Old World Masters in New World Collections

English, Eighteenth Century

English, Eighteenth Century

When Théophile Gautier saw Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Hallet, now known as The Morning Walk, he said that he felt “a strange retrospective sensation, so intense is the illusion it produces of the spirit of the Eighteenth Century. We really fancy we see the young couple,” he adds, “walking arm-in-arm along a garden avenue.”

It is this “strange retrospective sensation” that we feel when we look upon the canvases of Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney.

The Eighteenth Century was one of those periods in the world’s history when Society reached its peak, when Society was the goal of all things and of every one, and when it was dominated by taste, elegance, gaiety, lightness, brightness, wit, beauty, and charm. There was charm in everything—in art, in music, in literature, in conversation, and in dress. There was a chic and dainty grace with which the Eighteenth Century belle wore her large hat, tied her sash, and pointed the toe of her high-heeled satin slipper on the polished floor of the ball-room, or the greensward of the garden or lawn; and there was a corresponding chic and dashing elegance with which the Eighteenth Century beau made his bow, tapped his snuff-box, or handed the “ladies of St. James’s” in and out of their sedan-chairs.

This sparkling, iridescent age, with its taste, grace, and wit can never come again—for our world has travelled far along another path—but if the Eighteenth Century cannot return to us, we can return to it by means of its literature, its music, and its art.

At such a period, when the social world was of exceptional brilliance, it is only natural that the art of portraiture should have flourished with unparalleled lustre.

Three great geniuses arose in England to bring this special branch of painting up to a pitch that had never been reached there before.

It is true that Holbein’s portraits are magnificent, stately, and true to life, and that they present wonderful portrayals of character; but Holbein was painting in a world of drastic change, of adventure, of political agitation, when nearly everyone whom he painted had the fear of the axe descending upon his neck. It is true that Van Dyck painted people of elegance and distinguished manner—the portrait of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick on page 189 would alone prove this—and gives us a glimpse into a charming world.

But Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney were the first to paint Society—that brilliant, witty, provocative, frivolous, graceful, charming, chic, and altogether delightful Society of the Eighteenth Century.

The Eighteenth Century! How we delight in it!

We are not too far away to feel at home in it; and, moreover, much of our beautiful Georgian architecture survives in this country with Chippendale, Sheraton, and Heppelwhite furniture and Spode, Wedgwood, Chelsea, Lowestoft and various china, with other relics besides, to show us that our Colonial forefathers lived in style and elegance. The latest fashions in household furnishings and dress travelled here from London even quicker than they travelled to the English provinces.

To lift the curtain upon the Eighteenth Century is like lifting the cover from a Chinese jar of pot-pourri; and just as that subtle yet pungent scent of rose-leaves, lavender, sweet spices, and musk float from it, so visions appear before another sense. Our inherited memories bring before us pictures of brocade gowns or “hoops,” flowered silk overdresses, high-heeled satin slippers with glittering buckles, ruffles of Mechlin lace, “chicken-skin” fans gay with Watteau or Lancret or Pater pictures, rustling silks, shimmering satins, nodding feathers, cinnamon coats, Ramilies tie-wigs, lace-solitaires, wrist-ruffles, cocked-hats, swords, and snuff-boxes.

We seem to stand in lovely gardens, bright with roses and hollyhocks, larkspur, foxglove, amaranth, love-in-a-mist, bleeding-hearts, and gilliflowers, noting the moving shadow on the sundial and watching the stately peacocks behind the well-clipped hedges of box and holly; or we follow the fashionable world to Ranelagh or Vauxhall, where we look with fascinated gaze on the beautiful women in hoops of brocade or lutestring silk, much painted, powdered and patched, glancing archly beneath their coquettish “gipsy hats” at their gallant escorts, who know so well how to lead them through the steps of a minuet or a gavotte to the rococo tunes of Rameau, Dr. Arne, or Couperin with their quirls and pretty runs and trills and long pauses for stately bows.

That world is so fascinating to us that we fancy we, too, could wear without embarrassment the elaborate costume and that we, too, would feel much at home with Horace Walpole and his friends at Strawberry Hill. We, too, might be able to prepare minced chicken in a chafing-dish, just as satisfactorily as the Miss Berrys; and we like to fancy that we could take part in their airy conversation of charm, banter, and light mockery. At any rate, if we should not be able to succeed in entertaining Horace Walpole, we are very certain that Sir Horace could entertain us!

All the Society people of London of this time seem very friendly to us and we are strangely “at home” with the portraits of Gainsborough, Sir Joshua, and Romney.

When we look upon Diana, Lady Crosbie, Lady Betty Delmé, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Maria Walpole, Duchess of Gloucester, Lady Derby, and The Hon. Mrs. Davenport do we not feel that we have known and talked to these people in the flesh? Their eyes meet ours and our thoughts meet theirs,—and we are not strangers to one another.

And when we look upon Gainsborough’s Mall does it not bring back memories of the time when we, ourselves, walked there with all the gay throng of a bright morning?

Lord Gower said very aptly:

“Gainsborough created a new school by making a lady’s petticoat a thing of beauty. He could even throw a halo upon a ribbon or a scarf.”

That is true; but Lord Gower forgot the fact that the lady had by her taste and her high-bred elegance conferred distinction on her clothes by the fitness with which she selected them and by the manner in which she wore them.

Thrice in England have pairs of geniuses appeared at the same time, inviting comparison and attracting partisans—Keats and Shelley; Thackeray and Dickens; and Reynolds and Gainsborough.

There should be no partisans. The more we love and admire Keats, the better we are able to admire and love Shelley; the more we appreciate and delight in Dickens, the more we are able to appreciate and delight in Thackeray; and the more we comprehend and enjoy Sir Joshua, the more we are able to comprehend and enjoy Gainsborough.

Although they were rivals—and quite bitter ones at times—the two supreme English painters of the Eighteenth Century admired each other prodigiously.

“Damn him! how various he is!” Gainsborough exclaimed of Reynolds; and Sir Joshua remarked to Sir George Beaumont of Gainsborough; “I cannot imagine how he manages to produce his effects.”

“What is it then that gives Romney his hold upon this generation and will continue to give him a hold so long as a love of art endures among us?” Humphrey Ward asks; and then he answers his own question as follows:

“In part, of course, it is because he shares with Reynolds and Gainsborough the good fortune of having kept alive for us a society of which the fascination is enduring—that limited and privileged society of the Eighteenth Century which has realized such a perfect art of living and with which we can clasp hands across the gap as we cannot with the men and women of Charles the Second’s time, or even of Queen Anne’s. Much more is it because of temperament and training. Romney was an artist in love with loveliness; because he found it in the women and children of his time and stamped it on countless canvases.

“To our problem-haunted painters of to-day it may be seen that his sense of form was ‘generic and superficial’; they may condemn him because he did not try to penetrate deep into character and because he simplified too much, like the Greek sculptors. The lover of mere human beauty will care little for such objections, provided that a portrait gives him the essentials of a beautiful face.

‘The witchery of eyes, the grace that tips
The inexpressible douceur of the lips’—

and has blended them with the aristocratic dignity of the Lady Sligo, or with the melting sweetness of many of the sketches of Emma. This is what he finds in every first-rate Romney; and he finds much more. He finds pure and unfaded color, the fruit of the painter’s knowledge and of a self-restraint which forbade him to search for complex effects through rash experiments. He finds a quality of painting which, though it wants the subtlety and preciousness that Gainsborough reached instinctively and Sir Joshua by effort, is a quality to which nobody but a master can attain. To be convinced of this we have only to look closely at the brush-work of the eyes in any of the National Gallery Romneys, or the draperies in such pictures as the Lady Warwick and Children or the Lady Derby.

“When all is said, Romney remains one of the greatest painters of the Eighteenth Century and one of the glories of the English name.”

We are apt to think that it was easier to conquer a reputation in the Eighteenth Century than it is to-day and that Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Hoppner, and Raeburn stepped easily into their commanding positions. Let us remember that Horace Walpole mentions the fact that there were two thousand portrait-painters in London in his time!

The story of English Painting previous to the Eighteenth Century is interesting and very different from that of any nation on the Continent.

The Wars of the Roses, which lasted thirty years (1455–1485), coincide with the great developments of Painting in Italy and Flanders. During this period, while York and Lancaster were, like the Lion and the Unicorn, fighting for the Crown, no attention could be paid to the painting of pictures. Up to this period England had had a notable past in portraiture, fresco-painting, and, even more particularly, in the art of illumination and miniature-painting. In the decoration of manuscripts from about 1250 to 1350 the Anglo-Norman painters stood first in this branch of art. The old monastic artists had great traditions to follow and superb models to draw upon, such as the Book of Kells (dating from the Eighth or Ninth Century); and the Winchester School of the Tenth Century stood very high before the advent of the Normans in 1066.

Our own country to-day can show many examples of this splendid work in private collections. After William Caxton set up his printing-press at Westminster in 1471, there was little more need for the laboriously written manuscripts with their exquisite miniature-painting and illumination.

Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead bandits and other Puritans with their wholesale demolishing and slashing of all art and everything beautiful together with the Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed all the paintings that could have told us just what had been accomplished in England at the time when Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Botticelli were creating masterpieces in Italy and when Roger van der Weyden and Memling were painting gloriously in the great realm of the Dukes of Burgundy. Such works as the Romaunt de la Rose and other Anglo-Norman manuscripts give us a hint of what Painting in England must have been; for, of course, English, or Anglo-Norman Painting, in Plantagenet days must have been—as in other countries—an enlarged version of the brightly colored miniatures touched up with gold-leaf in the manuscripts.

Henry VIII seems to have been the first English King who was a patron of art in the modern sense. But there was no English artist of power to be patronized. The German Hans Holbein (see page 240) was made Court-Painter. Holbein painted all the great personages in Tudor England and his influence lasted long after his death. Miniature-portraits were also popular. The greatest artist in this line was Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619), a native of Exeter, trained as a goldsmith, a follower of Holbein, and appointed goldsmith, carver, and portrait-painter to Queen Elizabeth (whose portrait he painted many times). Later he was portrait-painter to James I. It was Hilliard, too, who engraved the Great Seal of England in 1587. Hilliard’s pupil, Isaac Oliver (1556–1617?), also a pupil of Federigo Zuccaro, was unsurpassed as a miniature-painter and taught his son Peter (1601–1660), who was famous for his drawings and water-colors as well as for his miniatures. Samuel Cooper (1609–1672), achieved a great reputation as a miniaturist portrait-painter and painted Charles II, Henrietta Maria, all the celebrities of the Court, and also John Milton and Oliver Cromwell. Collectors appreciate his works to-day.

Holbein left no School and there was no one to succeed him. Consequently when Antonio Moro (see page 257), came to England from Spain in 1553 to paint Mary Tudor, he stayed in London for some time painting celebrities.

In Queen Elizabeth’s time another foreign portrait-painter, Federigo Zuccaro (or Zucchero) arrived from Italy with a great reputation, having worked for Pope Gregory XIII and the Cardinal of Lorraine, and also in Antwerp and Amsterdam. Zuccaro painted Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Leicester, and many other English notables.

Another foreigner, Daniel Mytens (1590?–1656), arrived in the reign of James I, became his Court-Painter and continued in the post in the reign of Charles I, until Van Dyck’s popularity sent him back to Holland. Mytens painted in the style of Rubens and Van Dyck. Hampton Court Palace contains many full length portraits by him. A portrait by Mytens of Jeffrey Hudson (see page 191), holding a dog by a leash, hangs in Buckingham Palace.

However, in the reign of Charles I, Anthony Van Dyck (see page 181) dominated Painting just as Holbein had in the reign of Henry VIII. For years after his death every painter tried to follow Van Dyck’s style; but they all missed his distinction, not having his genius to start with.

Civil war and Puritanism killed art completely. Consequently when “Charlie came over the water” and the “King Enjoyed his Own Again,” there was nobody in the kingdom able to paint an acceptable portrait. Again a foreigner met the need. This time it was Peter Lely (1618–1680), who was a Dutchman, born in Westphalia, Germany, the son of Pieter van der Faes, a captain of infantry, who had changed his name to Lely. In 1640 young Lely was in England, painting landscapes and trying to imitate Van Dyck in portraiture. The marriage of Princess Mary to William, Prince of Orange gave Lely his first opportunity and he painted the Royal couple with Charles II, who made him a knight and baronet in 1679. Sir Peter only enjoyed his honors a year, for he died in 1680. Sir Peter Lely painted a great number of portraits, including the “Court Beauties,” which now hang in Hampton Court Palace.

The Court-Painter of Queen Mary II and Queen Anne was another foreigner, Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), a native of Lübeck, a pupil of Ferdinand Bol, Carlo Maratti, and Bernini, with painting experiences in Rome and Venice. Kneller painted portraits of Charles II, Louis XIV, James II, William III, Queen Mary, Queen Anne, and George I. For Queen Mary II he painted the “Beauties” at Hampton Court, in a certain sense a continuation of Sir Peter Lely’s “Beauties.” Kneller was knighted in 1692 and made a baronet in 1715.

Sir Godfrey painted the members of the Kit-Cat Club and every person of distinction in England. In 1705 he settled near Twickenham. Pope wrote an epitaph for Kneller’s monument in Westminster Abbey.

William Hogarth (1697–1764) who now enters the lists, is the first really English painter. Hogarth was a native of London and an engraver as well as a painter. Hogarth became Sergeant-Painter to the King in 1757. He first attracted attention by his prints for Butler’s Hudibras in 1726 and at this time began to paint in oils. In 1731 he painted The Harlot’s Progress and followed this with Southwark Fair and The Rake’s Progress which gave him great fame as a satirist. In 1745 he painted his own Portrait and the Marriage à la Mode (six scenes). The vigor and personality of his portraits, the beautiful coloring of his palette, and the atmosphere of the Eighteenth Century make Hogarth one of the great names in art. England was a long time producing an artist; but when he came he was a very great one.

Hogarth was so pre-eminently a chronicler of the fashions and follies of his time that we are apt to forget his beautiful use of color, and Hogarth’s technique is so solid and so sure that his colors are as fresh to-day as when they were painted.

Hogarth did not believe in his powers of portraiture; but the world does not agree with him. The portrait of Lavinia Fenton as Polly Peachum in the Beggar’s Opera, (National Gallery, London) ranks as one of the great portraits of the world. And there are others: David Garrick and his Wife in Windsor Castle; his own Portrait (National Gallery, London); Archbishop Herring (Lambeth Palace); Peg Woffington; and many others.

Hogarth’s book The Analysis of Beauty had the following origin. In his own portrait painted in 1745 he drew on a palette in one corner of the picture a serpentine line with the words: “The line of beauty and grace.” So much discussion ensued that Hogarth wrote the book to explain what he meant and to establish a standard of beauty.

The Eighteenth Century saw the great period of English Painting expressed in Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792); Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788); and George Romney (1734–1802). Others of importance were Richard Wilson (1714–1782), famous for his landscapes in many of which ruins were introduced; Francis Cotes (1725–1770), famous portrait-painter; and, lapping over into the Nineteenth Century, Sir William Beechey (1753–1839), who became portrait-painter to the Queen; John Hoppner (1758?–1810), portrait-painter (see page 416); John Opie (1761–1807), historical portrait-painter; Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830); Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823); Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851); John Constable (1776–1837); John Wilkie (1785–1841); and John Crome, known as “Old Crome” (1793–1842).

Lady Betty Delmé

Sir Joshua Reynolds	Collection of
(1723–1792).	Mr. and Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee.

This, one of Sir Joshua’s finest group pictures (93 × 57 inches), was painted in 1777, a year in which the artist made many notable portraits including that of Diana, Viscountess Crosbie (see page 345). Lady Betty Delmé is seated at the base of an old beech-tree on her estate between London and Portsmouth, her arm around her children. The little Scotch terrier seems much interested in his master. The whole is a wonderful study in amber and russet tones. The picture came to Mrs. Satterlee from her father, the late Mr. J. P. Morgan.

Joshua Reynolds was born in Plympton Earl Plymouth, July 16, 1723, the son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, headmaster of the grammar school. Early showing great talent for drawing, young Joshua was apprenticed in 1740 to Thomas Hudson, the portrait-painter, in London. Three years later he returned home and established himself as a portrait-painter at Plymouth Dock, where he met William Gandy, a painter, who had no little influence upon his style. In 1744 Reynolds was back in London and in 1749 back in Devonshire, this time settling in Devonport. In this year he met at Mount Edgcumbe young Commodore Keppel (afterwards Admiral), whose portrait he painted and with whom he formed a great friendship. Accepting Keppel’s invitation to sail with him on the Centurion for a Mediterranean trip, Reynolds eventually reached Rome, where he spent two years. While studying in the Vatican he caught a severe cold which resulted in a life-long deafness. Returning home in 1753, Reynolds took rooms in St. Martin’s Lane, then the headquarters of art, and people began to flock to his studio. He then removed to Newport Street and in 1760 established himself in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), which for thirty years was the rendez-vous for the artistic, literary, and distinguished world of London. In 1768 Reynolds was unanimously elected first President of the just-established Royal Academy and in 1769 was knighted by George III. In 1784 Sir Joshua succeeded Allan Ramsay as Painter-in-Ordinary to the King. In 1789 his eyesight began to fail and he soon had to relinquish his art. Sir Joshua died in 1792 and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral with great pomp. In addition to his enormous list of paintings Sir Joshua designed the windows for New College, Oxford, and Oxford gave him the degree of D. C. L. Sir Joshua’s famous Discourses on Art were delivered between 1769 and 1790 at the Academy “to encourage a solid and vigorous course of study.”

When we think of the thousands of pictures that Sir Joshua painted—all of them fine and many of them great—we stand amazed at the capacity of the artist who produced them. They were all creations! The five portraits of little Isabella Gordon known as Angels’ Heads (National Gallery, London), which in lightness, delicacy, and iridescence have been compared to the petals of a flower and the melting softness of the rainbow; Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse; the Strawberry Girl; the Age of Innocence; Nelly O’Brien; Kitty Fisher; Penelope Boothby; Mrs. Abington; Lord Ligonier; The Graces Decorating a Terminal figure of Hymen; Diana, Lady Crosbie; Mrs. Hardinge; Lady Cockburn and her Children;—all belong to the first rank of original and artistic achievement.

“Reynolds,” Sir Walter Armstrong writes, “arrived at results scarcely to be distinguished from those of genius, and did so entirely by the action of an original mind and a profound taste upon accumulated materials. His path towards excellence was conscious, discriminative, judicial. Every step he took was the result of a deliberate choice. He felt no heats driving him into particular expression in his own despite. Just as by fairness of mind he produced the effect of sympathy among his friends, so by unerring judgment he produces the effect of creation on us who value his art. He appears to me the supreme, if not the only, modern instance of a painter reaching greatness along a path, every step of which was trodden deliberately, with a full consciousness of why it was taken and whither it was leading, and with the power unimpaired to turn back or to change the goal at any moment. Superficially the art of Sir Joshua resembled that of Raphael as little as it well could; mentally the processes of the two men were curiously alike. Both possessed taste to such a degree that it became genius; and both were endowed, for the service of their taste, with a mental industry which is rare.”

It is unfortunate that Sir Joshua experimented so deeply with his pigments and glazes so that we can see none of his pictures in their pristine beauty and brilliance. That he was a rare colorist we would know from Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and the Angels’ Heads—the former rich and gorgeous and the latter iridescent and delicate—showing the two extremes.

Here is Sir Joshua’s palette given in the Farington Diary under date of August 14, 1806:

“Marchi (Sir Joshua Reynolds’s assistant) I called on before dinner to desire him to call upon J. Taylor to give his opinion of a picture said to be a portrait of Garrick by Sir J. Reynolds. I desired Marchi to state to me what colors Sir Joshua Reynolds had placed upon his palette and the order in which they were laid. He named them as follows. He used a handle palette as it is called: White; Naples Yellow; Yellow oker; Vermillion; light red; lake; black. Asphaltum he used occasionally, but that he had it in a galley-pot. His vehicles were: Mastick varnish and drying oil made into Macgilp in a pot. Nut oil which he used with his white in a pot. Mastick varnish only, which he sometimes used alone; and Marchi observed that it caused his colors to crack and fly off. Wax (white virgin wax) he had in a tin pot which he melted at the fire when he proposed to use it. This vehicle Marchi observed caused his colors to scale off from the canvas in flakes.”

To mention the sitters who came to Leicester Fields and the company that gathered there every evening when Sir Joshua was not dining out would be to list the entire society of London in the Eighteenth Century.

“In these days we are apt to forget that to many of Sir Joshua’s contemporaries, with the stricter notions of social precedency in vogue a century ago,” Sir Walter Armstrong notes, “the painter’s station in London society must have seemed almost an outrage, especially as it had been won without any kind of pretence or undue submission to those who were then called the great. Fond as he was of the best that Society could give, he lived his life in his own way, invited whom he chose to his table, leaving his guests to shake down among themselves as best they could, and, so far as we can discover, paying little heed to prejudices on the matter of birth, and still less to those which had to do with politics or conventional morality.”

Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower has made this very interesting comparison of Romney and Reynolds:

“The mighty events which were in progress around him—the war with the American Colonies, and the supervening naval war with France and Spain—ran their course without personally affecting him, whereas Reynolds was in constant touch with the men who were most vigorously opposing Lord North’s policy, with Burke and Charles Fox; and it was his own intimate friend of nearly thirty years standing, Admiral Keppel, whose trial in this very year 1778, formed the central battle-ground between the Court and the popular party. In all these things Reynolds was intimately concerned, as he was in the lighter events of social life, with his constant dinner-parties at Leicester Fields, his still more constant attendance at the tables of the great and the assemblies of Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Ord, his outings to Streatham, and his mild flirtation with ‘Little Burney.’ But Romney lived remote, as remote in his shyness and isolation as Gainsborough lived in his fondness for a Bohemian world—the world of artists that painted and played and left war to the soldiers and politics to the politician. It is true that a couple of years afterwards politics were brought pretty closely home to both of them, as they were, nolentibus volentibus, to all the householders in London. The Keppel riots in 1778, celebrating the acquittal of the popular Admiral, were festive and pleasant enough; noblemen and gentlemen went out with the crowd; young Pitt, it is said, helped to break Lord North’s windows; and young Rogers, the banker-poet, to unhinge the gates of the Admiralty. This was very well and very pleasant; but two years later the mob improved upon their lesson, and in the Lord George Gordon Riots London was ablaze.”

The Strawberry Girl

Sir Joshua Reynolds	Collection of
(1723–1792).	Mrs. Francis F. Prentiss.

James Northcote in his Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds notes: “The picture of a little Strawberry Girl was painted about this time (1775?) and he considered it one of his best works, observing that no man ever could produce more than about half a dozen really original works in his life; “and this picture,” he added, “is one of mine.”

This little girl is about three years old and is shown at three-quarter length with a handkerchief folded around her head after the fashion of a turban, the curls escaping from her forehead. She wears a lightcolored dress with a pinafore caught over her arm. At her neck is a ribbon bow. Her hands are demurely folded at the waist and over her right arm hangs a cone-shaped strawberry “pottle.” The background is composed of large rocks and trees at the right.

The picture is painted in oils on canvas (29 × 24 inches) and is a replica of the original in the Wallace Collection, London.

Leslie and Taylor voiced so well the impression that every one has when looking at this fascinating work that what they said bears quoting:

“The Strawberry Girl with her pottle on her arm, creeping timidly along and glancing round her with large, black eyes, might be Little Red Riding Hood hearing the first rustle of the wolf in the wayside bushes, could we substitute a red hood for the odd turban-like head-dress with which the painter has crowned his little maiden, and which even Sir Joshua’s taste can barely make becoming, and hang on her arm the basket of butter and eggs for her sick grandmother instead of the strawberry pottle which gives her a name.”

The model for The Strawberry Girl was Miss Theophila Palmer, Sir Joshua’s favorite niece, who lived with him and looked after him until her marriage. Her name Theophila was divided into two pet names. “The” and “Offie,” upon which Sir Joshua once wrote a playful-verse:

When I’m drinking my tea, I am thinking of The,
When I’m drinking my coffee, I’m thinking of Offie,
So, whether I’m drinking my tea or my coffee,
I always am thinking of thee, my The-Offie.

In the Farington Diary (Vol. IV), by Joseph Farington (London, 1924), we also learn that Miss Theophila Palmer was the “My dear Offy” of Sir Joshua’s letter, dated Jan. 30, 1781, in which he wished that she and Mr. Robert Lovell Gwatkin of Kellrow, Truro, Cornwall, her future husband, “may be as happy as both deserve—and you will be the happiest couple in England. So God Bless you!”

Fanny Burney, in a description of a reception at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house in Leicester Square, refers to young Gwatkin, the Cornish Squire, “making sheep’s eyes at Offy, whose uncle, Sir Joshua was very fond of her.” “I never was,” he wrote to Offy, “a great friend to the efficacy of precept, nor a great professor of love and affection, and, therefore, I have never told you how much I loved you for fear you should grow saucy upon it.”

The well-known picture of Simplicity is of Theophila Gwatkin, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Gwatkin and this little girl was also known affectionately as The.

Diana, Viscountess Crosbie

Sir Joshua Reynolds	Collection of the late
(1723–1792).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced the Strawberry Girl one of his most original creations. The portrait of Diana Lady Crosbie certainly ranks as another. All critics are united in considering it one of the finest productions of the master’s brush. Who but Sir Joshua would ever have thought of such a pose?

The Honorable Miss Diana Sackville, daughter of Lord George Sackville, aged twenty-one, was engaged to be married to Viscount Crosbie (son and heir of the first Earl of Glandore) and was visiting his seat, Ardfert Abbey, Kerry, Ireland. Lord Crosbie sent for Sir Joshua Reynolds to come and paint the portrait of Lady Diana; and the story goes that soon after arriving Sir Joshua caught sight of Lady Diana running across the lawn. He was so fascinated by her lightness and grace that he begged permission to paint her as he had first seen her.

Consequently, we have Lady Diana surprised in the act, as it were, of tripping over the park, holding up her dress with her right hand and extending her left in graceful attitude. The dress is white silk, bound at the waist by a gold sash, and beneath the folds of the dress, so exquisitely painted, the tip of a small slipper is seen. The picture was painted in September, 1777, and two months later Lady Diana was married to Lord Crosbie. In 1781, when her husband succeeded to the title, Lady Crosbie became, of course, Countess of Glandore. She died in 1814. For painting this portrait Sir Joshua received £78.15.

The picture, oils on canvas (93 × 58 inches), left the Crosbie home only within recent years to occupy a place of honor in Sir Charles Tennant’s drawing-room in London. From the Tennant Collection it went directly to California. The picture has been engraved several times and the best known engravings are by W. Dickinson (1779); James Scott (1863); and R. S. Clouston (1890); and “proofs before letters” of these plates bring very high prices in the auction-rooms.

“Here is a miracle of vivacity,” says Spielmann, “so natural, so alive, that you almost forget that you are in front of a picture as you look at this lady who moves across the canvas with outstretched hand to greet you as you approach. Rarely have animation and movement been so completely realized on canvas. The design is finely sustained by the mellow, golden tone of the white dress and the telling note of the golden scarf, all seen against a convincing landscape that seems entirely novel in Reynolds’s open-air portraits.”

Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse

Sir Joshua Reynolds	Collection of the late
(1723–1792).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

This gorgeous portrait, oils on canvas (93 × 56 inches), was painted in 1785, when the famous actress was twenty-eight, in the full bloom of her beauty and fruition of her talents; and it is rightly described by Mrs. Jameson as “the apotheosis of her genius and beauty.” It is painted in the “grand style” with rich coloring of amber and purple, the Tragic Muse seated on a throne among the clouds with her head lifted as if listening to some inspiring voices and her hand raised as if to command silence. A coronet of pearls adorns her hair, and heavy ropes of pearls are wound around her neck and are knotted loosely in front. Over her lap is thrown a drapery, on the hem of which Sir Joshua painted his name.

The poetic and dramatic conception of the picture show how much Sir Joshua admired Michelangelo’s Prophets and Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel.

In this magnificent work Sir Joshua certainly realized his theories regarding the “grand style” as expressed in his Fourth Discourse to his pupils: “To give a general air of grandeur at first view all trifling or artificial play of little lights, or an attention to a variety of tints, is to be avoided; a quietness and simplicity must reign over the whole work; to which a breadth of uniform and simple color will very much contribute.”

In the theatrical annals of England the Kemble family rank with the later Trees and Terrys; and Mrs. Siddons was a Kemble. Sarah Siddons, the eldest daughter of Roger Kemble, actor and theatrical manager, was born in 1755 in Brecon, Wales, where her father was managing a troupe of players. She was the sister of Charles Kemble, the famous comedian and manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, and aunt of Fanny Kemble, the noted actress. At an early age, Sarah played small parts in her father’s company and when she was eighteen was married to a young actor named Siddons, also in the Kemble company. Soon afterward Mr. and Mrs. Siddons appeared in The Clandestine Marriage in the provinces. Sarah Siddons soon attracted Garrick’s attention and he gave her an engagement at Drury Lane; but she was not a success. She then went to Bath, where she became a favorite and established her reputation. In 1783 she reappeared at Drury Lane and this time she took London by storm. Then she went to Dublin, where more triumphs added to her confidence as well as to her fame; and, when she returned to London, it was to Covent Garden, where her brother, John Philip Kemble, was manager. Mrs. Siddons shone especially in tragedy and achieved, perhaps, her greatest success as Lady Macbeth. When Byron saw her in this rôle he wrote: “It was something transcending nature; one would say that a being of a superior order had descended from a high sphere to inspire fear and admiration at the same time.”

Mrs. Siddons’s great parts were Lady Macbeth, Portia, Constance, Isabella, Jane Shore, Almeira, Lady Ann, Calista, Belvedera, and Mrs. Beverly. In 1812 she retired from the stage with a large fortune and died in 1831. Thomas Campbell wrote her life in 1834.

All the portrait-painters of the day had Mrs. Siddons sit to them. The most famous pictures, however, were Reynolds’s Tragic Muse; Gainsborough’s beautiful one in an afternoon costume of light blue, striped silk, black hat, yellow scarf and muff, in the National Gallery, London; and two by Lawrence, also in the National Gallery, London.

“It was probably after his return from his tour of the Low Countries that Mrs. Siddons, now in the very flush of her popularity, sat to him. She had not yet acted in Shakespeare, unless her first appearance as Isabella (Measure for Measure) and as Constance (King John) with her brother, John Kemble (for whom her success had procured a leading engagement at Drury Lane), preceded her first sittings, which is possible, though not probable. Her fame has been won in such parts as Isabella (in The Mourning Bride), Euphrasia (in The Grecian Daughter), Jane Shore, Calista, Belvedera, Zara, and Mrs. Beverly. The Royal Family, little as they loved tragedy, had already distinguished her by every mark of favor. Her house was besieged by the noble and fashionable. The managers of Drury Lane had gladly supplemented her modest salary of ten pounds a week by a double benefit; and in June she had left London—after a series of successes which almost eclipsed the still recent fame of Garrick—for Ireland and a short round of provincial performances. Mr. Russell, author of the History of Modern Europe, had sung her praises under the title of The Tragic Muse, before she left London. His verses are forgotten, but they may have suggested to Reynolds the subject of his picture. It could not have been prompted, as Boaden imagines, by an allusion in the epilogue to Tancred and Sigismunda, as her first appearance in that tragedy was on the 24th of April, 1784, when the picture was already in its place on the walls of the Exhibition-Room. The conception of this noble work was no doubt suggested by Michelangelo’s Isaiah. Mrs. Siddons told Mr. Phillips that it was the production of pure accident. Sir Joshua had begun the head and figure in a different view; but while he was occupied in the preparation of some color she changed her position to look at a picture hanging on the wall of the room. When he again looked at her and saw the action she had assumed, he requested her not to move; and thus arose the beautiful and expressive figure we now see in the picture.”24

Yet there is still another story, which is told by Mrs. Jameson. Mrs. Siddons used to describe Sir Joshua as taking her by the hand and leading her up to his platform with the words: “Ascend your undisputed throne; bestow on me some idea of the Tragic Muse.” On which, Mrs. Siddons said: “I walked up the steps and instantly seated myself in the attitude in which the Tragic Muse now appears.” It is most likely that both stories are true. Sir Joshua’s leading the Queen of the London Stage to her throne on his painting-platform with his courtly compliment was thoroughly in character and that he also encouraged The Tragic Muse to act her part and create expression as well as take a dramatic pose, is also most in keeping with the exciting moment. Sir Joshua undoubtedly foresaw that he had the opportunity of producing his greatest masterpiece.

Mrs. Siddons also related that when Sir Joshua was putting the last touches to the work he said: “I cannot resist the opportunity for going down to posterity on the edge of your garment,” upon which he painted his name and the date 1784 on the hem of the robe.

However, Sir Joshua had already done this ten years before in the portrait of Lady Cockburn and her Children, in the National Gallery, London, where the name and date make a decorative finish to Lady Cockburn’s amber-colored robe trimmed with white fur thrown across her lap and that famous picture was begun in 1773 and finished in 1775.

The Tragic Muse was greatly admired when it first appeared. The Public Advertiser, April 28, 1784, said:

“It is impossible to be too lavish in its praise; it is, indeed, a most sublime and masterly performance and undoubtedly one of the very best that ever was produced by Sir Joshua. He seems to have conceived and executed it with enthusiasm. Mrs. Siddons is drawn in the character of The Tragic Muse, the composition is in a grand style, the figure possesses great dignity, and that fine expression of countenance for which the original is preëminent and almost unrivalled. Sir Joshua has been said to paint the mind; and perhaps there never was a more striking instance of it than in this performance. The accompanying genii ready to administer the dagger or the bowl have also great expression, and in the effect of the tout ensemble there is a grandeur and a solemnity suited to the subject and highly worthy of universal admiration.”

It is illuminating, too, to dip into the Farington Diary (London, 1925), and note in 1801:

“Opie thinks the Mrs. Siddons by Sir Joshua the finest picture he knows. Opie thinks the picture of Mrs. Siddons much superior to any of the Titians which were brought by Day from Rome.

“Bourgeois mentioned that Sir Joshua had said the principle to work upon is to fix a high light and a lowest depth to which all other lights and dark parts should be subordinate.”

In 1808 we read:

“Lawrence spoke with the highest admiration of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Lord Heathfield now at the European Museum, having been sent there by Boydell to be sold for 350 guineas. He said this picture and the portrait of Mrs. Siddons by Sir Joshua are the top of his Art.” And again in the same year: “We looked at the picture of Mrs. Siddons by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Lawrence said, it was his best picture. I said, it was a high refinement of Rembrandt. Mr. Smith25 said he gave £320 for it, which was not half what Calonne paid. It cost the latter £800.”

On the authority of Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower in Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1902), we learn:

“There is another version of The Tragic Muse in the Dulwich Gallery. This was sold by Reynolds to M. Desenfans for seven hundred guineas in 1790 and the date on the hem of her garment is 1789, from which it appears that he completed this five years after the Grosvenor House picture. Both of these may be regarded as the authentic work of the master. There is a replica also of The Tragic Muse at Langley Park, near Stowe, which is said to have been given by Reynolds to Mr. Harvey in exchange for a painting by Snyders of a Boar Hunt; and another was in the possession of Mrs. Combe in Edinburgh. I think there is no doubt that these replicas are by the hands of Reynolds’s assistants.”

Mrs. Siddons in the Dulwich Gallery (canvas 93 × 57 inches) described as follows:

“She sits on a throne in front view and looks up towards the right; the right arm and the left elbow rest on the throne; with the hand raised as if listening to some inspiring voice; a coronet on the back of her hair; wearing an amber brown dress, with rows of pearls round her neck; across her lap is a robe, on the hem of which Sir Joshua has inscribed his name. Paid for, February 1790, Mrs. Siddons, sold to Mr. Desenfans £735.”

The picture was purchased from Sir Joshua in 1790 by Noel Desenfans and by him bequeathed to Sir Francis Bourgeois, R. A., by whom it was left to Dulwich College. It hangs in the picture gallery there. It is interesting to note that the date on the hem of the robe is 1789—five years after the Duke of Westminster’s picture! Some critics think that Sir Joshua also painted this replica himself.

Leslie and Taylor mention in their Life of Reynolds that they failed to find any note relative to Score’s making a copy of The Tragic Muse; but they draw attention, on the contrary, to the following extract from Northcote’s Life of Reynolds:

“The picture of a little Strawberry Girl with a kind of turban on her head was painted about this time (1772) and he considered it one of his best works, observing that no man ever could produce more than about half a dozen really original works in his life; ‘and this picture,’ he added, ‘is one of them.’ The picture was exhibited (1773) and repeated several times; not so much for the sake of profit as for that of improvement, for he always advised as a good mode of study, that a painter should have two pictures in hand of precisely the same subject and design and should work on them alternately; by which means, if chance produced a lucky hit, as it often does, then instead of working on the same piece, and by that means destroy that beauty which chance had given, he should go to the other and improve upon that. Then return again to the first picture, which he might work upon without any fear of obliterating the excellence which chance had given it, having transposed it to the other. Thus his desire of excellence enabled him to combat with every sort of difficulty or labor.

“The compilers’ theory, then, is: after the sketch of Mrs. Siddons’s portrait was laid in, he took up a fresh canvas, made a replica and worked on both alternately until ’the lucky hit’ was produced and that appeared to Sir Joshua in the picture finished and exhibited in the Royal Academy, 1784. Notwithstanding the glowing eulogiums passed upon it, a purchaser was not found for it until 1788, when it was sold to M. de Calonne. Sir Joshua did not record the sale in his ledger, or note-book, and it only transpired when Skinner and Dyke sold at their rooms, Spring Gardens, 1795, the English pictures of the Calonne Collection and specified in the Catalogue that M. de Calonne paid Sir Joshua 800 guineas for the portrait of Mrs. Siddons in the character of the Tragic Muse.

“At this time M. Desenfans was Consul-general in Great Britain for the Kingdom of Poland, a writer of marked ability, a recognized authority on art, an extensive picture-dealer, employed by the King of Poland to purchase high-class Old Masters to complete his Collection and who kept up an acquaintance with Sir Joshua, notwithstanding the trick he played of selling him, through Cribb, his frame-maker, the copy of a Claude, specially made by Marchi for the purpose as an original. The compiler’s surmise is, then, that he knew Sir Joshua had the unfinished replica on hand, and came to an understanding with him to complete it in its present form, ‘signed and dated 1789 on the edge of the robe.’ This investigation leads to three inferences; first, that Sir Joshua would not condescend, for any consideration, to sign and date a copy of The Tragic Muse made by Score; secondly, that an astute man of business, such as Desanfans was, would not give £735 for a copy; thirdly, that The Dulwich picture must now be regarded in the same light as the Westminster one—both from the hand of Reynolds; but which was first commenced cannot be ascertained.”

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Sir Joshua Reynolds	Collection of the late
(1723–1792).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

It is interesting to compare this picture by Sir Joshua with Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire (see page 373), which is probably the earlier of the two. This picture, oils on canvas (94 × 57 inches), was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776 as No. 233. The Duchess had not long been married when this picture was painted, as her marriage took place in 1774. There is something in the pose that suggests the portrait of Diana, Lady Crosbie, which was painted later. The Duchess is represented full-length facing the left, in the act of descending a flight of stone steps, her right hand placed on the balustrade and her left holding her dress very gracefully. The dress is cream-colored cut low in the neck and fashioned with full sleeves. The skirt is gracefully cut and abounds in plaits and draperies. A gauzy scarf is wound around her right arm and floats below. The hair is dressed very fashionably with a long and round curl pinned tightly at the back of the neck and reaching the shoulder, and above the braid which forms a coronal the hair mounts higher and is ornamented by pearls and grey and red feathers. Vines are growing gracefully around the balustrade, beyond which and through the near-by trees we see an open vista of the park with a statue at the left. Presumably this is Chatsworth, the seat of the Duke of Devonshire.

The picture was in the Collection of Earl Spencer, K. G., at Althorp, Nottinghamshire, before it was taken to California.

The Cottage Door

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of the late
(1727–1788).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

The little group is assembled in front of a thatched cottage, beside which a gnarled and withered tree rises scarred and seared by the storms of many years. Overhanging the roof a large tree droops its feathery Gainsborough foliage and, on the left, half of another feathery Gainsborough tree is waving in the summer breeze. By this tree, and farther back as well, a stream is seen falling in a little cascade beneath a rustic bridge. Luxuriant weeds grow in the foreground and by the side of the cottage, the door of which is open and beside which a peasant’s family is grouped. The mother, in yellowish brown skirt and white bodice, has a suggestion (save for the costume) of the beautiful ladies that sat to Gainsborough. In her arms is a baby. On her right, is a little boy, scantily dressed, who is eating something; in front of her are two children, one holding a bowl and the other dipping from it with a spoon; a fifth child, with one hand on his head and the finger of his left hand in his mouth, looks forward shyly; and the sixth is seated on the ground by his side. “Old pimply-nosed Rembrandt,” as Gainsborough called him, never lighted a scene more beautifully, nor more marvellously than this.

The picture, oils on canvas (57 × 46 inches), is one of Gainsborough’s most mature works and dates from about 1776–1778.

Bought by T. Harvey of Catton, Norfolk, in 1786, it passed to Mr. Coppin of Norwich in 1807. Then it became the property of Sir John Leicester, Bart., created Lord de Tabley in 1826; and at the Sale of the effects of the latter it was bought by Earl Grosvenor, created Marquess of Westminster in 1831. In 1921 The Cottage Door was sold by the second Duke of Westminster to Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

“There is no painter of English birth more widely appreciated than Gainsborough whose art touches every observer, great and simple, learned and unlearned. As we look at his pictures, said Constable, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them. A thread of romance runs through the whole of Gainsborough’s career, from his marriage to a beautiful and well-dowered bride, whose origin is shrouded in mystery, down to the pathetic termination of the long years of jealous rivalry with Reynolds. And romance and mystery are inseparably connected with his pictures—with the portraits of that Duchess of Devonshire, whom tradition has brought us to regard as typical of English beauty, with that masterpiece at Edinburgh, the portrait of Mrs. Graham, hidden from sight for fifty years on account of one of the tenderest of love stories; and with the famous Blue Boy, the secret of whose history still remains undiscovered.”26

“Old pimply-nosed Rembrandt and myself were both born in a mill,” Gainsborough used to say, because his father, John Gainsborough, was a manufacturer of woollens in Sudbury. Thomas was born there in 1727. At twelve he was said to be a “confirmed painter.” His first portrait seems to have been a great success. Some one had been stealing pears from the Gainsborough orchard and one day, when young Thomas was sketching there he saw a man’s face peering over the fence. Instantly he made a quick sketch and took it into the house. By means of this sketch the culprit was identified. Gainsborough then enlarged the sketch, painted an oil portrait, mounted it on a board, and stuck “Tom Peartree” up to the delight of all the neighbors and confusion of strangers. This picture was lent to the Gainsborough Exhibition held at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885 and is now in the Elizabethan Mansion in Christchurch Park, Ipswich.

In 1741 Gainsborough went to London and, after studying under Hubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman, took a studio in Hatton Garden and tried to start as a portrait and landscape-painter. A year of failure decided the young artist to return home. In a short time he married Margaret Burr (supposed to be a natural daughter of the Duke of Bedford) and removed to Ipswich. Here he painted chiefly landscapes. About 1760 he settled in Bath and immediately became the fashion. Fourteen years later Gainsborough removed to London, where his success continued and he became the rival of Reynolds. Gainsborough had already in 1768 been nominated by George III one of the thirty-six Academicians on the foundation of the Academy and he exhibited almost yearly at the Royal Academy from 1769 to 1788, when there was a misunderstanding about the hanging of his pictures. Gainsborough died in 1788, closing one of the most remarkable careers in art, for this great painter was almost entirely self-taught. Reynolds called attention to this remarkable fact in his Fourteenth Discourse, in which he cites Gainsborough as an example of an artist who has arrived “at great fame without the assistance of an academical education, or any of those preparatory studies which have so often been recommended.”

Yet his genius was such that he attained the greatest eminence in his day and his place in art to-day is in the small circle of the very great ones.

Ruskin did not exaggerate in the least when he wrote: “Gainsborough’s power of color is capable of taking rank beside that of Rubens; he is the purest colorist of the English School; with him, in fact, the art of painting did in great part die and exists not now in Europe. In management and quality of single and particular tint, in the purely technical part of painting, Turner is a child to Gainsborough. His hand is as light as the sweep of a cloud, as swift as the flash of a sunbeam. He never loses sight of his picture as a whole. In a word Gainsborough is an immortal painter.”

Gainsborough painted about seven hundred portraits and two hundred landscapes. Strange as it may seem, he preferred to paint landscapes. At least he told George III this. And he told his friend Jackson in a letter “I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my viol-da-gamba and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness and ease.”

This seems strange coming from one of the greatest of all portrait-painters.

To read the list of Gainsborough’s portraits is to run through the Social Register of London and Bath. Gainsborough painted “everybody that was anybody.” The great personalities of the day wanted their portraits “limned” by both Reynolds and Gainsborough, often adding Romney and Hoppner as well. The fourteen years that he lived in Bath Gainsborough’s painting-room was almost as much of a rendez-vous as the Pump Room and his sitters ranged from the most aristocratic and wealthy, such as Earl Spencer, his wife, and little daughter, the future Duchess of Devonshire, to statesmen, like Pitt, and actors like Garrick and Quin. The latter sat three times to Gainsborough. The following little piece of amusing acting usually took place. Quin, suffering from gout, would hobble to the painting-room and tapping at the door would ask “Is Old Grumpus in?” Gainsborough would reply “Come in”; and, placing a chair for his friend and a stool to rest his foot upon, would put on a grave, doctorial look and, resting his chin on his maul-stick, would inquire in the Bath phrase: “Well, how is toe?”

Quin evidently was a critic: “Sometimes, Tom Gainsborough,” he said, “a picture in your rigmarole style appears to my optics the veriest daub,—then, the devil’s in you, I think you a Van Dyck!” And Gainsborough would tell Quin that “nothing could equal the devilism of portrait-painting.”

“Indeed, he told me,” Angelo relates, “at his house in Pall Mall, that he was sure the perplexities of rendering something like a human resemblance from human blocks was a trial of patience that would have tempted holy St. Anthony to cut his own throat with his palette-knife.”

Gainsborough was devoted to music, played several instruments and was a great friend of the oboe-player in the Queen’s Band, John Christian Fischer, who married his daughter Margaret; of John Christian Bach, son of the great John Sebastian Bach; and of Bach’s associate, Charles Frederick Abel, the celebrated virtuoso on the viol-da-gamba, whose portrait Gainsborough painted with his instrument by his side, and which is now in the Huntington Gallery.

Gainsborough’s portrait by Zoffany in the National Portrait Gallery, London, presents a handsome and rather dashing man of about thirty-five with classic features and large, fine eyes with penetrating glance and an intelligent, interior light. Had he not been a painter he might have easily become a beau, or a gallant officer of the Major André type, or of that impudent young dog, Jack Absolute, who captivated Miss Lydia Languish in The Rivals.

It was the same in London as it had been in Bath. Gainsborough became the fashion. He barely had time to fill all the orders that came thick and fast and he enjoyed society and still more his cronies, and, to judge from numerous anecdotes, was not averse to wild companions; but for all that he was generous, sympathetic, outgoing, and much beloved by his friends.

As an instance of his ready wit on one occasion, when he was in court regarding a picture the councillor tried to embarrass him. “I observe,” he said, “you lay great stress on a painter’s eye. What do you mean by that expression!” “A painter’s eye,” replied Gainsborough, without a moment’s hesitation, “is to him what a lawyer’s tongue is to you!”

Gainsborough was sprightly, humorous, and lively in conversation and indeed, in society, to use the word of the period, something of a “rattle.”

Whenever he appeared, either at a morning lounge at Christie’s amidst the enlightened and polite, or at My Lady’s midnight rout surrounded by bowing beaux and curtseying belles, his gaiety enlivened every group. He knew everybody and everybody knew him; he was, however, most at home with the worthies of the auction-room. For some years Garrick was frequently his companion at Christie’s, where the amusement caused by the humor common to both never failed to give an additional zest to the proceedings. Mr. Christie often declared that “the presence of this choice pair added fifteen per cent to his commission on a sale.”

And this was a “choice pair,”—Garrick and Gainsborough!

“We know as little about Gainsborough’s tools and methods of painting as we do of his pigments, but if his daughter’s memory may be trusted, her father worked with paint so thin and liquid that his palette ran over unless he kept it on the level. It is generally agreed that he used very long brushes, and Nollekens Smith who saw him at work, says: ‘I was much surprised to see him sometimes paint portraits with pencils on sticks full six feet in length and his method of using them was this: he placed himself and his canvas at a right angle to the sitter, so that he stood still and touched the features of his pictures exactly at the same distance at which he viewed the sitter.’ The anonymous biographer of the Morning Chronicle who knew the painter excuses his supposed want of finish by saying that he worked with a very long and broad brush. Another contemporary, John Williams (Pasquin), in a biographical note declares that Gainsborough always prided himself upon using longer and broader tools than other men and upon standing farther away from his canvas when at work. That he always stood to paint we know from Thicknesse, but it is obvious that all his work could not have been done with broad tools of hog-hair. Probably he used camel-hair brushes sometimes, as did Gainsborough Dupont, who inherited his uncle’s implements and colors and in painting followed his manner exactly. Dupont left behind him, in addition to a great quantity of hogtools, ‘twelve bundles of camel’s hair pencils.’ Fulcher says that when Gainsborough’s sitters left him it was his custom to close the shutter, in which was a small circular aperture, the only access for light and by this subdued illumination work on his picture and get rid of superfluous detail. No authority is given for this statement, but there can be little doubt that Gainsborough loved to subdue the light in his painting-room. Williams says that it was sometimes subdued to such an extent that objects were barely visible.”27

And Osias Humphrey, R. A., tells us a little more, drawing from his memories of Bath,... “Exact resemblances in his portraits was Mr. Gainsborough’s constant aim, to which he invariably adhered. These pictures, as well as his landscapes, were frequently wrought by candle-light and generally with great force and likeness. But his painting-room—even by day a kind of darkened twilight—had scarcely any light and I have seen him, whilst his subjects have been sitting to him when neither they nor the pictures were scarcely discernible.” We also learn that Gainsborough let in more light when the picture reached its finishing stages.

The Mall in St. James’s Park

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of the late
(1727–1788).	Mr. Henry Clay Frick.

Horace Walpole characterized this delightful picture as airier than a Watteau and “all in motion and flutter like a lady’s fan.” It is one of Gainsborough’s latest works, painted in 1786, and one of his masterpieces, oils on canvas (57¾ × 47½ inches). The picture was among those in the painter’s studio at the time of his death. After a few changes of ownership, it passed into the Collection of George Frost, an artist and fellow-townsman of Gainsborough, and then to Sir Audley Dallas Neeld, Bart., Grittleton House, near Chippenham, Wiltshire.

The Mall is a perfect epitome of London society in the Eighteenth Century—the London of Austin Dobson.

“The Mall from the days of the Stuarts until the closing years of the Eighteenth Century was the field upon which fashion, and feminine fashion especially, chose to disport itself. Twice a day social London donned its best apparel and took a turn under the trees, once at midday and again, in summer, in its evening clothes after the early dinner. Here fashion met its friends, exchanged its repartees, made appointments for evening rendez-vous at Ranelagh or Vauxhall, ate fruit or bought flowers from Betty’s girl out of St. James’s Street, or drank syllabubs from the red cow’s milk which was one of the attractions of the London parks. Nothing in the external aspect of London more struck the intelligent foreigner than the amenities of the promenade in the Mall. One of these gentlemen concluded an eloquent pæan on the beauty of the lady promenaders, by recording with rapture that of a morning the very ground glistened with the pins which they had dropped. The Mall, indeed, was the very shrine of flounce and furbelow until somewhere about 1795, when fashion unaccountably moved northward to the walk in the Green Park at the back of Arlington Street, and from there later to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

“The very spirit of this life is preserved in Gainsborough’s picture, one of the few canvases in which he represents figures in motion; singular also among his work is that it contains a score or so of figures. There is a central group of four ladies with an attendant cavalier advancing towards the spectator, a pair on the right, two pairs on the left passing each other, others again seated on the right. The accidental episodic quality of such a subject is perfectly conveyed—the transient glance of a passing woman, the turn of the neck appropriate to that attitude, the ground dotted with an occasional dog. Technically it represents Gainsborough at his highest, where the solemn tones of his earlier manner have disappeared, and the very painting itself seems to echo his delight in the mastery of heightened, luminous color.”28

Maria Walpole, Duchess of Gloucester

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of
(1727–1788).	Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft.

The subject of this portrait was famous under three names: her maiden name of Maria Walpole; as Lady Waldegrave; and as the Duchess of Gloucester. She was very beautiful (no one could compete with her but the Gunning sisters); she was very witty and brilliant; and, moreover, she was noted for her rich qualities of heart and character. Her uncle, Horace Walpole, was devoted to her.

Maria Walpole began life under a cloud, but this was soon dispelled and the rest was all sunshine. The Hon. Edward Walpole, second son of Sir Robert, was her father and her mother was a milliner’s apprentice at Bath. Maria was baptized July 10, 1738, at St. James’s, Westminster, and was made legitimate by His Majesty’s warrant. Recognized as a Walpole, everything was done for her. The old London Town and Country Magazine gives us this very good idea of her preparation for life: “Maria’s education was suited to the rank of life in which she has ever figured; and the advantages she derived from it were entirely noticed by every man of taste and discernment who was happy enough to be in her company.”

Horace Walpole brought about her first marriage to the Right Honorable James, Second Earl of Waldegrave, K. G., in 1759; and he wrote to Sir Horace Mann:

“I have married, that is, I am marrying my niece, Maria, my brother’s second daughter, to Lord Waldegrave. What say you? A month ago I was told he liked her—does he? I jumbled them together and he has already proposed. For character and credit he is the first match in England—for beauty I think she is. She has not a fault in her face and person and the detail is charming. A warm complexion tending to brown, fine eyes, brown hair, fine teeth, and infinite wit and variety.”

In another letter Sir Horace wrote: “The second daughter of my brother is beauty itself. Her face, bloom, eyes, hair, teeth, and person all are perfect. You may imagine how charming she is when her only fault, if one must find one, is that her face is rather too round. She has a great deal of wit and vivacity with perfect modesty.”

To George Montagu on May 16, he wrote:

“Well! Maria was married yesterday. Don’t we manage well? The original day was not once put off; lawyers and milliners were all ready canonically. It was as sensible a wedding as ever was. There was neither form nor indecency, both which generally meet on such occasions. They were married at my brother’s in Pall Mall just before dinner by Mr. Keppel;29 the company, my brother, his son, Mrs. Keppel and Charlotte,30 Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lady Betty Waldegrave and I. We dined there. The Earl and new Countess got into the post-chaise at eight o’clock and went to Navestock (Lord Waldegrave’s seat near Brentwood, Essex) alone, where they stay till Saturday night; on Sunday she is to be presented. Maria was in a white and silver nightgown31 with a hat very much pulled over her face; what one could see of it was handsomer than ever; a cold maiden blush gave her the sweetest delicacy in the world.”

Maria was a friend of the Countess of Coventry, who had attained fame as the beautiful Maria Gunning and used to walk with her in the Park and they must have been a very striking pair, for after the Countess of Coventry’s death, Lady Waldegrave was considered the handsomest woman in England. A month after Maria’s marriage Sir Horace noted in a letter: “My Lady Coventry and my niece Walpole have been mobbed in the park.”

There were three daughters of this marriage—Laura, Maria, and Horatia—remembered to-day especially for the group portrait Sir Joshua Reynolds painted of them and which belonged to Sir Horace Walpole in 1782.

Lord Waldegrave died in 1763; and on Sept 6, 1766, Maria, now Dowager Countess of Waldegrave, was married privately to H. R. H. William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, seven years her junior. The marriage was performed in her own house in Pall Mall by her own chaplain and she thus became the sister-in-law of George III. The secret was kept for some time and the King banished his brother from Court, but after two years the Duke was taken back into Royal favor and the Duchess bore her honors with such grace and dignity that she became very popular at Court.

The portrait represented here, oils on canvas (35½ × 27½ inches), was painted about 1779, or before.

“We hear,” the Public Advertiser printed on May 4, 1772, “that the gentlemen upon the Committee for managing the Royal Academy have been guilty of a scandalous meanness to a capital artist by secreting a whole-length picture of an English Countess for fear their Majesties should see it; and this only upon a full conviction that it was the best finished picture sent in this year to the Exhibition.” Again in 1775 a society reporter for the Morning Chronicle gathered up this piece of gossip: “The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester are often going to a famous painter’s in Pall Mall; and it is reported that he is now doing both their pictures, which are intended to be presented to a great lady.”

The picture is nearly three-quarter length and represents the Duchess in a gold-tinted dress with hair dressed high and powdered and wearing lovely pearls. Her head is posed upon her left hand and the arm rests upon a pedestal that is barely visible. There is good reason for thinking this portrait was originally full-length and that it has been cut down. It is interesting to compare this portrait of the Duchess of Gloucester with The Hon. Mrs. Graham in the National Gallery, Edinburgh, who is painted, full length, and is resting her arm, likewise, on a pedestal.

“The introduction of a parapet, or indeed, of any kind of architectural setting in a portrait of kit-cat size is most unusual. The left arm resting on the parapet and the large scale on which the head is here painted, confirm our view that our canvas was originally, as Fulcher claims, a whole length. This canvas to-day is almost exactly kit-cat size. It may well have been cut down to meet the requirements of hanging. Half a century ago such a practice was not unknown, especially in the English Royal Collections. It will be remembered that the lower portions of the canvas of Gainsborough’s Eldest Princesses was very inceremoniously cut away in the early part of the Nineteenth Century.

“A kit-cat, strictly speaking, is a canvas for a portrait less than a half-length, but including the hands, and measuring 36 by 28 inches. It is so called from the portraits of the members of the Club at Barn Elms, who seem to have originally met in the pie-house kept in Shire Lane, London, by one Kit (i.e. Christopher) Cat. These portraits are now in the Baker Collection at Bayfordbury, near Hertford.”32

In June 1904 The London Times stated that “The Duke of Cambridge’s pictures, which are now hung on Christie’s walls, form the largest collection of portraits of the reigning house that has ever been offered for sale. All, in fact, represent George III and his family, with their husbands and wives. By far the finest is Gainsborough’s Maria Walpole, Countess of Waldegrave and Duchess of Gloucester, Horace Walpole’s beautiful niece.”

These art-treasures, as well as Gloucester House, had been inherited by the Late Duke of Cambridge from his aunt, the second and last Duchess of Gloucester, who died in 1857.

The sale of this picture created a sensation. Again referring to the London Times (June 13, 1904), we read: “The honors of the day distinctly fell to Gainsborough, whose beautiful portrait of Maria Walpole has established a record price for this artist’s pictures at auction. Bidding was started on Saturday at 5000 guineas and in rather more than half a dozen bids reached 12,000 guineas, at which it was knocked down to Messrs. Agnew & Sons. The price, therefore, quite eclipses the 10,000 guineas paid in 1876 for the famous stolen Duchess of Devonshire, which remained the record price for a Gainsborough until Saturday.”

In the following November, the Majestic brought the $60,000-Gainsborough to New York.

This portrait, when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1799, was described by Sir Horace Walpole as “very good and like.”

Maria Walpole died in 1807, two years after the Duke of Gloucester, leaving one son and two daughters. Of her other portraits Lionel Cust in The Royal Collection of Paintings, Vol. I, 1905, says:

“The beautiful Countess of Waldegrave was one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s favorite sitters. She sat to him in 1759, after her marriage, for the full-length portrait in peeress’s robes, which belongs to the present Earl Waldegrave, and again in 1761 and 1762, for the well-known portrait in a turban and for the Madonna-like group with her child, which was bequeathed by Frances, Countess Waldegrave, to the Duc d’Aumale, and is now in the Condé Collection at Chantilly. She sat again to Reynolds in 1764, as a widow in mourning for her husband, and more than once again during her widowhood. She sat to him in October, 1767, when really Duchess of Gloucester, for a portrait to be given to her father, Sir Edward Walpole.

“After the marriage had been revealed to the world, the Duchess sat to Reynolds in 1771, for the full-length seated portrait now at Buckingham Palace. This was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1774. This portrait descended to her daughter, H. R. H. Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester, who at her death in November, 1844, bequeathed the portrait to H. R. H. Prince Albert, the late Prince Consort.

“The Duchess of Gloucester sat for the last time to Reynolds in 1779, for a group of herself and her daughter, Princess Sophia Matilda.”

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of
(1727–1788).	Mr. and Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee.

She stands here—proud, elegant, disdainful, stylish, aristocratic, beautiful, and altogether charming, in her dashing, large, black hat worn at a debonnaire angle, white dress, and light petticoat and light blue sash, looking at us with the most marvellous eyes ever put upon canvas and a mouth that matches them in such naturalness that we expect the Duchess to smile at any moment. Her eyes have such fire and sparkle that they pierce right through us. It is hard to believe that we are looking upon a painted portrait—it must be the Duchess herself who gives us that alert, penetrating, fiery, and mocking glance.

This picture has had a most romantic history. It is the famous “Lost Duchess,” stolen in London, and found after twenty-five years in America.

The Duchess, in some unknown way, fell into the hands of a Mrs. Maginnis, an old schoolmistress, who had it cut down to fit the space over the chimney-piece in her sitting-room and burned up the cut-off piece. Mr. Bentley, a dealer bought the picture from Mrs. Maginnis for £56 and then sold it to Mr. Wynn Ellis, a wealthy City merchant, who sent this Portrait of a Lady to be engraved by Messrs. Henry Graves & Co. This firm, having already engraved the Clifden Duchess of Devonshire, at once identified the subject. When the Wynn Ellis Sale took place at Christie’s, June 6, 1876, this portrait created a great deal of excitement. It was catalogued as follows:

“T. Gainsborough, R. A. The Duchess of Devonshire, in a white dress and blue silk petticoat and sash, large black hat and feathers, 59½ × 45 inches.”

As this portrait of the Duchess was the first “star” that ever rose in an auction-sale, it is worth while putting forward here the contemporary account of an event which has passed into history. The London Times records:

“The sale of the modern pictures belonging to the Wynn Ellis Collection on Saturday last created such a sensation as has never been experienced in the picture world of London. Throughout the week the pictures had attracted a considerable number of visitors, but on the day preceding the sale the interest came to a climax and crowds filled the rooms of Messrs. Christie, Manson, & Woods. Anyone passing the neighborhood of St. James’s Square might well have supposed that some great lady was holding a reception and this, in fact, was pretty much what was going on within the Gallery in King Street. All the world had come to see a beautiful Duchess, created by Gainsborough; and so far as we could observe, they all came, saw, and were conquered by her fascinating beauty.

“When the portrait was placed before the crowded audience a burst of applause showed the universal admiration of the picture. The biddings commenced at one of 1000 guineas, which was immediately met with one of 3000 guineas from Mr. Agnew; and, amid a silence of quite breathless attention, the bids followed in quick succession until 10,000 guineas was announced. Mr. Agnew then called 10,100 guineas and won the battle in this most extraordinary contest. The audience densely packed on raised seats round and on the floor of the house, stamped, clapped, and bravoed.”

And now comes the story!

Twenty days after this sale, on the night of May 26, 1876, the galleries of Messrs. Agnew were entered, the canvas was cut from the stretching frame, and the Duchess was carried off!

Where?

By whom?

The picture was already too well-known to be saleable and to make it still better known photographs of the picture were immediately placed in every shop-window in London. The subject became of universal interest: pictures of the Duchess were printed on every article of merchandise possible; and fashion decreed that once again the Duchess’s huge hat should be the proper thing to wear. For many years afterwards the “Gainsborough Hat” and the “Picture Hat” continued to be worn in country towns across the Atlantic, far away from London, by persons who had never heard of the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire.

Sensation No. 2.

In March, 1901, the newspapers all over the world announced that the “Lost Duchess” had been found!

Mr. Morland Agnew, after various negotiations, was handed a parcel in the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago which proved to be the Gainsborough canvas. The discovery had been made by the New York Pinkerton Detective Agency, who found the thief, one Adam Worth alias Henry Richmond, son of a German Jew, who had settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and who was one of the most famous and clever criminals ever known.

A few days after its return the picture was purchased by Mr. J. P. Morgan at a price beyond £30,000.

Many years before, in 1762–3, Gainsborough had painted in his studio at Bath the Duchess of Devonshire when she was little Georgiana Spencer, aged six, in a white dress, pink ribbons, and dainty cap. At the same period Gainsborough painted portraits of her parents, Earl and Countess Spencer of Althorp, the one of the Countess ranking very high among Gainsborough’s works of the Bath period. The Countess, Margaret Georgiana, daughter of the Hon. Stephen Poyntz, was a very beautiful and extremely wealthy woman and the Earl also possessed enormous wealth and became famed for the magnificent Collection he made at Althorp. The marriage of this couple in 1755 created a sensation and was much talked of in the gossipy letters and memoirs of the day. One eye-witness related: “The bride followed in a new sedan-chair lined with white satin, a black page walking before and three footmen behind, all in the most superb liveries. The diamonds worn by the newly married pair were given to Mr. Spencer by Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and were worth £100,000. The shoe-buckles of the bridegroom alone were worth £30,000.”

Lady Harvey related that the wedding-party went from London to Althorp “in three coaches with six horses and two hundred horsemen. The villages through which they passed were in great alarm, some of the people shutting themselves up in their houses, and others coming out with pitchforks, spits, and spades, crying out ‘The invasion has come’, believing that the Pretender and the King of France were both come together; and great relief was experienced when the formidable cavalcade had passed without setting fire to the habitation, or murdering the inhabitants.”

The year after this marriage Mrs. Delany, Horace Walpole’s friend, met “Mrs. Spencer, one of the finest figures I ever saw, in white and silver with all her jewels and scarlet decorations; her modest, unaffected air gives a lustre to all her finery that would be very tinsel without it.”

Is it any wonder that with such parentage Georgiana Spencer should have had brains, beauty, charm, and perfect equipment in every way for that world of society which was her inheritance?

Georgiana was born on June 9, 1757, and was married at the age of seventeen to the fifth Duke of Devonshire, regarded as the “first match” in England. “Georgiana was a lively girl,” said Walpole, “natural and full of grace.” Immediately the Duchess became “the irresistible queen of ton” and the most conspicuous leader of society whenever and wherever she appeared. She dazzled every gathering by her beauty; astonished everyone with her elegant and extravagant dress; and charmed everybody by her wit and her grace. The Duchess was always among the gay butterflies who masqueraded at the Pantheon, promenaded at Ranelagh, danced at assemblies, or played for high-stakes at fashionable gaming-tables. To think of London society in the late Eighteenth Century without the Duchess of Devonshire, is impossible.

Walpole writes that she “effaces all without being a beauty; but her youthful figure, flowing good nature, sense, and lively modesty and modest familiarity make her a phenomenon.”

The Duchess had a clever mind and she delighted in the society of persons of talent. Fox, Sheridan, and Selwyn were among her special friends. The story of her campaigning for Fox with Fox’s sister, Lady Duncannon, and even selling “a kiss for a vote” is told by many pens and by pencils as well, for the Duchess afforded fine material for the caricaturists. The Duchess was much pleased, it is said, by the compliment paid to her during the Fox campaign by an Irishman, who exclaimed: “Sure I could light me pipe at her eyes!” And Gainsborough managed to fix this flaming glance in the famous Satterlee portrait.

Coarse satire attacked the Duchess of Devonshire as it attacks all who enter the political arena; but, on the other hand, there are many tributes from contemporary pens to her sweetness of disposition and to her noble and generous qualities of heart.

In 1806 upon hearing of her death at Devonshire House, Piccadilly, (just lately demolished), the Prince of Wales exclaimed: “We have lost the best-loved woman in England” and Charles James Fox replied: “We have lost the kindest heart in England.”

The Duchess of Devonshire occasionally wrote verse. Her Passage of the Mountain of St. Gothard, dedicated to her children (she had a son and two daughters), was published with a French translation in 1802; an Italian translation was printed in 1803; and a German translation in 1805. This poem gave occasion to Coleridge’s ode with the lines:

“O lady nursed in pomp and pleasure
Whence learned you that heroic measure?”

Gainsborough could not have made this or any other portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire until after 1782, because, in that year, Bate published in the Morning Herald, the following lines:

“O Gainsboro! thou whose genius soars so high,
Wild as an eagle in an unknown sky,
To Devon turn!—thy pencil there shall find
A subject equal to thy happy mind!
Amidst thy fairest scenes, thy brightest dyes,
Like young Aurora let the Beauty rise.”

Another portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire by Gainsborough is also in this country, owned by the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon. It represents a whole length life-size figure leaning against a pedestal and came from the Collection of the late Earl Spencer at Althorp, Nottinghamshire.

The Blue Boy

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of the late
(1727–1788).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

The Blue Boy is without doubt the most famous picture in the world. When it passed from the Duke of Westminster’s Collection in Grosvenor House, London, by private sale to the late Mr. Henry E. Huntington, the event created a sensation in the art-world, which soon extended to the general public. No painting was ever exploited so widely in the press and when exhibited at the Duveen Galleries in New York, before starting on its journey to California, the Blue Boy attracted unusual crowds.

Before it bade farewell to London the famous picture was exhibited at the National Gallery and the following extract from a letter of Sir Charles J. Holmes, Director of the National Gallery, dated January 24, 1922, to Sir Joseph Duveen, gives an idea of how the portrait is regarded in England:

“My dear Duveen: I saw the last, for the time being anyhow, of the Blue Boy this afternoon at ten minutes past four and feel bound to write these lines to thank you and Mrs. Huntington for the pleasure which the sight of it has given to more than 90,000 people during the last three weeks. It is indeed a most brilliant thing, outshining in its present condition all our English pictures at Trafalgar Square and when the natural mellowing of the varnish during the next two or three years has taken place its perfections will be enhanced. And though its passing from us has been the cause of universal regret, that regret has not been tinged with bitterness. It is generally recognized that while in the process of recovering from the War, the Nation could not have paid the price which its fortunate owner was able to afford.”

The picture, an oil painting on canvas, is large (5 feet, 10 inches × 4 feet) and represents a young boy, Master Jonathan Buttall of London, life-size, dressed in a blue suit, holding a broad-rimmed hat in his right hand and very conspicuously standing forth from a landscape background with a dark, cloudy sky.

The following notes from the Farington Diary, recently published, bring us into relation with the two early sales.

Under date of Dec. 15, 1796, we find:

“Buttall’s sale. I went to Gainsborough’s picture of a Boy in a Blue Vandyke Dress sold for 35 guineas. Several of his drawings were sold in pairs. Some went so high as 8 guineas and a half the pair.”

“May 25, 1802. I painted till four o’clock and then went to Nesbitt’s sale in Grafton Street, where I met Hoppner, who had purchased the Boy in Blue Dress by Gainsborough, which was Buttal’s, for 65 guineas. At Buttalls sale it was sold for 35 to Mr. Nesbitt.”

The picture is in marvellous condition. When Lord Ronald Sutherland-Gower saw it in the Duke of Westminster’s Collection before it came to America, he exclaimed:

“The Blue Boy at Grosvenor House has all the glamor and charm of a portrait of a fairy prince.”

These few words explain the spell that the picture seems to cast upon every one who sees it, for whenever The Blue Boy has been exhibited crowds have stood enraptured before it.

Regarding Mr. Nesbitt’s connection with the picture we have the following story from the Rev. J. T. Trimmer, Vicar of Marston-on-Dove, Derbyshire:

“Many years ago there resided at Heston a Mr. Nesbitt, a person of substance and a companion of George, Prince of Wales. He once possessed Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and in the following way. He was dining with the Prince. ‘Nesbitt,’ said the Prince, ‘that picture, (pointing to the Blue Boy) shall be yours.’ At first he thought the Prince must be joking, but, finding he was decidedly serious, Nesbitt, who was a beau of the first water, made all suitable acknowledgments for H. R. H.’s generosity and next morning the Blue Boy arrived, followed in due time by a bill for £300, which he had the satisfaction of paying. I heard Mr. Nesbitt many years ago tell the story at my father’s table.”

From Mr. Nesbitt the Blue Boy came into possession of John Hoppner, the artist, who sold it to Earl Grosvenor. Then, of course, The Blue Boy passed as an heirloom to his successor, the Duke of Westminster. For many years The Blue Boy hung in Grosvenor House, London, in the same room with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, the two most famous portraits of the two most famous English painters. And it is one of the romances of art that these two portraits should have crossed the Atlantic and to be again united, as it were, this time in a California mansion.

Gainsborough had doubtless some reason for painting this portrait; but it is not the reason usually given,—namely that it was done in refutation of a theory expressed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1778. Apart from the reasons now accepted to disprove this theory, the picture is too joyously painted for a controversial and academic tour de force.

One of Gainsborough’s latest biographers, Mr. William T. Whitley,33 discovered the following in a number of The European Magazine (August 1798), which would seem to give the real reason for the genesis of Gainsborough’s famous portrait:

Mr. Gainsborough

“One of the finest pictures this great artist ever painted, and which might be put upon a par with any portrait that ever was executed, is that of a boy in a blue Vandyke dress, which is now in the possession of a tradesman in Greek Street. Gainsborough had seen a portrait of a boy by Titian for the first time, and, having found a model that pleased him, he set to work with all the enthusiasm of his genius. ‘I am proud,’ he said, ‘of being of the same profession with Titian, and was resolved to attempt something like him.’”

So much has been written about this portrait and the copies that have been made of it that great confusion has resulted, and the constant repetition of the same story by writers has tended to obscure rather than to clarify the subject. However, the theory now accepted is that the portrait of The Blue Boy first appeared in public at the Royal Academy in 1770, sent there by Gainsborough himself,—a theory supported by a letter written by Mary Moser, R. A. to Fuseli, then in Rome, in which she said: “It is only telling you what you know already of the Exhibition of 1770, to say that Gainsborough is beyond himself in a Vandyke habit.” Another argument in favor of this date is found in a conversation with an old artist, John Taylor, recorded by J. T. Smith in his Book for a Rainy Day.

The person, chiefly, if not wholly, responsible for the first suggestion of the theory that Gainsborough painted the picture to disprove Sir Joshua Reynolds’s pronouncement regarding color seems to have been John Burnet, the engraver of some of Wilkie’s pictures and a writer on art. The legend began to be circulated in 1817, when Burnet published his Practical Treatise on Painting, where, after challenging the rules laid down by Sir Joshua, he says: “I believe Gainsborough painted the portrait of a boy dressed in blue, now in the possession of Lord Grosvenor, to show the fallacy of this doctrine.”

That seems to be all there is to it; and, once started, the story became widespread and was handed on from pen to pen and from lip to lip, until nearly everybody believes it.

Let us turn, however, to some of the authorities. First to F. G. Stephens:

“Master Jonathan Buttall was the son of Mr. Jonathan Buttall, an ironmonger in an extensive way of business, living at 31 Greek Street (at the corner of King Street), Soho, between 1728 (if not before) and 1768, when he died. According to the Book for a Rainy Day, he was ‘an immensely rich man.’ The younger Buttall continued in the business of his father until 1796, when his effects were sold by Sharpe and Coxe, the well-known auctioneers. These effects included premises in Soho and the City, a share in Drury Lane Theatre, many drawings by Gainsborough, and pictures by the same hand and others, wine, and musical instruments. It has been asserted that a Blue Boy (for there can hardly be a doubt that more than one version of the work exists) was sold on this occasion.

“A story has been credited that The Blue Boy was produced by Gainsborough to refute a dictum of Sir Joshua Reynolds, delivered in his Eighth Discourse to the Students of the Royal Academy, December 10, 1778: ‘It ought, in my opinion to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow color, yellow, red, or a yellowish-white; and that the blue, the grey, or the green colors be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support and set off these warm colors; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colors will be sufficient. Let this conduct be reversed; let the light be cold and the surrounding colors warm, as we often see in the works of the Roman and Florentine painters, and it will be out of the power of Art, even in the hands of Rubens or Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious.’

“It is obvious that the Eighth Discourse may have been delivered covertly to depreciate a picture which had been exhibited eight years before, but this is not likely; or it may be assumed that the painting was produced to demonstrate the futility of the President’s counsel. It is obvious that Gainsborough might, and probably did, find occasion to illustrate a principle which is apparently opposed to the dictum of Reynolds, without reference to the Eighth Discourse, or previous utterance of the P. R. A. Van Dyck repeatedly employed masses of blue in draperies, with results which are at least equal to those of the picture before us. The Children of Charles the First at Windsor is an example of the fact.34 Leslie and every practical critic recognized that Gainsborough had evaded the full and just method of controverting the declaration of Sir Joshua rather than successfully assailed it.

“The picture before us is known to have been exhibited at the British Institution with a collection of Gainsborough’s works—the first formed independently of the artist and his wife—in 1814, under the title of Portrait of a Youth and again at the same place, in 1834, as ‘117, A Young Gentleman in a Landscape; the Picture known as The Boy in Blue.’ It was at Manchester in 1857; the International Exhibition in 1862; and at the Royal Academy in 1870. The last occasion evoked the discussion above alluded to, when the other Blue Boy became prominent. The question may be summed up by saying that probably the younger Buttall had a version of his own portrait, while the Prince had another.

“Reynolds, by the way of supporting his own dictum, produced A Yellow Boy in the ‘Portrait of Charles, Earl of Dalkeith’ with an owl and a dog, which was No. 132 at the Grosvenor Exhibition, in 1884. ‘A Portrait of a Lady,’ by Gainsborough, known as ‘The Blue Lady’ was at the British Institution in 1859; ‘The Pink Boy’ (Master Nicholls, grandson of Dr. Mead), by Gainsborough, was at the Academy in 1879, No. 39; it has recently been sold to a member of the Rothschild family. The Blue Boy is at once the complement and the antithesis of Mrs. Graham (born Cathcart), now in the Scottish National Gallery (Edinburgh).”

Turning now to M. H. Spielmann in British Portrait Painting:

“In the view expressed by the late F. G. Stephens and others—an opinion I am inclined to share—the portrait known as The Blue Boy, more properly Master Jonathan Buttall, belongs to the year 1770, or thereabouts, and not to a period ten years later, as is argued by those who desire, in the face of internal evidence, to apply to it a passage—usually cited incorrectly—in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Eighth Discourse (delivered in 1778), against the use of masses of cold blue. The stricture could not possibly apply to this picture, which triumphs by virtue of its warm blue, as it does by nobility of pose (more suggestive of a prince, as we imagine a prince should be, than of the son of a wealthy ironmonger of Greek Street), by the well controlled power and dignity made manifest throughout and by the brilliant brush charged with fat paint. The finely posed head with its admirably expressed character of boyhood and a good deal of sturdy doggedness behind the intelligent eyes, is rendered a little more heavily than is Gainsborough’s wont; but that it is a masterpiece of portraiture, as it is of color, cannot be challenged. This portrait, which from its manner may be believed to have been painted eight years before the father’s death and not two years after it, is the first to show Gainsborough’s outstanding genius as a painter of independent thought and striking modernity. At the same time it should be pointed out an earlier Blue Boy by him exists in the portrait of his nephew, Edward Gardiner, painted in 1768.

“Here in Master Buttall is Gainsborough’s first great invention both in matter and manner, almost a challenge to Van Dyck’s reputation, but painted in a scheme of color Van Dyck never thought of, and would probably never have tried if he had. In handling it is Gainsborough’s first link with Watteau in its broken tints and fearless lightness of handling of the drapery, in its fascinating play of light and shade, its delightful silhouette and cast shadows. It is difficult to imagine how the composition could be bettered; the picture, by itself, had no others come from the same brush, would have immortalized the painter.”

Finally, Sir Walter Armstrong agrees, too, with the Stephens theory:

“Those who cling to the old traditions quote the style of The Blue Boy in support of the notion that it could not have been painted before 1779. I confess that, to me, it now seems, after much and close observation, to point the other way. The loaded impasto, the ruddy carnations, the tendency to brown and beyond it in the shadows, the preoccupation with force, seem all to belong to about the same period as the group at Knole and to be inconsistent with the feathery lightness, freedom, and gaiety which mark Gainsborough’s work towards the end of his life. The most significant comparison may be made with the National Gallery Mrs. Siddons. Here again blue, and a franker blue than that of the Master Buttall, is the dominant note. But the painting is more assured, the handling lighter and more prompt, the shadows more transparent, and the figure, as a whole, truer to its illumination. It would not be fair to dwell too much on the contrast between the flesh painting of The Blue Boy and that of the Mrs. Siddons, for I fancy the peculiar white bloom of the latter’s skin is due to the fact that she sat in her paint. But it must not be overlooked that even in the portraits of pretty women, that of Eliza Linley for instance, painted about 1770, there is a fullness of color we do not find ten years later. Taking everything into account, it seems to me that the old tradition of The Blue Boy must be given up, and that the Duke of Westminster’s picture, so far from being an answer to Reynolds, was one of the many things that provoked his dictum, Gainsborough replying, if he took the trouble to reply at all, with the Mrs. Siddons and those other portraits, painted in the last ten years of his life, in which blue, canary yellow, and other cool tints are made the centres of the color scheme.”

Buttall and Gainsborough continued their relations. Buttall was one of the “few friends Gainsborough respected and whom he desired should attend his funeral at Kew. Buttall outlived Gainsborough seventeen years and died in December, 1805, as the Morning Herald notes: “Died, on Friday last, at his house in Oxford Street, Jonathan Buttall, Esq., a gentleman whose amiable manners and good disposition will cause him to be ever regretted by his friends.”

General Philip Honywood

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of
(1727–1788).	Mr. John Ringling.

When Gainsborough exhibited this portrait in London in 1765 it created quite a stir, as it was a departure from the style of any portrait by that artist; and when it was sent home to Mark Hall, the seat of the Honywood family in Essex, a new room had to be built in order to accommodate it, as the canvas measures nearly ten feet square (96¾ × 82¼).

This has the reputation of being the finest equestrian portrait ever painted by Gainsborough. Fulcher writes of it:

“Never was the amenity of landscape more happily displayed. Through a richly wooded scene wherein the sturdy oak and silvery-barked birch are conspicuous, the soldier, mounted on a bay horse, appears to be passing, wearing a scarlet dress which contrasts finely with the mass of surrounding foliage. Nothing can be easier than his attitude, as with one hand he curbs his charger and with the other holds his sword which seems to flash in the sun. The picturesque design of this portrait, its brilliant coloring, its bold yet careful execution, Gainsborough never surpassed. No wonder that George III wished to become the possessor of it and no wonder that Horace Walpole wrote of it in his catalogue ‘very good.’ Of the nine pictures which decorated the walls of Mark Hall grand staircase, three were by Gainsborough and included the remarkable portrait of General Honywood. It is the largest work by that master and has the reputation also of being the finest equestrian portrait ever painted by Gainsborough, competing only with Van Dyck’s Portrait of Charles I in the Prado Gallery, Madrid, with which it has more than once been compared.”

The landscape, it is interesting to say, is a part of the park at Mark Hall. General Philip Honywood of Mark Hall came of an old Kentish family deriving its origin from a place called Honewood or Hunewood in the parish of Postling in Kent, where they had held lands since the Norman Conquest. General Philip Honywood was born in 1710 and succeeded his nephew in 1758. He was a General of His Majesty’s forces, Colonel of the Third Royal Dragoon Guards, Governor of the Town and Citadel of Kinston-upon-Hull and was also member of Parliament for thirty-one years for the borough of Appleby in the County of Westmoreland. Philip Honywood was always familiarly called “the General” and he died in 1785.

Until 1878 this portrait remained in possession of the Honywood family at Mark Hall.

Sir Walter Armstrong in his Gainsborough writes:

“It represents the General riding across the canvas from left to right. He wears a scarlet uniform and carries his sword, unsheathed, in his right hand; he has no scabbard. The horse, a rich bay, is a little too long. The painter has not taken the precaution to draw him in before commencing the figure, and so the fore-quarters are separated from the hind by rather too much middle-piece. This mistake is still more conspicuous in the Colonel St. Leger at Hampton Court, where a quite unreasonable amount of horse shows behind the figure. Otherwise, the Honywood picture is as successful in design as it is in all other ways. The landscape is one of the finest backgrounds ever painted and reminds one of the backgrounds to some of those equestrian portraits by Velasquez which Gainsborough never saw. It is curious that Reynolds had sent a General on Horseback to the Exhibition of 1761. Many things point to the probability that Gainsborough made an annual visit to London during the exhibition and it is quite likely that the apparition of Sir Joshua’s ‘General’ suggested the treatment of his own.”

The Reynolds referred to above is the portrait of Lord Ligonier now in the National Gallery, London.

The Harvest Waggon

Thomas Gainsborough	Collection of
(1727–1788).	Sir Joseph Duveen, Bart.

This picture bears comparison with Gainsborough’s famous Market Cart in the National Gallery, London. Some critics even prefer it. It is painted in oils on canvas (48 × 59 inches) and represents a countryside and a scene very familiar to the painter. The country is rugged with a wheel track winding from the left foreground away into the distance towards the blue hills. On the left, there are massive boulders overgrown with shrubbery and trees with russet foliage overhanging the lane. The rustic dray-cart, laden with laughing country folk, is halted to enable a young girl to clamber up over the wheel and into the arms of a youth who bends forward to help her. The three horses stand placidly while the driver adjusts the collar of the leader. A panting dog capers by the cart and two sheep that have strayed from their flock are seen resting by the boulders. The rock in the foreground is signed with the initials “T. G.”

The Harvest Waggon gains particular interest because the two young girls—one seated in the waggon and one climbing up over the wheel—are Gainsborough’s daughters. The horses, too, are portraits—horses that belonged to John Wiltshire, the chief carrier of Bath, and the cart is one of Wiltshire’s “flying waggons.” In some accounts of John Wiltshire he is represented as an ordinary dray-man, who drove his own carts and made deliveries. This was not the case, however. John Wiltshire was a man of importance in Bath, having built up a large “carrying business” (which we would to-day call express), with a regular service of “flying waggons,” always going back and forth from his warehouses in Broad Street, Bath, to the White Swan at Holborn Bridge, London. Wiltshire was elected Mayor of Bath in 1772 and gave a great entertainment at the Town Hall to the gentry and fashionables, giving thereby “much offense to the people in trade” who were not invited. Some idea of the speed of these “flying waggons” may be had from Gainsborough’s letter to Garrick relative to the delivery of the latter’s portrait:

“The picture is to go to London by the Wiltshire fly-waggon on Wednesday next and I believe will arrive by Saturday morning.”

John Wiltshire, who came of a good old family that had attained the rank of squires, lived in a fine mansion at Shockerwick near Bath, which had belonged to his father. This was quite a place of rendez-vous for the notable personages who visited Bath. “There,” it was said, “Anstey had a beech tree, Gainsborough an elm, and Quin an arm-chair, while Fielding, Allen, and their hospitable host, Wiltshire, enjoyed the shades of its sylvan glades.”

Wiltshire was so devoted to Gainsborough and such an admirer of his paintings that he would never allow him to pay any bills for “carrying.” Yet he delivered all of Gainsborough’s finished pictures. After a time, upon Gainsborough’s insisting, Wiltshire replied: “When you think I have carried to the value of a little painting, I beg you will let me have one, sir; and I shall be more than paid.”

By degrees Wiltshire thus acquired his small, but very choice, collection of Gainsboroughs, which was sold at Shockerwick in 1867.

The Harvest Waggon was one of these; and the way the picture came to be painted was this. On one occasion Gainsborough asked Wiltshire to lend him a horse for a model. The generous Wiltshire saddled and bridled one of his horses and sent it to Gainsborough for a present. Gainsborough painted this horse and made, as Fulcher says, “a remarkably fine study of this animal.” Gainsborough now returned the compliment. He painted The Harvest Waggon and sent it to Wiltshire as a present. Wiltshire was overjoyed, for here was his own waggon; here were his own horses; and here were the artist’s own daughters!

On giving The Harvest Waggon to Wiltshire, Gainsborough said it pleased him more than any picture he had ever painted.

From the Collections of Thomas Gibbons, Esq., Hanover Terrace, Regents Park, of the Rev. Benjamin Gibbons, Hanover Terrace, Regents Park, and of Sir Lionel Phillips, London, The Harvest Waggon passed into the Collection of the late Judge Elbert H. Gary. It attracted great attention at the Gary Sale in New York, April, 1928, when it was sold at the Plaza Hotel for $875,000, the highest figure that any picture has ever reached at auction.

John Walter Tempest

George Romney	Collection of
(1734–1802).	Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Field.

It would be hard to find in all the range of portraiture, at any time and in any place, a work more charming, true, sincere, natural, and ingratiating than this adorable boy with his beloved horse. You can see at a glance that they love each other.

Everything about the picture is delightful: the coloring, the handsome, sweet, and dreamy boy with his unspeakable grace and gentleness, the fine horse, so contented, and the suave landscape—all make both a portrait and a picture that will live for all time. No changes in fashion can ever destroy its beauty and its appeal. Moreover, Romney has succeeded in suggesting here a young boy’s dreams and the friendship between a boy and a horse. The relation between the two, as they enjoy a pause in their jaunt through the woodland, is marvellously expressed. The relation of these figures to the landscape is such that we feel as if we, too, were in this lovely, English, sylvan spot. We seem to hear the plash of the tiny waterfall and the sound of the horse’s lips as he quenches his thirst. In just one moment more and the sweet, gentle, dreamy boy will pat his friend’s warm, brown neck, leap lightly on his back and off they will go merrily

“to seek fresh woods and pastures new.”

The picture is in oils on canvas (90 × 58 inches) and was painted in 1779–1780. In the Catalogue Raisonné of Romney’s works we read:

“Whole length, when a youth, standing, facing towards and looking to the front; long hair; purple dress, white turned-down collar, white stockings and black shoes with silver buckles; standing by his horse, which is drinking at a stream to the left; right hand holding the reins; left hand holding whip; trees in the distance.”

For several years this lovely picture was in the Collection of Asher Wertheimer, Esq., of London.

John Walter Tempest was the only son of John Tempest, Esq., of Sherburn, County Durham, and member of Parliament for Durham. He died in 1793 at Brighthelmstone, where he had gone for his health.

The German critic, August Grisebach, has a profound admiration for this portrait. Writing in Die Kunst für Alle (1908), he says:

“As a new representation of the half-grown boy Romney’s John Walter Tempest stands next to the Blue Boy. In place of the warm lighting of the brilliant silk of the correctly adorned boy in Van Dyck style and the aristocratic pose of the manufacturer’s son, is the simple cloth coat of subdued violet against the light-brown horse, so quiet and reserved in color and line, similar to an antique relief.”

The Strawberry Girl is reckoned among the most original of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s works. Surely John Walter Tempest is one of Romney’s most brilliant triumphs! Moreover, the picture is highly original.

For a great number of years George Romney in his house, No. 32 Cavendish Square, shared the patronage of the aristocracy with Reynolds and Gainsborough. Romney’s career was remarkable, for he had almost no training. Romney was born in 1734 at Beckside, near Dalton in Cumberland, the son of a cabinet-maker, who wrote his name Rumney. He, too, was destined for a cabinet-maker, but made the acquaintance in Kendal of a portrait-painter named Christopher Steele, who had studied with Carle Van Loo, and became his pupil and apprentice in 1755. Romney soon painted a number of portraits in Kendal and also a hand holding a letter for the town post-office, which attracted much attention.

Undoubtedly Romney acquired something of the French style through this teacher and we may regard him indirectly as a pupil of Van Loo. Certainly there is a quality in Romney that finds response in the French painters of the Eighteenth Century.

Lord Gower says in his Romney (London, 1904):

“Apparently the Count made use of his pupil to prepare and grind his colors and to carve frames for his portraits. Later these color-grindings must have been of great use to Romney, and the preparation and mode of laying on the oil colors may account for the excellence and permanency of his paintings, which have stood admirably and unfadingly the test of time and which are in most cases as fresh and brilliant, as clear and transparent, as when they left Romney’s studio nearly a century and a half ago. It is not without interest that one recalls how all the great Italian and Flemish Masters instructed their pupils in the preparation of the minutest detail in all things relating to their painting, from the preliminary grinding of the colors and the laying on of the groundwork of their subject, whether on paint or canvas; for not only were the great Italian and Flemish old painters past masters in all that appertained to the technicalities of their art, but honest and loyal in seeing no detail, however irksome, omitted which could give permanency and endurance to their creations; hence those marvels of color, paintings three and four centuries old which still glow with all the brilliancy of gems and flowers, as radiant as some noble stained-glass window in some glorious Gothic fane.”

In 1762, when he was but twenty-eight, Romney moved to London (leaving his wife, son, and daughter) and established himself in the great city. As a painter of excellent portraits at low prices Romney soon saved enough money for a visit to Paris, and hard work enabled him to close his studio and spend two years in Italy. Soon after his return in 1775, Romney removed from Gray’s Inn to No. 32 Cavendish Square, formerly occupied by the painter, Francis Cotes, (who had died in 1770). A portrait of the Duke of Richmond Reading launched Romney into fame and fortune. Thenceforward there was nothing to do but work. Romney became the fashion and ranked with Gainsborough and Reynolds; and, as his prices were considerably less than theirs, his studio was never empty of sitters. Romney’s Diaries show his amazing industry and a golden register of the nobility and gentry besides people of fashion and artistic distinction. The year 1777, for instance, shows six hundred sittings which Mr. Ward calculates as representing from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty finished portraits. Romney’s charming style was now fully developed and some of his loveliest portraits date from this period: the Countess of Warwick and her Children; Lady Susan Lenox; Lady Derby (see page 401); Lady Albemarle; Lord Gower’s Children Dancing; John Walter Tempest; and Lady Craven, which inspired Horace Walpole to write:

“Full many an artist has on canvas fix’d
All charms that Nature’s pencil ever mix’d—
The Witchery of Eyes, the Grace that tips
The inexpressible douceur of Lips
Romney alone, in this fair image caught
Each Charm’s Expression and each Feature’s thought.
And shows how in their sweet assemblage sit
Taste, Spirit, Softness, Sentiment, and Wit.”

—H. W.

Therefore, it will be seen that Romney had been producing beautiful work before the advent of the beautiful Emma Hart, the future Lady Hamilton.

Romney left Cavendish Square in 1798, having bought a house at Hollybush Hill, Hampstead, from which he removed two years later to return to his wife and son at Kendal. He bought the estate of Whitestock, near Ulverstone, where his son finished the house he did not live to complete. Romney died in 1802, having been for two or three years in a state of complete imbecility.

“For the first half-century or more after his death his work was neglected. Hidden in private houses, the public never saw it; his biographies did not interest people; he had left no group of influential friends to hand down his memory. There was no such machinery of celebrity in his case as had existed so abundantly in Sir Joshua’s who lived not only by his pictures but by a multitude of lovely engravings and by the written and spoken word of colleagues, pupils, and friends. So Romney’s fame may almost be said to have died away during the dark ages between 1820 and 1850; and Christie’s Catalogues show that in those days he was ignored by collectors and by galleries, such as then existed. In the general revival of æsthetic intelligence which began about the middle of the century—a revival of which the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the eloquence of Ruskin, and the growth of a new class of wealthy amateurs were so many symptoms and conditions—Romney began to emerge once more. Never was there an artist who lived more wholly in his art. ‘In his painting-room,’ said his pupil, Robinson, ‘he seemed to have the highest enjoyment of life, and the more he painted the greater flow of spirits he acquired.’ It is true that, by one of the ironies of history, it was not primarily in portrait-painting that he was interested, but in those larger schemes and subjects to which, according to the classification of his time, he gave a higher place.”35

The Hon. Mrs. Davenport

George Romney	Collection of the
(1734–1802).	Hon. Andrew W. Mellon.

The Hon. Mrs. Davenport (Charlotte Sneyd) is another of Romney’s superlative creations. She is the personification of a gentle English beauty, who might well have sat for the portrait of Tennyson’s “Queen of the Rosebud Garden of Girls” in Maud.

Mrs. Davenport, dressed in perfect taste, is posed against a lovely landscape background. Her gown is a delicate, yet glowing pink, and her cape is white velvet trimmed with white fur. She also wears a white scarf with brown ribbon and a white felt hat trimmed with brown and white ribbons. Her powdered hair is arranged in soft ringlets and a black velvet band around her neck affords a note of contrast to the general lightness of the color of the costume. A fashionable muff adds a chic touch. The face is remarkably sweet and intelligent, as well as beautiful, and the whole impression given by the portrait is of a charming, gentle, gracious, and lovable personality.

Charlotte Sneyd, born in 1756, was the daughter of Mr. Ralph Sneyd of Keele Hall, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, descended from an ancient family of Chester, one of whom had been knighted on the battlefield of Pinkie in 1547. Her mother was the daughter of Sir W. W. Bugot, fifth Baronet of Blithefield, and the grand-daughter of the first Earl of Dartmouth.

Charlotte Sneyd was married in 1777 to Mr. Davies Davenport, High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1783, and M. P. from 1806 to 1830. His seats were Capesthorne, Crewe, and Calvely, Nantwich. Their youngest son took the extra surname of Bromley and owned Baginton Hall, Coventry. The Hon. Mrs. Davenport died in 1829. She was a cousin of Honora Sneyd, whose name has been associated with that series of portraits by Romney known as the “Serena” portraits. Honora was also famous for her engagement to the talented, charming, and ill-fated Major John André.

The picture, painted in oils on canvas (30 × 25 inches), came from the Collection of Brigadier-General Sir William Bromley-Davenport, K. C. B., Lord-Lieutenant of the County of Chester, Capesthorne Hall, Cheshire, England.

Lady Derby

George Romney	Collection of
(1734–1802).	Mr. Jules S. Bache.

Of Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, Romney made one of his most beautiful portraits and one of the most beautiful portraits, moreover, of that great portrait period in which Romney worked. Everything about it is lovely. There is no color in the picture except Lady Derby’s golden hair and the green and brown tones of the distant landscape and of the tree behind her. The dress, a thin white India mull of exquisite fineness and transparency, is draped over a white brocade skirt, making a costume which is the quintessence of purity and lightness; and Romney has treated the white so perfectly that the picture seems to emit a celestial radiance. Lady Derby has the fresh English complexion of rose and white, and her golden hair is like sunshine and amber. The pose is so easy and natural that we may safely guess it was a characteristic one. Lady Derby seems unconscious of her charm; but she was certainly too beautiful not to know it.

Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, was the only daughter of James, sixth Duke of Hamilton and the famous Irish beauty, Elizabeth Gunning, who, with her sister, Maria, took London by storm when they removed there in 1751 from Dublin. The career of the Gunning sisters was extraordinary, for they had no money; but their handsome faces, fine figures, stylish dressing, and charming manners, soon brought them into notoriety. Crowds surged around them whenever they appeared: in the streets, in Hyde Park, at Ranelagh, at Vauxhall, at routs, at assemblies, or at the theatre. Horace Walpole said “it was extraordinary that two sisters should be so beautiful.” Maria Gunning married in 1752 the Earl of Coventry and also in the same year Elizabeth married surreptitiously James, sixth Duke of Hamilton “using the ring of the bed-curtain for her wedding ring.” On his death, six years later, she married John, fifth Duke of Argyll. Elizabeth, now Duchess of Argyll, was still as beautiful as ever and people ran after her as usual whenever she appeared in public. “One Sunday evening in June, 1759,” so Horace Walpole notes, “she was mobbed in Hyde Park. The King ordered that to prevent this for the future, she should have a guard; and on the next Sunday she made herself ridiculous by walking in the Park from eight to ten P. M. with two sergeants of the Guards in front with their halberds and twelve soldiers following her.” Elizabeth, Countess of Derby, with such a beautiful mother, had, therefore, the right to be a beauty. On June 12, 1774, “Lady Betty Hamilton” was married to Edward Smith Stanley, afterwards twelfth Earl of Derby, known as the “Cock-fighting Earl.” She soon tired of him and ran away with the Duke of Dorset, who had been working on the Derby estate for some time in the guise of a gardener in order to be near the beautiful Elizabeth and to perfect their plans for elopement. Who can look upon Romney’s portrait and blame him? Lord Derby married in 1797 the celebrated actress Miss Farren (see page 420). Elizabeth Hamilton died in 1797, aged forty-four.

This portrait, oils on canvas (49½ × 39 inches), was painted in 1776–1778, after twelve sittings: Nov. 27, 1776; Jan. 31, Feb. 11, 14, 21, and March 19, 1777; Feb. 13, March 2, 9, 14, 23 and May 4, 1778. A mezzotint was made by John Dean in 1780.

After having been for many years in the Tennant Collection this chef-d’œuvre passed to Mr. Jules S. Bache.

A charming picture of Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, or “Lady Betty Hamilton,” as a child of five years, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, now hangs in the Widener Collection at Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. The little girl is seated on a bank facing the spectator and is shown at full length, wearing a pink dress over a large hoop, with low neck and short sleeves, and a spray of flowers at her neck. In her hands she holds a bouquet of bright flowers. This picture, painted in 1758, belonged to the Duke of Argyll and afterwards to the Earl of Normanton.

“The Eighteenth Century,” says Max Roldt, “has often been called the Age of Grace. If I were asked how this name could best be justified, I should point without a moment’s hesitation to the portraits by George Romney. Others painted graceful women in graceful dresses and graceful poses, but Romney personified Grace, made her his goddess; and it was her portrait which he painted over and over again under different lineaments and with various features. See his Lady Derby as she sits on a bank quietly dreaming under the trees; her legs are lightly crossed; her elbow rests on her knee so that her long, fine hand just touches her chin without actually supporting the pure oval of the head; with her white, muslin dress pulled up showing the underskirt of the broché satin of the same hue, is she not the very embodiment of grace?”

Emma, Lady Hamilton

George Romney	Collection of the late
(1734–1802).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

Who tied that white band over the big hat—Romney or Emma? It was certainly a very original idea!

“Three quarters in a straw hat called Emma, finished for Mr. Crawford,” is the way this picture is referred to in John Romney’s Memoirs; and in Romney’s own Ledger this note occurs: “Three quarters paid for by Mr. Crawford, 30 guineas, Sept. 15, 1792, and sent home to Mr. Crawford’s No. 48 Brook Street, July 21, 1792.”

At three-quarter, then, seated in a chair, dressed in white and wearing the conspicuous “straw hat,” trimmed with a broad band of ribbon tied into large bows, “Emma” looks at us rather pensively,—almost sadly. The pose is alluringly graceful and easy, but the swirling lines, when analysed, show the thought and art of a master. It is like a graceful melody of Mozart. Contour, beauty, and rhythm all are here!

Romney painted no fewer than thirty pictures of the “Divine Emma,” in character and with titles, and fourteen portraits, without titles; and, besides, he painted many replicas and variants of these portraits.

Emma Hart came into Romney’s life in 1782, taken to the painter’s studio in Cavendish Square one April morning by the Hon. Charles Francis Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick, with whom she was then living. Romney was instantly struck by her extraordinary beauty, vivacity, and talent for posing. From this first picture, entitled Nature and representing Emma with a little black spaniel under arm, for which Greville paid twenty guineas, Romney produced portrait after portrait in various characters: Alope; Ariadne; Bacchante; In a Black Hat; Calypso (perhaps the same as Ariadne); Cassandra; Circe; Comedy; Comic Muse; Cybele; Daphne (perhaps the same as Bacchante); Contemplation; Emma in a Straw Hat (see page 405); Euphrosyne; Gipsy; Iphigenia; Joan of Arc; Kate (same as Ariadne); Magdalen; Medea; Meditation; with Miniature in Belt; Miranda; Lady Hamilton in Morning Dress; Nature; Nun; Pythian Priestess; Reading the Gazette; St. Cecilia; Sensibility; Serena; Servant’s Cap; Shepherdess; Sigismunda; Spinning-Wheel; Supplication; With Vesuvius in the Distance; Welsh Girl; Wood Nymph (same as Alope).

Portraits without titles are: Seated resting head on right hand, white dress; Bust to left showing hands, head leaning on right hand, forefinger on chin, bare neck and shoulders, blue and white drapery; Half-length, life-size, head facing, resting on crossed hands, light dress, colored scarf twisted around the head, arms bare to elbow, leaning on table; Head looking up to left; Head looking up to left (oval); Head to left with startled expression (sketch); Three-quarter length figure seated to left looking back over left shoulder, head resting on left hand, white dress and cap and colored sash; Half figure turned to right, white dress, white drapery around head (several versions); Head, shoulders, full face, low cut white dress, dark curly hair; Bust facing front, face looking down reading a book, white dress, brown background; Bust, life-size looking upward and smiling; White veil over head; Head and shoulders looking at spectator and smiling, dark red dress cut low, brown hair falling over shoulders, turban; Half figure directed to left looking at spectator, dark dress, white fichu, dark felt hat with broad brim and bunch of feathers, hair bound with blue ribbon, hands resting on lap, white lace cuffs.

The story of Emma, Lady Hamilton, is a strange one. She was born on April 26, 1761, at Denhall, Chester, the only child of Henry Lyon, a blacksmith: no one knows why she took the name of Hart. While she was a child, her mother moved to Hawarden, entering the service of Mrs. Thomas, wife of the parish doctor, and Emma remained there until she was sixteen, earning her living as nursery-maid and waiting-woman. We find her in London in her eighteenth year employed in the celebrated Temple of Health, of which the notorious empiric, Dr. Graham, was the originator and proprietor, presiding there as the “lovely Hebe Vestina, Rosy Goddess of Health.” Here, at certain times of day, the “lovely Hebe” and the famous quack could be seen buried up to their necks in the mudbaths, Dr. Graham’s hair dressed according to the latest expression of the perruquier’s taste and Hebe with one of those towering head-dresses of the day, powdered and decorated with flowers, feathers, ropes of pearls, and gewgaws of many kinds.

Sir Walter Armstrong is of the opinion that Emma Hart sat for Gainsborough’s Musidora Bathing her Feet (in the National Gallery, London). “The features,” he says, “are those of Emma Lyon refined, the hair is hers, and the rest of the figure is what we find in several of Romney’s pictures.”

There is a very good reason that this might be so, for Gainsborough rented one part of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, and Dr. Graham rented the other. Consequently, Gainsborough had every opportunity of seeing the lovely Emma very frequently.

While presiding at Dr. Graham’s establishment, Emma attracted the attention of Sir Henry Featherstonehaugh of Up Park, Sussex, who persuaded her to leave the Temple and reside at Up Park. In the following year she placed herself under the protection of the Hon. Charles Greville.

In 1784 Sir Charles’s uncle, Sir William Hamilton, his Majesty’s Ambassador at Naples, came to London on a visit, a widower, a man of distinguished tastes, an art-connoisseur, a lover of music, and a descendant of a noble family. Sir William became fascinated with Emma and there was a clever transfer of Emma, not to the credit of either of these dashing “blades.” Ultimately Emma joined Sir William in Naples, where she was lodged at the British Embassy and treated with the distinction due royalty, having, moreover, her carriage, boat, livery, and other appurtenances of state. In a letter to the Hon. Charles, Emma says: “Sir William is very fond of me and very kind to me. The house is full of painters painting me. He has now got nine pictures of me and two a-painting. Marchant is cutting my head in stone, that is in cameo for a ring. There is another man modelling me in wax and another in clay. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me, so that Sir William as fitted up a room that is called the painting-room. Sir William is never a moment from me. He goes no where without me. He has no dinners but what I can be of the party. Nobody comes without they are civil to me.”

On Sept. 6, 1791, the infatuated Ambassador married Emma in Marylebone Church, the Marquis of Abercorn, Sir William’s kinsman, acting as best man. During the months preceding the wedding Emma sat almost daily to Romney.

On June 19, 1791, Romney wrote to William Hayley: “At present and the greatest part of this summer, I shall be engaged in painting pictures from the divine lady. I cannot give her any other epithet for I think her superior to all womankind. I have two pictures to paint of her for the Prince of Wales. She says she must see you before she leaves England, which will be in the beginning of September. She asked me if you would not write my life. I told her you had begun it; then she said she hoped you would have much to say of her in the life, as she prided herself on being my model.”

Romney also gave a party in Emma’s honor, on which occasion she displayed her remarkable talents. Romney wrote:

“She performed in my house last week, singing and acting before some of the nobility with most astonishing power. She is the talk of the whole town, and really surpasses everything, both in singing and acting, that ever appeared. Gallini offered her two thousand pounds a year and two benefits if she would engage with him, on which Sir William said pleasantly that he had engaged her for life.”

Directly after her marriage Lady Hamilton gave Romney a sitting. His Diary has these dates:

“Sept. 5 Mon. Mrs. Hart at 9.

Sept. 6 Tues. Lady Hamilton at 11.”

Sir William and Lady Hamilton left soon afterwards for Naples and Romney and Emma never met again.

Sir William Hamilton died in 1803; but from 1796 Emma had lived with and for Lord Nelson until his death in the Battle of Trafalgar. Emma died at Calais, Jan. 15, 1815.

The portrait shown here (30 × 25 inches), belonged to Tankerville Chamberlayne, Esq., and then passed into the Collection of Alfred C. de Rothschild, Esq.

England indirectly owes to Lady Hamilton one of Nelson’s great victories. When Nelson was in pursuit of the French, it was Lady Hamilton who obtained the order from the King of Naples for the fleet to enter port for provisions and water. Nelson thereupon entered the harbor of Syracuse, watered his fleet, and fought the victorious Battle of the Nile. A few months later Lady Hamilton and Nelson managed to rescue the Royal family of Naples by taking them through a subterranean passage and by boats to Nelson’s ship, the Vanguard. “The world owes it to Lady Hamilton,” says John Paget, “that the sister of Marie Antoinette did not share her horrible fate—that another head, as fair as that which fell into the basket of sawdust in front of the Tuileries on the 16th of October, 1793, did not roll on the scaffold at Naples in 1799. When we come to take the account as it stood between the world and Lady Hamilton when it finally closed in 1815, we find it strangely changed since 1791. The balance has turned. It is the world, it is humanity, that is the debtor.”

What a strange career! A woman of matchless beauty, artistic gifts of a high order, mental brilliance, generosity, charm, and kindness of heart, and, moreover, able to educate herself in the ways of society, admired, and courted by princes, artists, and men of powers, the intimate friend of the Queen of Naples, the beloved of Lord Nelson, the deity of Romney, enjoying at one time all that wealth and distinction could give and at the end forlorn, poor, and deserted, and dying in a foreign country—such was the life of Emma, Lady Hamilton!

How beautifully Humphrey Ward sums up the whole situation:

“We know that in later years many painters tried their skill upon her—Reynolds once, Madame Vigée Le Brun at least twice, Angelica Kauffman probably, and many an Italian painter and sculptor to whom she sat in Sir William’s painting-room at Naples. But none of these artists, not even Reynolds himself, in the well-known Bacchante, made of the most beautiful woman in the world anything that was distinctive, anything that was much removed from the commonplace. It is Romney alone who has preserved the life of those wonderful features, of that radiant hair, and of the multitudinous phases of expression through which this born actress, inspired by his suggestions, passed seemingly at will. Her name remains inseparably bound, though in very different ways, with the names of two great men—a hero and a painter. In the Chronique scandaleuse of a hundred years ago, Emma belongs to Nelson; in the history of art, she belongs to Romney.”

Anne, Lady de la Pole

George Romney	Collection of the
(1734–1802).	Hon. Alvan T. Fuller.

The portrait represented here of Anne, Lady de la Pole, oils on canvas (49 × 39½ inches), was painted in 1786 after the great Lady Hamilton period. The dress is of white satin with puffed sleeves of white mull and a sash of pale green with gold fringe. The slippers, of pale green, match the sash. The hair is powdered and draped with a white veil.

A critic notes that “the sheen of the white satin dress has since it was painted one hundred and forty years ago become slightly tinged with mauve thus completely harmonizing with the light color of the sash and shoes. The manipulation of the light on the right side of the picture gives a mellow autumnal atmosphere to the portrait of a dignified and beautiful woman.”

Anne, Lady de la Pole, was the only daughter of John Templer, Esq., of Stover House, Devon, and was married in January, 1781, to Sir John William Pole, sixth Baronet and son of Sir John Pole of Shute, Devon, whom he succeeded in 1766. Sir John assumed by “sign-manual” the name of de la Pole.

At the same time that he made this beautiful portrait, Romney also painted Sir John de la Pole, as a companion piece. Lady de la Pole died in 1832.

The Hon. Mrs. Grant of Kilgraston

Sir Henry Raeburn	Collection of
(1756–1823).	Mr. C. Fisher.

This picture comes from the Collection of Colonel Walter Brown of Renfrew and was formerly in the Collection of the Hon. Mr. Stuart Gray.

It is an oil on canvas (30 × 24 inches), depicting Mrs. Grant of Kilgraston, daughter of Francis, Lord Grey. The lady is turned three quarters to the left and wears a dark gown with deep loose frill of white around the neck. Her hair falls in careless curls over her brow. The background is plain.

Compared with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s some two thousand portraits, Raeburn’s some seven or eight hundred is small; but it is, after all, a goodly number.

“Raeburn,” in the words of his fellow-townsman, Robert Louis Stevenson, “was a born painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face and had possessed himself of what was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in his studio. What he was so swift to perceive he conveyed to the canvas almost in the moment of conception.”

Raeburn, born in Stockbridge, a suburb of Edinburgh, in 1756, became the leading Scottish portrait-painter, President of the Royal Society of Artists at Edinburgh, and a Royal Academician in 1815, presenting in 1821 his diploma picture The Boy with Rabbit. Raeburn was knighted by George IV in 1822.

Raeburn was almost entirely self-taught; and it seems strange that with practically no training, as the world understands this word, that he should have risen to the circle of great painters. Many of the greatest Italian painters of the Renaissance began life as goldsmiths. So did Raeburn. After a preliminary education at the famous Heriot’s Hospital in Edinburgh, he was apprenticed to a goldsmith in that city. Next he took up miniature-painting and passed on to oils, devoting himself to portraits. Success came quickly and early. At the age of twenty-two Raeburn was thoroughly established as the leading portrait-painter in Scotland and had married a wealthy widow of title. A visit to London and Rome in 1785–7 was the only break in his enviable life, passed in the greatest serenity replete with domestic happiness, social distinction, and artistic fertility. Practically an entire generation of the men and women of Scotland, most of them celebrities—sat to Raeburn in his studio.

As Raeburn’s portraits are neither signed nor dated and no very marked periods emphasize his style, it is difficult to assign accurate dates to any of his works unless some special year is attached to them. Moreover, no lists of the sitters and note-books are known. If he kept them they were destroyed. However, as Raeburn advanced in years he attained more and more command of technique, his appreciation of character became deeper, and his expression of it more complete.

Raeburn was appreciated by his contemporaries. When he showed some of his portraits to Sir Joshua Reynolds in London in 1785, Sir Joshua took him at once into favor and friendship; Sir Thomas Lawrence pronounced the portrait of The Macnab (the Highland Chieftain) the best representation of a human being he had ever seen; and Sir David Wilkie compared Raeburn to Velasquez. Writing to a brother artist from Madrid in 1828 Sir David remarks:

“There is much resemblance between Velasquez and the works of some of the chiefs of the English School; but of all Raeburn resembles him most, of whose square touch in heads, hands, and accessories, I see the very counterpart of the Spaniard.” Wilkie also wrote to Alexander Nasmyth from Spain: “There are some heads by Velasquez in Madrid, which, were they in Edinburgh, would be thought to be by Raeburn; and I have seen a portrait of Lord Glenlee, I think, by Raeburn, which would in Madrid be thought a near approach to Velasquez.”

Dr. John Brown, one of Raeburn’s best friends, described his methods as follows: “Like Sir Joshua, Raeburn placed his sitters on a high platform, shortening the features and giving a pigeon-hole view of the nostrils. The notion is that people should be painted as if they were hanging like pictures on the wall, a Newgate notion, but it was Sir Joshua’s. Raeburn and I have had good-humored disputes about this. I appealed to Titian, Van Dyck, etc., for my authorities; they always painted people as if they were sitting opposite to them, not on a mountebank stage, or dangling on the wall. This great question we leave to be decided by those who know best. His manner of taking his likenesses explains the simplicity and power of his heads. Placing his sitter on the pedestal, he looked at him from the other end of a long room, gazing at him intently with his great dark eyes. Having got the idea of the man, what of him carried farthest and ‘told,’ he walked hastily up to the canvas, never looking at his sitter, and put down what he had fixed in his inner eye; he then withdrew again, took another gaze and recorded his results, and so on, making no measurements.”

It is pleasant to catch a glimpse of a painter from another painter. Farington writes in his Diary, Sept 21, 1801:

“I next went to Mr. Raeburn, the portrait-painter most esteemed here who lives in York Place, New-Town. The house is excellent and built by himself. His show room is lighted from the top. His painting-room commands a view of the Forth and the distant mountains. Here I found pictures of a much superior kind to those I saw at Mr. Nasmyth’s. Some of Mr. Raeburn’s portraits have an uncommonly true appearance of nature and are painted with much firmness, but there is great inequality in his works. That which strikes the eye is a kind of Camera Oscura effect and from those pictures which seem to be his best, I should conclude he has looked very much at nature, reflected in a camera. Raeburn and Nasmyth do not associate much with other artists and hold themselves very high. Raeburn scarcely indeed with any of the profession. The prices of Raeburn are 100 guineas for a whole length, 50 guineas half length, 30 guineas for a kit-cat and 25 guineas for a three-quarter portrait.”

Quinton McAdam

Sir Henry Raeburn	Collection of
(1756–1823).	Mr. A. W. Erickson.

Raeburn was particularly happy in painting portraits of children, full of naturalness and charm and character; and it will be remembered that he chose for his contribution to the Royal Academy the lovely Boy with a Rabbit.

On a par with this masterpiece stands the portrait represented here of Quinton McAdam, a little boy twelve years old, the only son of Quinton McAdam of Craigengillan, Ayrshire, to whom Burns wrote an “Epistle” addressed to Mr. McAdam of Craigengillan. Quinton McAdam was born in Angus in 1805 and died in 1826 and this picture hung for over a hundred years at Camlarg, the dower-house of Craigengillan until it was purchased by the Agnews of London in 1926. The family still possess Raeburn’s receipt for payment for the picture.

The portrait is painted on canvas (61 × 47 inches), life-size, and represents the boy in light yellowish-brown trousers, dark jacket, and white, ruffled shirt. The light shines beautifully on his satiny, blonde hair. His eyes are violet blue.

Mary Horneck

(The Jessamy Bride.)

John Hoppner	Collection of
(1758–1810).	Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft.

This canvas (29 × 24½ inches), a portrait of Mrs. Gwyn, better known as Mary Horneck, Oliver Goldsmith’s “Jessamy Bride,” remained in the possession of the Gwyn family until it was sold at Christie’s in 1889. Subsequently it passed into the Collection of Mr. Henry G. Marquand and thence into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft in Cincinnati.

The “Jessamy Bride” appears in a low-cut, white dress with blue sash and a white cap with a peacock-blue bow and tied under her chin with a narrow, black ribbon, or cord. A black spotted scarf is thrown around her waist and draped over her arms. The complexion is rosy, the eyes are brown, and the hair is powdered à la mode.

Mary Horneck was the daughter of Captain Kane William Horneck of the Royal Engineers and Hannah Mangles, known in her day as “the Plymouth Beauty.” Both were painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Captain Horneck died in 1755, leaving his widow in comfortable circumstances and she immediately removed with her three children, Charles, Mary, and Catherine, to London. About 1769 the Hornecks became acquainted with Oliver Goldsmith, who had three years before that date written The Deserted Village, which he dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, then President of the Royal Academy. Goldsmith soon found appropriate names for the Horneck children. Mary was the “Jessamy Bride”; Catherine was “Little Comedy” and Charles was the “Captain in Lace.” They are all three mentioned in Goldsmith’s acceptance to a dinner given by Dr. Baker to the Hornecks and to which the Horneck girls sent an invitation to Goldsmith in rhyme. Goldsmith’s reply was as follows:

“Your mandate I got,
You may all go to pot,
Had your senses been right
You’d have sent before night;
As I hope to be saved,
I put off being shaved;
For I could not make bold
While the matter was cold,
To meddle in suds,
Or to put on my duds;
So tell Horneck and Nesbitt
And Baker and his bit,
And Kauffman beside
And the Jessamy Bride,
And the rest of the crew,
The Reynoldses too,
Little Comedy’s face,
And the Captain in Lace—
(By the bye, you may tell him
I have something to sell him)—
Tell each other to rue
Yon Devonshire crew
For sending so late
To one of my state.
But ’tis Reynold’s way
From Wisdom to stray
And Angelica’s36 whim
To be frolick like him;
But alas! your good worships, how could they be wiser
When both have been spoiled in to-day’s Advertiser?”

It was after Goldsmith’s death that Mary Horneck married Col. Gwyn of the 16th Dragoons, who eventually became an equerry to the King. On his appearance at Court, Fanny Burney noted that “Colonel Gwyn is reckoned a remarkably handsome man and he is husband of the beautiful eldest daughter of Mrs. Horneck.” Of Mary Horneck, now Mrs. Gwyn, Fanny Burney wrote in 1788, she was “as beautiful as the first day I saw her; all gentleness and softness;” and a year later, as “soft and pleasing and still as beautiful as an angel.”

Mrs. Gwyn became a Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte and died in London in 1840, at the age of eighty-seven.

Catherine Horneck (“Little Comedy”) married in 1771 the artist, Henry William Bunbury. Their son, Charles John Bunbury was painted at the age of eight or nine, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

John Hoppner born in Whitechapel, London, of German parents, in 1758, was a follower of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and became a Court-Painter and a rival of Lawrence. Hoppner married in 1782 the daughter of Mrs. Wright, the American sculptress and maker of wax-works, who often sat to him as a model. Hoppner exhibited his first picture at the Royal Academy in 1780; and, through the patronage of the Prince of Wales, became a fashionable portrait-painter. After the death of Gainsborough and Reynolds, Hoppner and Lawrence commanded the field of art. Hoppner’s charming canvases, which are very characteristic of the period, are gaining in vogue day by day and bring very large prices.

Eliza Farren, Countess of Derby

Sir Thomas Lawrence	Collection of
(1769–1830).	Mr. J. P. Morgan.

Lawrence was only a young man of twenty-one when he sent to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1790 this portrait of Miss Farren, which was catalogued as The Portrait of an Actress.

The picture, oils on canvas (80 × 57 inches), shows the graceful young woman walking in a beautiful English park with a blue sky overhead, and who has paused for a moment. She wears an ivory-white, satin cloak trimmed with brown fur over a soft white muslin gown. Her gloved left hand is holding a large muff on which is a blue bow.

The picture was very much criticized. On hearing many adverse opinions, Miss Farren wrote to Lawrence:

“One says it is so thin in the figure that you might blow it away; another that it looks broke off in the middle; in short, you must make it a little fatter at all events diminish the bend you are so attached to, even if it makes the picture look ill, for the owner of it is quite distressed about it at present. I am shocked to tease you and dare say you wish me and the portrait in the fire; but as it was impossible to appease the cries of friends, I must beg you to excuse me.” The owner Miss Farren refers to was most probably Lord Derby.

At the death of Eliza, Countess of Derby, the portrait became the property of her daughter, Mary Margaret, wife of Thomas, second Earl of Wilton. From her descendant, Lord Wilton, the picture passed into the Collection of Mr. Ludwig Neumann of Manchester, and thence into possession of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, from whom it was inherited by his son.

This picture is very well known by the famous engraving by Bartolozzi, published in 1792, and re-issued in colors in 1797. On the death of Lady Derby in March, 1797, the Earl of Derby married, two months later, the subject of this portrait, to whom he had long been attentive. In the Farington Diary, under date of October 15, 1797, we read:

“Miss Farren (the actress afterwards Lady Derby) was bridesmaid to Lady Charlotte Stanley (Lord Derby’s daughter). Lord Derby’s attachment to Miss Farren is extraordinary. He sees her daily and always attends the play when she performs. When she came to Knowsley her mother was with her, so careful she is of appearances.”

And again on May 20, 1797: “Lady Gage told Hoppner that when Lady Derby (Miss Farren the actress recently married to Lord Derby) was presented, the Queen advanced to her, which is a great compliment.”

Eliza Farren, born in 1759, was the daughter of George Farren, a surgeon and an apothecary of Cork, who went on the stage and attained a little success. His wife and daughters also followed him and, consequently, Eliza was brought up in the theatre. She played juvenile parts in Bath, acting with her family, and often sang between the acts. At the age of fifteen she appeared in Liverpool as Rosetta in Love in a Village and soon afterwards as Lady Townly in The Provoked Husband. In 1777 she made her London début at the Haymarket as Miss Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer with great success and for many years she was the favorite actress of the Haymarket and of Drury Lane. When the charming Mrs. Abington left Drury Lane in 1782, Miss Farren was accepted as her successor. Miss Farren’s specialty was the fine and fashionable lady and her big part was Lady Townly. She was greatly admired in the rôles of Lady Fanciful in The Provoked Wife; Berinthia in the Trip to Scarborough; Belinda in All in the Wrong; Angelica in Love for Love; Elvira in The Spanish Friar and also in the Shakesperian parts of Juliet and Olivia in Twelfth Night.

Thomas Lawrence was born in Bristol in 1769 and spent his early years in Devizes, where his father was proprietor of the Black Bear Inn. Very early the boy showed remarkable talent for drawing portraits in crayons. He was so successful that he went to Bath, took a studio, and began his remarkable career which reached its climax when he became the foremost portrait-painter in England.

“In 1787 the wish of Lawrence’s heart was realized, and we find the young painter, then eighteen, established in rooms in what was then known as Leicester Fields—the present Leicester Square. He was accompanied to London by his father and on the thirteenth of September of that year he was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy. Armed with a letter of introduction from Prince Hoare, one of Lawrence’s Bath patrons, a member of the Dilettanti Society and Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to the Royal Academy, Lawrence obtained an interview with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and as a specimen of his ability and artistic skill he took to the President an oil-portrait of himself, painted in 1786. He was kindly received by the courtly old Sir Joshua, who praised his work and spoke most encouragingly to the young artist. “You have been looking at the Old Masters, I see,” he said, “but my advice is this: Study Nature! Study Nature!”

Three years later the young artist, who was extremely handsome and “romantic” in appearance, exhibited his picture of Miss Farren at the Royal Academy, which attracted much attention.

In 1791 Lawrence made a drawing of a much more beautiful subject, Emma, Lady Hamilton, from which a print was engraved.

“Hoppner who was ten years older than Lawrence,” writes Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, “had been for some time the favorite painter of George, Prince of Wales, with the result that half the smart ladies of the town sat to him. But the King, who allowed the Queen’s and Princess Amelia’s portraits to be painted by Lawrence, became so much interested in him, that, on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds in February, 1792, he decided that the young painter, then not twenty-three years of age and not yet a full member of the Academy, should be appointed to the post of Painter-in-Ordinary, an office that had been filled by the late President. ‘Never perhaps, in the country,’ writes Redgrave, in his account of Lawrence, ‘had a man so young, so uneducated, so untried in his art, advanced as it were per saltum to the honors and emoluments of the profession.’ The King’s favorite painter was the American, Benjamin West, Sir Joshua’s successor in the Presidential Chair, and Windsor was filled with his historical pictures, which, although once valuable, would not now fetch even a modest sum if they were sold at Christie’s.”

About 1790 Lawrence removed to Old Bond Street, installing himself in a handsome apartment with his friend, Farington, as his secretary.

Lawrence tried to paint imaginary and historical pictures, but it soon was evident that portraiture was his forte. The death of Opie in 1807 and of Hoppner in 1810, left him without a rival. On the death of Benjamin West in 1820, Lawrence was unanimously elected President of the Royal Academy. Fuseli, a little dissatisfied, exclaimed: “Well! well! since they must have a face-painter to reign over them, let them take Lawrence; he can at least paint eyes!” The period between 1820 and 1830 (when Lawrence died) is practically a “Lawrence Age.” Sir Thomas painted everybody of note from George IV and the Duke of Wellington to fashionable ladies of no particular distinction save their wealth. His full-length portrait of George IV in his Coronation robes was so frequently copied and given by the King to his friends that nearly every Royal Collection in Europe can show a replica.

The spirit of the age was certainly expressed in Lawrence’s portraits. We have only to look at such portraits as the Countess of Blessington (Wallace Gallery), Lady Peel (Frick Collection), Lady Dover and her Son, and La Duchesse de Berri to realize how true this is. These ladies look as if they had stepped from the pages of Akermann’s Repository.

It is always interesting to learn what an artist has to say about his own work. To Mrs. Jameson, Lawrence wrote the following:

“My thoughts have almost invariably been devoted to Sir Joshua, and, generally, to the Italian School—Raphael, Correggio, Titian, even Parmigiano. An admirer of the very finest works of Van Dyck, and acknowledging the consistent ability of his pencil, I have been less his votary than, perhaps, hundreds since his time, of distinguished taste and talent (Gainsborough, for instance), to whose judgment in other cases I should justly bend. Rubens has been infinitely more the object of my admiration; but, as you know, presents very little as example for portrait-painting.

“Sir Joshua continues to be more and more my delight and my surprise. Rembrandt has another and still higher place in my affection. In my men, then, I have thought of both, and of Titian and of Raphael, as the subjects approached their style. In women, of Sir Joshua, Raphael, Parmigiano, and Correggio. In children, of Sir Joshua and the two latter. In my portraits of Kemble and of Mrs. Siddons, of the highest Italian School.”

In 1825 the King of France gave Lawrence the Cross of the Legion d’honneur. Lawrence died in 1830, unmarried, a fashionable “man about town,” courted, admired, and not unlike Lord Byron, in some respects. Lord Gower says:

“That his fame underwent a marked decline during the half-century after his death in this country cannot be doubted; but within the last few years a reaction has set in, which is tending to place him again in the forefront of our greatest portrait-painters.

“Both as a man and as an artist Lawrence was impressionable, and in his work was entirely influenced by the spirit of his period, a period of affectation that frequently bordered upon vulgarity. If Lawrence’s art in portraiture had been genius instead of talent of the highest order, he would have created a public taste instead of slavishly following that set by the Court or Society of his day. As it was, his work was the ultimate expression of the curtain and column school of portraiture, and his success set a fashion that was followed for years afterwards by innumerable portrait-painters. These, in imitating the style, missed the spirit and perception by which Lawrence, trammelled as he was by the absurdities of dress and conventionality of attitude and surroundings, was enabled to place upon his canvases some suggestion of the actual identity of his sitters. And it was not until the advent of George Frederick Watts and the late Sir John Everett Millais that the effects of the imitation of the obvious points of Lawrence’s style finally disappeared from English portraiture.

“Lawrence’s chief defect was that he turned his art too much into a trade; he would have attained a far higher position had he contented himself with painting half the people he did, and his name would have stood on a higher pinnacle in the Temple of Fame. During the last twenty years of his life he painted but little more, as a rule, than the face of his sitter, the rest of the picture being completed by his pupils; or rather his assistants. This practice has, of course, lessened the value of his portraits.

“These are grave failings; but on the other side, his great merits are incontestable and weigh the scale in his favor. Where, except among the very greatest of those whose fame chiefly rests on their excellence in the art of portrait-painting—such giants as Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Van Dyck, Reynolds, and Gainsborough—can finer work be shown them than in such astonishing likenesses as those of Lawrence when at his best; and the master must be judged by his master-works. His style, when once he had adopted it, had the great merit of being a style of its own, of much refinement and excellence in drawing; although his work was, perhaps, too smooth in technique and somewhat affected in feeling. His paintings have lasted, whereas those of many of his contemporaries are mere wrecks and shadows of their former selves; for he attempted no experiments in glazings and pigments, as was Sir Joshua’s wont, and his pictures are, as a rule, as fresh as when they were painted.

“I believe it only fair to place him immediately beneath our three greatest portrait-painters,—that immortal trio, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney: at a time when Hoppner, Opie, and Raeburn were all working, this is high praise.”

Pinkie

Sir Thomas Lawrence	Collection of the late
(1769–1830).	Mr. Henry E. Huntington.

This radiant portrait is generally considered to be Lawrence’s masterpiece. How fresh, how sweet, how breezy it is! “Pinkie” stands on a high hill with a beautiful low-lying landscape of wooded hills spreading out and undulating towards the distant horizon. The sky is dappled with swiftly moving clouds and the morning breeze is blowing pretty freshly, for Pinkie’s light gown is rippling with it and the strings of her bonnet are fluttering and flapping rather violently. These ribbons are pink, matching the sash which holds the diaphanous, white gown in place. Pinkie’s eyes are brown, large, and lustrous and her brown hair is touzled by the wind; but she looks at us so sweetly and brightly that we love her at first sight. How daintily her little slippered foot is planted on the flower-sprinkled turf! Her airy, youthful, billowy figure suggests the idea of Spring beneath whose every footstep flowers instantly appear in full bloom.

How far she has come! Do we not see her home in the distance on the right, encircled by a crescent of leafy trees and with a wide driveway through the clearing?

“Pinkie’s” name was Sarah Moulton-Barrett, and she was the only daughter of Charles Moulton, Esq., and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Moulton. Pinkie was born March 22, 1783, and the lovely child died at the age of twelve, the year in which this portrait was painted. It is interesting to note that Pinkie was the aunt of the famous poet, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was the daughter of Pinkie’s brother, Edward Moulton-Barrett of Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and Hope End, Hereford.

The portrait, oils on canvas (57½ × 39¾ inches), was painted in 1795 and was formerly in the Collection of Octavius Moulton-Barrett, Esq., Westover, Calbourne, Isle of Wight, and thence it passed to the Right Hon. Lord Michelham, K. C. V. O., London. A modern critic rapturously expresses what every one feels on looking at this enchanting picture:

“If ever canvas was instinct with life, this picture lives and breathes. If ever the vehicle of oil paint spread on canvas has caught the wind as it blows, the light that dances in a mischievous child’s eyes, the breath of life and joy in living, Lawrence, in this picture, achieved the miracle. You feel, as you look at it, that you could read small print by its light in the dead of night. The color of it is the color of sea-downs on a May morning; the joy of it is of the joy of the first warm day of Spring. And in the little girl’s graceful figure are comprised whatever things are lovely, whatever things are pure, to the minds of men.”

Footnotes

1 “The early Byzantine masters represented the Madonna’s garments enriched with lines of gold. Giotto and the early Florentine painters as a rule preferred to suggest a plain material, often of delicate color except when the Madonna was portrayed as Queen of Heaven. In their devotional pictures the Sienese masters used gorgeous gold and red, or white and gold fabrics. Some of the Giotteschi and perhaps Gentile da Fabriano inherited from Siena their love of representing splendid textiles. Later color effects were made more of a study and deeper, richer tones appeared; but simple materials were represented except among the Venetians, who frequently in their pictures of both sacred and profane subjects painted elaborate, richly colored fabrics. This cult of splendor reached its height in the Sixteenth Century under Paolo Veronese.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

2 “The incident of the Adoration of the Magi is related only in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, and there very briefly; but many legends grew up around the Magi and Kings from the East. The number of the Magi was at first indeterminate, but about the Fourth Century the number three became general. It was not until the Fifth and Sixth Centuries that the Magi became Kings and not until the Tenth Century were they represented as crowned Kings. The Magi were for the first time pictured as of different ages, an old man, a middle-aged man, and a young man, in an Eastern manuscript dating from about 550. During the Middle Ages the exact age of each was given—the eldest was sixty, the youngest twenty, and the other forty years old. Their names, the Latin forms of which were Jaspar—later Gaspard—Balthasar, and Melchior, first appeared in a Greek Sixth Century manuscript. A passage attributed to Bede, quoted in Male’s Religious Art in France, Thirteenth Century, states that ‘Melchior, an old man with long, white hair and a long beard, offered gold, symbol of the divine kingdom. The second, named Caspar, young and beardless, with a ruddy countenance, honored Christ in presenting incense, an offering pointing to his divinity. The third, named Balthasar, with a dark skin and a full beard, testified in his offering of myrrh that the Son of Man must die.’ It was not until the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries that artists represented the third King as a negro, in accordance with the teachings of the theologians that the three Kings represented the three races of mankind coming to render homage to the Christ Child. The subject of the Adoration of the Magi was a favorite one with artists, particularly in the Fifteenth Century, as it lent itself to the richest and most elaborate treatment. The early legends asserted that St. Joseph did not appear; but in representations dating from the Fifteenth Century he is almost invariably present.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

3 “The legend which makes St. Luke a painter was of Eastern origin and was introduced into the West at the time of the First Crusade. There may have been a Greek painter of Madonnas named Luca whom the Western Church confused with the Evangelist, but the Evangelist was always regarded an authority on the characteristics of the Madonna. His Gospel gives the fullest account of her. The subject of St. Luke painting the portrait of the Madonna was frequently treated in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance.“—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

4 “Double roses, pink or red, were the symbol of divine love and were consecrated to the Madonna. One of her titles was the Madonna della Rosa, doubtless based on the verse in the Song of Solomon (ii. 1)—‘I am the Rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys’—for as early as the first centuries the Fathers of the Church applied to the Madonna the imagery of the Canticles. The tradition is that when the roses were massed together in garlands or baskets they symbolized heavenly joys. The painters of Central Italy during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries represented clusters of lilies and roses in the foreground of their Madonna pictures as votive offerings to her of sacred flowers. Often angels present bowls of flowers to her.
“Myrtle was one of the Madonna’s flowers and symbolized her purity and other virtues. The jasmine, though not strictly a sacred flower, is often found in religious paintings—the star-shaped blossom apparently symbolized divine hope or heavenly joy. It is often found with roses and lilies beside the Madonna. The carnation had no definite symbolic meaning, but was frequently used instead of the rose; then it had the same significance as the rose, the symbol of divine love, sacred to the Madonna.—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

5 “In general, representations of the Annunciation before the Twelfth Century are rare; but after the beginning of the Thirteenth Century they become very frequent, appearing somewhere on every altar-piece—in medallions, or quatrefoils above the main panels, in the pinnacles, or in the predella, or painted, or carved on the outside of the shutters. The subject was often treated as a mystery, not as an actual scene. Generally only the Virgin and Angel were represented, although it was not unusual to find other figures. From the end of the Fourteenth until the Sixteenth Century, God the Father is often seen in the sky and the Dove of the Holy Spirit descends from Him to the Virgin on rays of light. The Virgin was represented seated, standing, about to rise at the approach of the Angel, or kneeling. Gabriel was pictured standing, or kneeling, before her, or just alighting on the earth, his feet not yet touching the ground. In the Thirteenth Century representations, notably in the painted glass windows, the Virgin and the Angel stand face to face; later the Italian artists represented the scene as taking place in an open loggia, while the Flemish artists painted the Virgin in meditation in her room when the Angel appeared to her. Before the Thirteenth Century, Mary was often represented with a basket of wool, or distaff as, according to the Protevangelion, she continued to spin for the Temple after she had become affianced to Joseph and was working when the Angel came. Gabriel bears the light staff, or sceptre, of a herald, a scroll on which is inscribed his greeting, an olive-branch, or a stalk of lilies.
“The lily probably was developed from a flower with a long stalk which was introduced during the Thirteenth Century appearing in glass-painting and miniatures and signifying springtime, ‘the time of flowers,’ when the Annunciation took place. Later, lilies were used to symbolize the purity of the Virgin and were placed in a jar, or vase, near her, or were carried by the Angel. In Spain the vase of lilies was almost essential to representations of the Annunciation and became the special and distinguishing attribute of the Virgin. The Spanish Order of the Lily of Aragon, established by Ferdinand of Castile in commemoration of a victory over the Moors in 1410, had for its badge ‘pots filled with white lilies interlaced with griffins, to which was pendent a medal having thereon an image of the Virgin Mary.’ In Italy, neither the vase of lilies nor the stalk was considered essential in representations of the Annunciation, although they are of frequent occurrence. Certain of the Florentine artists, notably Fra Filippo Lippi, represented both. Ghirlandaio, in his Annunciation at San Gimigniano, placed a vase beside the Virgin’s desk and combined other flowers—roses, daisies, and jasmine—with the lilies. The Angel bears the lily-stalk.
“It is interesting to note that while in the majority of Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century Annunciations the Archangel Gabriel was represented bearing a lily, the Sienese painters seldom used this flower, preferring the olive-branch, always a favorite symbol with them. In the Annunciation it referred to the Christ Child as the bringer of peace on earth. One interpretation of the avoidance of the use of the lily by Sienese artists is that it was due to the hatred of Siena for Florence, the lily being the flower of Florence.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

6 Col. G. F. Young, The Medici (London, 1910).

7 Julia Cartwright, The Painters of Florence (London, 1916).

8 Col. G. F. Young, The Medici (London, 1909).

9 Col. G. F. Young, The Medici (London, 1909).

10 “The pomegranate in the hand of the Child, bursting open and showing the seeds, has been variously interpreted. It may be a symbol of the hope in eternity, which the Christ gave to man, signified by the unexpected sweetness of the fruit within the hard rind. In the writings of the early Fathers the fruit is also interpreted as the emblem of congregations, because of its many seeds, or as the emblem of the Christian Church because of the inner unity of countless seeds in one and the same fruit.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Painting (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

11 Berenson.

12 “Space composition differs from ordinary composition in the first place most obviously in that it is not an arrangement to be judged as extending only laterally, or up and down, on a flat surface, but as extending inwards in depth as well. It is composition in three dimensions and not in two, in the cube, not merely on the surface.... Painted space composition opens out the space it frames in, puts boundaries only ideal to the roof of heaven. All that it uses whether the forms of the natural landscape, or of grand architecture, or even of the human figure, it reduces to be its ministrants in conveying a sense of untrammelled, but not chaotic, spaciousness. In such pictures how freely one breathes,—as if a load had just been lifted from one’s breast; how refreshed, how noble, how potent one feels; again, how soothed; and, still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far-away bliss!”

13 Julia Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este (London, 1908).

14 Julia Cartwright, Beatrice d’Este (London, 1908).

15 Beryl de Sélincourt, Venice (London, 1907).

16 “In the north of Italy garlands of fruit took the place of votive flowers. In pictures of Florentine origin, when the Madonna holds a single rose, she is represented as the Madonna del Fiore—Our Lady of the Flower—to whom the Cathedral at Florence was dedicated.
“Fruits in general symbolized the fruits of the spirit, or a votive offering, or were often used purely for decorative purposes. The cherries which the Angels offer to the Child are the fruit of Heaven, typifying the delights of the blessed. In a picture by Memling in the Uffizi, the Child holds in one hand a cluster of cherries—the fruit of Paradise—while with the other He reaches out for the apple offered Him by an Angel. This typifies His relinquishment of heavenly joys and His taking upon Himself the sin of the world.
“The apple and the gourd were often painted together by artists, notably Crivelli. The use of the gourd dates back to the wall-pictures in the catacombs, where Jonah was represented as the type of the Risen Christ and the gourd as the symbol of the Resurrection. As the apple was the fruit of Eden which brought sin into the world, so the gourd represented the Resurrection which saved the world from the consequences of its sin. In early pictures the apple sometimes represents the fruit of Paradise, which the King of Heaven brings down to earth with Him. In general, however, it is used as the symbol of the sin of the world which Christ takes upon Himself.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

17 Beryl de Sélincourt, Venice (London, 1907).

18 It is interesting to see that Vasari calls Dürer a Fleming!

19 This reminds us of the old Nursery rhyme:
“Sing a song of sixpence,
 A pocket full of rye;
Four-and-twenty blackbirds
 Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
 The birds began to sing;
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
 To set before the King?”

Undoubtedly this jingle is an echo of the jokes and “pleasantries” in confectionery and pastry that were perpetrated by the Mediæval chefs.—E. S.

20 This was a fashion of the period, originating in Italy (see pages 51, 86, 103).

21 “The introduction of little angels singing vigorously and playing on musical instruments about the Madonna’s throne was a favorite motif of the Umbrian Boccatis. Indeed, angel musicians were represented by artists of all Schools from the Twelfth to the Seventeenth Century. They stand or kneel before the Madonna and Child, or—particularly in Venetian and North Italian paintings—sit on the steps of the throne, playing on lutes, harps, viols, miniature organs, blowing horns and trumpets, striking cymbals and triangles or beating drums and timbrels, and singing their songs of praise and adoration. They make a delightful note of joyousness in representations of the Madonna and Child and are among the happiest creations of painters and sculptors.”—Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

22 For surprises in pastry, see page 160.

23 Strawberry Hill Simeon had not then been discovered.

24 Leslie and Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London 1865).

25 William Smith (1756–1835) was a politician who took a great interest in literature and art. He was a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds, for whose Mrs. Siddons as The Tragic Muse he paid £320 at the Calonne Sale in 1795 and sold it to Mr. G. W. Taylor for £900. At the Taylor Sale in 1823 the picture cost Earl Grosvenor £1,837. It passed recently to America along with Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.
“This picture Sir Joshua Reynolds valued at 1000 guineas—a large sum in his day—but notwithstanding all the encomiums passed upon it, The Tragic Muse remained on his hands for several years. At length it was purchased from the artist for £800 by M. de Calonne, the ex-minister of finance in France.
“When M. de Calonne’s pictures were sold by Skinner and Dyke on March 28, 1795, The Tragic Muse was bought by Mr. Smith of Norwich for £700 and Mr. Smith sold it privately to Mr. G. Watson Taylor for £900. At the sale of Mr. Taylor’s pictures in 1823 it was purchased by Earl Grosvenor for £1,837-10. Inherited by the Dukes of Westminster, The Tragic Muse hung for many years in Grosvenor House, in company with Gainsborough’s Blue Boy until it was sold in 1921 to the late Mr. Henry E. Huntington.”

26 William T. Whitley, Gainsborough (London, 1915).

27 William T. Whitley, Gainsborough (London, 1915).

28 William B. Boulton, Gainsborough, 1907.

29 Maria’s sister Louisa had married the Hon. and Rev. Frederick Keppel, second son of the Earl of Albemarle.

30 Maria’s sister who married Lionel, fifth Earl of Dysart.

31 Name for evening dress.

32 Maurice W. Brockwell, Taft Catalogue of Paintings (New York, 1920).

33 Thomas Gainsborough (London, 1915).

34 The portrait of Henrietta Maria (see page 193) is another example.

35 Humphrey Ward.

36 Angelica Kauffman, the famous painter.