BRITISH AND EUROPE AN PORTRAITURE 1600 – 1930
All paintings in this catalogue are for sale Exhibition opens Wednesday 5th June 2013 at 147 New Bond Street, London W1S 2TS Monday – Friday 10.00am – 6.00pm, Saturday 10.00am – 1.00pm Telephone: +44 (0)20 7493 3939 Cover detail: Sir Joshua Reynolds pra, Portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Forbes (c.1750–1802), cat. no. 15
www.richard-green.com
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INTRODUCTION Portraits have fascinated people ever since cavemen first drew round the profile of a shadow thrown by flickering firelight. Our selection spans from the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century to the Jazz Age of the 1920s. These portraits were made for many different reasons: to show kinship and friendship; power and professional standing; as the public face of families and as tributes to a beloved companion. Notable among them is the delicately painted, psychologically penetrating portrait of Prince Rupert of the Palatine (cat. 4) by Jan Lievens, Rembrandt’s rival as the leading Leiden portrait painter around 1630. Gerard Donck’s portrait of Nicolaes Lossy and his wife Marritgen, c.1633 (cat. 5), celebrates not only a marriage but Lossy’s prestige as City Organist of the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam: the couple are enveloped in an exquisitely-painted still life of musical instruments and scores. Johan Zoffany’s monumental, lifesize painting of Claud Alexander and his brother Boyd (cat. 16), executed in Calcutta in 1784, dramatises the moment when Claud learns that his Indian-made fortune has purchased him an estate in his beloved Scotland, crowning his career. The sweet candour of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of Elizabeth, Lady Forbes, c.1775 (cat. 15) demonstrates why he was the most soughtafter portraitist of his age, catching likeness, elegance and personality with fluid, bravura brushstrokes. Society portraits of beautiful women hold their fascination down the centuries. Augustus John’s Baronne Baba d’Erlanger and Miss Paula Gellibrand, 1919–21 (cat. 31), portrays two sleek, stylish friends at the cutting edge of fashion, entwined in vivid swathes of Jazz Age colour. Sir John Lavery’s Mrs Rosen’s bedroom, 1926 (cat. 33) vividly evokes the New York society hostess through her clothes and interior decorations, rather than her features. We are indebted to the scholars who have contributed so much to unlocking the secrets of portraiture in history. We would especially like to thank Dr Wendy Baron, Dr Caroline Corbeau, Andrew Cormack, Sabine Craft-Giepmans, Dr Lloyd DeWitt, Dr Rudi Ekkart, Karen Hearn, Rebecca John, Dr Friso Lammertse, Professor Kenneth McConkey, Pippa Mason, Professor David Mannings, Professor Leonée Ormond, Dr Richard Ormond, Professor Aileen Ribeiro, Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu, Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg, Peter Sutton, Mary Webster, Prof. Dr Ernst van der Wetering and Dr Arthur K Wheelock. Richard Green Executive Chairman
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RICHARD GREEN a f amily business
RICHARD GREEN “I am proud to introduce the directors of our family business, now in its third generation. We offer clients an unrivalled selection of paintings of the highest quality, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Based in London, our reach is international and we work with individual collectors and some of the greatest museum and private collections in the world. We advise on all aspects of collecting and we are renowned for our art historical research.” Telephone: +44 (0)20 7493 3939 Email: richardgreen@richard-green.com
JON ATH A N GREEN
M AT THEW GREEN
JOHN GREEN
PENN Y M A RK S
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“Our own exhibitions of Impressionist and Modern paintings are highlights in my calendar, as are the art fairs we participate in worldwide, from Paris to Palm Beach. We work at the heart of an important industry and I take satisfaction in the paintings we have sold to some the world’s most important museums. I am proud to be a co-director on the board of TEFAF Maastricht and co-founder and director of Master Paintings Week in London.”
“My work with Old Masters, as well as nineteenth century, Sporting and Modern art, takes me all over the world to help build collections for private clients and institutions – it is highly rewarding to acquire key pictures for clients and also to advise on future plans for important collections.”
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CONTENTS THE GOL DEN AGE 1
WES T FR I ESL A N D S CH O O L , CI RCL E O F JA N CL A ESZ .
An eight-year-old boy, identified as a member of the Blauhulck family, holding a horse
2 CO RN EL IS J O NS O N VA N CEU L EN
A lady in a black and white dress
3 CO RN EL IS J O NS O N VA N CEU L EN
John Huxley (1596–1661) of Wyer Hall, Edmonton, Middlesex Elizabeth Tryon, wife of John Huxley
4 JA N L I E V ENS
A young man identified as Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619–1682)
5 GER A R D D O N CK
Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664) and his wife Marritgen Pieters
6 IS A ACK LU T T I CH U Y S
Andries Rijckaert (1636–1716) Susanna Rijckaert-van Wisselt (b.1635)
7 C A SPA R N E T S CH ER
Nicolaes Arckenbout (1672–1717)
FROM THE ENL IGHTENMENT TO ROM A NTICISM 8 THOMAS HUDSON
A young girl sitting in a park holding a basket of flowers
9 A L L A N R A M S AY
Cecilia Craigie, daughter of Robert Craigie of Glendoick, Perthshire
1 0 A L L A N R A M S AY
Lieutenant John Abercrombie (d.1758) of the 1st Foot, The Royal Regiment
11 SIR J O SH UA RE Y N O L D S pr a
Mary Powis, Countess of Courtown (c.1737–1810)
12 T IL LY K E T T L E
William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland (1744–1814)
13 N AT H A N I EL DA N CE r a
Sir James (1704–1774) and Lady Hodges (1721–1787) and their family
1 4 SIR J O SH UA RE Y N O L D S pr a
The playwright Arthur Murphy (1727–1805)
15 SIR J O SH UA RE Y N O L D S pr a
Elizabeth, Lady Forbes (c.1750–1802)
16 J O H A N ZO FFA N Y r a
Claud Alexander (1752–1809) and his brother Boyd (1758–1825) with an Indian servant
1 7 RO B ER T H O M E
Lieutenant-Colonel William Sydenham and his wife Amelia at Madras
18 FR A N CIS A L L E Y N E
Mrs James Fector with her son Peter (b.1787) and daughter Mary (b.1791)
19 SIR T H O M A S L AWREN CE pr a
Rebecca, Lady Simeon (d.1830)
20 SIR T H O M A S L AWREN CE pr a
Miss Selina Peckwell, later Mrs George Grote (1775–1845)
THE NINE TEENTH CENTURY 2 1 CH A R L ES L A N D SEER r a and SI R EDWI N H EN RY L A N D SEER pr a
The children of the Rev. Edward Coleridge (1800–1883) of Eton College c.1833
2 2 JACO B T H O M P S O N
The children of John Harvey Esq., gathering wild flowers
2 3 FRED ERI C , LO RD L EI GH TO N pr a , r w s , hrc a , hr s w
Mrs Henry Evans Gordon
24 SIR FR A N CIS GR A N T pr a
Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower (1867–1953) on her pony Lady Whitworth
2 5 SIR S A MUEL LUK E FI L D ES kc v o , r a
Mrs Lockett Agnew
FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO MODERNISM 26 É VA GO NZ A L ÈS
La fenêtre
2 7 GUS TAV E C A I L L EB OT T E
Madame Anne-Marie Hagen
28 H EN RY H ERB ER T L A T H A N GUE r a
A study (Resting after the game, Kate La Thangue)
29 WA LT ER RI CH A RD SI CK ER T r a , prba , ne ac , re
Woman in profile with downcast eyes, Mlle Errázuriz
30 PH IL IP A L E X I US D E L Á SZLÓ
Viscountess Chaplin, née the Hon. Gwladys Wilson
31 AU GUS T US EDWI N J O H N om , r a
Baronne Baba d’Erlanger (1901–1945) and Miss Paula Gellibrand (1898–1964)
32 PIERR E B O N N A RD
Le corsage rayé
33 SIR J O H N L AV ERY r a , r s a , rh a
Mrs Rosen’s bedroom
3 4 SIR A L FRED MUN N I N GS pr a , r w s
Miss Millicent Baron on Magpie
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THE GOLDEN AGE
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B WEST FRIESLAND SCHOOL, CIRCLE OF JAN CLAESZ. Portrait of an eight-year-old boy, identified as a member of the Blauhulck family, holding a horse Dated upper centre: Anno Domini . / 1618; inscribed upper right: Aetatis Sua . 8 . Oil on panel: 44 * 32 ½ in / 111.8 * 82.5 cm Frame size: 52 * 41 in / 132.1 * 105.4cm In a Mannerist style gilded and painted oak frame PROV EN A N CE
Private collection, France
This Portrait of an eight-year-old boy holding a horse recently came to light in a French private collection. The painting style and the coat of arms depicted in the upper right corner indicate that it must have originated in West Friesland, the most northerly part of Holland. Portraits of young boys standing next to a miniature horse are extremely rare and were only painted in this area and particularly in the town of Enkhuizen. At the beginning of the seventeenth century this little port was in terms of extent and importance the fifth town in Holland, greater than towns such as Dordrecht and Rotterdam. Like most towns of any importance, Enkhuizen also had its own artists, although until recently they had all been entirely forgotten. However, systematic research has rescued some from oblivion, their paintings having been anonymous until now. The oldest Enkhuizen painter known to us is Jan Claesz, whose work we can trace from 1593 to 1618. We have traced about thirty paintings by him, many being portraits of children. His 1609 life-size painting of a Five-year-old boy (possibly Sieuwert Heinsius) (Collectie Portret van Enkhuizen, Stichting Verzameling Semeijns de Vries van Doesburgh, inv. 14),1 depicted standing with a miniature horse, is the earliest example of a portrait of a young boy with a horse. In the first half of the seventeenth century this new form of picture was repeated many times by other painters in Enkhuizen and nearby towns such as Hoorn;
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they include, inter alia, the painters Jacob Wabe (1626) and Herman Meindertsz. Doncker (1646). The present painting, dated 1618, is the oldest of the portraits of young boys that we now know to have been inspired by Jan Claesz. Minor differences in the style of painting and the entirely different signature from the authenticated inscriptions indicate that it was not painted by Jan Claesz. himself, but by an as yet unidentified artist, who was doubtless trained by him and whose work displays the same qualities as that of his teacher. To date it has not been possible to identify the young boy depicted, although various clues can be found in the painting. In the top right corner is the coat of arms of his family, showing a ship at sea, and below it is the statement that he was eight years old at the time the portrait was made. Various families in the ports of West Friesland used coats of arms with ships, and these included the Blauhulck family. In view of the wealth and standing of this family, it is possible that the boy was a member of this leading Enkhuizen governing family. Unfortunately, there has been no full reconstruction of the genealogy of the Blauhulcks that would make this certain and enable one to recover personal information about the boy. Although there has been no formal identification of the artist or his sitter, this portrait can be considered a very characteristic and extremely charming example of the West Friesland school of painting in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Rudi Ekkart
1 Oil on panel 39 ¼ * 27 ½ in / 100.5 * 70 cm.
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C CORNELIS JONSON (or JOHNSON) VAN CEULEN London 1593 – 1661 Utrecht
Portrait of a lady in a black and white dress
Signed and dated centre right: C . J . f / 1629 Oil on canvas: 30 ½ * 25 ½ in / 77.5 * 64.5 cm Frame size: 37 ½ * 33 in / 95.2 * 83.8 cm In a Baroque style carved and water-gilded white gold frame PROV EN A N CE
General Sir Henry de Bathe, KCB, 4th Bt. (1823–1907), Wood End, near Chichester; his son Sir Hugo de Bathe, 5th Bt. (1871–1940); his sale, Sotheby’s London, 13th May 1931, lot 45 (419 gns to Leggatt) Harry Lawson Webster Levy-Lawson, 1st Viscount Burnham (1862–1933) Private collection, UK
Born in London of German and Flemish stock, Cornelis Jonson probably trained as an artist in the northern Netherlands before returning to England around 1618. He was at the height of his popularity in the late 1620s and early 1630s, painting the nobility and gentry in a style that is ‘reserved but sympathetic and with exceptional attention to the detail’1 – all characteristics of this fine portrait of 1629. In 1632 Jonson was appointed ‘servant in ye quality of picture maker’ to Charles I, but van Dyck’s second visit to Britain in that year then turned portrait fashion in a more flamboyant direction. Jonson’s preference for plain, dark backgrounds makes this portrait all the more dramatic, enhancing the sitter’s pearly skin, soft hair and intricate black-and-white costume. The tout ensemble is black and white, from the hair decoration and jewellery to the dress itself. Such a sustained colour sense is more typical of masculine dress of the period, perhaps suggesting a romantic conceit of Night and Day, or Melancholy and Joy, which gives the portrait an aura of poetic grace. Jonson used a similar palette of black and white, broken only by a red ribbon and a glint of gold, in his portrait of the dashing young courtier Sir Thomas Hanmer of 1631 (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).2
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This lady is dressed in the height of fashion of the late 1620s, which emphasized a soft, curved and horizontal silhouette with figure-of-eight sleeves and glowing, perfectly round pearls at her throat. The full sleeves are cut into strips or ‘panes’ over white silk padded undersleeves and tied with black-and-white bows. Jonson has made the lady’s collar a focus of his virtuosity, depicting the layers of starched, translucent silk gauze, intricately embroidered, which frame the sitter’s enviably white neck and bosom. Her hair is bound with ribbon at the top, cut and curled (‘frizled’) at the side, with a long lock snaking past her baroque pearl earring. On the left of her head she wears a love-lock tied with a thin black ribbon, rather like the love-lock sported by Sir Thomas Hanmer. Such love-locks – a style more associated with men than with women – were long strands of the wearer’s hair (or that of a lover) threaded through an earring. Lovelocks were unpopular with Puritan critics such as William Prynne, whose book The Unloveliness of Love-Lockes (1629) declared the style (which he claimed derived from the native inhabitants of North America, the ‘infidell and idolatrous Virginians’) to be a sign of ‘affected Singularitie’ and ‘uncomely Vanitie’. This lady’s love-lock, like her lavish and rather unusual collar, serves to emphasize her air of stylish individuality. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this portrait was in the collection of the de Bathe family of Knightstown, Co. Meath; it may well represent a member of the de Bathe family. General Sir Henry de Bathe, KCB, 4th Bt. (1823–1907) served as a Colonel in the Scots Guards, 89th Regiment and Shropshire Light Infantry. The painting descended to his son Sir Hugo de Bathe, 5th Bt. (1871–1940), a leading racehorse owner. In 1899 he married an equally keen aficionado of the Turf, the actress Lillie Langtry, former mistress of Edward VII. The Jonson portrait was sold by Sir Hugo at Sotheby’s in 1931. Details of the costume are based on a report kindly provided by Aileen Ribeiro, Professor Emeritus of the Courtauld Institute of Art. 1 London, Tate Britain, Van Dyck and Britain, exh. cat. by Karen Hearn, p.63. 2 Hearn op. cit., p.63, no.16, illus. in colour.
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D CORNELIS JONSON (or JOHNSON) VAN CEULEN London 1593 – 1661 Utrecht
Portrait of John Huxley (1596–1661) of Wyer Hall, Edmonton, Middlesex
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Portrait of Elizabeth Tryon, wife of John Huxley
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D CORNELIS JONSON (or JOHNSON) VAN CEULEN London 1593 – 1661 Utrecht
Portrait of John Huxley (1596–1661) of Wyer Hall, Edmonton, Middlesex Portrait of Elizabeth Tryon, wife of John Huxley A pair, each signed and dated centre right: C . J . fecit / 1632 Oil on canvas: 30 * 25 in / 76 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 37 D⁄i * 32 ½ in / 94.9 * 82.6 cm In Mannerist style gilded and painted oak frames PROV EN A N CE
By descent from the sitters in a UK private collection
This radiant pair of paintings of a young married couple, dated 1632, shows Jonson at the height of his powers, conveying with great subtlety the textures of fine clothing, hair and skin. The painted oval format of Elizabeth Huxley’s portrait is characteristic of Jonson’s work in the late 1620s and early 1630s, although he also worked in the plain rectangular format typified by the portrait of her husband. Elizabeth’s glorious, cascading locks are seen in other Jonson portraits of around this date, for example that of the great heiress Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery of 1631 (Tythrop House, Thame).1
has small peppercorn buttons and is unbuttoned from mid-chest – a casually and relaxed style typical of ‘cavalier’ costume of the period. As for Elizabeth, it is fairly rare to see a woman in her underwear, as a companion to an image of her husband; this testifies to their happy marriage. In spite of the informality of her clothing, Elizabeth wears a double strand pearl necklace and pear-shaped pearl earrings – pearls were expensive status symbols, and also signified chastity’. John Huxley (1596–1661) was the son of George Huxley (1562–1628) of Wyer Hall, near Edmonton, Middlesex, and his wife Catherine. On 31st July 1626 he married Elizabeth Tryon, the daughter of Moses Tryon of Harringworth, Northamptonshire, the High Sheriff of that county.
Professor Aileen Ribeiro comments: ‘This charming couple are clearly devoted to each other; they wear identical Flemish bobbin lace for their collars, and Elizabeth is depicted in what was known as ‘undress’, in white linen shift, stays (corset) laced at the front, and her hair undone and falling over her shoulders – this is how her husband would have seen her in the intimacy of her dressing room. After marriage, women’s hair was always worn up, for long hair was a symbol of sexuality which only a husband was entitled to see. John Huxley wears his hair fairly long, as was the fashion for most men of his class in the 1630s. By this time, fashion had left behind the colourful and elaborate clothes of the Jacobean period, and men had moved towards simpler and more restrained styles. Here John wears a white satin doublet ‘paned’ (cut in strips) on the breast and the sleeves, allowing glimpses of his shirt to be seen beneath; the doublet
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Wyer Hall, Edmonton, seat of the Huxleys.
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They had nine children. Huxley served as a magistrate for Middlesex during the Commonwealth (1649–53). Jonson’s pair of paintings hung in the main hall at Wyer until the house was pulled down in 1818. The Huxleys and the Tryons were gentry with City connections. Moses Tryon, a Royalist, is recorded in 1638 as one of the wealthiest inhabitants of St Olaves, Old Jewry in London.2 George Huxley, a haberdasher, bought the medieval Wyer Hall from Sir John Leeke in 1609 and substantially altered it. Daniel Lysons described the house in 1795: ‘The house was rebuilt in the year 1611 by George Huxley, Esq. as appears both by the date and initials on the pipes, and the arms of Huxley over a chimney-piece in one of the principal rooms. An ancient door-way remains belonging to a former house, of which it is probable that the hall also was a part. It is fitted up with scrolled pannels, among which the rose and pomegranate, the devices of England and Aragon, frequently occur. In this hall are some good family-pictures. In an upper room are the arms of the Merchant-Adventurers, to which company it is most probable Mr Huxley belonged’.3 Wyer Hall descended in the male line of the Huxleys until 1743, and then through the children of John Huxley’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, who married the London merchant Samuel Tatem, to James George Tatem (d.1854). By the early nineteenth century Wyer Hall was dilapidated and was leased as a boarding house before its demolition in 1818. 1 See AJ Finberg, ‘A chronological list of portraits by Cornelius Johnson, or Jonson’, Walpole Society, vol. X, 1921–22, p.20, no.45 and pl. XXXI. 2 TC Dale, The Inhabitants of London in 1638: St Olaves, Old Jewry, 1931, pp.171–2. 3 See ‘Edmonton’, The Environs of London: volume 2: County of Middlesex, 1795, pp.249–77.
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E JAN LIEVENS
Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam
Portrait of a young man with a white falling ruff and a black coat and cloak, identified as Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619–1682) Oil on canvas: 26 * 20 in / 66.2 * 51.6 cm Frame size: 35 ½ * 30 in / 90.2 * 76.2 cm In a Baroque Calvinist polished ebony frame Painted circa 1631–32 PROV EN A N CE
Mrs Whatman, Vinters, near Maidstone, Kent; her sale, Christie’s London, 16th June 1900, lot 65 (as Rembrandt; £620 gns (£651) to Parker) P & D Colnaghi, London (as Rembrandt) N Steinmeyer, Cologne (as Rembrandt) Frederic Theodore Fleitman (d.1975), New York Minusio, Switzerland Private collection, Switzerland L I T ER AT URE
Wilhelm Bode and Hofstede de Groot, Rembrandt: beschreibendes Verzeichnis – Gemälde mit den heliographischen Nachbildung, Paris 1897– 1905, no.559, illus. (as Rembrandt) Wilhelm R Valentiner, Klassiker der Kunst: Rembrandt, Stuttgart 1908, p.67, illus. (as Rembrandt) (see also Supplements of 1921, 1923 and 1931) Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Gesamtkatalog des beschreibenden und kritischen Verzeichnisses der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. VI, Esslingen 1915, p.319, no.762 (as Rembrandt) Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol. VI, London 1916, p.357, no.762 Abraham Bredius, Werksverzeichnis von Rembrandt, 1935 (English edn. 1937), p.154 (as Rembrandt) Jakob Rosenberg, Rembrandt, London 1964 (as Rembrandt) Kurt Bauch, Rembrandt Gemälde, Berlin 1966, no.350 (as Rembrandt)
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Horst Gerson/Abraham Bredius, Rembrandt: the Complete Edition of the Paintings by A Bredius Revised by H Gerson, London 1969, p.560, no.154; illus. p.134 (as ‘a masterly portrait by Jan Lievens, of the Leyden period’) Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau 1983, vol. VI, no.2329, illus. (as Isaac de Joudreville) J Bruyn et. al., Stichting Foundation Research Project: a Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. Volume II 1631–1634, Dordrecht 1986, pp.784-7, no.C 74, illus. (as possibly by Jan Lievens) To be included in the catalogue of works by Jan Lievens in Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg’s forthcoming monograph Jan Lievens, Freund und Rivale des jungen Rembrandt
This sensitive Portrait of a young man has been confirmed as a painting by Jan Lievens independently by three leading scholars of his work: Prof. Dr Ernst van der Wetering of the Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project; Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg, former Director of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel; and Dr Lloyd DeWitt, Curator of European Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Long in the shadow of Rembrandt, to whom this portrait was attributed for much of its history, Lievens has recently emerged as a highly various and talented artist in his own right, through exhibitions such as the National Gallery, Washington DC’s Jan Lievens: a Dutch Master Rediscovered, 2008.1 Jan Lievens was born in Leiden in 1607 and at the age of eight became the pupil of the Leiden painter Joris van Schooten (c.1587–c.1653). From circa 1617–20 he studied in Amsterdam with the history painter Pieter Lastman. Lievens returned to Leiden as an independent master and from 1625 to 1632 worked closely with fellow townsman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), although there is no evidence that they shared a studio. Constantijn Huygens, a Renaissance man and Secretary to the Prince of
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E JAN LIEVENS
Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam
Portrait of a young man with a white falling ruff and a black coat and cloak, identified as Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619–1682) Orange, noted the genius of both precocious young men, which owed ‘nothing to their teachers but everything to their own aptitude’.2 The three scholars referred to above place this Portrait of a young man towards the end of Lievens’s years in Leiden, before he departed for London in 1632. Prof. Dr Ernst van de Wetering writes: ‘the painting (which I had the opportunity to study closely in the restoration workshop of Mr Bijl in Alkmaar) gave me strong associations with the Portrait of Constantijn Huygens by the young Jan Lievens (1628–29) (Sumowski Vol. III no. 1286). The delicate dealing with details in the face and the characteristic, as it were floating, fleshtones in the face, the tendency to a slightly greyish tonality, this all reminds me of Jan Lievens. Although I am aware of the fact that Jan Lievens’s style was constantly changing and that we do not know who may have worked in his most direct environments, I believe that the execution (especially of the nose and the mouth) is so superb, that the painting can only be attributed to a painter as gifted as Jan Lievens’.3 The painting’s qualities were long obscured beneath a thick veil of discoloured varnish. Restoration by Martin Bijl has revealed the beautifully gradated tones of the flesh, the tactile quality of the falling ruff and the intelligent, rather soulful quality of the sitter: a subtle understanding of character which is also apparent in Lievens’s Portrait of Constantijn Huygens (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Dr Lloyd DeWitt suggests that the portrait may depict Prince Rupert of the Palatine (1619–1682), third son of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and his charming ‘Queen of Hearts’ Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England. Elected to the throne of Bohemia, Frederick had disastrously lost his country at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, becoming known as the ‘Winter King’ for the brevity of his reign. His family went into exile in The Hague, reliant on handouts from their Dutch and English relatives. The angelic-looking but unruly Rupert, nicknamed by
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his family Robert le Diable, grew up to be a brave, complex, clever man, a hero of his English uncle’s Civil War, a talented artist and scientist. Lloyd DeWitt comments that the present work is one of the few portraits done by Lievens in Leiden, besides those of Constantijn Huygens and Rupert’s elder brother Prince Charles Louis of the Palatine (1617–1680) with his tutor Wolrad von Plessen, signed and dated 1631 (J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; fig. 1). Lievens’s Boy in a turban, c.1631 (private collection, New York), also probably shows Charles Louis. DeWitt notes of the present portrait: ‘The likeness is as finely rendered as in those three other portraits, and exhibits Lievens’s typical use of red in the corner of the eye, the touches of grey along the nose and eyebrow, and the use of scratch marks in the hair that run against its flow, all seen in those three works and in others by Lievens. The alternation of fat and thin paint in the details of the ruff is typical of Lievens’s work, as is the virtuoso handling of the black-on-black pattern in the sleeve, where the vertical stripes are laid over horizontal bands of shading or reflection, which appears again in his portrait of Huygens that was executed slightly earlier (c.1628–29) than the present work and which still betrays Lievens’s earlier, more energetic application of paint’. Constantijn Huygens, who was delighted with his portrait, was probably influential in securing for Lievens the commissions to paint the exiled Bohemian princes, who were being tutored in Leiden. DeWitt adds: ‘the importance of this portrait, if it does show Prince Rupert, is considerable. It bears the peculiar facial features of the prince seen in the Rembrandt-workshop double-portrait of Rupert and a tutor posing as Eli and Samuel now at the Getty Museum (fig. 2), and in Lievens’s portrait of his brother Charles Louis (also in the Getty) in the pendant. These matching features, specifically the similar structure of eyelids, the long narrow nose, full bottom lip and substantial chin, and especially the brown eyes (his brother Charles Louis seems to have had blue eyes, according to the Van Dyck portrait of 1637 in the Musée du Louvre), indicate that the sitter is Prince Rupert. The style of the present portrait points to a date of around 1631’ which would accord with Rupert’s age of twelve. Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg dates this portrait to 1632, Lievens’s last year in Leiden. He writes: ‘the sensitive modelling of the face and the regular rounded execution of the eyes, eyebrows and lids can be studied for the first time in his smaller and very differently conceived portrait of Constantijn Huygens from 1628/29. Later Lievens developed this manner in life-size figures, especially in 1631. Comparable is the
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double portrait of Prince Charles Louis of the Palatine with his tutor Wolrad von Plessen. These paintings with their restrained colourism do not represent the end of Lievens’s production in Leiden. A more mature period characterized by a richer colourism followed. The Boy in a turban in a New York private collection reflects this and the present portrait, with its rich and differentiated flesh tones, also belongs to this phase’. Schnackenburg adds: ‘another argument speaks also for a dating at the very end of Lievens’s beginnings in Leiden. The portrait scheme is taken from Rembrandt’s early portrait painting. Very close are Rembrandt’s oval-shaped bust portraits without hands from 1632, especially his Portrait of a young man with a white falling ruff in the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, dated 1632.4 It seems that Jan Lievens with this formal portrait sought competition with Rembrandt for the last time in his career’. Information based on separate reports by Prof. Dr Ernst van de Wetering, Dr Lloyd DeWitt and Dr Bernhard Schnackenburg.
Fig. 1. Jan Lievens, Prince Charles Louis of the Palatinate with his tutor Wolrad von Plessen in historical dress, 1631. Oil on canvas 40 ¾ * 38 in / 103.5 * 96.5 cm. The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
N OT E O N PROV EN A N CE
This painting was until 1900 in the collection of the Whatman family at Vinters, their estate near Maidstone in Kent. The Whatman fortune was built on paper. James Whatman I (1702–1759) had invented wove or vellum paper, which gave a much smoother surface than laid paper, and which was to become the paper of choice for aristocratic correspondents, watercolourists such as Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner, fine engraved books (including William Blake’s Songs of Innocence) and government papers in Britain and America. It is not certain at what point the Lievens portrait (then thought to be by Rembrandt) entered the Whatman collection, but James Whatman II (1741–1798), who greatly developed his father’s business, was also a keen patron of the arts.
1 The exhibition travelled to Milwaukee Art Museum and the Rembrandhuis, Amsterdam 2009; exh. cat. by Arthur Wheelock et. al. 2 Quoted by Arthur K Wheelock, Jr. in ‘Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master’ in exh. cat. National Gallery, Washington 2008, p.10. 3 Letter of 15th February 2005. 4 Bredius/Gerson 1969, p.561, no.155; Corpus II, 1986, no. A 60; Suermondt-LudwigMuseum, Aachen, Bestandskatalog der Gemäldegalerie, Niederländer von 1550 bis 1800, Aachen/München 2006, pp.210, 211.
Fig. 2. Workshop of Rembrandt, Samuel and Eli (Prince Rupert of the Palatinate with his tutor), c.1629–30. Oil on canvas 40 ½ * 34 ¾ in / 102.9 * 88.3 cm. The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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F GERARD DONCK (Active 1627 – 1640)
Portrait of Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664), city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and his wife Marritgen Pieters Signed and dated on the virginals: GDonck Ao 163[3] Oil on panel: 18 ¾ * 24 ¾ in / 47.7 * 62.9 cm Frame size: 26 * 33 in / 66 * 83.8 cm In a Baroque style ebonised pearwood frame PROV EN A N CE
Wayne Charfield-Taylor (1883–1967), Under Secretary of Commerce and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D Roosevelt; by inheritance in a private collection, USA E X H IB I T ED
On loan to the Indianapolis Museum of Art until 2010 L I T ER AT URE
Ruud van der Neut, ‘Ontdekkingen op TEFAF’, Tableau, Feb–March 2011, pp.72–74, illus. in colour Sabine Craft-Giepmans, ‘De Amsterdamse organist Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (ca. 1604–1664), door Gerrit Donck geportretteerd’, Amstelodamum, 98–3, 2011, pp.122–129; illus. in colour p.122
The sitters in this portrait have recently been identified by Sabine CraftGiepmans of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie as Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664), from 1639 city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and his wife Marritgen Pieters. Lossy came from a musical dynasty that held posts as city musicians over several generations; like many such families, they were Catholic. His grandfather Jan Willemsz. Lossy (Dordrecht c.1545–Haarlem c.1629) was a well-known Haarlem musician, the teacher of the famous organist and composer Jan Pietersz. Sweelinck (1562–1621). Nicolaes’s father, Willem Jansz. Lossy (Haarlem c.1580–Amsterdam 1639), was an organist and composer for the flute. On 25th May 1604 Willem married Haesgen
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Willems, daughter of Willem Aertsz., city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. On Willem Aertsz.’s death in 1607 he inherited his father-in-law’s post, as his son Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy was to do on his father’s death in 1639. Nicolaes married Marritgen Pieters on 24th November 1626 in the Nieuwe Kerk, where his father was organist. The elegant clothing that the couple wears suggests a date for the portrait in the early 1630s, a few years earlier than Nicolaes’s promotion to city organist in 1639. It perhaps was painted to mark Nicolaes’s post as the organist at the Nieuwezijds Chapel. At his father’s death, Nicolaes succeeded to his job
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F GERARD DONCK (Active 1627 – 1640)
Portrait of Nicolaes Willemsz. Lossy (c.1604–1664), city organist of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, and his wife Marritgen Pieters at the Nieuwe Kerk at the handsome salary of 450 guilders a year. He also earned money as a merchant and iron trader, enabling him in 1638 to buy a garden near the Amstel outside the Regulierspoort. In 1650 Nicolaes bought a garden on the Oetgensdwarspad and in 1662 a parcel of land south of the Spiegelpad. On 11th January 1645 the great organ of the Nieuwe Kerk was destroyed in a fire. Nicolaes supervised its rebuilding, which took ten years. The new organ was approved by Lossy and the remarkable blind composer and carillon player from Utrecht, Jacob van Eyck (c.1590–1657). He described Lossy as ‘a clever, fast and very good organist’ and paid homage to him in a composition named ‘Lossy’. Nicolaes Lossy and his wife are seated in an interior with a black and white tiled floor. He rests his hand on a muselar virginal, while Marritgen is seated beside a table covered with an oriental carpet and a shawm, song books and sheet music. The virginal resembles early seventeenth century instruments by the famous Ruckers family in Antwerp; compare, for example, the muselar virginal dated 1622 by Johannes Ruckers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acc. no. 11.176.1. It is probably an heirloom, reminding the viewer of earlier musical generations of the Lossy family. The instrument is supported by an unusual stand and has yellow-paper decorations derived from Balthasar Silvius’s Variorum protractionum … (Antwerp and Paris, 1554). The manuscript leaf visible on the table contains an anonymous canon for two voices, tenor and soprano, with the tenor leading. A canon is a strict and learned musical form, in which the two parts use the same material as in a traditional round. The musical instruments, song books and sheet music underscore the pervasive theme of music.1 Since the form of the canon depicted in the present work is perpetual, it could also signify stability, unity and constancy in marriage. The lid of the virginal is decorated with the coat of arms of the Lossy family between grisaille images of a couple making a sacrifice – possibly to Hymen, the god of marriage – and a soldier.
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Very little is known about the artist Gerard Donck, who signs his paintings either as GDONCK or with the monogram GD. No documents have been discovered about his life and the only evidence of his work is his signed paintings and prints. He is sometimes called Gerard van Donck, but on insufficient evidence. His earliest dated work is of 1630 and latest 1640. He painted market scenes and street vendors (see for example, The vegetable seller, Sotheby’s New York, 12th January 1995, lot 104; and Peasant selling eggs, Christie’s London, 9th July 1993, lot 164); high life genre scenes (see sale Koller, 13th November 2000, lot 1049) and small scale portraits (see for example The portrait of Jan van Hensbeeck and his wife, Maria Koeck, with an infant in a landscape, National Gallery, London, inv. no.1305). The style of Donck’s portraits resembles that of Thomas de Keyser, Hendrick Pot and Pieter Codde (see especially Portrait of a family in an interior, Sotheby’s New York, 17th October 1997, lot 78), so that it has been assumed he worked in Amsterdam and possibly Haarlem. He was also active as a printmaker and illustrator. Donck engraved or provided the designs for most or all of the illustrations in the Amsterdam playwright and composer JH Krul’s songbook Eerlycke Tytkorting (The Honest Pastime) (Haarlem 1634), one of which is inscribed: G Donck in Venter [sic]. These engravings were reprinted in JH Krul’s De Pampiere Wereld (Amsterdam 1644). The connection with songbooks, as well as the instruments that appear in Donck’s portraits, suggests that he delighted in music and the company of musicians. Information based on the article by Sabine Craft-Giepmans of the RKD and an essay by Peter C Sutton, Executive Director of the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut. 1 On the theme of music in Dutch painting and portraiture, see P Fischer, Music in Painting of the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Sonorum Speculum, nos. 50– 1, Amsterdam 1972; and exh. cat. The Hague, Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder Galleries and Antwerp, Herrenhuis Museum, Music & Painting in the Golden Age, cat. by Edwin Buijsen et al. 1994.
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G ISAACK LUTTICHUYS London 1616 – 1673 Amsterdam
Portrait of Andries Rijckaert (1636–1716)
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Portrait of Susanna Rijckaert-van Wisselt (b.1635)
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G ISAACK LUTTICHUYS London 1616 – 1673 Amsterdam
Portrait of Andries Rijckaert (1636–1716) Portrait of Susanna Rijckaert-van Wisselt (b.1635) A pair, the former signed upper right: J Luttichuys; the latter signed with a monogram and dated lower left: J.L. Ano i666 Oil on canvas: 33 B⁄i * 27 F⁄i in / 84.1 * 70.2 cm Frame size: 44 * 38 B⁄e in / 111.8 * 97.2 cm In a Baroque style ebonised frame (Andries Rijckaert) In a 19th century ebonised frame (Susanna Rijckaert-van Wisselt) The portrait of Andries painted circa 1665–8; the portrait of Susanna painted 1666 PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by Andries Rijckaert (1636–1716) and his sister Susanna Rijckaert-van Wisselt (b.1635); by descent to Cornelia Roëll-Bailli; Douaire Roëll-Collot d’Escury, The Hague, by 1905; De Geer-Roëll Collection (inscription on the stretcher); by descent to a private collection, The Netherlands E X H IB I T ED
Utrecht, Centraal Museum, Tentoonstelling van oude kunst mit particulier bezit in stad en provincie, 1938, no.123 (portrait of Susanna) Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Drie eeuwen portret in Nederland, 1952, no.93a L I T ER AT URE
Ernst Wilhelm Moes, Iconographia Batavia: beredeneerde lijst van geschilderde en gebeeldhonwde portretten van Noord-Nederlanders in vorige eeuwen, vol II, 1905, pp.305–306, nos.6670 and 6673 Bernd Ebert, Simon und Isaack Luttichuys: Monographie mit kritischem Werkverzeichnis, 2009, pp.588–590, Is. A.98 and Is. A.99, figs. 179 and 180
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G ISAACK LUTTICHUYS London 1616 – 1673 Amsterdam
Portrait of Andries Rijckaert (1636–1716) Portrait of Susanna Rijckaert-van Wisselt (b.1635) Isaack Luttichuys’s portraits of Andries Rijckaert (1636–1716) and his sister Susanna Rijckaert (b. 1635) are fine examples of his society portraiture and have the rare distinction of being able to trace their provenance directly back to the sitters themselves. Susanna is portrayed sitting before a blue curtain, her left arm resting on a red cloth draped over a stone balustrade. She is dressed in a fashionable, yet restrained black and white costume with very wide, puffed sleeves and a doublelayered collar, which covers her shoulders. Her hair is worn in ringlets, crowned with a small black cap (tipmuts). She wears a double string of pearls around her neck, pearl bracelets, rings on her fingers, a jewelled clasp in her hair and matching drop earrings. With an elegant gesture of her right hand, she fingers a handsome brooch pinned to her bodice. She has blue eyes and a pale, creamy complexion. Her younger brother stands against a similar backdrop, facing towards the viewer, with one hand resting on his hip and the other tucked into his brown doublet, the sleeve of which is split to reveal a voluminous white chemise and diaphanous cuff. He sports a dashing moustache, long brown periwig and a broad, bib-fronted band of white cambric, trimmed with a deep border of lace. He wears a purple ribbon around his wrist, while loops of lavender-coloured ribbons, or galants, decorate the top of his breeches. This extravagant outfit reflects the height of French fashion. He conveys an air of casual elegance. Susanna and Andries Rijckaert were the children of Johannes Rijckaert (1609–1679) and Cornelia Merchijs (1614–1694) and the grandchildren of Pieter Merchijs (1582–before 1628), a merchant from Amsterdam, and his first wife, Sara Berrewijns. Fine pendant portraits of Peter Merchijs and his second wife, Maria Florianus, were painted by Cornelis van der Voort in 1622, which also remained with descendents of the family until 2007.1 Little is known about the lives of the sitters depicted here: Susanna was certainly married twice, in 1655, to Nicolaes van den Heuvel, who died only a year later, and then in 1658, to Jacob van Wisselt. Andries remained unmarried.
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Although nothing is known about Luttichuys’s artistic training or when precisely he arrived in Amsterdam, his oeuvre indicates that, broadly speaking, his stylistic evolution followed the general trends in portraiture of his day. His earliest works hint at Rembrandt, but as the latter’s pre-eminence in Amsterdam waned in the 1640s and was replaced by that of Bartholomeus van der Helst, so Isaack turned increasingly to van der Helst as his model. The other major influence on his development was that of the Flemish master Anthony van Dyck, whose elegant and courtly style was introduced into Holland in the late 1630s and early ’40s by such artists as Adriaen Hanneman and Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen. Isaack’s mature period began around 1650, by which time he had evolved a distinctive personal style that combines elements of van Dyck’s elegance with the robust realism of van der Helst. Dated portraits by Luttichuys exist for almost every year of the following two decades, the majority of which depict their sitters at half-length in life-size format. Isaack’s patrons seem to have been drawn mostly from Amsterdam’s wealthy burgher classes, but he also occasionally portrayed scholars and publishers. These two portraits from Luttichuys’s maturity exemplify the artist’s elegant, painterly manner and his sensitive response to the individuality of the sitters. The subtle, rather cool palette is characteristic, as is the clear, even light. Isaack displays a great eye for detail in his precise rendering of the young people’s costly clothing and accessories, which testify to their wealth and social status. Using lively brushwork, he perfectly describes the various textures of corduroy, linen, silk, transparent voile and lace. Close observation of the young man’s collar reveals that the intricate motifs in the dentelle opaque, as this type of lace was known, was achieved by scratching out the design in the top layer of wet paint using the end of the brush to reveal the darker tone beneath. Although this technique was by no means unique to Luttichuys, it was his normal method for realising the appearance of lace. The heavy curtains of shimmering moiré silk which hang behind the figures were one of the artist’s standard backdrops and appear elsewhere in his oeuvre. Pippa Mason
1 Cornelis van der Voort (1576–1624), Portraits of Pieter Merchijs and his wife, Maria Florianus, oil on panel, each approximately 48 ¼ * 35 ¼ in / 122.5 * 89.6 cm. Sotheby’s Amsterdam, 14th November 2007, lot 49.
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H CASPAR NETSCHER
Heidelberg circa 1639 – 1684 The Hague
Portrait of Nicolaes Arckenbout (1672–1717)
Signed and dated lower left: CA Netscher. Ft. / 1679 Oil on panel: 11 ¼ * 9 in / 28.5 * 23 cm Frame size: 18 * 16 in / 45.7 * 40.6 cm In a 19th century gilded French Louis XIV style composition frame PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by the sitter’s parents; by inheritance to the sitter’s wife Maria de Lange;1 their son Cornelis Arckenbout (d.1755); his wife Henrietta van der Laanen (d.1759); her husband’s cousin Johan van der Marck (d.1770), Leiden; his notary Albertus Kleynenbergh, Leiden; his son Jan Kleijnenberg, Leiden; Kleinenbergh [sic] sale, 19th July 1841 and ff., lot 178 (1,270 florins to Landry) Baron Arthur de Rothschild (1851–1903); sale M Baron de X [de Rothschild], Paris, 15th May 1931, lot 31, illus. (FFr.18,500) sale Comtesse de M et. al. (ex-collection Mme H), Paris, 20th March 1953, lot 12, illus. L I T ER AT URE
J Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, vol 9, Supplement, London 1842, p.539, no.5 (as Portrait of an interesting youth; wrongly described as 10 * 8 in on canvas) C Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, vol 5, London 1913, pp.171, no.64 ME Wieseman, Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, Doornspijk 2002, p.294, no.184 (as location unknown) Face Book: Studies on Dutch and Flemish Portraiture of the 16th–18th Centuries. Liber Amicorum Presented to Rudolf EO Ekkart on the Occasion of
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his 65th Birthday, Leiden 2012, pp.405–412, Friso Lammertse, ‘Over enkele Rotterdamse portretten van Caspar Netscher’, illus. in colour p.405
Trained by Gerard ter Borch in Deventer, Caspar Netscher settled in The Hague in 1662, specialising in high-life genre scenes. After circa 1667 he concentrated on small-scale portraits, often with an allegorical element which appealed to the courtly clientèle of The Hague. By the end of the decade he was the most sought-after portrait painter in the city and also much in demand among the wealthy classes of Rotterdam. For many years the identity of this sitter was lost. Recent research by Friso Lammertse of the Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (see Literature above) has revealed that he is Nicolaes Arckenbout (1672– 1717), elder son of Lidia van Vredenburgh (1647/48–1679), a member of a wealthy Rotterdam Regent (patrician) family, who married Cornelis Arckenbout in 1671. Both Lidia and her husband died in 1679, leaving three children: Nicolaes, Jacob and Agatha. Nicolaes married Maria de Lange. Maria’s probate inventory of 14th March 1721 lists three portraits by Caspar Netscher, of Lidia and of her sons Nicolaes and Jacob as boys. All three portraits survive, Lidia (fig. 1) and Jacob in separate private collections. The Portrait of Nicolaes Arckenbout has an exquisite delicacy of finish that reflects Netscher’s training with Gerard ter Borch, as well as the influence of Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), most famous of the Leiden
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H CASPAR NETSCHER
Heidelberg circa 1639 – 1684 The Hague
Portrait of Nicolaes Arckenbout (1672–1717)
fijnschilders, whose highly detailed genre paintings commanded enormous prices. Netscher, however, balances extreme detail with painterly fluidity and an interest in textures, evident in the virtuoso treatment of the reflections on the bubbles, the intricacies of the child’s sleeve and the dense, rich weave of the table carpet. The boy’s face, with its intense blue gaze, has real personality. Netscher introduces life and movement into his portrayal by adding the genre element of the child blowing soap bubbles. This was a favourite theme in seventeenth century Dutch child portraits, evoking both the innocent joys of youth and the fragility of life; Netscher also treated the subject in Two boys blowing bubbles, 1670 (National Gallery, London).2 The Roman proverb homo bulla est (man is a bubble) was reiterated by Erasmus in his influential Adagia (1572). The child points with his pipe to a bubble that floats away towards a heartrendingly blue sky, past the statue of a dancing satyr that stands in the shadows. The Bacchic theme is continued in a relief on the parapet on which the child leans: three putti drag a goat by its horns. The classical sculptures seem to hint of the vanities of the adult world which the child has not yet encountered. Netscher’s highly-educated audience would have recognised the satyr as a treasure from the Palazzo Borghese, etched by Jan de Bisschop as plate 1 of his Signorum Veterum Icones in 16723 (fig. 2). Nicolaes Arckenbout and Maria de Lange had only one child, Cornelis. At her death Cornelis inherited their estate ‘Het Paradijs’ at Crooswijk and a large fortune in land, bonds, annuities, gold, silver and jewels. Nicolaes and Maria owned a number of family portraits, as well as Christ preaching on the Sea of Galilee and other works by Herman Saftleven, and a Winter landscape by Isaac van Ostade. Cornelis moved to Gouda in 1720 and rapidly became one of its most prominent and richest citizens, holding the offices of Sheriff, City Councillor and Mayor.
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Netscher’s exquisite, glamorous work was avidly collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Louis XV acquired The singing lesson, for example, in 1741. The present painting belonged to Baron Arthur de Rothschild (1851–1903), son of Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812–1870) of the French branch of the banking family. Baron Arthur was a prominent philatelist and keen yachtsman who supported the America’s Cup. He bequeathed to the Louvre ten of his finest Old Masters, including works by Jacob van Ruisdael and Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
Fig. 1. Portrait of Lidia van Vredenburgh (1647/48–1679), 1669. Private collection.
Fig. 2. Jan de Bisschop, Dancing satyr, etching, 1672. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London.
1 Her probate inventory of 14th March 1721 lists portraits by Netscher of Nicolaes, his brother Jacob Arckenbout (private collection) and his mother Lidia van Vredenburgh (private collection). A label on the reverse of the present painting, written by Johan van der Marck c.1759, reads No 2 Oom Nicolaas Arckenboudt door G. Netscher (No 2 Uncle Nicolaas Arckenboudt by G. Netscher). All details of the Arckenbout family are from Friso Lammertse’s article. 2 A composition very similar to the present Boy blowing soap bubbles (in a Munich private collection c.1954) is recorded by Wieseman as a studio variant: Wieseman op. cit., p.329, no.B 31). 3 See for example British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, inv. no.1850.0810.654.
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FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT TO ROMANTICISM
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I THOMAS HUDSON Devon 1701 – 1779 Twickenham
Portrait of a young girl sitting in a park holding a basket of flowers
Inscribed on the reverse: Hudson Pinxt.1 Oil on canvas: 33 ½ * 40 in / 85 * 102 cm Frame size: 41 ½ * 48 in / 105.4 * 121.9 cm In a period carved and gilded corner and centre frame Painted in the late 1750s PROV EN A N CE
Sir Brian Mountain, 2nd Bt. (1899–1977), by 1942 Private collection, UK Richard Green, London, 2000 Private collection, UK E X H IB I T ED
London, Richard Green, Sporting and British Art, 2001, pp.104–5, no.45, illus. in colour
Devon-born, like his famous pupil Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Hudson was one of the most fashionable portrait painters in London by the 1740s. He bought himself an impressive house in Great Queen Street, painted such worthies as the Duke of Cumberland and George Frederic Handel, and campaigned to raise the status of artists as a member of the St Martin’s Lane group. Hudson visited France and the Low Countries with his friend William Hogarth in 1748. His portraits of the 1750s, like this Young girl in a park, reflect his exposure to the sensuous handling and rich colouring of Flemish painting, as well as elements of the French rococo.
by the flowers that she has gathered on a walk through an Arcadian landscape. The green of the countryside is vividly contrasted by her flowered dress of coral-coloured, figured taffeta (possibly a Spitalfields silk) and matching shoes.3 The elaborate silk would have been very expensive and the fine froth of Mechlin bobbin lace on the child’s sleeves further proclaims her status. She wears a lace cap decorated with black feathers and a pearl, with a cap ornament of ‘paste’ jewels, imitation rubies and diamonds. The straw hat lying nearby adds to the air of bucolic grace, but this charming young girl could never be mistaken for a milkmaid.
Pastoral settings were particularly suited to portraits of children. They were much favoured by Hudson, for example in his portrait of The Courtenay children, c.1744 (Powderham Castle, Devon).2 In the present work, the youthful freshness of the young girl is emphasised
1 The inscription is on the reverse of the nineteenth century relining and probably echoes an inscription on the reverse of the original canvas. canvas. 2 London, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, Thomas Hudson 1701–1779, 1979, no.22, illus. 3 Details of the costume are taken from a report kindly provided by Professor Aileen Ribeiro.
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J ALLAN RAMSAY
Edinburgh 1713 – 1784 Dover
Portrait of Cecilia Craigie, daughter of Robert Craigie of Glendoick, Perthshire (1685–1760), Lord President of the Court of Session Signed and dated lower right: A. Ramsay / 1754; Oil on canvas: 29 ¾ * 25 in / 75.6 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 37 * 32 in / 94 * 81.3 cm In a period carved and gilded pierced swept frame PROV EN A N CE
By descent in the Craigie or Douglas family, one of whom emigrated to Canada in the nineteenth century; by descent to Kay Gairdner, Toronto; her daughter Daphne Bell, Toronto; by inheritance in a Canadian private collection
This portrait was made just before Allan Ramsay’s second visit to Italy from 1754–7. Well-established in London, he was still moving in the Scottish intellectual and gentry circles of his Edinburgh upbringing as the son of a celebrated poet. Ramsay had trained in the Naples studio of Francesco Solimena in 1737, but by the mid-1750s his crystalline, Italianate baroque manner had given way to a softer, more naturalistic style, influenced by Hogarth and French painters such as MauriceQuentin de la Tour and Jean-Marc Nattier. This portrait balances a Caledonian grace and restraint in the personification of the sitter with a rococo love of luxurious, pastel fabrics reflecting sinuous streams of light. Cecilia Craigie’s face is painted with an exquisite delicacy that emulates the short, feathery strokes of a la Tour pastel; not only her features, but her lively intelligence and good nature are conveyed. Hidden away in a Canadian private collection for at least 150 years, Cecilia Craigie was unknown to Alastair Smart when he compiled his catalogue raisonné of Allan Ramsay’s work. Smart does, however, list other Ramsay portraits of Cecilia’s family, including that of her father Robert Craigie, dated 1744 (1685–1760) (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh), and sister Anne Craigie, dated 1750 (private
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collection).1 Anne is in ‘Vandyck’ costume and more crisply painted than Cecilia, as befits the earlier date; she is also set in a painted oval and the lower right hand signature is very similar to the one on Cecilia’s portrait. Robert Craigie was the younger son of Laurence Craigie of Kilgraston. A successful career at the Bar allowed him to purchase the estate of Glendoick, Perthshire in 1726. From 1742–46, a period which spanned the Jacobite rebellion, he was Lord Advocate of Scotland. From 1754 he was Lord President of the Court of Session. George III described Craigie as ‘a very good lawyer, an honest man, and a good Whig’.2 He had four sons and three daughters with his wife Barbara, daughter and heiress of Charles Stewart of Carie. Ramsay knew the family personally, consulting Craigie over his marriage contract when he eloped in 1752 with his enchanting second wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay. Cecilia Craigie married Colonel Robert Douglas (1716–1803) of Strathendry Castle, Fife, first cousin of the economist Adam Smith (1723–1790). Like her father, the youngest of Cecilia’s five sons, David, had a distinguished legal career, becoming a Lord of Session in 1813 and a Lord of Justiciary as Lord Reston in 1816. David Douglas spent his later childhood with Adam Smith and inherited his superb library.
1 Alastair Smart, ed. John Ingamells, Allan Ramsay: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, p.96, no.110 and p.259, fig. 167; p.96, no.109 and p.307, fig.348 respectively. 2 Quoted by Smart, p.96.
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BA ALLAN RAMSAY
Edinburgh 1713 – 1784 Dover
Portrait of Lieutenant John Abercrombie (d.1758) of the 1st Foot, The Royal Regiment Signed and dated lower right: A. Ramsay / 1754 Canvas, painted oval: 30 * 25 in / 76.2 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 37 * 32 in / 94 * 81.9 cm In a period carved and gilded centre and corner frame PROV EN A N CE
John Yates; Christie’s London, 26th July 1935, lot 117 (‘Portrait of a Gentleman, of the Abercromby Family’; 125 gns to Reid) LC Wallach; Sotheby’s London, 25th May 1955, lot 123 (unsold) JR Lang, The White House of Milliken, Brookfield, Renfrewshire; by descent L I T ER AT URE
Alaistair Smart ed. John Ingamells, Allan Ramsay: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London 1999, p.203, no.593; p.337, fig. 467
Born in Edinburgh, Allan Ramsay enjoyed a very successful career as a portrait painter in London from 1738, but kept up his Scottish patrons and connections. This fine portrait of John Abercrombie, an officer in the 1st Regiment of Foot, was made when Ramsay was back in Edinburgh for the first six months of 1754, before leaving for his second trip to Italy. It has the ‘strong likeness firm in drawing’1 for which George Vertue praised Ramsay’s male portraits, but also the ‘new and lively naturalism’ which the artist developed in the early 1750s.2 This portrait of John Abercrombie is notable for the exquisite quality of light which makes the sitter stand solidly in space and evokes a personality with a keen, intelligent gaze and slight reserve – every inch the Army officer. A brilliant draughtsman, Ramsay organizes his composition with elegant economy so that every detail tells.
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The painted oval was a favourite format for Ramsay’s half-length portraits. In 1754, the same year as the Abercrombie portrait, he painted the philosopher David Hume in this format (private collection, Scotland).3 The pose of John Abercrombie is repeated in another military portrait, that of Sir Peter Halkett, 2nd Bt., 1754 (whereabouts unknown).4 John Abercrombie was serving in the oldest, and one of the most distinguished, regiments of the British Army, the 1st Foot or Royal Regiment, today known as The Royal Scots. He had started his career on 13th March 1741 as an Ensign in another Lowland regiment, the 25th Foot, later the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. On 10th May 1742 he was promoted Second Lieutenant. On 28th April 1743 Abercrombie transferred to Hope’s 60th Foot and on 2nd May 1744 was promoted Lieutenant. He
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BA ALLAN RAMSAY
Edinburgh 1713 – 1784 Dover
Portrait of Lieutenant John Abercrombie (d.1758) of the 1st Foot, The Royal Regiment exchanged out of the 60th Foot before it was disbanded at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and into the 1st Battalion of the 1st Foot on 16th April 1746. On 2nd February 1757 he was promoted Captain-Lieutenant of the 1/1st Foot, that is the senior Lieutenant who had the immediate management of the Colonel’s Company. Abercrombie was made Captain of his own company in the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Foot on 7th May 1757. During the Seven Years’ War (1757–63) the 2nd Battalion of the regiment served in North America. Captain Abercrombie was ‘discharged dead’ on 16th July 1758, a casualty perhaps of the fierce Indian raids on the South Carolina border, where the Battalion was stationed.5 Ramsay’s portrait makes a splendid feature of the handsome uniform of the 1st Foot, scarlet with dark blue facings and gold lace, which then as now are the colours of the Royal livery. All eighteenth century Royal regiments wore scarlet and blue, although some had silver lace. The 1st Foot was raised in 1633 by John Hepburn of Athelstaneford, near Edinburgh, at the request of Charles I. Then as now the senior regiment of infantry, it fought at the coveted position at the right of the line. On 16th April 1746, coincidentally the day that John Abercrombie joined the 1st Foot, the regiment fought at Culloden. Information on John Abercrombie and the 1st Foot kindly provided by Andrew Cormack.
1 2 3 4 5
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Quoted in Smart, op. cit., p.8. Smart ibid., p.8. Smart pp.138–9, no.278; p.335, fig.458. Smart p.129–130, no.234; p.334, fig.455. Commissions in the Army were purchased at this period. Abercrombie’s rapid promotions in the early years of his career and his ability to exchange into the 1st Foot, which would have required a douceur to the officer with whom the exchange was arranged, suggests that Abercrombie was a reasonably wealthy man, well able to afford Ramsay’s fees as a portrait painter.
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BB SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Mary Powis, Countess of Courtown (c.1737–1810), later Lady in Waiting to Queen Charlotte Inscribed on a label on the stretcher: This/Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of the Countess of Courtown Lady of the Bed Chamber/to Queen Charlotte, to be an heirloom Canvas: 36 * 28 ½ in / 91.4 * 72.4 cm Frame size: 43 ¼ * 35 in / 109.9 * 88.9 cm In a period carved and gilded corner and centre frame Painted circa 1762 PROV EN A N CE
By inheritance to the 1st Earl of Lilford Private collection, USA
Mary Powis was the younger daughter and coheiress of Richard Powis (or Powys) (c.1707–1743) of Hintlesham Hall, Suffolk, Tory MP for Orford, and his wife Lady Mary Brudenell, daughter of George, 3rd Earl of Cardigan of Deene Park, Northamptonshire. Perhaps dazzled by his wife’s very grand connections, Powis spent much of his fortune in improvements to Hintlesham, Georgianising the Tudor core. He was said to be so poor when he died that he was buried by royal charity at Hampton Court; his widow sold Hintlesham and in 1754 was remarried, to Thomas Bowlby of Durham.1 Joshua Reynolds, the most fashionable portrait painter in London, was the natural choice to portray the daughter of Lady Mary Bowlby when the time came to launch her in society. This portrait was probably made around the time of Mary’s marriage on 19th April 1762 to James, Viscount Stopford (1731–1810), a large landowner in Co. Wexford who became 2nd Earl of Courtown in 1770. Mary Powis was well connected both among the English and the Irish aristocracy. On 22nd August 1761 Lady Kildare, later the Duchess of Leinster and second of the famous Lennox sisters who were daughters of the 2nd Duke of Richmond,
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wrote to her husband: ‘Mr Stopford is going to be marry’d to a relation of mine, a pretty agreable girl, Miss Powis, daughter to Lady Mary Bowlby, She has a £20,000 fortune’.2 This painting is an exquisite example of one of Reynolds’s formal portraits of an aristocratic young lady of the 1760s. Unlike his paintings of demimondaines, he does not employ quasi-classical dress, but portrays Mary in the height of contemporary fashion, in a lace-trimmed, ruched pink silk dress suitable for presentation at Court. Great attention is lavished on the fall of the lace cuffs and the elaborate pink silk sleeves, as well as the contrast between the rococo pastels of the dress and the diaphanous black shawl thrown over it. Everything conspires to present an image of graceful, modest femininity: Mary’s pearly complexion and oval face, the soft halo of her upswept hair and the froth of silk and lace at her throat. She holds a spray of pinks, often used by Holbein and other Tudor portraitists as a symbol of betrothal. Reynolds, who had an encyclopaedic understanding of his predecessors’ work, no doubt intended this allusion.
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BB SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Mary Powis, Countess of Courtown (c.1737–1810), later Lady in Waiting to Queen Charlotte Reynolds’s Pocket Book (Royal Academy of Arts, London) records appointments with ‘Miss Powis’, presumably Mary’s elder sister Elizabeth (1736–1826) from February to April 1759 and ‘Miss Powis and Miss Mary Powis’ on 12th April 1759. There are five more appointments with ‘Miss Powis’ on 9th, 13th and 20th February, 26th March and April 13th 1762, and a single payment of 15 gns for Miss Powis is entered in the Ledger between June 1761 and August 1762. Mannings (op. cit., p.380) agrees with Graves and Cronin that the 1759 portrait was probably of Elizabeth and the 1762 sittings were for Mary. The present portrait was not known to Mannings when he published his catalogue raisonné of Reynolds’s paintings, but he lists an oval portrait of Mary wearing a ruched dress and a fur stole, which he dates circa 1762 (Dayton Art Institute, Ohio).3 It is likely that the present work was painted around the same time, as part of the preparations for Mary’s marriage. Her sister married Thomas Townshend, afterwards Lord Sydney (1732–1800), a month later on 19th May 1762. James Stopford inherited the Irish Earldom of Courtown from his father the 1st Earl in 1770; his seat was at Courtown (or Kiltennel) in Co. Wexford. As an Irish Peer, he could sit in the House of Commons and was MP for Great Bedwyn in 1774 and for Marlborough 1780–93, acting in the interest of his wife’s uncle, Thomas Brudenell-Bruce, 1st Earl of Ailesbury. Courtown supported William Pitt the Younger but was far more of a courtier than a politician, much in favour with George III. He was a Privy Councillor, Lord of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales 1780–4 and Treasurer of the Household 1784–93. In 1788 Mary was appointed Lady in Waiting to Queen Charlotte. Fanny Burney, the novelist and reluctant member of the Royal Household, noted approvingly: ‘Lady Courtown has had a new place not merely given, but created for her. She was so useful and pleasant to the Queen at Cheltenham, that she has been appointed Lady in Waiting in the Country, by which means she will now regularly attend her Majesty
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in all country excursions, and during all her residences at Windsor and Kew. I am very glad of it, for she is constantly cheerful and obliging, and seems invariably in good humour and good spirits’ (Diary, 18th August 1788).4 Lady Courtown needed all her good humour and tact to support
the Queen during George III’s terrifying ‘madness’ of 1788, but she was also present during his convalescence in Weymouth the following summer, when public affection for the King was at its height. Courtown’s great ambition was for a British Peerage, which would give him and his heirs a seat in the House of Lords. He achieved this on 7th June 1796, becoming Baron Saltersford of Saltersford in the County of Chester. The Courtowns had four sons and two daughters. The eldest, James, 3rd Earl of Courtown (1765–1835) – in the opinion of Fanny Burney ‘a cheerful, lively, well-bred young man’5 – married his kinswoman Lady Mary Montagu Scott, daughter of the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, and served as an MP in his father-in-law’s interest. The second son, the Hon. Sir Edward Stopford (1766–1837), became a Lieutenant-General and the third, the Hon. Sir Robert Stopford (1768– 1847), Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom and Commander in Chief in the Mediterranean. The fourth son, the Hon. Richard Bruce Stopford (1774–1844), was Canon of Windsor and Chaplain to Queen Victoria.
1 Romney Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, vol. II, Members E-Y, p.368. 2 B Fitzgerald, ed., Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, 3 vols, Dublin 1949–53, quoted in David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, New Haven and London 2000, Text vol., p.380, no.1466. 3 Mannings p.380, cat.1466. The present painting will be included in a revised version of the catalogue raisonné. 4 The Diary and Letters of Mme d’Arblay Edited by her Niece, vol. IV, 1788–1789, London 1854, p.208. 5 Ibid., p.44, 19th August 1789.
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BC TILLY KETTLE
London 1734/5 – 1786 near Aleppo
Portrait of William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland (1745–1814), wearing an Oxford gentleman-commoner’s gown Signed lower left: T. Kettle/Pinxit Oil on canvas: 30 * 25 in / 76.1 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 37 * 31 H⁄i in / 94 * 81 cm In a period running pattern carved and gilded frame Painted circa 1763–4 PROV EN A N CE
Lord Auckland (1745–1814) Francis Seymour, 5th Marquess of Hertford (1812–1884) Mrs Stevenson Scott, New York, by 1927 Mortimer Brandt, New York Acquired by Mr and Mrs EM Ayers in 1940 for the Art Institute of Zanesville, OH (now the Zanesville Art Center) L I T ER AT URE
James D Milner, ‘Tilly Kettle, 1735–1786’, The Walpole Society, vol. XV, 1926–7, pp.58–9, 84 and pl.XIXa Art Institute Fifth Anniversary of the Opening Catalogue, Zanesville, OH 1940, under ‘Recent additions to the permanent collection’, no.8 Art Institute Zanesville, OH, Catalogue 1942, Zanesville 1942, pp.8, 10, cat. no.5 Born in London, Tilly Kettle met Joshua Reynolds in the early 1750s and was influenced by his fresh and sophisticated style. From 1762–4 he worked in Oxford and the Midlands, gaining commissions through his patron and lifelong friend Richard Kaye (1736–1809), later 6th Baronet and Dean of Lincoln, who was appointed Chaplain to William, 3rd Duke of Portland in 1762. This portrayal of William Eden is a superb example of Kettle’s Oxford portraits. As James Milner comments, it ‘breathes simplicity, dignity, and refinement, qualities which raise Kettle’s standard completely out of the ranks of mere Reynolds imitators into an independent and quite masterly sphere’ (op. cit., p.59).
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Kettle paints William Eden as a Christ Church undergraduate, wearing the intricate, braided gown of a gentleman-commoner, to which he was entitled as the son of a Baronet. Eden’s demeanour is one of elegant restraint, as befitted a young man of breeding who was already a serious scholar. His face is painted with greet sensitivity, while care is lavished on the textures of his sober but expensive clothes: the lawn bands, ruffles, the velvet collar of his coat and the complex play of light and dark on the gown. Particularly beautiful is the passage which describes Eden’s left hand emerging from the shadows beneath its ruffled cuff, holding his college cap.
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BC TILLY KETTLE
London 1734/5 – 1786 near Aleppo
Portrait of William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland (1745–1814), wearing an Oxford gentleman-commoner’s gown William Eden was the third son of Sir Robert Eden, 3rd Bt. (d.1755) of Windlestone Hall, West Auckland, Co. Durham, and his wife Mary (d.1794), daughter of William Davison of Beamish, Co. Durham. He was educated at Durham School and Eton before going up to Christ Church in 1762. He gained his BA in 1765 and was admitted to the Middle Temple, being called to the Bar in 1768. Eden practised law on the northern circuit but was far more interested in the philosophy of jurisprudence. In 1771 he published the most significant tract of his legal career, The Principles of Penal Law, which argued that legal penalties should try to reform criminals rather than merely punish them, and which advocated the reduction of the number of capital offences, singling out the notoriously harsh game laws. The Principles brought Eden to the attention of Lord Suffolk, Secretary of State for the Northern Department, whose Under-Secretary he was appointed in 1772. Thus began Eden’s career as a highly able administrator. He was MP for New Woodstock from 1774 and in 1776 pushed through the Hulks Bill, which improved the terrible housing of convicts in hulks on the Thames and gave them employment, such as clearing the river. The same year Eden gained a promotion to the Board of Trade and married Eleanor Elliot (1758–1818), daughter of the politician Sir Gilbert Elliot, 3rd Bt. (1722–1777). In 1778 he was appointed to the five-man commission for conciliation with America, led by his Oxford friend, the 5th Earl of Carlisle. When Carlisle was sent to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in 1780, Eden accompanied him as Chief Secretary. In Ireland he became expert in commercial matters and was involved in the foundation of the Bank of Ireland. In 1785 Eden was sent by William Pitt, Prime Minister at the tender age of twenty-four, to negotiate a commercial treaty with France consequent upon the end of the American War of Independence. Eden
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succeeded triumphantly, but was less successful in tricky commercial negotiations with Spain while he was Ambassador in Madrid 1788–89. He was raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Auckland in 1789 and served from 1789–93 as Ambassador in The Hague, steering cannily through the turbulent years before the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. Eden retired from the diplomatic service in 1793 and was raised to the British peerage as Baron Auckland of West Auckland. Lord Auckland remained an ally of Pitt, who in 1796 wooed and very nearly married his daughter Eleanor, the only serious romantic relationship recorded in Pitt’s life. In 1798 Pitt appointed Auckland joint Postmaster-General and he was one of Pitt’s closest advisors on the possibility of union with Ireland in the years 1798–1800. In 1801, however, Auckland broke with Pitt over his plans to accompany the Act of Union with a degree of Catholic emancipation; his opposition influenced George III and Pitt was forced to resign. Auckland remained in office under Pitt’s successor, Henry Addington, but was dismissed when Pitt returned to power in 1804. After Pitt’s death, Auckland was President of the Board of Trade in the Ministry of All the Talents in 1806–7. He died at his home, Eden Farm, Beckenham, on 28th May 1814. Auckland had twelve children with his wife Eleanor. His eldest son, William, mysteriously drowned in 1810 and the Barony of Auckland was inherited by his son George Eden (1784–1849), who was First Lord of the Admiralty 1834–5 and 1846–9 and Governor-General of India 1835–42. He was a patron of Captain William Hobson, British Consul to New Zealand, who in 1840 named the new settlement of Auckland in his honour. George was made Earl of Auckland in 1838. His highly talented sister, Emily Eden (1797–1870), lived with her brother in India, made drawings of the scenery and people and published vivid accounts of life there, including Up the Country (1866).
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BD NATHANIEL DANCE ra (later SIR NATHANIEL DANCE-HOLLAND) London 1735 – 1811 Winchester
Portrait of Sir James (1704–1774) and Lady Hodges (1721–1787), their sons John, James and Henry, and their daughters Mary and Elizabeth Oil on canvas: 56 ¼ * 61 ¼ in / 143 * 155.5 cm Frame size: 64 ½ * 69 ½ in / 163.8 * 176.5 cm In a period carved and gilded Carlo Maratta frame Painted circa 1766 PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by Sir James and Lady Hodges; bequeathed by Lady Hodges in her Will of 26th July 1784 (proved 6th August 1787) to her daughter Elizabeth; by inheritance to her niece Mary Hodges (c.1738–1831), daughter of Rev. Henry Hodges, who married secondly, in 1785, Sir Peter Nugent, subsequently 2nd Bt. (c.1745–1799) of Donore, Co. Westmeath; by descent in the Nugent family E X H IB I T ED
Dublin, World Refugee Year: Exhibition of Treasures, 1959–1960, no.364 (lent by Sir Richard Nugent) L I T ER AT URE
Corey Piper, ‘A contribution to the iconography of Maria Walpole (1736– 1807): a portrait by Nathaniel Dance (1748–1827)’, The British Art Journal, vol. XII, no.2, Autumn 2011, pp.9–10, illus. in colour
The son of George Dance Snr (1695–1768), architect of the Mansion House, Nathaniel Dance trained with Francis Hayman in London and spent from 1754 to 1765 in Rome, where he worked as an assistant to Pompeo Batoni. This lively, sophisticated conversation piece of the Hodges family is among his finest works, showing the influence of Batoni in its vibrant colouring, elegant composition and sensuous handling of paint. It was made in the mid-1760s, after Dance’s return to London, and before Sir James Hodges’s second son James departed
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for a career with the East India Company at Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast. It is rare among Dance’s conversation pieces in having an indoor setting; The Pybus family, 1769 (National Gallery of Victoria, Australia) shows a similarly graceful, large family group in a park. Dance portrays the Hodges family as happy, affectionate and prosperous, in their sumptuous drawing room with its blue and white porcelain and Italianate landscape by Richard Wilson over the mantelpiece. The sitters have an air of well-bred ease, but a sense of animation is provided by James Hodges Jnr, seated in the foreground, whose head turns swiftly, pigtail flying, to greet a visitor entering the room. The commission was no doubt provided through Dance’s City connections: his younger brother, George Dance Jnr (1741–1825), like his father before him, was a City architect, designer of Newgate Gaol. Sir James Hodges (1704–1774), a stationer and bookseller, was Town Clerk of London from 1757 until his death. He was painted by Joshua Reynolds in 1765 (Tate Britain, on loan to the V&A), a likeness astonishingly close to that of Dance. Next to Sir James sits his wife Mary (1721–1787), in a splendid yellow silk dress. Her youngest son Henry (d.1810) gazes tenderly at her. Henry became Rector of Embleton, Northumberland and in 1798 married Sophia Alexander, daughter of Charles Crickett, MP for Ipswich. Their daughter Mary (c.1738–1831) married as her second husband, in 1785, Sir Peter Nugent of Donore, Co. Westmeath, in whose family the Dance portrait descended. James Hodges Jnr spent nearly thirty years in India, dying at Bath in 1794. His elder brother John (d. before 1810), depicted at the far right of Dance’s portrait, served as a soldier in the East India Company and attained the rank of Colonel. He married Francis, daughter of Sir Robert Deane, 5th Bt., and sister of the 1st Baron Muskerry. Behind the young men are their sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth inherited the Dance family portrait from her mother and bequeathed it to her niece Mary.
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BE SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Arthur Murphy (1727–1805)
Inscribed on the reverse of the original, unlined canvas: Portrait of Arthur Murphy Esquire / painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds for /Mrs Thrale, after Mrs Piozzi of whom / I purchased it, in 1819 – George Watson Taylor Canvas: 30 * 25 in / 76.5 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 36 ¾ * 31 ½ in / 93.3 * 80 cm In a period carved and gilded Carlo Maratta frame Painted 1773–9 PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by Henry Thrale (1728–1781) for his library at Streatham Park, Surrey; sale on the premises of the contents of Streatham Park, George Squibb, 10th May 1816, lot 59, bought in for £102.18 Sold by Mrs Piozzi (formerly Mrs Thrale) in April 1819 to George Watson Taylor (1771–1841), 1 Harley Street, London and Erlestoke Park, Wiltshire; his sale, Robins, 25th July 1832, lot 142 (£23.2 to Graves) Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Bt. (1788–1850); by descent in the Peel family until sold Robinson & Fisher, 11th May 1900, lot 256 (bt. Agnew’s); sold by Agnew’s on 14th July 1900 to Charles Fairfax Murray (1849–1919); his sale 14th December 1917, lot 72 (bt. Arthur Sulley); sold by Sulley to Mr Ralston-Mitchell; by descent to a private collection, Yorkshire, England L I T ER AT URE
Joshua Reynolds, MS Pocket Books (Royal Academy of Arts, London): sittings for 8th September, 8th, 11th and 15th November 1773; 8th September 1777; 12th and 18th February 1779 CR Leslie and T Taylor, Life & Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, London 1865, vol. II, pp.48, 55 A Graves and WV Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, London 1899–1901, vol. II, p.679
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JL Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale), 2nd edn, Oxford 1952, p.442, note 1 M Hyde, The Thrales of Streatham Park, Cambridge, MA and London 1977, pp.180, 300 M Hyde, ‘The Library Portraits at Streatham Park’, The New Rambler (Journal of the Johnson Society of London), Serial C, no.XX, 1979, pp.14, 16, 22–24 Agnew’s Picture Stockbook, no.4 PH Highfill et. al., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel, Carbondale 1984, vol. 10, p.399 The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–1821 (formerly Mrs Thrale), vol. 5, 1811–1816, Cranbury, NJ and London 1999, pp.477–8, 482, 484, 490–1, 493, 539; vol. 6, 1817–1821, 2002, pp.84, 250–1, 253, 255–7 D Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London 2000, text vol. p.347, no.1312; plates vol., p.440, fig. 1098 Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti and London, Tate Britain, Joshua Reynolds: the Creation of Celebrity, 2005, exh. cat. ed. by Martin Postle, p.165
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BE SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Arthur Murphy (1727–1805)
T H E S T RE AT H A M WO R T H I ES
This sensitive portrait of the Irish actor, playwright and lawyer Arthur Murphy is one of the twelve ‘Streatham Worthies’ painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds for the wealthy brewer Henry Thrale (1728–1781) to hang in his library at Streatham Park, Surrey. Untraced for nearly a century, it completes the circle of friends (seven portraits in public and four in private collections) who made Streatham Park a focus of wit and learning in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The centre of this circle was Dr Samuel Johnson, towering literary figure and compiler of the Dictionary of the English Language, whom Arthur Murphy had known since 1754. In 1765 Murphy introduced Johnson to Thrale and his feisty, intellectual wife Hester (1741–1821). Johnson soon became a frequent visitor to the Thrale household at Deadman’s Place, Southwark, on the site of the brewery, and at their country house, Streatham Park. In 1772 Thrale extended Streatham to provide a large library with accommodation for Johnson above; Johnson gave advice upon the library’s design and contents. The twelve portraits by Reynolds were arranged above the bookcases: ‘Mr. Thrale resolved to surmount these treasures for the mind (his books) by a similar regale for the eyes, in selecting the persons he most loved to contemplate, from amongst his friends and favourites, to preside over the literature that stood highest in his estimation’.1 He ‘fixed upon the matchless Sir Joshua Reynolds’2 for the commission; a natural choice, as Reynolds was a long-standing friend of Johnson and in 1764 had founded the Club at which Burke, Murphy, Garrick, Johnson and several of the Thrale circle met. The idea of surmounting bookcases with portraits of noble minds was inspired by the Upper Reading Room at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and by the libraries at Chesterfield House, Woburn and Badminton; Thrale’s innovation was to make them portraits of living friends. Fanny Burney dubbed them the Streatham
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Worthies after the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe, which contained sculpted busts of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and other famous historical figures. Between 1772 and 1781 Reynolds executed the twelve portraits and a double portrait of Thrale’s wife and eldest child, the formidable Queeney,3 to hang over the chimneypiece; the group cost Thrale about £500. Apart from Arthur Murphy, and Reynolds’s own Self-portrait, c.1775 (Tate Britain, London),4 they comprised: Henry Thrale, 1777 (Hyde Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard);5 Dr Samuel Johnson, c.1772–8 (Tate Britain);6 the playwright Oliver Goldsmith, 1772 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin);7 the actor David Garrick, c.1776 (Houghton Library);8 the writer and politician Edmund Burke, 1774 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh);9 the musicologist Dr Charles Burney, 1781 (National Portrait Gallery, London);10 Queeney Thrale’s Italian tutor Giuseppe Baretti, 1773 (Lady Teresa Agnew, Melbury Park, Dorset);11 Lord Sandys, 1773 (Lord Sandys, Ombersley Court, Worcestershire)12 and William Lyttleton, 1772 (Viscount Cobham, Hagley Hall, Worcestershire)13 – both Oxford friends of Henry Thrale – and the lawyer Sir Robert Chambers, 1773 (sold Sothebys London, 25th November 2004, lot 48; private collection).14
A R T H U R MU R PH Y
Reynolds sought to bring out the mannerisms and personality of his sitters; taken as a whole, the Streatham Worthies seem to be engaged in a dialogue as lively as they were in life, presided over by the kind, solid and imposing Henry Thrale. Reynolds cups a hand to his ear – a reference both to his deafness and to his role as listener among the Streatham group – while Johnson’s immense bulk and power of
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BE SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Arthur Murphy (1727–1805)
intellect are brilliantly evoked. The portrait of Arthur Murphy, painted with a fluent, soft impasto, conveys his intelligence, good nature and urbane elegance. The face is subtly modelled with short strokes of paint, scumbling and glazing to convey Murphy’s fair complexion and humorous grey eyes. His powdered hair is more freely painted, as is the lace at his throat, evoked with a few twists and flicks of the brush to offset the rust-red velvet of his jacket and waistcoat. The canvas has never been relined, so the impasto and the light which plays across skin, hair, velvet and lace have been preserved in excellent condition. Reynolds set Murphy against a plain background, enhancing the vividness of his spotlit figure and its sculptural solidity. All the Streatham Worthies were designed to be seen from comparatively high up and far away. The sympathy and psychological acuteness in his portrait of Murphy reflects Reynolds’s delight in the company of intellectuals and men of letters: his social circle comprised writers and politicians rather than artists. Arthur Murphy was a very old and valued friend both of Thrale (from his bachelor days) and Johnson. Mrs Thrale tells the amusing story of how Murphy and Johnson met. Murphy was staying in the country with his friend the actor Samuel Foote, but needed to contribute his regular article for the Gray’s Inn Journal and send it up to London. Impatient to rejoin Foote’s guests, and ‘unwilling to pump his own brains.. [he]..snatched up a French Journal that he saw lying about, translated a Story which he liked in it & sent it to press’. The story turned out to be a translation of one of Johnson’s Rambler pieces; Murphy rushed round to apologise, and thus ‘commenced an Acquaintance, which has lasted with mutual Esteem I suppose near twenty Years’.15 The novelist Fanny Burney, taken into the Streatham circle along with her distinguished father Dr Burney, describes Murphy as ‘the most intimate in the house, amongst the Wits, from being the personal favourite of Mr. Thrale’. Murphy, ‘for gaiety of spirits, powers of dramatic
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effect, stories of strong humour and resistless risability, was nearly unequalled: and they were coupled with politeness of address, gentleness of speech, and well-bred, almost courtly, demeanour’.16 Hester Thrale, who could be sharp about her husband’s friends, wrote verses in 1781 on the characters shown in Reynolds’s portraits. Murphy she praises for ‘A Mind in which Mirth can with Merit reside, / And Learning turns Frolic with Humour his Guide’.17 Arthur Murphy was a man of many talents:18 one of three Irishmen among the Streatham Worthies (the others being Burke and Goldsmith) in a century dazzling with Irish wit and eloquence. Born at Clooniquin, Co. Roscommon and educated in France, Murphy came to London and worked at the banking house of Ironside and Belchier until 1751. From 1752–4 he served on the staff of the Covent-Garden Journal and published the Gray’s Inn Journal. By now some £300 in debt, in 1754 Murphy took to the stage, making his Covent Garden début as Othello. He found time to write theatre criticism, contribute to the Literary Magazine and in 1757 to inaugurate an anonymous political weekly, The Test, which attacked Pitt the Elder and supported the Whig Henry Fox. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn and called to the Bar in 1762, acting as a lawyer both for Edmund Burke and for Thrale. Murphy’s first play, the farce The Apprentice, was performed at Drury Lane in 1756. His plays were successful throughout the 1760s and 70s, while his best-known comedy, The Way to Keep Him (1760), was performed into the twentieth century. In 1761 he rented Drury Lane with the comic actor Samuel Foote, one of his closest friends. The love of Murphy’s life was the actress Ann Elliott, for whom he wrote the part of Maria in The Citizen (1761); she left him for the Duke of Cumberland, and Murphy never married. In 1762 Murphy published the works of Henry Fielding and the first biography of the novelist. In 1792 he produced an Essay on the Life and
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Genius of Samuel Johnson and in 1801 a Life of David Garrick, celebrating the two sons of Lichfield whom he had known so well. Murphy was a Commissioner of Bankruptcy 1765–78 and 1796–1805, an ironic post for a man who spent much of his life in debt. He was made a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn in 1802 and granted a royal pension of £200 a year. Despite making considerable sums over the years from his plays and his talents as a lawyer, Murphy was forced to sell his house in Hammersmith Terrace and part of his fine library towards the end of his life. He died in 1805.
T H E FAT E O F T H E P O R T R A I T
Henry Thrale died in April 1781 and never saw the Streatham Worthies hung in his library. His widow leased Streatham Park with its contents to the Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne, and the Worthies looked down on peace negotiations with France at the end of the American War of Independence. In 1784 Hester Thrale scandalised her family and friends by marrying her children’s music teacher, Gabriel Piozzi (1740–1809). This marriage to a Catholic and a man of low birth caused a rupture with Johnson and with all the Streatham Worthies still living. Murphy alone remained faithful. Mrs Piozzi, once more widowed and financially straightened, sold the contents of Streatham Park in 1816. She instructed her steward: ‘Murphy’s Portrait must not be sold under 100£’ and it was bought in for her for £102.18.19 Writing to the Rev. Thomas Whalley, she proclaimed ‘I kept dear Murphy for myself – He was the Playfellow of my first Husband, The true and partial Friend of my second’.20 She refused an offer for the portrait of 150 gns from George Watson Taylor, who had paid £378 for Johnson’s portrait at the sale21 and £31.10 for Baretti’s.22 Murphy, she declared in her Commonplace Book, was ‘the only Man among the Wits I fostered – who did not fly from the Colours’.23
In 1819 the seventy-eight-year-old Mrs Piozzi gave in to Watson Taylor’s pleading and sold Murphy’s portrait and a Cipriani Magdalen to him for £200.24 George Watson Taylor was one of the most colourful collectors of the early nineteenth century. He inherited a vast Jamaican fortune from his brother-in-law Simon Taylor and bought Erlestoke Park, Wiltshire in 1819, filling it with fine furniture and Old Master paintings. Arthur Murphy’s portrait was intended for the Reynolds Room at Erlestoke. Watson Taylor’s extravagance eventually outran even his deep pockets and the contents of Erlestoke were auctioned over twenty-one days in 1832. Murphy’s portrait was bought by Sir Robert Peel, later Prime Minister, and remained in the Peel family until 1900. It was later owned by the artist and connoisseur Charles Fairfax Murray before being sold in 1917 by the dealer Arthur Sulley to Mr Ralston-Mitchell, in whose family it descended.
1 Mme D’Arblay [Fanny Burney], Memoirs of Dr Burney, vol. II, London 1832, p.80. 2 Ibid. 3 Mrs Henry Thrale and her daughter Hester, 1777–8 (Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada). Mannings op. cit., pp.443–4, no.1750, pl.89, fig.1248. 4 Ibid., p.50, no.18, fig. 1151. 5 Ibid., p.443, no.1749, fig. 1234. 6 Ibid., p.281–2, no.1014, fig. 1070. 7 Ibid., p.220, no.737, fig. 1005. 8 Ibid., p.211–12, no.706. 9 Ibid., p.114, no.285, fig. 1100. 10 Ibid., p.115–6, no.290, pl.97, fig. 1352. 11 Ibid., p.72, no.107, pl.72, fig. 1067. 12 Ibid., p.404, no.1574, fig. 1086. 13 Ibid., p.315, no.1163, fig. 1053. 14 Ibid., p.128, no.343, fig. 1077.
15 Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi) 1776–1809, vol. I, 1776–1784, ed. K Balderston, Oxford 1942, p.153, August–September 1777. 16 Memoirs, op. cit., vol. II, p.174. 17 Thraliana, vol. I, p.472, 10th January 1781. 18 Richard B Schwartz, ‘Murphy, Arthur’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 2004. 19 The Piozzi Letters, op. cit., vol. 5, p.477, 5th May 1816. 20 Ibid., p.484, 13th May 1816. 21 Piozzi Letters, vol.6, p.84. 22 Piozzi Letters, vol. 5, p.491, note 6. 23 Quoted in Piozzi Letters, vol. 5, p.493, note 4. 24 Piozzi Letters, vol. 6, p.251, letter to Sir James Fellowes, 21st March 1819.
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BF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Forbes (c.1750–1802)
Oil on canvas: 29 ¾ * 24 H⁄i in / 75.5 * 63.4 cm Frame size: 37 ½ * 32 ½ in / 95.2 * 82.6 cm In a period carved and gilded hollow frame Painted circa 1775–6 PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by the sitter’s husband, Sir William Forbes, 6th Bt. (1739–1806); by family descent E X H IB I T ED
Aberdeen, Historical Portraits, 1859, no.80 (lent by Mrs George Forbes)
The charm and candour of this painting reveal why Joshua Reynolds was in such demand as a portraitist from the 1760s to the 1780s, painting aristocrats, politicians, intellectuals, men and women in a way which expresses social status, but also warmth and vitality. Elizabeth Forbes, the twenty-five-year-old wife of a prominent Scottish banker, holds our attention with a direct, good-natured gaze, poised as if about to speak. She is entirely at ease in her world, without a trace of arrogance, ‘amiable’ in the sense that Jane Austen would understand the word. Two-and-a-quarter centuries after Lady Forbes sat in Reynolds’s studio, the dialogue between sitter and spectator retains its magic. This portrait had not been seen by Professor David Mannings when he compiled Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (2000). It had remained in the Forbes family and had only been exhibited once, at Aberdeen in 1859. Having now seen the painting in the original, Professor Mannings confirms that it is ‘an attractive example of Reynolds’s work’ of circa 1775–6 which will be included in a future revised edition of his catalogue raisonné. The attribution to Reynolds and the dating has also been confirmed by Martin Postle.
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Reynolds exploits the 1770s fashion for white silk dresses by balancing a restrained, ‘classical’ colour palette with a sense of luxurious textiles. Lady Forbes’s white dress is delicately edged in gold. At her waist she wears a gold-embroidered ‘Turkish’ sash, very à la mode for the era: a similar sash can be seen adorning the white-clad figure of Mary Wordsworth, Lady Kent, 1777 (with Richard Green in 2003; private collection). Draped round Lady Forbes’s shoulders is a soft pink mantle painted with bravura brilliance. The colour is echoed in the ribbon that holds the pearls and feather of her high coiffure, in a passage of especial elegance. Unlike Lady Kent’s, Elizabeth’s hair is unpowdered, retaining its rich brunette beauty. Her youthful, rosy complexion, created by Reynolds from delicate scumbles and glazes, is preserved like the rest of the portrait in superb condition. Reynolds’s Pocket (or sitter) Books for 1774–6 are lost, but his Ledger (account book) records a payment of 70 gns from Sir William Forbes in May 1776. According to David Mannings, this probably refers to the ‘three-quarters’ (30 * 25 in) portrait of Sir William Forbes (private collection) at 50 gns and a replica at 20 gns,1 but it is also possible that the
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BF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS pra Plympton 1723 – 1792 London
Portrait of Elizabeth, Lady Forbes (c.1750–1802)
Ledger refers to a pair of works, the aforementioned Sir William and the present Lady Forbes, priced at 35 gns. each.2 Reynolds painted Sir William again in 1786 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh),3 while Elizabeth was painted by Romney in a large, stylish hat (private collection).4 Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Sir James Hay MD Bt. of Haystoun, Peebleshire, married on 20th September 1770 Sir William Forbes (1739– 1806), 6th Bt. of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire. An ancestor’s part in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion had lost Forbes his family lands at Pitsligo. He grew up in Aberdeen in ‘dignified penury’5 before being apprenticed to Coutts’ bank in Edinburgh in 1754. His flair gained him a partnership and, after Coutts moved its business to London in the 1760s, the Edinburgh branch was established as ‘Sir William Forbes, James Hunter & Co.’ in 1773. Forbes became a wealthy man, a leading member of the Merchants’ Company of Edinburgh and, under the influence of a strong Episcopalian faith, a major philanthropist. He supported the Orphans’ Hospital, Royal Infirmary and Royal High School, among many other projects. On succeeding to the title and arms of Pitsligo in 1781, Forbes built the Aberdeenshire village of New Pitsligo, with chapels, schools and a linen works to provide employment for the inhabitants. He eschewed politics, turning down offers of parliamentary seats and an Irish peerage in 1799. A ‘wise banker’ who advised William Pitt the Younger, ‘urbane and welcoming, with refined tastes in music, dancing and drawing’,6 Forbes moved with his wife in intellectual circles in both Edinburgh and London. They were friendly with the poet James Beattie and James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson. Boswell introduced Forbes to Johnson in 1773, and the banker became a member of the celebrated Literary Club, joining the witty company of Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Murphy7 and Joshua Reynolds himself. Reynolds was always at his best painting friends, as his sympathetic
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portrait of Elizabeth shows. The Forbes’ happy marriage produced four sons and five daughters. Sir William wrote a touching tribute to Elizabeth after her death in 1802, as well as a number of other works, including Memoirs of a Banking House (1803; published 1860). Continuing their literary interests, their eldest son William was a lifelong friend of Sir Walter Scott. The bank ‘Sir William Forbes & Co.’ was affiliated with the Glasgow Union Banking company in the nineteenth century and absorbed into the Union Bank of Scotland in 1843.
1 David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London 2000, text volume p.199, no.657; plates volume, p.464, fig. 1182. 2 Malcolm Cormack states that 36 gns was Reynolds’s standard price for a so-called ‘three-quarter-length’ in the mid-1770s; see Cormack, ‘The Ledgers of Sir Joshua Reynolds’, The Walpole Society, 1970, p.105. 3 Mannings op. cit., text volume, p.199, no.658; plates volume p.553, fig. 1484. 4 Sotheby’s London, 15th July 1992, lot 37. 5 John Booker, ‘Forbes, Sir William, of Pitsligo, sixth baronet (1739-1806)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition 2004–13. 6 ODNB, op. cit. 7 See cat. 14.
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BG JOHAN ZOFFANY ra Frankfurt 1733 – 1810 Kew
Portrait of Claud Alexander (1752–1809) and his brother Boyd (1758–1825) with an Indian servant Inscribed lower centre and right: Claud Alexander / B.1752 D.1809; Boyd Alexander / B.1758 D.1825; Zoffany pinxit Oil on original, unlined canvas: 89 ½ * 77 in / 227.5 * 195.5 cm Frame size: 99 ½ * 87 ½ in / 252.7 * 222.2 cm In a period carved and gilded semi Carlo Maratta frame Painted in 1784 PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by Claud Alexander (1752–1809); by descent in the Alexander family of Ballochmyle House, Mauchline, Ayrshire L I T ER AT URE
Lady Victoria Manners and Dr GC Williamson, John Zoffany, RA: His Life and Works 1735–1810, London 1920, pp.111, 172, illus. Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825, London 1987, pp.134, 242–243, 456–457; pl.165 (erroneously as by AW Devis) BF Tobin, Picturing Imperial Britain: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenthcentury British Painting, Durham and London 1999, p.262, no.37 Mary Webster, Johan Zoffany 1733–1810, New Haven and London 2011, pp.478–480, colour illus. and colour detail
Cosmopolitan and adventurous, Johan Zoffany was born in Germany, trained in Rome, sought success in London and spent time in Florence painting the Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–7; Royal Collection). Returning to England in 1779, he found his lively conversation pieces superseded by the ‘grand manner’ portraits of Reynolds and Romney and determined to try his fortune in India, where there were rich commissions from Honourable East India Company officials. Zoffany landed at Madras in July 1783 and by 15th September was in
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Calcutta, armed with an introduction from Lord Macartney, Governor of Madras, who wrote that he was ‘without dispute the greatest Painter that ever visited India’.1 Zoffany received commissions from Warren Hastings, the cultured and sympathetic Governor of Bengal, including a magnificent full-length of Hastings’s beloved wife Marian (1783/4; Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta) and a conversation piece of the couple strolling near their country house at Alipore (1783; Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta). He enjoyed the patronage of other members of Calcutta high society, among them the Impeys, D’Oylys, Auriols and Dashwoods.
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BG JOHAN ZOFFANY ra Frankfurt 1733 – 1810 Kew
Portrait of Claud Alexander (1752–1809) and his brother Boyd (1758–1825) with an Indian servant This lifesize portrait of Claud and Boyd Alexander with an Indian servant is among the most outstanding of Zoffany’s Indian paintings. Claud Alexander, Military Paymaster-General, is standing on a terrace as the sun goes down over the Hooghly river. The servant has just brought him a letter, which he discusses with his brother Boyd (in the green coat). Zoffany’s early career as a painter of theatrical conversation pieces is reflected in the lively relationship between the brothers, the alert pointer and the serene gaze of the servant, whose features and exotic costume Zoffany observes with exquisite delicacy. Mary Webster comments that this is ‘one of Zoffany’s finest portrayals of an Indian’.2 The painting was begun in the intervals of Zoffany’s work for Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal. He would have determined the composition and laid in the figures before Boyd Alexander left for Scotland in February 1784. In a letter to his family of 8th December 1784, Claud Alexander declared that he had sent down to the homeward-bound East Indiaman Southampton ‘my picture wch I request you will get out of the India House as soon as possible as it is a capital painting & I should be sorry if it got any damage; as it was painted by Zoffany a member of the academy I imagine it will be exempted from Duties’.3 The portrait was intended to commemorate the fulfilment of Claud Alexander’s career in India and to remind him, when it hung in a country house in chilly Britain, of the vivid landscape and exotic peoples of the Subcontinent. By now a rich man, having amassed about £50,000, he was intending to return to his Scottish birthplace. In 1782 Claud had bought the estate of Ballochmyle at Mauchline, Ayrshire from Sir John Whitefoord, who had been ruined by the Ayr Bank Crash of 1772. The letter he holds, headed ‘Glasgow 22nd Decr. 1782’ and written by his cousin Alex Cunninghame,4 refers to this purchase, hence Claud’s animation and Boyd’s affectionate delight. Even the faithful pointer
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seems to share in the good news. Zoffany captures the moment for which every East India Company nabob longed: the day on which he had gained fortune enough to retire to an estate in Britain. Warren Hastings, who left India in 1785, made enough money to repurchase his ancestral estate, Daylesford in Worcestershire.5 Claud Alexander followed him to Britain the same year.
Claud Alexander was typical of the young men who set out to make their fortunes in India, many of whom, like Hastings himself, came from impoverished gentry families. Claud was the third son of Claud Alexander of Newton-upon-Ayr and his wife Joanna, daughter of Alexander Cunninghame. In 1771, warned that his ‘father’s situation and the large family he has to provide for make the greatest economy necessary’, Claud set sail for Calcutta as an East India Company writer, or clerk. Like most junior Company officials, he was expected to supplement a meagre salary by private trade and commission business. In 1774 Claud was made first assistant to the Commissiary-General, who was responsible for auditing the army’s accounts, and by 1776 was his deputy. In 1780 he rose to the lucrative position of Military Paymaster-General. Claud Alexander was not part of Warren Hastings’s inner circle, criticising him and inclining to take the part of Hastings’s arch-enemy, Philip Francis. By 1784, however, he had recognised Hastings’s extraordinary abilities, calling him ‘that worthy good man who has been the saving of us all’. He was a close friend of Hastings’s secretary George Bogle (1746–1781), a brilliant scholar and linguist whom Hastings sent on the first British mission to Tibet in 1774. When Bogle drowned in 1781, Claud looked after his estate and sent Bogle’s daughters Mary and Martha (by his Indian ‘bibi’) to live with Bogle’s family in Scotland. Boyd Alexander went out to Bengal in 1776, but was never a covenanted servant of the East India Company. From 1778–9 he was Deputy Paymaster to the Garrisons at Patna. He left India in February 1784.
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In 1786 Claud Alexander took up residence with his unmarried sister Wilhelmina at Ballochmyle House, designed for the Whitefoords in 1760 by Robert Adam. Robert Burns lived nearby at Mossgiel Farm; one spring evening while wandering on the estate he met Wilhemina and composed the song The Bonnie Lass o’Ballochmyle. Claud was less than amused by its rather forward sentiments, but Wilhelmina is said to have treasured Burns’s manuscript all her life. Energetic and entrepreneurial, Claud in 1787 founded the Catrine Cotton Works with David Dale, who had built the Lanark Mill with Richard Arkwright. In 1791 Claud wrote to his friend Miss Touchet in India: ‘I have such a large family in my newly erected village to look after, that these and the management of my estate keep me constantly employed. I have got a thousand souls in the village….not less than a ton of yarn is spun and sent to market every week. I have been finishing a house for a Sunday’s school, and a subscription is now going about for a church….They say it is not the employment of a gentleman to give bread to so many people….I meant to say that a cotton spinner is not the employment of a gentleman. But I am satisfied in my own mind that I am doing good’. Claud Alexander married Helena, the daughter of Sir William Maxwell; her beauty was also celebrated by a local poet. They had three sons, Claud, William Maxwell and Boyd.
1 Quoted in Webster op. cit., p.453, to whose catalogue raisonné this essay is greatly indebted. See Webster pp.478–480. 2 Ibid., p.480. 3 Private collection; typescript copy in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. 4 The original of the letter is in a private collection, Scotland; typescript copy in the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. I am grateful to Richard Wenger for the details of Claud Alexander’s biography and for drawing these letters to my attention. 5 Today in Gloucestershire.
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BH ROBERT HOME
Hull 1752 – 1834 Cawnpore
Portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel William Sydenham and his wife Amelia, with St Thomas’s Mount, Madras in the background Oil on canvas: 30 B⁄c * 36 B⁄e in / 77.5 * 92 cm Frame size: 38 * 44 ½ in / 96.5 * 113 cm In a period carved and gilded swept frame Painted circa 1791 PROV EN A N CE
Arthur Tooth, London, 1946–7 (advertisement in The Connoisseur, March 1946) Private collection, England L I T ER AT URE
M Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825, London 1979, pp.306–8, pl.212
William Sydenham (1752–1801), the son of Samuel Sydenham and Alice (née Chapman) of Minehead, came from a distinguished Devonshire family. Sydenham joined the East India Company’s Madras Artillery as a Cadet in 1768. In 1776 he married Amelia Prime, niece of General Horne, who had also served with the Artillery in India. In 1786, at the time of the war with Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Sydenham was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in command of the First Battalion at St Thomas’s Mount near Fort St George, Madras, which can be seen in the background of this painting. Home was a fine landscape painter and detailed landscape backgrounds give extra vividness to his portraits. William Sydenham was promoted to Major-General, Commandant of Artillery and Auditor-General of Fort St George in January 1801, but died in June of that year.
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The Sydenhams had two sons, Benjamin and Thomas, and a daughter, Mary Ann, who married a Major Orr. Benjamin became Secretary to Marquis Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington’s brother) when he was Governor-General of India; Home painted Wellesley on several occasions. Benjamin served in the Madras Engineers from 1794 to 1808 and was a fine amateur artist. Thomas Sydenham became Ambassador to the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad; both boys were portrayed by John Russell.
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BI FRANCIS ALLEYNE Fl. 1774 – 1792
Portrait of Mrs James Peter Fector of Dover, with her son Peter (b.1787) and daughter Mary Frances (b.1791) Oil on canvas: 27 ¼ * 34 ¼ in / 69.2 * 87 cm Frame size: 33 * 40 in / 83.8 * 101.6 cm In its original carved and gilded Adam style frame Painted circa 1791-92 PROV EN A N CE
Mr and Mrs James Peter Fector; their daughter Mary, who married Major-General Edward Matson (1791-1873), Royal Engineers;1 their daughter Emma, who married Lieutenant-General Sir Henry James (1803-1877), Royal Engineers; their son Ernest CF James, 87th Royal Fusiliers, Hyde Park Court, London, by 18952 Sir Philip and Lady Haldin, Lympne Place, Lympne, Kent, circa 1920–1958; by descent
Francis Alleyne specialised in small-scale oil portraits, drawing his sitters from the landed gentry, merchants, Army and Navy officers. He painted a number of Kentish families in the 1780s and 90s, including a pair of portraits of William Wheatley of Lesney House, Kent and his wife, which are both dated 1786 (private collection).3 This delightful conversation piece is more ambitious in scope than most of Alleyne’s works, depicting a young mother and her children in an easy, affectionate relationship. Four-year-old Peter Fector rests a hand on his mother Frances’s knee and with the other holds a doll to amuse his baby sister Mary, who in turn glances trustingly up at Frances. Given Mary’s age (she was baptised on 16th May 1791), the painting must have been made circa 1791–92. The family are all dressed in fine white muslins, the children with lace and ribbon trimmings, reflecting the trend towards neoclassical purity and simplicity that characterised the last decade of the eighteenth century. The austere interior, with just a hint of a
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red curtain, concentrates attention on the sitters and their relationships. The beautifully painted, elegant doll that Peter holds may not be merely a child’s toy, but a ‘fashion doll’ sent over from the Paris dressmakers to show ladies in England the latest modes. The Fectors, prominent Dover merchants and bankers with roots in Europe, were well placed to receive news from France, at least until the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793. Frances Lane was the daughter of Thomas Bateman Lane, who was four times Mayor of Dover between 1770 and 1800, and Lieutenant Governor of Dover Castle.4 In 1783 she married the banker James Peter Fector, a partner with his father Peter and elder brother John Minet Fector in the firm of Fector & Minet. The firm was founded in the late seventeenth century by Stephen Minet, a Huguenot from Calais who fled to Dover after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. By the 1740s the business, which also had a London branch, was involved with banking as well as merchant and agency work. Peter Fector Snr (1725– 1814), joined the bank in 1740. He was made a partner six years later and hugely expanded the business, becoming one of the wealthiest men in Dover. He married a cousin, Mary Minet, daughter of John Minet, Rector of Eythorne. ‘Possessed of much landed property’, Peter Snr built himself a fine house overlooking the Channel at Upper Eythorne.5 The family bank was sold in 1842 to the National Provincial, today incorporated into the Royal Bank of Scotland.
1 History of the Matson family by Colin Matson, kindly brought to my attention by Richard Matson. 2 Family tree on a piece of paper attached to the reverse of the painting, written by Ernest CF James on 2nd March 1895. 3 Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of British 18th Century Paintings, Woodbridge 1981, p.27, illus. 4 Kathleen Hollingsbee, Dover History Scrapbook. 5 Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 10, Canterbury 1800, p.62.
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BJ SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE pra Bristol 1769 – 1830 London
Portrait of Rebecca, Lady Simeon (d.1830)
Oil on canvas: 30 * 25 in / 76.2 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 38 ¾ * 34 in / 98.4 * 86.4 cm In a period carved and gilded fluted hollow frame Painted in the early 1790s PROV EN A N CE
By descent to Laura, Lady Simeon, widow of Sir Edmund Simeon, 5th Bt.; her sale, Christie’s London, 4th July 1919, lot 36 (2520 gns to Agnew) Bought from Agnew’s by Horace Trumbauer in the 1920s French and Co., New York, 1955 Private collection, UK E X H IB I T ED
Columbus, Ohio, The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Sir Thomas Lawrence as Painter and Collector, 1955, no.26 L I T ER AT URE
Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1954, p.58 Kenneth Garlick, ‘A catalogue of the paintings and drawings of Sir Thomas Lawrence’, The Walpole Society, vol. XXXIX, 1962–1964, p.177 Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1989, p.265, no.718
Kenneth Garlick1 dates this painting to the early 1790s, the decade of Lawrence’s first great successes as a portrait painter; he was appointed Painter in Ordinary to George III at the age of twenty-four in 1792. It shows his bravura brushwork and delicate use of impasto and glazes which give such life and glamour to his portraits. Rebecca Simeon was the eldest daughter of John Cornwall of Hendon House, Middlesex. On 14th June 1783 she married the distinguished lawyer John (later Sir John) Simeon of Walliscot, a member of an old Oxfordshire family and a descendant of the wife of the Parliamentarian
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John Hampden. John’s brother Charles (1759–1836) was a well-known Evangelical divine. Sir John Simeon, 1st Bt. (1756–1824) was MP for Reading 1797–1802 and 1806–18. A practising barrister and member of Lincoln’s Inn, he was Recorder of Reading 1779–1807 and Master in Chancery from 1795–1808, when he became Senior Master. He was a commissioner for the management of George III’s property during the later stage of the King’s insanity, 1812–20. Simeon was created a Baronet in 1815. 1 Garlick 1989, op. cit., p.265.
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CA SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE pra Bristol 1769 – 1830 London
Portrait of Miss Selina Peckwell, later Mrs George Grote (1775–1845)
Oil on canvas: 49 ¼ * 39 ½ in / 125.1 * 100.3 cm Frame size: 58 * 48 in / 147.3 * 121.9 cm In a period carved and gilded swept frame Painted circa 1793 PROV EN A N CE
By descent to the sitter’s great-grand-daughter, Miss Mayor, Queen’s Gate House, Kingston Hill; her sale, Christie’s London, 20th May 1927, lot 33 (5,880 gns to Colnaghi) P & D Colnaghi, London, 1951; by descent to a European private collector E X H IB I T ED
Brighton Art Gallery, Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA, 1951, no.9 L I T ER AT URE
Country Life, May 1938 Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence, London 1954, p.40 Kenneth Garlick, ‘A catalogue of the paintings, drawings and pastels of Sir Thomas Lawrence’, Walpole Society, 1964, vol. XXXIX, p.96 Kenneth Garlick, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Oxford 1989, p.200, no.357
Described as being ‘of uncommon beauty’ and ‘noted for her gaiety’, Selina Peckwell married the banker George Grote in 1793; this portrait was probably made at the time of her wedding. Painted a mere few months after the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, it triumphantly epitomises the new Romantic portrait style. A child prodigy, Lawrence first exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of eighteen in 1787 and two years later astonished Georgian society with his bravura full-length of Lady Cremorne (Tate Britain). He painted Queen Charlotte the same year and by 1793 was Painter in Ordinary to George III and about to be elected as a full Academician.
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Miss Peckwell stares soulfully into the distance, set in a richly-impasted, stormy landscape painted with a dashing fluency that reflects Lawrence’s admiration of Rubens and van Dyck. Her curls are ruffled by the same breeze that animates the swirling drapery of her skirt, painted with the creamy highlights that give such animation to Lawrence’s work. His depiction is of a woman of feeling, in tune with nature. Selina Peckwell was the daughter of the Rev. Dr Henry Peckwell (1747– 1787) and Bella Blosset of Co. Meath, who came from a well-connected Huguenot family. Endowed with ‘a handsome person and talents of…. superior quality’,1 Peckwell attracted the notice of the bossy Methodist crusader Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who appointed him one of her Chaplains. A fine preacher, he also held the living of Bloxham-cumDigby in Lincolnshire. Peckwell died at the age of forty through septicaemia contracted while doing a post-mortem examination (he was teaching himself medicine to aid the charity he had founded, The Sick Man’s Friend). Six years later Selina, Lady Huntingdon’s god-daughter and namesake, married George Grote (b.1762), son of the Bremen-born banker Andreas Grote. They lived at Clay Hill, Beckenham in Kent, and had a family of ten sons and one daughter. Their eldest son, George Grote Jnr (1794–1871) became a distinguished politician and historian of Greece. Selina Peckwell’s youthful gaiety did not survive her marriage; she was a strict mother to her numerous brood, bringing them up in the precepts of the Evangelical church.
1 Mrs Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote, 1873, p.4.
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CB CHARLES LANDSEER ra 1799 – London – 1879
SIR EDWIN HENRY LANDSEER pra
1802 – London – 1873
Portrait of the children of the Rev. Edward Coleridge (1800–1883) of Eton College Oil on canvas: 39 ¾ * 49 ¼ in / 101 * 125 cm Frame size: 55 ½ * 66 in / 141 * 167.6 cm In its original gilded Victorian composition frame Painted circa 1833 PROV EN A N CE
By descent in the family to Lord Coleridge (b.1937), The Chanter’s House, Ottery St Mary, Devon E X H IB I T ED
London, Royal Academy, 1834, no.334 (Portraits of the children of the Rev. Edward Coleridge of Eton College. The dog by E. Landseer, R.A.)
This charming work is a collaboration between Charles Landseer, who painted the children, and his brother Edwin, who depicted the magnificent St Bernard dog at the centre of the composition. As much a personality as the children, this gentle giant tolerates the baby sitting on his back and the control of the little girl holding him by a ribbon leash, as she sits by the path with her newly-gathered flowers. Edwin Landseer expresses the solidity of the animal and his subtle brushwork captures every nuance of texture and colour in the thick coat. Edwin’s empathy with animals and his ability to show them reacting in a natural way with humans had already made him celebrated; he was to become the favoured animal painter of the Royal family and creator of such iconic Victorian animal images as the Monarch of the glen, c.1851 (John Dewar & Sons Ltd., London). The happy family group evokes both the carefreeness and the responsibilities of childhood: the eldest boy tenderly supports the baby, while
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his sister supervises the family pet. The freshness of the wooded landscape and the flowers enhances the delicate beauty of the children; the precious and fleeting years of childhood are to be treasured and preserved in paint. The sitters are children of the Rev. Edward Coleridge (1800–1883), then Assistant Master at Eton, and Mary Keate (d.1859), whom he had married in 1826. Edward Coleridge came from a long line of pedagogues and clergymen originating from Ottery St Mary, Devon; his uncle was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the family’s sole rebel. ‘A fine, handsome boy, full of spirits, [who] grew into an equally fine, handsome man’,1 Edward was a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, before becoming a master at Eton in 1824. He married one of the six daughters of Eton’s Headmaster, the diminutive but formidable John Keate (1778–1852), who ruled the school in the period when it really was an apprenticeship for the field of Waterloo. Keate once flogged eighty
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CB CHARLES LANDSEER ra 1799 – London – 1879
SIR EDWIN HENRY LANDSEER pra 1802 – London – 1873
Portrait of the children of the Rev. Edward Coleridge (1800–1883) of Eton College boys in one night to put down a rebellion (the boys cheered him at the end of it, and later subscribed a large sum as a leaving present). Edward Coleridge, though a highly popular and inspiring master, both in the classroom and on the playing field, was equally unsqueamish about corporal punishment. ‘He had by far the most successful house at Eton for many years, and when he flogged the boys, which he did with a will, he said he loved them more for every stroke he gave them. He bore the infirmities of old age with indifference, the fruit of his buoyant, joyous nature. He was a complete embodiment of the muscular Christian’.2 Edward and Mary Coleridge had four sons and a daughter. He became Lower Master of Eton in 1850 and Fellow in 1857, retiring in 1867. In 1862, after Mary’s death, he married Mary Bevan, and the same year became Vicar of Mapledurham near Reading. The sensitive Landseer portrait of his children is not the only evidence of Edward Coleridge’s artistic interests. A member of the Ecclesiological Society and the embryonic Oxford Movement, he helped to raise £30,000 towards the building of St Augustine’s College, Canterbury, designed in the Gothic Revival style by William Butterfield. Butterfield subsequently rebuilt The Chanter’s House at Ottery St Mary, where the Landseer portrait hung for many years, for Edward Coleridge’s nephew, Lord Coleridge (1820–1894).
1 Lord Coleridge, KC, The Story of a Devonshire House, 1905, p.83. p.83. 2 Lord Coleridge, op. cit., p.83.
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the golden age
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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
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CC JACOB THOMPSON
1806 – Penrith, Cumberland – 1879
The children of John Harvey Esq., gathering wild flowers
Signed and dated lower left: Jacob Thompson fecit 1846 Oil on canvas: 41 * 32 in / 104.1 * 81.3 Frame size: 40 * 48 ¾ in / 101.6 * 123.8 cm In a Victorian style composition gilded frame PROV EN A N CE
Mrs Harvey, Penrith, until at least 1882 Private collection, UK E X H IB I T ED
Cumberland, The Carlisle Exhibition, 1846 L I T ER AT URE
Llewellyn Jewitt FSA, The life and works of Jacob Thompson, JS Virtue & Co., London, 1882, pp. 20, 99
In this charming picture, Jacob Thompson combines the sensitive and characterful portraits of George and Ann Harvey at the ages of nine and three, with a dramatic and detailed representation of the local landscape of their birth, celebrating the beauty of art and nature with the same brush. Penrith born and Cambridge educated, George Tyson Harvey MA (1837–1907) grew up to be a scholar and clergyman, the Rector of St Mary Magdalene in Lincoln and later Vicar at Navenby, Lincolnshire. The children’s portrait was almost certainly commissioned by their parents John Harvey and Margaret (née Tyson), local patrons of the artist from Penrith, who owned, along with this portrait, ‘one of Mr Thompson’s youthful pictures of a scriptural subject’.1 As well as the present work, Llewellyn Jewitt documents that Thomson executed individual portraits of Mr and Mrs Harvey, George and a Miss Tyson (most likely the children’s maternal aunt). At the time of its painting, Thompson had returned from London to
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the Lake District with his wife Ann Parker Bidder (1799–1844), living from January 1841 at Lowther New Town in a house owned by his patron, the Earl of Lonsdale, before settling in 1843 for the rest of his life in a cottage known as The Hermitage, near Lowther Castle. Born in Penrith in 1806, Thompson spent the majority of his life in this mountainous region of north-west England and was inspired from a young age by its breath-taking natural beauty. As the artist’s friend and biographer recounted, Thompson ‘breathed in with the pure air of the mountains a love for the beauties of Nature and an appreciation of the glories by which he was surrounded; and studying Nature with all the warmth and zeal of an ardent devotee, became ultimately one of her most powerful and gifted expounders’2. Thompson’s love of the Cumbrian landscape was encouraged by his practice of the art of fly-fishing. It was on an evening ramble with rod and sketchbook in hand that he made the acquaintance of Thomas Wilkinson of Yanwath, the writer and friend of William Wordsworth, who also endorsed ‘his ever increasing love for beautiful scenery’.3 Thompson’s painting of Thomas Wilkinson’s House at Yanwath, in the collection of the Wordsworth Trust, is thought to be one of his earliest works. The artist met his friend and patron, William Lowther, the second Earl of Lonsdale, in the same outdoor setting and through him found entry to the Royal Academy Schools in London and the guidance of its President, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Thompson began to exhibit at the RA from 1832 and, as Lawrence predicted, became incredibly successful as a portrait painter of the nobility and wealthy country families. A year before this portrait, Thompson painted an altarpiece for St Andrews Church in Penrith with scenes of The Annuciation to the Shepherds and the Agony in the Garden, which may have inspired the young George Harvey towards his religious calling. 1 L Jewitt FSA, The life and works of Jacob Thompson, JS Virtue & Co., London 1882, p.99. 2 Ibid., p.2. 3 Ibid., p.4.
the nineteenth century
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CD FREDERIC, LORD LEIGHTON pra, rws, hrca, hrsw Scarborough 1830 – 1896 London
Mrs Henry Evans Gordon
Oil on canvas: 20 H⁄i * 16 H⁄i in / 53 * 42.9 cm Frame size: 30 D⁄e * 26 H⁄i in / 78.2 * 68.3 cm In its original gilded Watts pattern frame Painted circa 1870–5 PROV EN A N CE
The sitter, then by descent to her granddaughter, Judith Furse Sotheby’s London, 12th July 1967, lot 110, bought Douglas Old Hall Gallery, Iden, Rye Thomas N. Capozello, New York, June 1969 L I T ER AT URE
Leonée and Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton, Yale University Press, London 1975, p.160, no.197 Victorian High Renaissance, exh. cat., Manchester City Art Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, 1978–9, p.104, no.42 Malcolm Warner, Friendship and Loss in the Victorian Portrait: May Sartoris by Frederic Leighton, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009, pp.48–9, illus. in colour fig. 33
In this striking portrait of Mrs Henry Evans Gordon, the refined handling of her face is skilfully contrasted with the more spontaneous treatment of the fichu that covers her head and is knotted at her throat, as well as the bold and confident modelling of her pink, silk dress and the indication of flowers in her hand. The dark, slightly mysterious background suggests the auditorium of a theatre with May, an accomplished amateur actress, depicted in costume on the stage. Mary Theodosia (May) Sartoris was born in 1845, the second child and
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only daughter of Adelaide Sartoris, the author and hostess who played such an important role in Leighton’s early life and career. Adelaide Sartoris (1815–1879) was born Adelaide Kemble, and came from a famous theatrical family. She was the niece of John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, the two greatest tragedians of their day and the subject of celebrated portraits by Lawrence, Gainsborough and Reynolds. Her father was the actor Charles Kemble and her sister Fanny Kemble was also a distinguished actress. Before her marriage in 1843, Adelaide Kemble had been a leading soprano, best known for her performance
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CD FREDERIC, LORD LEIGHTON pra, rws, hrca, hrsw Scarborough 1830 – 1896 London
Mrs Henry Evans Gordon
in the title role of Bellini’s Norma. By Edward, the son of a wealthy French banker, she had three children, Greville, May and Algernon.
her mother in 1925. On her death, it passed to the actress Judith Furse, the daughter of Catherine’s sister, Jean.
Leighton met the Sartoris family in Rome in February 1853, and until her death Adelaide Sartoris was his closest friend and confidante. Leighton was very fond of her daughter May and painted her several times. A drawing of May’s head, now in Bolton Art Gallery, is signed and dated May 1854, the year after he met Adelaide. Leighton’s first oil portrait of May can be dated to approximately 1860, when the sitter was about fifteen years of age. In the full-length portrait, she appears walking towards the viewer in her black riding dress with a bright red scarf, set against a background of the autumnal Hampshire countryside (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, tx). A second drawing of her head, inscribed ‘souvenir affectueux des bonnes journées’, bears the date October 1862 (private collection).
We are grateful to Leonée and Richard Ormond for their assistance with the cataloguing of this work.
May married Henry Evans Gordon, the son of a Major General, in April 1871 and the couple settled near to her parents at Warsash in Hampshire. Leighton painted another oil portrait of May in the 1870s (besides the present work) and one of her husband, which was among his submissions to the 1877 exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery. The three quarter length portrait of May, now at Leighton House Museum, dated 1875 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in that year, shows her in profile, with her head turned away from the viewer. She wears a terracotta coloured dress, with an elaborate silver belt and lace collar and cuffs. Behind her is a small black dog, a blue bow round its neck. The present portrait therefore falls between Leighton’s two other important oil paintings of the sitter and exhibits a freshness and immediacy that neither of them possess. Dating from the early 1870s and showing May in her late twenties, this picture may have been painted at the time of her marriage to Henry. Henry and May Evans Gordon had four daughters and the eldest, Catherine, inherited the portrait from
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Frederic, Lord Leighton, Mrs Henry Evans Gordon (1845–1925), 1875. © Leighton House Museum, London / The Bridgeman Art Library.
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CE SIR FRANCIS GRANT pra Edinburgh 1803 – 1878 Melton Mowbray
Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower (1867–1953) on her pony Lady Whitworth near Walmer Castle Oil on canvas: 47 * 66 ½ in / 119.5 * 169 cm Frame size: 60 ½ * 80 in / 153.7 * 203.2 cm In a period Victorian gilded composition frame Painted circa 1876 PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned by the sitter’s father, Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville (1815–1891); by descent to Granville Leveson-Gower, 6th Earl Granville (b.1959) E X H IB I T ED
London, Royal Academy, 1877, no.263 (Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower on her pony “Lady Whitworth”)
Born into the Scottish gentry, Francis Grant was handsome, witty and a passionate rider to hounds. He soon ran through his fortune and took up painting: first hunting scenes, then portraits which came to define the High Victorian era. When he was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1866, the Illustrated London News called Grant ‘our most fashionable portrait painter since Lawrence’.1 Married to a niece of the Duke of Rutland, he moved effortlessly in the society of the aristocrats and politicians whom he depicted. This portrait of Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower combines Grant’s subtlety as a portraitist with his bravura as an equestrian painter. There is a touching fusion of poise and fragility in the nine-year-old Lady Victoria’s control of her galloping pony as it races down the Kentish coast on a blustery autumn day. The rich impasto of Grant’s brushwork is lavished on the glossy flanks of the pony and Lady Victoria’s golden hair streaming in the wind. Hounds running parallel in the background add to the exhilarating sense of speed. The grandeur of the composition
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looks back to Grant’s earlier equestrian portraits, such as Master James Fraser on his pony, 1844 (Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, ct),2 but also reflects his studies of the equestrian royal portraits of Velásquez, Rubens and van Dyck. Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower came from one of the most socially and politically prominent Whig families in England. She was the daughter of Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville (1815–1891) and his second wife Castalia, daughter of Walter Campbell of Islay. Granville’s mother was Lady Henrietta Cavendish, daughter of the 5th Duke of Devonshire and Lady Georgiana Spencer. As Granville wryly admitted during a parliamentary debate in 1855: ‘I have relations upon this side of the House [of Lords], relations upon the cross-benches [and] relations upon the opposite side of the House’.3 Granville’s wealth derived from mines and vast estates in Staffordshire, though he never lived on them. An amiable, urbane personality,
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CE SIR FRANCIS GRANT pra Edinburgh 1803 – 1878 Melton Mowbray
Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower (1867–1953) on her pony Lady Whitworth near Walmer Castle his cosmopolitan outlook derived from a youth spent in Paris, where his father was Ambassador. Granville was for many years leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords and served as Lord President of the Council, Foreign Secretary 1851–2 and 1870–74, and Colonial Secretary 1868–70. The glittering salons held at his London town houses, 16 Bruton Street and (from 1873) 18 Carlton House Terrace, provided a social centre for the Liberal Party and attracted distinguished visitors from all walks of life, far beyond the boundaries of politics. Like most Whig grandees, Granville could switch with ease from a discussion of matters of state to horse-breeding and racing; both were deeply in his blood. In 1865, the year that he married Castalia Campbell, Granville was made Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports by the Prime Minister Lord John Russell. In the background of Lady Victoria’s portrait is Walmer Castle, official residence of the Lord Warden, with the white cliffs of the Kentish coast beyond. The castle was built by Henry VIII as part of a chain of artillery defences against the French and retains the rounded bastions visible in the painting. Among Lord Granville’s distinguished predecessors as Lord Warden was the Duke of Wellington, who died at Walmer in 1852. On 8th September 1896 Lady Victoria Leveson-Gower married the barrister Harold John Hastings Russell (1868–1926), nephew of the 9th Duke of Bedford. They lived in Beaufort Gardens and Shere near Guildford and had three children. Lady Victoria died on 11th February 1953.
1 Quoted in Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, High Society: the Life and Art of Sir Francis Grant 1803–1878, exh. cat. by Catherine Wills, 2003, p.71. 2 High Society, op. cit., illus. in colour pl.23. 3 Quoted in Muriel E Chamberlain, ‘Gower, Granville George Leveson-, second Earl Granville (1815–1891)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 2004.
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the nineteenth century
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CF SIR SAMUEL LUKE FILDES kcvo, ra Liverpool 1844 – 1927 London
Portrait of Mrs Lockett Agnew
Signed lower right: Luke Fildes; signed and inscribed with the title on the reverse Oil on canvas: 56 * 42 in / 142.2 * 106.7 cm Frame size: 66 ¼ * 51 ½ in / 168.3 * 130.8 cm In a period oak gilded Watts pattern frame Painted 1887–88 PROV EN A N CE
The artist, then by descent to Mrs Bernard Myers (the artist’s granddaughter) Thomas Agnew & Sons, presented by the above on 10th November 1966 E X H IB I T ED
London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1887, no. 386 (as Mrs WL Agnew) Manchester City Art Gallery, The Autumn Exhibition, 1888 L I T ER AT URE
David Croal Thomson, ‘The Life and Work of Luke Fildes RA’, The Art Annual, London, 1895, p.19 LV Fildes, Luke Fildes RA, a Victorian Painter, Michael Joseph, London 1968, pp.107, 112, 120
This stylish, radiant portrait of the youthful Mrs Lockett Agnew is full of elegance and vitality, the magnificent detail of her dress heightened by the impressionistic handling of the outdoor setting. Depicted in threequarter length, turned slightly to the right, Augusta Lockett Agnew is seated upon a green garden bench surrounded by a lush, broadly painted wilderness strewn with cream and yellow flowers which echo the juxtaposed tones of her superb costume. As well as the self-assurance manifest in her impeccable poise and commanding, almost regal pose, it is abundantly clear that Mrs Lockett Agnew was a woman of
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means with excellent taste in clothing. Possibly designed or inspired by the French couturier, Jacques Doucet (known for the elegance of his toilettes and his admiration of 18th century objets d’art), her opulent outfit comprises a luminous jacket and skirt of striped white silk over a highcollared gold embroidered bodice. The jacket has large gold buttons, and a panel of the same material as the bodice is inserted in the skirt accentuating the line of her right leg; at the neck she wears a diamond brooch. The yellow ribbon at her waist echoes that of her hat, which is decorated with white ostrich feathers. To complete the ensemble she
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CF SIR SAMUEL LUKE FILDES kcvo, ra Liverpool 1844 – 1927 London
Portrait of Mrs Lockett Agnew
holds a gold-topped cane and long, fine brown kid gloves in her right hand. Tightly corseted, Mrs Agnew is not really dressed to go walking in the countryside, as we might think at first glance. Inspired by English riding habits of the 1780s, this is a fantastic, if impractical, outfit of rich materials, which would have been worn for a formal afternoon or early evening function. Mrs William Lockett Agnew, née Augusta Isobel Sheil, was born in 1859 in Mallow, Ireland, the daughter of John Francis Augustus Sheil and his wife Hannah Evelina Exshaw. She married William Lockett Agnew, of the distinguished family of art dealers, in 1884, three years before the present work was painted. A fashionable and well-connected couple, Mr and Mrs Lockett Agnew lived at Hallingbury Place, Bishops Stortford from 1909 where their guests included George V. A passionate gardener, Mrs Lockett Agnew devoted a great deal of time to redesigning the grounds at Hallingbury, installing water and rose gardens. Following her husband’s death in 1918, she tended the garden from a wheel chair. Her efforts and enthusiasm were later rewarded when a species of poppy (papaver orientale) was named the Mrs Lockett Agnew in her honour. She died at her London home, 1 Cumberland Terrace, Regent’s Park, on the 27th January 1922. William Lockett Agnew, named after his maternal grandparents, William and Jane Garnet Lockett, was born in Salford in 1858 to Thomas Agnew Jnr (the second son of the firm’s founder, 1827–1883) and his wife Anne Kenworthy. William joined the family business in 1881, becoming a senior partner from 1913 until his death five years later. Described as being ‘highly sociable, the superb salesman’ with ‘many friends in many walks of life’, Lockett provided the perfect foil to his more reserved cousin Charles Morland Agnew.1 The cousins made a ‘formidable combination’ as salesman and buyer, continuing to run the business successfully following the retirement of Sir George Agnew in 1902.2 Amongst the gregarious couple’s loyal artist friends, the Lockett Agnews counted Philip de László (and his wife Lucy), who painted the
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sitter in 1913 (private collection), a year after painting her husband. Sir Luke Fildes was another close friend, demonstrated by his choice of Augusta to be one of his very first sitters. Exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1887 along with a painting of his wife, Fanny, Mrs. Luke Fildes (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), these portraits marked the beginning of Fildes’s illustrious career as a society portrait painter. Writing of their exhibition at the RA in The Art Annual, David Croal Thomson commented ‘it is scarcely necessary to say these canvases attracted a great deal of attention. They gave the idea to many beautiful women to have their own portraits painted by one so facile, yet so faithful, with his brush’.3 Not only did 1887 mark ‘the ascendancy’ of portraiture at the Royal Academy (according to the reviewer of The Magazine of Art), but it also saw Fildes elected an Associate on 10th March, an event the press felt was justified by the work he exhibited that year.4 Following its display at the RA, the portrait of Mrs Lockett Agnew went on to be shown at the Autumn Exhibition at Manchester City Art Gallery in 1888, where it was considered ‘a great success’.5 The artist’s friend and fellow RA, Henry Tanworth Wells (1828–1903), was in charge of the hang at the Manchester exhibition and wrote to him about the painting’s reception, enclosing press cuttings with the following review: “the picture must now be acclaimed as one of the finest female portraits of late years. Again – in pose and expression it clearly aims at the frankness, the easy freedom of the most intimate modernity, and it hits the mark. Looking more into detail, we should like to draw attention to the mastery of the flesh painting, which is carried further than one ever saw it taken in a Fildes before”.6 Fildes began his artistic career as an illustrator for journals including The Graphic, before being commissioned, upon the advice of John Everett Millais (1829–1896), to illustrate the last work of Charles Dickens, Edwin Drood. The unexpected death of Dickens inspired Fildes to try his hand at painting social realist subjects in oils, such as Applicants for admission
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to a Casual Ward, 1874 (Royal Holloway, University of London), often based upon earlier illustrations. Established as an official portraitist from the date of this painting, Fildes was later commissioned to paint the first State Portrait of King Edward VII in 1902 and a decade later his successor King George V, amongst other royal commissions. The firm of Agnews played an important part in Fildes’s commercial success and wider popularity, purchasing The village wedding, 1883 (Lord Lloyd-Webber Collection) for 2,500 guineas, the highest price Fildes ever received for a painting. They also published an engraving of The doctor, 1891 (Tate Britain), which sold more than one million copies in America alone. Fildes made a second portrait of Mrs Lockett Agnew which was exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1891.7 Details of the costume are based on a report kindly provided by Professor Aileen Ribeiro.
1 Dennis Farr, ‘Agnew Family’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (online edition 2010) and Geoffrey Agnew, Agnews 1817–1967, The Bradbury Agnew Press Ltd., London 1967, pp.40–41. 2 Geoffrey Agnew, ibid., pp. 40-41. 3 David Croal Thomson, ‘The Life and Work of Luke Fildes R.A.’, The Art Annual, London 1895, p.19. 4 The Magazine of Art, p.271 and The Art Journal, 1887, p.246, cited in Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits, Images of an Age of Opulence, Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge 1987, pp.82, 86. 5 LV Fildes, Luke Fildes, R.A. A Victorian Painter, Michael Joseph, London 1968, p.112. Luke Fildes’s letter to Harry, 1888 ‘…Mrs Agnew’s portrait a great success, I believe, at Manchester’. 6 Ibid., p.112. 7 The Art Annual, op.cit., p.19 ‘…the Academy of 1891, the same exhibition that contained ‘The Doctor’, a portrait of Mrs Lockett Agnew, another smaller work of brilliant success’. LV Fildes, op.cit., p.120.
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CG ÉVA GONZALÈS 1849 – Paris – 1883
La fenêtre
Signed lower left: Eva Gonzalès Canvas: 21 H⁄i * 18 H⁄i in / 55.6 * 47.9 cm Frame size: 33 * 29 in / 83.8 * 73.7 cm In its original gilded composition Barbizon frame Painted circa 1865–70 PROV EN A N CE
Éva Gonzalès sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 20th February 1885, lot 36 (FFr. 75) Private collection, France Private collection, Paris E X H IB I T ED
Paris, Salons de La Vie Moderne, Éva Gonzalès, January 1885, no.27 L I T ER AT URE
Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu and Jacques de Mons, Éva Gonzalès 1849– 1883: Étude Critique et Catalogue Raisonné, Paris 1990, no.24; illus. p.274
Éva Gonzales was born in 1847 in Paris into a talented family. Her father, Emmanuel Gonzalès, was a famous novelist.1 Her mother, a talented harpist,2 guided the education of their two daughters with the lilt of her mezzo-soprano voice. After a childhood steeped in literature and music, notably opera,3 Éva Gonzalès headed towards an artistic career. She chose painting and on 3rd January 1866 joined the atelier of Charles Chaplin,4 fashionable portraitist of the grand bourgeoisie and Parisian aristocracy. It was unthinkable at the time for a young girl of good family to attend the atelier of Edouard Manet: he had shaken the Establishment with his painting Olympia, exhibited at the Salon of 1863. With this work, rejected at the time, the artist opened the way for the Impressionists and became the precursor of modern art. Yet Éva became his student, his only pupil, in February 1869.
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La fenêtre was executed circa 1865–1870, during which Gonzalès initially followed the teachings of Charles Chaplin, with whom she remained until May 1867; she then worked on her own before attending the studio of Manet. This painting shows the qualities of subtlety and flexibility of her brush. The two little girls, quietly sitting on a balcony, pose in pink and blue-striped dresses. One holds a book, the other a doll. The brush of the artist skilfully conveys the soft texture of fabrics, the craftsmanship of the wrought iron balcony and behind, the foliage of the wisteria. Through the branches, one can see two Medici vases surmounting the pillars of a gate, and to the left, the silhouette of a large house.5 In the foreground, notice the stack of books, including one with a yellow cover (probably E Dentu editions)6 at the foot of the girl in pink. The
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CG ÉVA GONZALÈS 1849 – Paris – 1883
La fenêtre
artist portrays here a delicate still life. Her dexterity is revealed in the execution of the still, open white pages. Through books, Éva Gonzalès pays tribute to her father, whom she worshipped and admired. Featuring as a school book in La fenêtre, the book becomes bedtime reading in Le réveil (catalogue raisonné no. 81). It can be the main subject of the painting, as is the case with the novel hidden in a musical score in En cachette (no. 90). It is also a chromatic counterpoint in Sous le berceau (Honfleur) (no. 108): the yellow book re-enlivens the ensemble with raw colour against cool green and blue tones. Finally, found on the knees of the sitter in La lecture au jardin (no. 115), a masterpiece of Éva Gonzalès, the book takes on the leading colours of the painting: red for the cover and green for the band. La fenêtre can be compared to a pastel executed in 1873–1874, called La nichée,7 and exhibited at the Salon of 1874. The artist uses in both cases the same pale blue and pink tones creating a melody that the art critic Castagnary was quick to point out: ‘A girl in a pink bathrobe sits in front of her dressing table [covered with a blue cloth] and looks upon a teeming litter of puppies in a basket. It’s fair, bright and full of seductive harmony; Miss Éva Gonzalès has an education as a colourist and it shows at first sight. There is a sense in what she puts into each production. Nothing vulgar, nothing ill-mannered: grace in its utmost simplicity and naturalness. These are happy qualities that cannot fail to achieve the best results’. Now presented in the catalogue of the Salon des Artistes Français as the pupil of Charles Chaplin and Edouard Manet, Éva Gonzalès received praise and encouragement from the most important critics and authors, even Alexandre Dumas himself. She led her artistic career in the shadow of Edouard Manet whose ideas she embraced, refusing, as he did, to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions. The official arena of the Salon was hers, and her artistic career, fired with intelligence and strong determination, led her to be recognized as a pioneer of modern
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art. She always maintained a very feminine inclination for soft colours, used here in La fenêtre, but she eventually learned how to use bursts of red and green in service to a new pictorial writing used in La lecture au jardin. What would she have painted had she lived longer? Her paintings, as rare as they are beautiful, are a testament to her passion. Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu
1 Emmanuel Gonzalès (1815–1887) is today forgotten. 2 Éva Gonzalès made a painting of her mother playing the harp (Sainsaulieu catalogue raisonné op. cit., no.55). 3 Éva Gonzalès painted in 1874 Une loge aux Italiens (cat. rais. no.61), with her sister Jeanne and Henri Guérard, Manet’s engraver, posing as the couple in the opera box. Éva married Henri Guérard in 1879. 4 1825–1891, painter and engraver. 5 An oral tradition records that the little girls were the children of the caretakers of the château de Dampierre, the property of the Duc de Luynes. Éva Gonzalès was probably introduced to Dampierre either by Charles Chaplin or by her father Emmanuel Gonzalès, President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. Thanks to this office, Emmanuel Gonzalès was received in all the salons of Paris. 6 This publisher, celebrated in the nineteenth century, published Emmanuel Gonzalès. 7 Bought by the French State at the sale of 1885 after Gonzalès’s death. Today the pastel is in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
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the golden age
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FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO MODERNISM
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CH GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE Paris 1848 – 1894 Gennevilliers
Portrait de Madame Anne-Marie Hagen
Signed and dated lower right: G Caillebotte / 79 Oil on canvas: 28 * 21 ¾ in / 71.1 * 55.2 cm Frame size: 40 F⁄i * 33 ¼ in / 103.2 * 84.5 cm In an antique Louis XV carved and gilded swept frame PROV EN A N CE
Private collection, Rheims To be included in the catalogue critique of the work of Gustave Caillebotte being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute This painting is recorded as an autograph work of Gustave Caillebotte in the archives of the Comité Caillebotte
Hagen,1 who appears in a number of his paintings, most famously as the fashionably-dressed woman on the bridge in Le pont de l’Europe, 1876 (Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva).2 Caillebotte modelled for the flâneur at the fulcrum of this work: a few steps ahead, he glances back at this lady, so that it is not certain whether they are together, or whether he is admiring a stranger. The status of Anne-Marie was similarly shadowy and elusive. Caillebotte’s haut-bourgeois family disapproved of his having a mistress; to the world he was a bachelor-abouttown, living with his brother Martial on the Boulevard Haussmann. Simplicity, stillness, intelligence and affection inform this portrait. The uncluttered but shimmering background and subtly modulated tones of purple, blue and rose emphasise Madame Hagen’s elegance and self-possession. Discreet jewellery – gold bracelets, a diamond ring, earrings – offsets her sober, well-cut dress. The predominant palette, as so often in Caillebotte’s interior scenes and portraits, is cool, while the caressing, varied brushwork creates a figure that is vividly real. Completely relaxed, Anne-Marie gazes trustingly at the artist, inhabiting the space with an easy intimacy.
Born into a wealthy Normandy family, Gustave Caillebotte was a lynchpin of Impressionism, exhibiting with the group from 1876 to 1882. He inherited a fortune from his father in 1874 and had no need to sell his paintings, but was a generous benefactor to fellow artists. Caillebotte amassed a superb group of Impressionist works which he bequeathed to the French nation in 1894; today they form the core collection of the Musée d’Orsay. Because he had no need of promotion by a dealer such as Durand-Ruel, who spread the gospel of Monet and his circle, many of Caillebotte’s own paintings remained in the collection of his family and friends. It was not until the 1970s that his work attracted serious scholarly attention and he was revealed as one of the most innovative and original painters of the Impressionist group. His output was relatively modest – he died aged just forty-six – and his financial independence enabled him to choose more radical subjects than some of his contemporaries.
Caillebotte himself was modest and generous; a critic wrote of him in 1882 that he ‘lives very quietly, detests compliments, asks only to defend his school, and would never want to carry off a victory’.3 After Martial married in 1887, Caillebotte moved permanently with Charlotte Berthier, who seems to have replaced Anne-Marie in his affections in the mid-1880s, to the house that he had bought at Petit Gennevilliers in 1880. There they lived in a flower-filled domestic paradise that Caillebotte often painted in his later years. Roses in the garden at Petit Gennevilliers, c.1881–83 (private collection), shows her tending the flowers, the architect of all this well-ordered beauty.4
Caillebotte used his family and friends as models in his paintings of modern life; most of his portraits are of people with whom he had a close connection. This serene work depicts his companion Anne-Marie
It has been argued by some art historians that Anne-Marie Hagen is the same young woman as Charlotte Berthier, who appears in Caillebotte’s Will of 1883, giving her a FFr. 12,000 annuity, and in a codicil of
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CH GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE Paris 1848 – 1894 Gennevilliers
Portrait de Madame Anne-Marie Hagen
1889 leaving her the house at Petit Gennevilliers.5 As Charlotte can be firmly identified as the young woman portrayed in 1883 by Renoir in a painting now in the National Gallery, Washington DC, it is clear that she and Anne-Marie were indeed different women. Exquisitely dressed in a winter costume, Anne-Marie Hagen appears in a Portrait de jeune femme dans un intérieur, 1877 (private collection).6 She is holding a fan in the unfinished oil Portrait de jeune femme (private collection).7 La femme à la rose, 1884 (formerly Robert Orchard Collection; private collection),8 the last known representation of her, like the present work shows Anne-Marie in a frontal pose against a plain background, in a dark dress which contrasts with the vivid burgundy rose at her throat. Kind brown eyes, creamy skin and strong, capable hands are features both of this and our 1879 portrait. As in our portrait and Le pont de l’Europe, one can see the glint of the same gold bracelet on her left wrist. Although she inhabited the territory of the ‘kept woman’, Caillebotte shows Anne-Marie not as a sensual plaything but as an intelligent and dignified human being, a much-loved life’s companion, despite his family’s disapproval.
1 The identification of the present painting as a portrait of Anne-Marie Hagen was kindly made by Sophie Pietri of the Wildenstein Institute (communication of January 2013). 2 Marie Berhaut, Gustave Caillebotte: Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Pastels, Paris 1994, pp.84–85, no.49, illus. 3 Quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte, New Haven and London 1987, p.10. 4 London, Royal Academy, Gustave Caillebotte: the Unknown Impressionist, 1996, illus. p.176. 5 Varnedoe op. cit., p.197. 6 Berhaut op. cit., p.94, no.59, illus. Sold at Christie’s London in 2005. 7 Berhaut p.96, no.63, illus. 8 Berhaut p.181, no.287, illus. Sold Christie’s New York, 8th November 2012, lot 432.
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CI HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE ra, neac, roi Croydon 1859 – 1929 London
A study (Resting after the game, Kate La Thangue)
Signed lower right: H.H. La Thangue Oil on canvas: 34 * 23 in / 86.4 * 58.4 cm Frame size: 40 * 29 in / 101.6 * 73.7 cm In a gilded composition La Thangue frame Painted in 1889 PROV EN A N CE
Isaac Smith jp, Bradford his sale, Christie’s, 15th May 1911 to Rigg anon sale, Christie’s, 6th March 1981, lot 43 as The tennis player Spink and Co., London Mark Birley, Thurloe Lodge, London E X H IB I T ED
London, New Gallery, 1889, no. 16 as A study L I T ER AT URE
The New Gallery, An Illustrated Catalogue with notes by Henry Blackburn, Chatto and Windus, 1889, p.10 Frederick Wedmore, ‘The New Gallery’, The Academy, 18th May 1889, p.348 ‘The New Gallery – Second Notice’, The Glasgow Herald, 7th June 1889, p.9 ‘The New Gallery’, The Morning Post, 4th May 1889, p.3 George Thompson, ‘HH La Thangue and his work’, The Studio, vol. IX, 1896, illus. p.176 (as In the orchard) Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits, Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge, pp. 94–5, illus. Kenneth McConkey, ‘Tennis Parties’, in Ann Sumner ed., Court on Canvas, Tennis in Art, London 2011, pp.60, 62, illus. p.64
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With all the talk about Naturalism and Impressionism in the 1880s it is surprising that only a small number of British artists painted portraits in the open air. Few professional portrait painters were willing to leave the creature comforts of the studio for the unpredictable outdoors, and the convention of adding an exterior setting as appropriate, at the conclusion of sittings, was maintained. This practice, referred to as ‘faking it’ was strenuously rejected by the younger generation.1 It was
only at the end of the century that the Latin phrase ad vivum was taken to mean seizing the subject, unposed, in the middle of some characteristic action or activity, beyond the confines of the studio. Indeed some young painters, led by Henry Herbert La Thangue, made it clear that they had rejected the very idea of a studio. When in his thirtieth year, La Thangue painted his wife, Katherine, seated on a wicker chair in what Henry Blackburn described as ‘a green garden’, it was a noteworthy occasion. Katherine was already a familiar figure in artistic circles, having modeled for Val Prinsep’s At the Golden Gate in 1883 (Manchester City Art Galleries) and for La Thangue’s Gaslight study in the previous year (fig 1). Known as Kate, she was born in London to an immigrant family that originated in Zurich and prior to her marriage to La Thangue in 1885 she had worked as an actress and artists’ model.2 By 1886 the couple were living at Horsey Mere in Norfolk, where the painter found inspiration in the flat landscape and daily activities of fieldworkers and Broadsmen. The portraits of Kate however, provide a brief glimpse of their domestic setting. Exhibited simply as A study, the present canvas shows the young Mrs La Thangue looking round attentively as if to catch the words of an unseen friend, and the racquet on her lap tells us that she is resting after a game of tennis.3 Her dog, the sometimes unruly bloodhound, Bor, sits quietly in the background (fig 2).4
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CI HENRY HERBERT LA THANGUE ra, neac, roi Croydon 1859 – 1929 London
A study (Resting after the game, Kate La Thangue)
Although the setting is indeed an orchard garden, the theme is modern.5 Lawn tennis, a new arrival among domestic sports, had, in the previous fourteen years replaced croquet as the most popular middle class young person’s outdoor pastime.6 Within four years of its introduction it was the subject of Punch cartoons in which young women were seen striking Grecian poses with tennis racquets (fig 3). By 1880 the Wimbledon Croquet Club had already added tennis to its title and was holding annual championship games, and although other clubs were opening across the country and in the colonies, it was essentially a game played in the spacious gardens of rural and suburban villas. This was graphically illustrated when, in 1885, it was the subject of John Lavery’s Naturalist panorama, The tennis party (Aberdeen Art Gallery) – a picture that, though derided at the Royal Academy, was lauded in the Paris Salon. Tennis was the game for those with aesthetic and avant-garde aspirations.7 It is clear that the earnest young La Thangue shared Lavery’s ideals. As a student he too had completed his training in the Paris ateliers, and by the end of the 1880s was renowned in the artist community as the most radical founder member of the New English Art Club.8 His public advocacy of the ‘democratic’ principles of French plein air Naturalism distinguished his work from that of its more timid followers and his unconventional métier was a constant source of curiosity for contemporaries. One can imagine that A study attracted as much attention in the artist community as it did from the wealthy west Yorkshire collectors who were supporting the painter. In the late summer of 1889, when the picture had just been shown at the New Gallery, La Thangue was hailed as the founder of ‘the Square Brush School’ and esteemed for his ‘love of truth and directness’. Even those who did not know him were, we are told, affected at second or third hand. His style was described as ‘a technical method which puts paint on canvas in a particular way with a square brush, which many older men never use. Those who practice it in its simplest form leave brush-marks, and do
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Fig. 1. Henry Herbert La Thangue, A gaslight study, 1888. The Atkinson, Southport.
Fig. 2. Henry Herbert La Thangue, Sketch (Kate La Thangue with ‘Bor’), c.1889–93, unlocated.
not smooth away the evidence of method, thus sometimes insisting on the way a picture is painted, perhaps at the sacrifice of subtleties in the subject’.9 La Thangue emphasized breadth and the Naturalistic ‘truth’ of the ensemble at the expense of surface detail and to achieve his effects the painter must work exclusively on the motif. As is clear from AD McCormick’s drawing, he pinned his primed, unstretched canvas to a stout wooden panel while painting (fig 4).10 The surface thus offered
no resistance to his brush-marks, each of which could be clearly seen. On some occasions this finished fragment was bounded by a painted framing rectangle before being removed from the panel and tacked to a stretcher. Contemporaries in the Chelsea ‘colony’ such as Frank Brangwyn were overawed. One might expect that a picture with obvious appeal to young painters would fall foul of conservative critics. This was to some degree the
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case. La Thangue’s large, life-size companion-piece in the New Gallery show, the Portrait of Mrs Tom Mitchell (unlocated) was extensively discussed, and not universally approved.11 However, in the opinion of Frederick Wedmore, one of the first British writers on Impressionism, the present Study, pleasing ‘at first because of its vividness’, was simply ‘finer than the larger painting’. The critic of The Morning Post concurred in finding the picture ‘a clever piece of execution’.12 With a few years’ hindsight however, it was apparent to George Thomson that ‘the classical subject’ was ‘as dust and ashes’ and ‘a naturalistic movement was in the air’. Placing his wife in the dappled shade at the edge of an orchard with ripe corn in the fields beyond, fully expressed ‘The glory of sunlight, the envelope of the atmosphere, the verisimilitude only attainable with the model amidst [her] habitual surroundings – these aspirations come earlier perhaps, than a sympathy with the life of the toilers in the fields’.13
Fig. 3. George Du Maurier, Modern Aesthetics, from the Punch Almanach, 1878. Internet Archive / www.victorianweb.org.
It was indeed the case that the painter of later monumental ruralist Academy-pieces such as The last furrow, 1895 (Gallery Oldham) and The man with the scythe, 1896 (Tate Britain) had tested his theories and found his approach in splendid canvases such as Resting after the game. Kenneth McConkey
1 George Thompson, ‘HH La Thangue and his Work’, The Studio, vol. IX, 1896, p.172. 2 Katherine, née Rietiker (1859–1941), outlived her husband by twelve years and they had no offspring. Her stage name prior to her marriage was Kate Leeson. 3 The present, more descriptive title, was adopted after the picture entered the collection of Isaac Smith JP (1832–1909), Mayor of Bradford. Smith also owned La Thangue’s large Leaving home, shown at the New Gallery in 1890. 4 James Stanley Little, ‘HH La Thangue’, The Art Journal, 1893, p.175, described the ‘somewhat formidable and self-willed animal as an important member of the La Thangue establishment, taking his name from the Norfolk abbreviation for ‘neighbour’. 5 The New Gallery, An Illustrated Catalogue with notes by Henry Blackburn, 1889, (Chatto and Windus), p.10. 6 For a modern survey of works of art featuring tennis see Ann Sumner ed., Court on Canvas, Tennis in Art, Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2011. 7 See Kenneth McConkey, ‘Tennis Parties’, in Ann Sumner ed, 2011, pp.47–81. 8 Kenneth McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, Royal Academy Publications, 2006, pp.32–36. La Thangue’s radical practice was matched only by his radical politics. When the New English emerged, he promoted the idea that it should be the focus of a much ‘bigger movement’, side-lining the Royal Academy and opening its doors to democratically elected committees and selection juries. The Academy was perceived as a dead hand, while in France, the State control of the Salon had been relinquished in favour of the artists themselves.
Fig. 4. AD McCormick, La Thangue painting ‘Resting after the game’, from Morley Roberts, ‘A Colony of Artists’, The Scottish Art Review, vol II, 1889, p.73.
9 Morley Roberts, ‘A colony of Artists’, The Scottish Art Review, Vol. 2, August 1889, p.73. 10 Kenneth McConkey, A Painter’s Harvest, HH La Thangue, 1859–1929, Oldham Art Gallery, 1978, pp.10, 17. 11 See for instance The Saturday Review, 25th May 1889, p. 639; The Athenaeum, 25th May 1889, p.670. Mrs Tom Mitchell was the daughter-in-law of Abraham Mitchell, a wealthy wool worsted manufacturer. Her husband was vice-president of the Arcadian Art Club in Bradford during the late 1880s when La Thangue was its president. 12 Frederick Wedmore, ‘The New Gallery’, The Academy, 18th May 1889, p.348; ‘The New Gallery’, The Morning Post, 4th May 1889, p.3. 13 Thompson, 1896, pp.167–8.
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CJ WALTER RICHARD SICKERT ra, prba, neac, re Munich 1860 – 1942 Bathampton
Woman in profile with downcast eyes, Mlle Errázuriz
Signed lower right Sickert; inscribed Mlle Errazuriz on the stretcher Oil on canvas: 20 * 16 inches / 50.8 * 40.6 cm Frame size: 27 B⁄c * 23 B⁄c in / 69.8 * 59.7 cm In a Louis XIII style composition frame Painted circa 1904–5 PROV EN A N CE
The artist Adolphe Tavernier and Bernheim Jeune, Paris [16130], 14th June 1907, acquired from the above Adams Gallery Dr Robert Emmons, 1934 Agnews, London, 1952 Ralph Smith, Sydney, Australia E X H IB I T ED
Paris, Bernheim Jeune, Exposition Sickert, 10th–19th January 1907, no.69 (as Portrait) Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Walter Richard Sickert, 1968, no.20 Sydney, David Jone’s Art Gallery, Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942, 13th May–8th June 1968, no.6 Sydney, David Jone’s Art Gallery, Walter Richard Sickert 1860–1942: Paintings and Drawings from Public and Private Collections in Australia, 14th–30th August 1980, no.13 L I T ER AT URE
Lillian Browse, Sickert, Rupert Hart-Davis, London 1960, pl. 36 Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2006, p.303, no.233
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This is one of Sickert’s most lovely and tender portraits. Its distinguished provenance includes Adolphe Tavernier, a noted French art connoisseur, and Robert Emmons, Sickert’s first biographer. Yet until very recently we have known nothing of its subject. Many paintings by Sickert over the course of a century have lost their original, more explicit or evocative, titles; few have regained them. Lillian Browse first published the painting in 1960 under the clumsy, but accurately descriptive, title Woman in profile with downcast eyes with the tag Venice attached. However, unlike Sickert’s Venetian studies, Woman with downcast eyes is painted on an English, not a Continental, size canvas. This fact implies an English source for the portrait. Several decades ago, Professor Ronald Pickvance saw a photograph of this painting in the archives of the Paris dealer, Bernheim Jeune. He established that it was bought directly from Sickert by Tavernier (who acted as advisor to the dealer), and that it was first exhibited in Sickert’s one-man show at Bernheim in January 1907 (no.69) under the unhelpful title Portrait. The Bernheim exhibition proved that the latest possible date for the painting was the end of 1906. Its style and handling push the date of its execution further back to 1904–5. At this time Sickert especially favoured bust-length, female portraits in profile, with the face in shadow, eyes downcast, eyebrows, eyelashes, mouth and chin defined in summary lines of drawing with the brush. It is particularly close to the quirky profile portrait, also on an Englishsize canvas, which still bears its intriguing original title, Danseuse de Memphis U.S.A. Having gone to live abroad in 1898, Sickert spent much of 1904–5, including the Christmas and New Year period, in London. He returned to England permanently in 1905. His emotional life was in turmoil.
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CJ WALTER RICHARD SICKERT ra, prba, neac, re Munich 1860 – 1942 Bathampton
Woman in profile with downcast eyes, Mlle Errázuriz
His frequent and unrepentant infidelities with countless women had forced his first wife to divorce him in 1899. Ever susceptible, his infidelities persisted but did not prevent him from proposing marriage, during his visit to Venice of 1903–4, to Maria Luisa Fortuny, the eccentric spinster sister of Mariano Fortuny (best remembered now as a fashion and textile designer). His suit ultimately refused, Sickert considered remarriage to his first wife Ellen who had never ceased to befriend and support him. However, Sickert’s active social life in London over the winter of 1904–5 presumably dissuaded him from making a long-term commitment. Handsome, witty and unattached, he was sought after by the hostesses of London. Among the women he encountered was the beautiful Mrs George Swinton with whom he enjoyed a passionate friendship celebrated in many portraits, some identified as such, others not. The tenderness of Woman in profile strongly suggests the sitter was not a hired model, but a treasured friend or lover. Had the canvas been Continental, Maria Luisa Fortuny might have been a candidate. An identification with Mrs Swinton accords with the date and the English canvas, but Woman in profile lacks Mrs Swinton’s voluptuous sensuality. The search for an identity continued. Most of the paintings unsold at the 1907 exhibition were included in an exhibition and sale arranged by Bernheim at the Hôtel Drouot in 1909. This time the catalogue gave dimensions suggesting the possibility that the 1907 Portrait reappeared as either Profil (no.22) or Portrait de Mlle E... (no.56). The initial in the latter title was tantalising, but the mystery endured until the painting returned to England from Australia where it had been treasured in a private collection for over fifty years. When the painting went for examination and cleaning by a conservator sticky tape was removed from the back, uncovering the inscription ‘Mlle Errazuriz’ on the stretcher. This could only be the Chilean beauty, Eugenia Errázuriz.
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Eugenia Huici, daughter of a Bolivian silver-magnate, was born in Chile in 1860 (the same year as Sickert). She and her husband, José Tomás Errázuriz, a landscape painter from a Chilean copper-mining and winemaking family, moved to Paris in 1882. Eugenia’s beauty and sense of style attracted many friends from the arts and fashion worlds, including Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau and Cecil Beaton. Picasso made more than twenty portraits of her during their thirty year friendship; Coco Chanel designed the simple black shift Eugenia wore as a lay nun in her old age. Her taste in interior decoration – whitewashed walls, redtiled floors, curtains of unlined linen – was one of the most powerful influences on the minimalist aesthetic of modern times. She was painted in the 1880s and 1890s by John Singer Sargent, Giovanni Boldini and Jacques-Emile Blanche. British artists who painted her included Augustus John, Ambrose McEvoy, William Orpen and now, we learn, Sickert. Sickert probably met Eugenia Errázuriz in Venice or in Paris. They had many friends in common. She and her husband moved to Chelsea around 1900 where Sickert certainly met her over the winter of 1904–5 at parties hosted by mutual friends, for example Charles Conder and his wife. It is interesting that Sickert called his painting Mlle E ..., rather than Mme E ... . The Errázuriz marriage did not long survive, except in name, after their move to London. Sickert was possibly reflecting this fact, or simply disguising the identity of his sitter. The tenderness of his portrayal is evident. Whether it denoted more than friendship is the mystery that endures. Wendy Baron
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DA PHILIP ALEXIUS DE LÁSZLÓ Budapest 1869 – 1937 London
Portrait of Viscountess Chaplin, née the Hon. Gwladys Wilson
Signed and dated lower right: P.A. de László 1915. June 14 Oil on board: 35 F⁄i * 28 in / 90.5 * 71 cm Frame size: 35 * 44 in / 88.9 * 111.8 cm In its original French Louis XIV style carved and gilded frame PROV EN A N CE
The sitter and then by family descent E X H IB I T ED
London, The French Gallery, A series of portraits and studies by Philip A de László, MVO, June 1924, no.1 L I T ER AT URE
De László Archive 061-0070, letter from Viscountess Castlereagh to Philip de László, 25th November, 1914 The National Portrait Gallery, 1913–15 Album, p.92, fig B The artist’s Sitters’ Book, vol I, f. 104: Gwladys Chaplin June 3rd 1915
Philip de László is now recognised as one of the most significant portrait painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His great skill in capturing a sitter’s likeness and his ability to transpose glamour and vitality onto a canvas equalled that of Sargent.
over the next twelve years, a reflection of their prominence in London society. Edith was a renowned hostess and her parties were justly famous, in retrospect emblematic of a lifestyle which was to vanish with the First World War.
The artist’s correspondence reveals that de László was introduced to Mrs Chaplin by her sister-in-law Edith Castlereagh, née Chaplin, who took her to the artist’s studio in November 1914. Viscountess Castlereagh – who became the 7th Marchioness of Londonderry in 1915 when her husband Charles Stewart Vane-Tempest-Stewart succeeded his father – was already an important patron of de László. The artist had made a striking three-quarter length portrait of her in 1913, and by 1915 he had also painted her husband, her son, and her mother-inlaw. The Londonderry family would commission many more portraits
It therefore seemed natural that Edith Castlereagh should introduce her brother’s wife to de László. In a letter to the artist dated 25th November 1914, she informed him that Eric Chaplin, who was then fighting in the war in the Queen’s Own Staffordshire Yeomanry, was keen to commission a portrait of Gwladys.
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‘My brother is most anxious for you to paint her, and I should like to talk to you when I see you. She really is a lovely creature, and I do hope it will be possible for her to be included in your exhibition, you must refuse
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DA PHILIP ALEXIUS DE LÁSZLÓ Budapest 1869 – 1937 London
Portrait of Viscountess Chaplin, née the Hon. Gwladys Wilson
all the rich ugly ones!!! And the year after you can have a “chamber of horrors”!’ The resulting picture, for which sittings took place in June 1915, was in fact not exhibited by de László until 1924, but it was then given a place of honour at one of his most prestigious one-man exhibitions, at the French Gallery in Pall Mall, as the opening portrait in the show. De László tended to choose the dresses and jewels his models should wear for the sittings, as he usually had very definite ideas as to what was required, often draping his own fabric on the sitters, or using his own props in order to produce the desired effect. In this instance he lent Gwladys Chaplin a long row of pearls, which, according to one of her descendants, she greatly disliked. However, the artist did not relent, and his sitter was eventually delighted with her portrait, though a compromise is attained by her holding rather than wearing the offending necklace.
Eric succeeded his father as 2nd Viscount in 1923, and the couple made their home at 23 Chelsea Square, SW3. They were happily married, and had two sons: Anthony (b. 1906), a celebrated zoologist and musician who succeeded his father in 1946 as 3rd Viscount Chaplin, and the Hon. Niall Greville Chaplin (b. 1908). Gwladys Chaplin died in 1971, aged 90. De László’s portrait pays tribute to her enduring beauty and vivacity. We are grateful to Dr. Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, former British and French editor of the Philip de László Catalogue Raisonné, for writing the catalogue entry for this portrait. The catalogue raisonné is currently presented in progress online: www.delaszlocatalogueraisonne.com.
The Hon. Gwladys Alice Gertrude Wilson was born in 1881, the fourth daughter of Charles Henry Wilson, 1st Baron Nunburnholme, and his wife Florence Jane Helen Wellesley. On 3rd August 1905 at Warter Priory in York, she married Eric Chaplin (1877–1947), the only son of Henry, 1st Viscount Chaplin and Lady Florence Leveson-Gower. Her father-in-law, an eminent MP and close friend of the Prince of Wales, had been embroiled in a scandal when his betrothed, Lady Florence Paget, eloped with the 4th Marquess of Hastings shortly before their wedding. Revenge was implemented to some degree when Chaplin’s horse Hermit won the 1867 Derby against the odds, fighting injury, to the financial detriment of the Marquess. Henry Chaplin’s subsequent marriage to Eric’s mother was happy but cut tragically short when she died giving birth to a second son.
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DB AUGUSTUS EDWIN JOHN om, ra Tenby 1878 – 1961 Fordingbridge
Portrait of Baronne Baba d’Erlanger (1901–1945) and Miss Paula Gellibrand (1898–1964) Oil on canvas: 30 * 25 in / 76.2 * 63.5 cm Frame size: 37 D⁄e * 32 D⁄e in / 95.9 * 83.2 cm In a period gilded oak reeded frame
d’Erlanger dispensed hospitality, offered some relief. However, I did a few portraits here, including one of Miss Baba d’Erlanger with her friend, Miss Paula Gellibrand’.1
Painted 1919–21
Commissioned by Captain Frederick Guest, Lloyd George’s Chief Whip and Winston Churchill’s cousin, this double portrait depicts two friends who were so inseparable that they were known as ‘The Twins’,2 despite their contrasting styles of beauty – Baba dark and intense, Paula shimmering and golden, with ice blue eyes. John responds not only to their superb good looks but to the zeitgeist – their marcel-waved hair and simple dresses have a classical unfussiness that ushers in the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties. The brushwork has the witty fluidity of a foxtrot, while the composition is organized around bold blocks of colour: red, gold and deep sapphire. The red of Baba’s dress is picked up in the carmined lips of both young women and the blue of Paula’s eyes is echoed by her earring and a glimpse of blue sleeve.
PROV EN A N CE
Commissioned in 1919 by Captain Frederick Guest, mp (1875–1937); later sold by him to Baba d’Erlanger’s husband, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge; by descent to their son E X H IB I T ED
London, Alpine Club Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Augustus E John, ARA, March–May 1923, no.9 ‘The John portrait of a recent bride and her bridesmaid’, The Sketch, 4th April 1923, illus. p.7 Ettore Cosamati, ‘Augustus John’, Dedalo, vol. IX, 1929, pp.677–706; illus. p.679, fig. 26
This dazzling double portrait of two society beauties has not been seen in public since it was shown at Augustus John’s Alpine Club exhibition in 1923. It was begun at Deauville in September 1919, the year that John painted participants at the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War, as well as two of his most famous sitters, the Marchesa Casati (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto) and TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) (Tate Britain). The Peace Conference commissions propelled John from being a portrayer of arty Bohemians to the chosen portraitist of the international beau monde. He was staying in Deauville at Lloyd George’s Villa La Chaumière, trying to finish a portrait of the Prime Minister. John feigned boredom with Deauville but noted in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro: ‘The ‘Villa Black and White’, where the Baroness Catherine
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Baba seems to have been as recalcitrant about the finishing of her portrait as Lloyd George was about his. Freddie Guest wrote to her on 25th October 1921: ‘Dear Infant, Baba. Will you please show that you are quite grown up and keep your solemn promise to me to help to get John’s picture finished! He is perspiring with anxiety to reproduce your ‘mug’ true to type on canvas. Please do this for me if you want a birthday present. I have a very nice one waiting in my drawer’.3 Shortly before the portrait was exhibited to great acclaim at the Alpine Club Gallery in March 1923, Baba had been the bridesmaid at Paula’s marriage to the Marques de Casa Maury. Born Mary Liliane Matilda, Baronne d’Erlanger, Baba was the daughter of the French banker Baron Emile d’Erlanger and his wife Marie-Rose Catherine de Rochegude, a flamboyant, flame-haired society hostess and patron of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes known for her spectacular parties – in Paris, in London, on the Grand Canal, and later in Hollywood. Baba’s father looked after
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DB AUGUSTUS EDWIN JOHN om, ra Tenby 1878 – 1961 Fordingbridge
Portrait of Baronne Baba d’Erlanger (1901–1945) and Miss Paula Gellibrand (1898–1964) the family’s business interests in England and was head of various transport companies, including the Channel Tunnel Company. He became a naturalized British subject in 1891; Baba was educated in England. The d’Erlangers lived at 139 Piccadilly and Falconwood in Kent, but travelled constantly. In London in November 1923 Baba married Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, a descendant of Louis IX of France. They too became famous for parties given in their home on the Avenue Charles-Floquet, which had themes such as ‘Souvenir de Proust’ (a friend of Baba’s mother) and ‘Le Bal 1900’. The Prince and Princesse were patrons of José Maria Sert, Dalí and Man Ray, and also spent time in Hollywood in the 1930s. Baba was a friend of Natalie Paley, cousin of the murdered Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and the wife of the couturier Lucien Lelong, whose clothes Baba frequently modelled. Cecil Beaton, photographing her at the beginning of his career in 1926, commented: ‘Baba d’ErlangerLucinge…was the first to bring into fashion the exotic, simian grace of the jungle and thereby created an astonishing effect of originality and allure.4 Beaton was even more overwhelmed by Paula Gellibrand, whom he photographed many times in the 1920s, the ultimate ‘Flapper’ in glittering, fish-scale metallic dresses, her huge blue eyes full of smoky allure. He ranked her with Greta Garbo among ‘the most consistently lovely’ women he had photographed.5 Born in 1898, Paula was the tenth and youngest child of Edmund Gellibrand and his wife Paula Schalmz. In 1913 she married Ivan Brooks at the British Embassy church in Paris. Paula’s second husband, Don Pedro José Monés y Maury, Marques de Casa Maury (c.1895–1968) – ‘Bobby’ to his friends – was a motor racing enthusiast who competed in his Bugatti in the French Grand Prix of 1922. They married at St James’s Spanish Place in March 1923. The Press had a field day with Paula’s outré fashion sense – her ‘nun-like’ satin
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wedding gown and style of footwear not ‘yet adopted’ by Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (who was about to become the Duchess of York). Baba, Paula’s only bridesmaid, wore a silver tissue gown and turban. After his divorce from Paula, Casa Maury married the Prince of Wales’s former mistress, Freda Dudley Ward. He founded the Curzon Cinema in 1934 and in the Second World War held the rank of Wing Commander as a Senior Intelligence Officer in Combined Operations. From 1932 to 1939 Paula was married to William Allen, journalist, MP for Belfast (1929–31) and scholar of Caucasian history. Her fourth husband was ‘Boy’ Long, a rancher at Elementaita in Kenya. Paula became part of the hedonistic ‘Happy Valley’ set and a close friend of the notorious Alice de Trafford. In her later years Paula lived in Oxfordshire, keeping her fined-boned beauty almost to the end of an eventful life.
Cecil Beaton, Paula Gellibrand, Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928. Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s.
Cecil Beaton, Baba d’Erlanger, Princesse JeanLouis de Faucigny-Lucinge. Bromide print, 1920s. © National Portrait Gallery, London.
1 2 3 4
Readers’ Union edition, London 1954, p.114. Press cuttings. Letter in a private collection. Self-portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton 1926–1974, ed. Richard Buckle, London 1979, p.151. 5 Cecil Beaton, Photobiography, London 1951, p.178.
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DC PIERRE BONNARD
Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867 – 1947 Cannet, Alpes-Maritimes
Le corsage rayé
Signed lower right: Bonnard Oil on canvas: 25 ¼ * 18 in / 64 * 46 cm Frame size: 33 * 26 in / 83.8 * 66 cm In an antique Louis XIII carved and gilded frame Painted circa 1922 PROV EN A N CE
Paul Rosenberg, Paris Leon Delaroche, Paris, 10th May 1938, then by descent Private collection, Europe, 1998 Richard Green, London, 2006 Private collection, USA L I T ER AT URE
J and H Dauberville, Bonnard, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris 1973, vol. III, p.140, no.1153, illus.
Perhaps best known for his intimate interiors, Pierre Bonnard had begun painting private domestic scenes as early as 1889 and throughout his career he continued to record scenes from his intimate world, frequently inspired by his companion and muse Marthe de Méligny. In these works he endeavoured ‘to draw the spectator into a painting on a contemplative journey, in which familiar objects are encountered as though for the first time, forming unexpected relationships and assuming new meanings’.1 By the 1920s Bonnard’s palette had developed from dark, earthy tones to a brighter, more vibrant combination of reds, blues and whites. The flat planes of colour seen in his earlier works are replaced by a more varied, dappled application of paint which served to create depth and intensity. Le corsage rayé is an expression of Bonnard’s love of colour. The background and white tablecloth are described by a subtle,
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carefully blended variety of pastel tones including azure, ochre, violet and teal green, which creates a powerful contrast with the intense scarlet of Marthe’s brightly lit striped blouse. For Bonnard, ‘light, in combination with colour, became a key factor in the organization of a painting. Objects are broken up by light in patterns of colour across the surface, and the dialogue between object and colour, colour and pattern, pattern surface, surface and pictorial depth becomes part of the content of the painting’.2 Bonnard met his lifelong companion, the beautiful Marie Boursin, in 1893. He encountered her on the boulevard Haussmann in Paris when she introduced herself as sixteen year old Marthe de Méligny, the daughter of artistocratic Italian parents. It was not until after their marriage some thirty years later that Bonnard discovered her real identity; in truth she was a farmer’s daughter from the Midi and had been twenty four at their first meeting. Described as ‘voluptuous’ and ‘almost risqué’, Marthe became central to Bonnard’s work, appearing in one hundred and fifty paintings and over seven hundred sketches. In Le corsage rayé Marthe is seated at a table in a pensive, reserved mood; her face is turned away from the viewer, her eyes avoiding direct contact with the painter. Although Bonnard depicted her throughout her life in the most intimate situations, Marthe was known to be shy and reserved. Antoine Terrasse, the artist’s great-nephew, recalled that she would carry an umbrella to shield herself from attention when out in public. The intimate nature of this painting is intensified by the fact that during this period Marthe was aware that Bonnard was engaged in a rather public affair with Renée Monchaty. Crushed by her partner’s infidelity, she further withdrew from public life. This contemplative pose, in which she appears immersed in her own thoughts, creates a deeply personal and private painting. The striped red blouse that Marthe is wearing in Le corsage rayé appears in a number of works from the 1920s, including Reine Natanson
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DC PIERRE BONNARD
Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867 – 1947 Cannet, Alpes-Maritimes
Le corsage rayé
et Marthe Bonnard au corsage rouge, 1928 (Dauberville no.1403; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris), Femme tenant un chien (Dauberville no.1156; the Phillips Collection, Washington, dc) and Le corsage rouge (Dauberville no.1319; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).
Portrait of Madame Reine Natanson and Marthe Bonnard an corsage rouge, 1928. Oil on canvas. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library. 1 Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, p.52. 2 op cit., p.171.
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DD SIR JOHN LAVERY ra, rsa, rha Belfast 1856 – 1941 Kilmaganny, County Kilkenny
Mrs Rosen’s bedroom
Signed lower left: J Lavery; signed, dated and inscribed MRS ROSEN’S BEDROOM/ BY/ JOHN LAVERY/ NEW YORK/ 1926 on the reverse Oil on canvas: 25 * 30 in / 63.8 * 76.5 cm Frame size: 33 * 38 in / 83.8 * 96.5 cm In an Italian Casssetta style painted and gilded carved frame PROV EN A N CE
Mr and Mrs Walter Rosen; by descent to Mrs Anne Bigelow Stern London, Royal Academy, 1927, no.26 E X H IB I T ED
L I T ER AT URE
Royal Academy Pictures, 1927, Walter Judd and Co. 1927, p.40
In a sumptuous ‘Venetian’ bedroom a young woman wearing a floorlength white evening dress arranges her hair. Light streams into the room from windows on the left and under an ornate marble mantel, a fire burns in the hearth. Draped over a nearby armchair is the cloak she will wear when she leaves. But at the moment, coiffure, bringing order to her abundant auburn ‘Aureole’, demands her full attention. To find out more about this ethereal presence the contents of the room must be scrutinized, for they – as much as she – are the subject of the picture by Sir John Lavery.
Critics realized that the painter was fascinated by the fall of light on furniture and bric-a-brac and one even asserted that such pictures fulfilled a grander function as ‘records of our times and significant commentaries upon that reckless changing thing called “good taste” …’ Desmond MacCarthy, who penned these words, was anxious to see something deeper than mere fashion in these spaces – they represented ‘a phase of taste’, a statement about the way members of an aesthetic elite lived their lives.1 The pictures were ‘records’ or ‘documents’ that were just as telling as a characteristic pose in a conventional portrait.
In 1925 the painter had held a highly successful exhibition of Portrait Interiors at the Leicester Galleries in London. Although it was heralded as a new genre, Lavery, throughout his career, had never shied away from painting his subjects in situ even though his reputation rested upon his ability to capture more conventional likenesses. Nevertheless the challenge of painting someone in the privacy of their domestic surroundings had, in the age of illustrated journalism, a particular frisson that was only apparent in the reactions to the Leicester Galleries show.
By the time Lavery’s show was being reported in the United States, The Art News could inform its Manhattan readers that the painter intended to bring these pictures to the Duveen Galleries. The writer assured his readers that Lavery came to these intriguing ‘portrait interiors’ not as an ‘outsider, but as one who … understands to the full, their essential character’, and he went on to note that a number of commissions were already arranged for his forthcoming visit to New York, some of which may have been arranged by Sir Joseph Duveen.
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DD SIR JOHN LAVERY ra, rsa, rha Belfast 1856 – 1941 Kilmaganny, County Kilkenny
Mrs Rosen’s bedroom
Situated on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, the dealer’s galleries were just two blocks away from the residence of Walter T and Lucie Bigelow Rosen, a wealthy couple with a direct link to the artist. One of Lavery’s London interiors represented the home of Ivor Churchill Guest, Lord Wimborne.2 In 1905, Lucie Rosen’s mother was married for a second time to Lionel George William Guest, Lord Wimborne’s younger brother, and it must have seemed natural to the art-loving Rosens to seek out and commission the painter. Lucie Bigelow Dodge was born into a wealthy ‘Gilded Age’ New York family in 1890 (fig 1). From an early age she showed great aptitude for music. When she met her husband, the successful banker, Walter Tower Rosen, in 1914 she discovered a kindred spirit for he too was a keen amateur pianist and art collector. Within six weeks, the two were married and after the births of their children, Walter Jnr and Anne Bigelow Rosen, they moved into their remodelled midtown residence at 35 West 54th Street, New York. This quickly became a fashionable salon attracting artists, actors, writers and musicians during the winters, while much of the Rosens’ summers were spent in Europe, finishing each year with a sojourn at the Grand Hotel in Venice, their favourite city. It was there that the Rosens consorted with the dealer, Adolph Loewi, who is likely to have provided artefacts for Lucie Rosen’s bedroom.3 The interior is unusual in that it represents an intimate space – albeit one that contains elements of grandeur. The large carved overmantel for instance may have been a European import, as are the chairs, the mirror and the ornate bedframe. The room, decorated in green and red, imitates the Venetian décor with which Mrs Rosen was familiar. It also chimes with that of the other fashionable houses which Lavery painted on his North American sojourns – those of Pierpoint Morgan, Harold Pratt, Alexander Hamilton Rice and the Mackays of Harbour Hill, Long Island (figs 2 & 3).4
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In this plush setting, the flamboyant Lucie Rosen stands by the dressing table holding a hand-mirror, preparing for an evening performance. Two years after the picture was painted Walter Rosen purchased the Caramoor estate at Katonah in New York State. This, like their midtown residence, was filled with antiques and became a resort for visiting musicians. At the same time Lucie met the Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, who had recently patented a device for producing electronic music and she determined to become a master of the instrument, giving public concerts in the thirties and forties in the US and throughout Europe. It is unlikely that Lavery would have understood this new music – produced by the performer waving her hands across the top of the instrument to produce eerie, wailing sounds (fig 4). The painter in later years confessed that he had no ear for music, beyond ‘popular airs of a sentimental nature’; lengthy classical performances bored him.5 He was, however, frequently in the company of musicians and considered John McCormack among his friends. Indeed one of the current series of ‘portrait interiors’ represented the Irish tenor and his family at Esher Place (fig 5).6 However this, like Mrs Rosen’s bedroom, is more about life-style than public performance. Its music is in what we can see; in space, objects and the light that falls on them. It is intimate rather than extrovert – and in Lucie Rosen’s case, it provides a unique and revealing glimpse into the Venetian reveries of a woman of the 1920s in midtown Manhattan. Kenneth McConkey
Fig. 1. Olive Tinton Bigelow Pell, Lucie Bigelow Rosen, c.1930. From the Caramoor Rosen House archives.
Fig. 2. Sir John Lavery, The Gothic Room, 901 Fifth Avenue, 1926. Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
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Fig. 3. Sir John Lavery, The Library, Harbor Hill, Long Island, 1926. Private collection.
Fig. 4. Lucie Bigelow Rosen performing on the theramin, photograph c.1935. © Corbis Images.
Fig. 5. Sir John Lavery, Count John McCormack and his family, 1923. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Ireland / The Bridgeman Art Library.
1 Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Sir John Lavery’s Portrait Interiors’, Apollo, vol 2, 1925, pp.267–273, quoted in McConkey, 2010, p.169. 2 Essential information on the Rosens is contained at www.caramoor.org/rosenhouse-and-garden/about-the-rosens. Lucie Bigelow Dodge (1890–1968) was the oldest child of Flora and Charles Dodge. 3 Adolph Loewi, of German Jewish extraction, established his business in Venice in 1911. A New York branch was opened in 1933–4 and in 1939, Loewi moved permanently to the United States, bringing most of his stock. He retained outlets in Italy and New York, but established his firm in Beverley Hills in 1939. His expertise lay in Renaissance and Baroque works of art and interiors, and he was noteworthy in supplying the Gubbio Studiolo to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asolo Theatre to the Ringling Museum, Sarasota and Venetian rooms in the Burbank- Livingston-Griggs House overlooking St Paul in Minnesota. Loewi also provided works of art for the Rosens’ Caramoor House. 4 Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, Edinburgh 2010 (Atelier Books), pp.168–170. 5 Unpublished MS., Diary entry for 9th March 1924. 6 McConkey 2010, p.168.
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DE SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS pra, rws Mendham 1878 – 1959 Dedham
Portrait of Miss Millicent Baron on Magpie
Signed lower left: A.J. MUNNINGS Oil on canvas: 30 ½ * 38 in / 77.5 * 96.5 cm Frame size: 39 * 47 in / 99.1 * 119.4 cm In an antique 18th century English corner and centre carved and gilded frame Painted in 1929 PROV EN A N CE
Private collection, UK Christie’s London, 11th October 1974, lot 186 Richard Green, London, 1974 Frost & Reed, London, 1975, no.61 Sotheby’s London, 22nd June 1977, lot 36 Mr and Mrs Montgomery Fisher, USA Richard Green, London, 2010 Private collection, USA E X H IB I T ED
London, Royal Academy, 1930, no.227 L I T ER AT URE
Sir Alfred Munnings, The Second Burst, London 1951, p.326
In the 1920s and 30s Alfred Munnings developed a flourishing career as a painter of equestrian portraits, reviving a tradition that went back to Titian and Rubens. The miller’s son from Mendham now moved in high society, racing with the Rothchilds at Deauville and rubbing shoulders with the Prince of Wales at Biarritz. A trip to America in 1924 had added that nation’s plutocrats to his list of admirers: among others, he painted a superb equestrian portrait of the New England financier Frederick Henry Prince, Master of the Pau Foxhounds (private collection, USA).
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This portrait of Millicent Baron, heiress to the Carreras tobacco empire, epitomises Munnings’s brilliance as an equestrian portraitist. He subtly integrates the young girl in effortless command of her dark bay horse with the fresh, early summer landscape of her father’s estate at Fulmer in Buckinghamshire. The creams and beiges of Millicent’s riding clothes are echoed in the blossom of the may tree and the candle-shaped flowers of the towering chestnut. The copper beech in glossy new leaf picks up the brown and midnight-blue tones of Magpie’s rippling coat. Following the practice of Stubbs, Munnings presents the horse in profile, as beautifully cut as a horse on a Parthenon frieze, emphasizing its noble gait and superb configuration. Photographs of Millicent confirm how well Munnings has caught the likeness of his human sitter. Millicent was the great-granddaughter of Bernhard Baron (1850–1929), Chairman of Carreras. Born in Brest Litovsk, Belarus, Baron emigrated to New York in 1867 and worked in a tobacco factory, sleeping at night in the tobacco sheds. Five years later he took out his first patent for a machine for making cigarettes. In 1895 he settled in London and joined the tobacco retailer and blender Carreras, remaining its Chairman until his death. With innovative marketing and famous brands like Black Cat and Craven A, Carreras prospered on the wave of fashion for cigarettes in the opening decades of the twentieth century. A major philanthropist, Bernhard Baron gave away more than £2 million to help the poor, but was still worth £5 million at his death. Millicent’s parents were Edward Levy, a great-nephew of Bernhard Baron, and Bertha Schaul, a grandchild of Bernhard Baron from the Baltimore branch of the Baron family, which had prospered in the cloth trade. Edward Levy changed his name to Baron after coming to England to work for his great-uncle and eventually succeeded him as Chairman of Carreras. The Barons moved in the chicest circles. ‘My grandmother had her salon
from impressionism to modernism
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DE SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS pra, rws Mendham 1878 – 1959 Dedham
Portrait of Miss Millicent Baron on Magpie
decorated by Syrie Maugham and my grandfather shot pheasant with the Duke of Norfolk’, Millicent’s daughter Elizabeth Luard recounts in her memoirs.1 The brilliant scientist Miriam Rothschild, a contemporary of Millicent, commented: ‘The English Rothschilds were not like the Barons. We were a dull lot compared to them’.2 Munnings painted portraits of Millicent on Magpie and her younger sister Miss Betty Baron on Freckles (RA 1933) in the early summer of 1929. Munnings later joined the family at the villa in Biarritz which they had rented from Princesse Murat. Mornings were spent at La Chambre d’Amour, ‘a sort of Royal Enclosure where only millionaires, their wives and friends bathe, bask in the sun, drink cocktails, eat lobster salads’.3 In the evenings the dashing young Prince of Wales, the future Duke of Windsor, would come over to the villa to dance. ‘A beauty and a flirt, like all the Baron women’,4 Millicent Baron married Richard Longmore, son of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, at the beginning of the Second World War. ‘Both remarkably handsome and unusually courageous’,5 Wing Commander Longmore MBE, DSO, DFC was killed in action in 1943. Four years later she married Longmore’s Eton schoolfriend and fellow RAF officer David (later Sir David) Hildyard, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, ably abetted by Millicent’s social flair.
1 2 3 4 5
My Life as a Wife, 2008, p.18. Ibid., p.20. The Second Burst, p.326. Miriam Rothschild quoted in My Life as a Wife, p.20. Ibid., p.174.
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from impressionism to modernism
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March 2006
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RICHARD GREEN
Richard Green has assisted in the formation and development of numerous private and public collections including the following: UN I T ED K IN GD O M
Aberdeen: City Art Gallery Altrincham: Dunham Massey (NT) Barnard Castle: Bowes Museum Bedford: Cecil Higgins Museum Canterbury: Royal Museum and Art Gallery Cheltenham: Art Gallery and Museum Chester: The Grosvenor Museum Coventry: City Museum Dedham: Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum Hampshire: County Museums Service Hull: Ferens Art Gallery Ipswich: Borough Council Museums and Galleries Leeds: Leeds City Art Gallery Lincoln: Usher Gallery Liskeard: Thorburn Museum London: Chiswick House (English Heritage) Department of the Environment The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood The Museum of London National Maritime Museum National Portrait Gallery National Postal Museum Tate Britain The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum Lydiard Tregoze: Lydiard House Norwich: Castle Museum Plymouth: City Museum and Art Gallery Richmond: London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and Orleans House Gallery St Helier: States of Jersey (Office) Southsea: Royal Marine Museum Stirling: Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum York: York City Art Gallery
C A N A DA
Fredericton: Beaverbrook Art Gallery Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada
EI R E
Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland FR A N CE
U N I T ED S TAT ES O F A MER I C A
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts Cincinnati, OH: Art Museum Gainesville, FL: Harn Museum of Art Houston, TX: Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Los Angeles, CA: J Paul Getty Museum New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art New York, NY: Dahesh Museum Ocala, FL: The Appleton Museum of Art Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum Pasadena, CA: Norton Simon Museum Rochester, NY: Genessee County Museum San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library St Louis, MO: Missouri Historical Society Sharon, MA: Kendall Whaling Museum Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art Ventura County, CA: Maritime Museum Washington, DC: The National Gallery The White House Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Winona, MN: Minnesota Marine Art Museum Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum
Compiègne: Musée National du Château GER M A N Y
Berlin: Staatliche Kunsthalle Darmstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum Hannover: Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe: Staatliche Kunsthalle Speyer am Rhein: Historisches Museum der Pfalz HOLL AND
Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum Rijksmuseum Utrecht: Centraal Museum S O U T H A FR I C A
Durban: Art Museum SPA I N
Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Sun Fernando Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional del Prado SWI T ZERL A N D
B ELGI UM
Antwerp: Maisons Rockox Courtrai: City Art Gallery
Zurich: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum T H A IL A N D
Bangkok: Museum of Contemporary Art
D EN M A R K
Tröense: Maritime Museum
Catalogue by Susan Morris and Rachel Boyd. Photography by Sophie Drury and Beth Saunders. Graphic Design by Chris Rees.
Published by Richard Green. © 2013 All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated (without the publisher’s prior consent), in any form of binding or other cover than in which it is published, and without similar condition being imposed on another purchaser. All material contained in this catalogue is subject to the new laws of copyright, December 1989. We have made an effort to trace the copyright holder of all comparable images. Printed in England by Hampton Printing (Bristol) Ltd.
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