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. I 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’.