Strawberry Hill's Missing Portrait

Silvia Davoli, Research Curator for the recent Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill exhibition, describes her search for a renowned painting that was once part of Horace Walpole’s celebrated collection. Lost Treasures was supported by a Curatorial Research Grant and a Publication Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre.

Horace Walpole’s (1676–1745) collection was one of the most important of the eighteenth century but it was dispersed in a great sale in 1842. The exhibition Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill (October 2018–February 2019), held at Strawberry Hill House and Garden, reunited over 150 objects from this famous and unique collection in Walpole’s former house in Twickenham, situated among by Walpole to the Flemish artist Paul van Somer, had found its way to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation in Houston, Texas. Careful archival research, however, has demonstrated that there are in fact two nearly identical versions of the same painting, and that Lord Falkland’s portrait originally at Strawberry Hill remains untraced.

David Nicholls, Twickenham: Strawberry Hill.

Despite the long distance between London and Houston, and the significant the interiors as he designed it. As an art historian and provenance researcher, I helped to assemble the list of exhibits, which meant tracking down missing works and verifying the provenance for each loan. But in the course of my research, an iconic portrait long considered as having come from Strawberry Hill—which we intended to be a highlight of the exhibition—suddenly had to be struck from our list.

Scholars had always assumed that Portrait of Henry Carey Lord Falkland, which was painted in 1603 and attributed costs of transport, we had initially been particularly excited to include this painting in the exhibition. It was part of a set of four full-length Elizabethan portraits that Walpole had bought expressly for his gallery at Strawberry Hill. It had, moreover, inspired one of Walpole’s most influential literary inventions: the scene in his gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), in which a portrait comes to life. Manfred, lord of the castle, has just declared his intention to divorce his wife and offered himself to his daughter-in-law, when he witnesses the painting of his grandfather “quit its panel, and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air”.

This trope of a figure stepping out from a painting had important consequences in the gothic literary canon. Walpole’s scene popularised the notion that paintings could play an active, and tantalisingly sinister, role in the narrative. Its echoes are found in the conceit, employed by writers such as Mary Shelley, that what is lifeless can suddenly live; and in a narrative like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which turns art into life and vice versa. The portrait is mentioned in Walpole’s detailed Description of the Villa, an inventory made in 1774, as “Henry Carey Lord Falkland, deputy of Ireland, and father of the famous Lucius lord Falkland; in white by Van Somers.” Unfortunately, despite its importance, there is no mention of the picture’s provenance in Walpole’s copious correspondence. The next fixed point in its journey is recorded in the catalogue of the great sale of 1842, which notes that the painting was sold to a John Tollemache Esq. of Helmingham Hall. It seems he wished to share it with the public, as a copy of the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition catalogue also records the portrait, loaned from his collection, as piece number 41 in the British Portrait Gallery.

To illuminate the next stage of the portrait’s life, I conducted a close study of the Helmingham Hall dossier and a file corresponding to Falkland’s portraits at the Heinz Archive and Library at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At the Heinz, through the study of archival photographs documenting the painting and consideration of the correspondence amassed over decades, I discovered that the portrait now at the Blaffer Foundation in Houston had arrived there together with its companion portrait, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland (dated 1620 and attributed to Paul van Somer). Both had come directly from the Falkland family where they had been held, as confirmed by the current Lord Falkland, continuously for more than three centuries. Comparing old black and white images of Walpole’s Lord Falkland with the portrait now in Houston, it becomes apparent that the two are almost identical. Very minor differences are found in details such as the rendering of the hat, the fabric of the coat, and the cape. Is Walpole’s iconic portrait therefore an eighteenth-century copy?

As its current location is unknown, this question remains unanswered. Ultimately, I found that Walpole’s version of the painting was kept by Tollemache and sold by his heirs in 1953. Its last recorded owner was Margaret “Daisy” Van Allen Bouquiere (d. 1969), an American socialite and art collector from Long Island. After that, the portrait reached England again and its traces were lost. It has been suggested that the portrait was eventually purchased by Nancy Lancaster (d. 1994), the famous interior decorator, who reportedly had the portrait hanging in one of her living rooms at Halsey Court together with similar images of subjects all dressed in white silk. But all this is yet to be confirmed.

Joseph Constantine Stadler, The Gallery at Strawberry Hill, no date, aquatint on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In staging the exhibition, we left an empty space where once the Portrait of Lord Falkland hung—we hope that, with attention drawn by the recent show and our discoveries, the lost portrait will resurface.

The Gallery at Strawberry Hill during the exhibition Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection, 20 October 2018 to 24 February 2019.