‘Me thinks I see the love that shall be made’: two Restoration views of St James Park, Christian Verdu

The Restoration saw a strong dependence of the visual arts and verbal arts upon each other. This paper analyses one painting and one poem about a public space closely connected to the monarchy: St James Park, to illustrate how different artistic media could express contrasting views on Charles II’s self-fashioning as an approachable yet regal figure, and how sexual slander was used by both court wits and parliamentarian poets to debunk the painterly idioms of court portraiture and landscaping.