The Arts During the Life of Queen Anne, 1660s-1710s

FAIN: FA-56482-12

James A. Winn
Boston University (Boston, MA 02215-1300)

In his influential edition of the works of Alexander Pope (1871-79), Whitwell Elwin describes Queen Anne as "ugly, corpulent, sluggish, a glutton and a tippler." If modern historians are more polite, they still underestimate Anne’s intelligence and ability. By approaching the life and reign of this popular and successful monarch through her knowledge and patronage of the arts, I intend to provide a more balanced picture. She was a highly competent performer on the guitar and the harpsichord, an excellent dancer and actress in her youth, a fluent speaker of highly idiomatic French, a shrewd connoisseur of painting and architecture, a promoter of opera, and a reader able to quote such poets as Cowley from memory. In crafting works of art designed to flatter and please her, artists including Dryden, Purcell, Lely, Kneller, Wren, Philips, Handel, and Pope reveal the complex and nuanced interplay between political and aesthetic motives that defines the culture of this fascinating period.

Associated Products

Queen Anne: Patroness of the Arts (Book)
Title: Queen Anne: Patroness of the Arts
Author: James Winn
Abstract: As the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne (1665-1714) received the education thought proper for a princess, reading plays and poetry in English and French while learning dancing, singing, acting, drawing, and instrumental music. As an adult, she played the guitar and the harpsichord, danced regularly, and took a connoisseur's interest in all the arts. In this comprehensive interdisciplinary biography, James Winn tells the story of Anne's life in new breadth and detail, and in unprecedented cultural context. Winn shows how poets, painters, and musicians used the works they made for Anne to send overt and covert political messages to the queen, the court, the church, and Parliament. Their works also illustrate the pathos of Anne's personal life: the loss of her mother when she was six, her troubled relations with her father and her sister (James II and Mary II), and her own doomed efforts to produce an heir. Her eighteen pregnancies produced only one child who lived past infancy; his death at the age of eleven, mourned by poets, was a blow from which Anne never fully recovered. Her close friendship with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, a topic of scabrous ballads and fictions, ended in bitter discord; the death of her husband in 1708 left her emotionally isolated; and the wrangling among her chief ministers hastened her death.
Year: 2014
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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