Oliver Cromwell

Robert Walker's portrait of Oliver Cromwell (1649) is one of the most historically significant British portraits of the seventeenth century — an image of the Parliamentary general at the moment of his greatest triumph, painted in the year that King Charles I was executed and the English Republic was established. Walker, who specialized in Parliamentarian portraiture, modeled his Cromwell image on Van Dyck's royalist portraits, deliberately appropriating the visual language of aristocratic power for the man who had overthrown the monarchy. The portrait is one of several Walker made of Cromwell and exists in multiple versions, having been widely copied and disseminated as propaganda for the new republican regime.

Walker deploys the compositional conventions of Van Dyck's aristocratic portraiture — armored figure, commanding pose, dramatic backdrop — while adapting them to Cromwell's less idealized physical appearance and more austere Protestant identity. His handling is accomplished if less fluent than his model, with careful attention to armor surfaces and the sitter's distinctive craggy features.