A king’s favourite who amassed a great art collection.

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was the favourite of King James I -

who addressed him as ‘my sweet child and wife’ - and subsequently chief

minister to King Charles I. Buckingham was a beauty, and he surrounded

himself with beautiful things. He enjoyed exquisite clothes, like the fabulous

white silk suit encrusted with diamonds that he wore to visit the Queen of

France. He was a superb dancer. When he cut capers during a court

masque King James startled visiting ambassadors by shouting out ‘By God,

George, I love you!’ 

He was a discerning patron. Inigo Jones renovated his houses. John

Tradescant was his garden designer.  In his great house on the Strand he

put together a collection of art works as fine as King Charles’s.  At the age

of 35 Buckingham was murdered. His collection was scattered, but

contemporary inventories allow us to reconstruct it. 

He will show you some of the magnificent paintings he owned - the Titians, the

Tintorettos, the Veroneses. But Buckingham was not just a collector of old

masters: he was also a patron, commissioning boldly innovative new work.

Most remarkable are the portraits of himself that he commissioned from

painters including Van Honthorst, Van Dyck and Rubens – images by great

artists of a man known as ‘the handsomest-bodied man in Europe’.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s  book on the 17th century Duke of  Buckingham, The

Scapegoat, will be published by Fourth Estate in October 2024. Her last non-

fiction book,  The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio was described in The Sunday

Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. It won all three of the UK’s most

prestigious prizes for non-fiction - the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper

Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her other non-fiction books include

Cleopatra and Heroes. She also writes fiction. Her novel, Peculiar

Ground, is largely set in the 17th century, and narrated by a landscape

designer loosely based on the diarist John Evelyn. It was described as

“almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance” (The Guardian) and “of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail’.

(New York Times).  In her short story collection, Fabulous, she retells fables

from classical mythology, relocating them to modern Britain. A Fellow of the

Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she has written

on books, theatre and the visual arts for publications including The Sunday

Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman and the TLS. She

was Chair of the Judges for the 2021 International Booker Prize. 

She lives in London and Suffolk.