ABSTRACT Robert Walker was the leading portraitist of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarian elite. He achieved great commercial success with the replication of a simple formula of portraying his almost universally male sitters with military grandiosity. When, however, Walker was commissioned to paint a marriage portrait pair of Colonel Hutchinson and his wife, Lucy, Walker achieved greater depths of character, compositional flair and humanity than is found elsewhere in his oeuvre. Walker was perhaps inspired by the connoisseurial tastes of Colonel Hutchinson who was one of the leading buyers at the auctions of King Charles I’s goods. More intriguingly, however, Walker may have been inspired by the literary talents and unvarnished decency of one of his only known female sitters – Lucy Hutchinson. The resulting marriage pair offers an intimate and unique vision into the lives of a happily married, art collecting, husband and wife. They also offer a more complex vision of an artist who has often been disregarded as a formulaic painter of men in armour.