Charles V as a Child

In 1878 Jan Van Beers moved to Paris in search of fame and fortune. Now in his twenties, the young man from Lier dreamed of a glittering career as a history painter in the artistic capital of Europe. The conservative (and also French) press hailed Van Beers’s talent, and in addition to his original choice of historical subjects praised his…

In 1878 Jan Van Beers moved to Paris in search of fame and fortune. Now in his twenties, the young man from Lier dreamed of a glittering career as a history painter in the artistic capital of Europe. The conservative (and also French) press hailed Van Beers’s talent, and in addition to his original choice of historical subjects praised his use of colour and astonishing technique. He was even regarded as a worthy successor to Henri Leys, who had died in 1869. But Van Beers’s history paintings remained unsold, and the French state did not want them either. So, in 1880, the artist resolutely abandoned history painting for more lucrative genres. From then on he specialised in frivolous little genre scenes and delicately brushed portraits. The French lapped them up, and Van Beers became rich and famous, just as he had dreamed. Charles V as a child is one of Van Beers’s last history scenes. He painted it in Paris in 1879, and exhibited it that year at the Antwerp Salon. The following year it was selected for the large exhibition of Belgian art in Brussels on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence. Charles, the eldest son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna of Castile, was born in Ghent in 1500. He inherited the Netherlands when his father, the Duke of Burgundy, died in 1506. In 1515 he officially came of age, and in 1516 he became King of Spain and in 1519 German emperor. By chance and predestination he gradually became the mightiest ruler on earth. His rise fascinated people in the 19th century. They saw drama in the portrait of a child who became powerful before he knew what it meant. He is sitting nonchalantly in an ornate chair and is wearing a splendid white silk suit hemmed with gold ribbons. His small feet are resting on a beautiful cushion. On his head he has a baret adorned with a costly brooch. The rather pale child is staring expressionlessly ahead of him, as if he is already feeling the weight of his later life. The greyhound and the book on the floor cannot distract him. Quite apart from its magisterial technique style, the power of this portrait lies above all in the fact that it fires the viewer’s imagination. In a century that cultivated the individuality of the child, when authority and prestige were becoming increasingly associated with personal merit, the image of a child on a throne was not something that went without saying. Charles V as a child is a 19th-century staging of a 16th-century royal child. The canvas shows how an innocent child was kidnapped by the adult world. Or as Pol De Mont put it in Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift in 1898: ‘The languishing morbidezza of a spoiled, precocious royal child, the languorous boredom of a spirit in complete idleness that is intent on something different, on something new, even if it is forbidden, or perhaps for that very reason, that was expressed superbly here in that slender, pale being.’