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Updated: June 5, 2025
The staircases were in a blaze with the glaring frescoes of Verrio. In every corner of the mansion appeared a profusion of gewgaws, not yet familiar to English eyes.
'At that rate, you would spend more than I do to maintain my family. 'True, sire, answered the painter; 'but does your Majesty keep an open table as I do? Verrio designed the large equestrian portrait of the king for the hall of Chelsea College, but it was finished by Cooke, and presented by Lord Ranelagh.
Above us the brilliant heavens, beneath us the beautiful sloping valley, stretching away in the white moonlight as far as the eye could reach. Could I but paint such a scene with the brush of a Verrio or Laguerre, I should have no need to describe it in these halting and feeble words.
I am so short in cash that I am not able to pay my workmen, and your Majesty and I have learned by experience that pedlars and painters cannot give credit long. The king laughed at this impudent speech, and reminded the painter that he had but lately received a thousand pounds. 'Yes, sire, persisted Verrio, 'but that was soon paid away.
'In possession of the Cartoons of Raphael, Fuseli lectured, angrily, on the subject, years afterwards, 'and with the magnificence of Whitehall before his eyes, he suffered Verrio to contaminate the walls of his palaces. But there was raging then a sort of epidemical belief in native deficiency and in the absolute necessity of importing art talent.
The ceiling was painted by Verrio, and the walls highly ornamented; but the decorations were greatly injured by the fury of an anti-Catholic mob, who assailed the building, and destroyed its windows, on the occasion of a banquet given to the Pope's nuncio by the king.
Dominici says that 'Verrio had such a love for travelling that he could not remain in his own country. Charles II., desiring to revive the manufacture of tapestry at Mortlake, which had been stopped by the civil war, invited Verrio to England; but when he arrived the king changed his plans, and intrusted the painter with the decoration in fresco of Windsor Castle.
One of its houses of public entertainment was the meeting-place of a club of virtuosi, for whose club-room Louis Laguerre, the French painter who settled in London in 1683, designed and executed a Bacchanalian procession. This was the artist who was coupled with Verrio in Pope's depreciatory line, "Where sprawl the Saints of Verrio and Laguerre."
The two chapels perished together; that ancient chapel where Wolsey had heard mass in the midst of gorgeous copes, golden candlesticks, and jewelled crosses, and that modern edifice which had been erected for the devotions of James and had been embellished by the pencil of Verrio and the chisel of Gibbons.
We first went into Wolsey's great Hall, up a most spacious staircase, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with an allegorical fresco by Verrio, wonderfully bright and well preserved; and without caring about the design or execution, I greatly liked the brilliancy of the colors. The great Hall is a most noble and beautiful room, above a hundred feet long and sixty high and broad.
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