King Charles the First.

A full length portrait of King Charles 1st, wearing full armour, carrying a baton in one hand, and with his other hand resting on the hilt of his sword. In the background his plumed helmet and Crown rest on a velvet covered table. His gauntlets lie on the floor. Van Dyck executed this painting just after the outbreak of the Civil War. After a painting in the Houghton Collection, assembled by Sir Robert Walpole at his seat at Houghton in Norfolk, and subsequently sold to Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779 by the collector’s grandson, George Walpole, the profligate 3rd Earl of Orford. The deal was concluded through the Russian envoy in Great Britain, A. I. Musin-Pushkin, despite a great outcry from Parliament and British society as a whole.