BRITISH ART REDISCOVERED - Unseen Pictures | Untold Stories

B R I T I S H A RT REDISCOVERED Unseen Pictures

Untold Stories

Miles Wynn Cato

B R I T I S H A RT REDISCOVERED Unseen Pictures

Untold Stories

Catalogue of an Exhibition at Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London 5-10 July 2022

Miles Wynn Cato www.mileswynncato.co.uk • +44 (0) 7766 460127 • mileswynncato@gmail.com

P R E FA C E

To live as a discovery-focused art dealer one must exist in a state of constant readiness; constantly looking, constantly searching, constantly reading and constantly dreaming.

Truthfully, there are no days off. If the dreams are underpinned by an unflagging dedication to the cause, and a knife-edge vigilance, then in the fullness of time an eye may develop, the rewards of which can potentially compensate for the barren times, and the many inevitable disappointments, great and small. The greatest rewards start with fleeting moments of recognition when a picture appears, often when least expected. Breathing ceases momentarily, and for a second or two the whole business of life makes perfect sense.

Of course, those exhilarating beginnings are by their very nature entirely unpredictable and in the long in-between times, it is natural to lose hope that they will ever happen again. But somehow the miracle happens and up something pops to rekindle the fire, the hope, and above all the sheer fascination that is often waiting to be revealed where art and history meet. If the something happens to surface at auction, then with the excitement comes the pain of waiting for the fateful moment when the journey of rediscovery either commences in earnest, or simply crashes and burns. It is an ever present reality that the internet has opened this process to quick-witted dealers and obsessive collectors all over the world. Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

This catalogue, and the accompanying exhibition, are built upon thirty years of experience as a dealer in early British pictures, and are the hard-won results of many journeys of rediscovery. Some have been short and relatively straightforward but others have included long rides on the unpredictable rollercoasters of research, conservation and expert approval. Discovery-hunting is a process in which one has to be prepared to sometimes accept the very real consequences, financially and emotionally, of expert disapproval. Were this not the case the catalogue may have been a little fuller, but it would undoubtedly have been shorter on credibility.

I am truly delighted to present such a substantial and wide-ranging group of pictures which have come through the rigorous filtration processes of rediscovery intact. Although the search continues, with one or two more promising prospects already underway, it is hard to believe that it will be possible to bring together another collection of rediscoveries

on this scale. Every one of the pictures in this catalogue is special in its own way, but the fact that no fewer than five are by Thomas Gainsborough makes me especially happy.

Gainsborough is a painter with whom, over many years, I have developed a particular sense of connection, a connection which has deepened through intensive research into the paintings and drawings in this exhibition.

Following my previous discovery of paintings by that most stimulating of Welsh artists Thomas Jones, it is gratifying to be able to add another fascinating and highly original landscape to his oeuvre. Furthermore, I am particularly excited to present a previously unknown lifetime portrait of an English genius who ranks among the greatest minds in human history; the philosopher John Locke.

I hope that all those who read this catalogue, and indeed who are able to see the pictures exhibited together, will share both my appreciation for the brilliance of British art during the long eighteenth century, and also excitement in the fact that such discoveries are still possible.

Miles Wynn Cato Cheltenham, March 2022 Acknowledgements I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all the following, whose generosity and kindness have helped make this exhibition possible: Dr Nicholas Amor, Nicholas Bagshawe, Lucy Bamford, Dr Bettina Baumgärtel, Hugh Belsey, Dr James Bettley, Mark Bills (Gainsborough’s House), Adam Busiakiewicz, Edward Maitland-Carew, Jane & Bob Carr, Alan Derbyshire, Dr Jane Eade,Ted Few, Dr Bendor Grosvenor, Amelia Jackson, Rica Jones, Geoffrey Lane, Lowell Libson, Dr Stephen Lloyd,Thomas Lloyd, Edward Martin, Geoffrey Munn, Dr Susan Sloman, Dr Greg Smith, Caroline Lowsley-Williams and Amina Wright.

Most of all I would like to thank my wife Kim, not only for her invaluable contribution to every practical aspect of the exhibition, but also for her support and encouragement, without which it may never have happened at all.

CONTENTS

Catalogue number 1.

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3.

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7.

8.

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Thomas Gainsborough – A Portrait of H C Wise – unlocated since 1947 Joan Carlile (attributed) – A Portrait of Abigail Stephens – previously unrecorded Alexander Geekie – A Portrait of John Locke – unrecorded since 1727 Thomas Jones - A Wye Capriccio – unrecorded since 1776 Anglica Kauffman – Zoraida – previously known only from the engraving Thomas Gainsborough - An Early Portrait – previously unrecorded Joseph Wright of Derby - A Cambridge Portrait – previously unrecorded William Daniell - A Hebridean Landscape – previously unrecorded Robert Thorburn – A Portrait of a Lady – previously unrecorded Thomas Gainsborough - A Suffolk Landscape – previously unrecorded Thomas Gainsborough – A Scene in a Village – unlocated since 1926 Thomas Gainsborough - A Cottage and Pond – previously unrecorded Emily Combe after Gainsborough - A Wooded Landscape – previously unrecorded Thomas Lawrence - Lulworth Castle – previously unrecorded

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1.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, RA (1727-1788) Portrait of Henry Christopher Wise (1738-1805) Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches In a fine carved and gilded English period frame Provenance: Commissioned by the sitter’s father Henry Wise, circa 1759, by descent to George Wise (1831-1888), by descent to Maj-Gen Sir George Henry Waller, 3rd Bt (1837-1892), by descent to Sir Wathen Arthur Waller, 5th Bt (18811947), his posthumous sale, Christie’s 12 December 1947, lot 146, bought by Wells, Private Collection, England Literature: E K Waterhouse, Preliminary Checklist of Portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, 1953 p. 114. Waterhouse, Gainsborough, 1958, p. 96, no. 728. H Belsey, Thomas Gainsborough,The Portraits, 2019, p. 884, no. 955 (illustrated in b/w)

This handsome portrait’s last appearance on the market as by Gainsborough was at Christie’s in 1947.1 It dates from the artist’s very first foray into the Bath art world during the winter of 1758/1759, when Gainsborough was in the process of deciding to leave Ipswich for what he hoped would be a more lucrative and engaging life in the highly fashionable Somerset spa town.2 On New Year’s Day 1759, Henry Christopher Wise’s parents, Henry (1706-1778) and Mary (1703-1760), arrived in Bath,3 and it was almost certainly during this stay that they both sat to Gainsborough.4 The commission is recorded in the correspondence of their friend George Lucy (c. 1714-1786), of Charlecote Park, Warwickshire, whose own sitting to Gainsborough the following year may well have been on the Wises’ recommendation. In a letter to his housekeeper, dated 23 February 1760, Mr Lucy wrote: ‘I finished sitting for my Phiz yesterday morning. Mr Wise says ‘tis as like as his.’5 The receipt for his portrait survives among the Lucy papers; it cost 8 guineas.

Given their proximity in date, the three Wise canvases were almost certainly charged at a similar rate.

Both the portraits of George Lucy and Henry Wise are characterised by a simplicity and directness which is typical of Gainsborough’s early male portraiture6 in Bath, and 4

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The fine sixteenth and seventeenth century mansion of Warwick Priory (Plate 1),11 together with its estate and lands associated with the Brompton property, passed to the elder of Henry Wise’s two surviving sons, the bachelor Matthew (17031776). In the mid-18th century, Matthew Wise took down a large proportion of the old Priory buildings and erected a handsome new classical range overlooking the gardens. Upon his death in 1776, Matthew’s brother Henry inherited, but he remained living largely in London. Within two years he in turn died and his only surviving son and heir, Henry Christopher Wise, thus came into his very considerable inheritance.

Plate 1. Warwick Priory, garden front.

(Reproduced with permission of Burke’s Peerage)

which is deployed to particularly striking effect in this portrait of the handsome young Henry Christopher Wise. However, whereas the father is depicted in a sober buffcoloured suit, the son is dressed in vibrant blue velvet, edged with white rabbit fur.7 His hair is fashionably dressed with an aile-de-pigeon bag wig and both father and son have a tricorn hat tucked under their left arm. It is not recorded whether Henry Christopher Wise arrived with his parents when they went to Bath in the New Year of 1759. If he did, then he was almost certainly painted with them, if not then he must have returned to sit soon afterwards. In 1759, he achieved his majority and so, as the de facto heir to his family’s Warwickshire and Middlesex estates, it was an auspicious time to have his picture painted.

The Wise family had been counted among the landed gentry of Warwickshire since the time of Henry VIII and by the reign of Charles I, their annual estate rentals were around £700, a very respectable sum. However, following the Civil War, under Cromwell’s Protectorate, their estate was sequestered and sold, reducing the family to a parlous condition. It was thanks to the remarkable talents of Henry Christopher Wise’s grandfather, another Henry Wise (1653-1738),8 that the family fortune was revived, and in spectacular fashion. This gentleman was an extremely successful and sought-after landscape gardener during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. A partner in the Brompton Nurseries,9 he was appointed to the post of Royal Gardener

by William III, Queen Anne and George I.10 In addition to overseeing many royal gardens, he laid out some of the greatest English gardens of the period including Blenheim, Wanstead and Longleat. In 1709, Henry Wise bought the Warwick Priory estate and when he died there in 1738, he left an immense fortune, estimated at some £200,000.

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The new owner of Warwick Priory was thirty eight and had been married for ten years to Mary Wathen, the daughter and heiress of Dr Samuel Wathen.12 Mary was considerably younger than her husband and bore him six children, several of whom, as was sadly common in this period, predeceased him.13 Around 1773, Henry Christopher Wise returned to Gainsborough with a commission to paint his lovely young wife, Mary (Plate 2).14 The artist’s years in Bath, which were drawing to a close, had been immensely successful and he was already vying with Sir Joshua Reynolds as the most fashionable painter in England.15 The contrasting portraits of Henry Christopher and Mary Wise provide a perfect demonstration of how Gainsborough’s technique changed during his years in Bath, her picture being far looser and showing the enormous confidence of his rapidly maturing style. It is a testament to the consistent quality of Gainsborough’s art that, despite the significant change in his style, the two pictures remain successful as a pair.16 Mary and Henry Christopher Wise appear to have lived a fairly quiet and settled life at the Priory, underpinned by their considerable wealth. In addition to what are likely to have been a substantial bequests of capital from both his father and uncle, in the latter years of the 18th century the annual rental of the Warwickshire estate was over £2000.17 Warwick was still a small town, but a distinguished one, dominated by its two architectural masterpieces: the parish church of St Mary18 and of course Warwick Castle.19 Henry Christopher Wise performed the sorts of roles expected of a country gentleman of ample fortune, serving as High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1780, and as Steward of Warwick Races in 1781.20 In 1784, he exercised the right of Presentation to the Rectory of St Nicholas’s church at Charlewood in Surrey, a gift obtained by his grandfather Henry Wise in 1716, and which remained with the Wise family until 1884.21 On 14 January 1805, after a short illness, and at the respectable age of sixty-seven, Henry Christopher Wise died at home. The Bath Chronicle reported that he was ‘much lamented by a large and respectable circle of friends, and the poor in general.’22

A notice in the Morning Chronicle recorded that his death was ‘deeply and universally regretted.’23 He is buried, alongside his grandfather Henry, in the aisle of St Mary’s church where a memorial stone marks the spot.24 His heir was his eldest son Matthew (1767-1810), who, in addition to Warwick Priory itself, received all the family lands in Warwickshire and Middlesex. Henry Christopher Wise’s will is a long document which sets out at considerable length his wishes for the extensive property and capital, including generous cash bequests to his other surviving children, as well as making provision for the poor of Warwick.25 However, despite the munificent inheritance enjoyed by Matthew Wise, he apparently had no desire to live at the Priory and within a few months it was advertised to let.26 It is not clear whether or not a tenant was found, but in October 1809 almost the entire contents of the house were auctioned in a sale lasting five days,27 an event which marked the end of the Priory as the Wise family’s primary home. The following year, Matthew, who had duly performed his duty as High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1807, died aged just forty-three. He was unhappily married and having no children, the Priory estate devolved to his brother, the Rev. Henry Wise (1772-1850), vicar of Offchurch near Warwick.28 In 1851, the Rev. Wise’s son, another Henry Christopher Wise MP, sold the Priory and thirty-seven acres of the park to the Birmingham and Oxford Railway Company. The house itself remained tenanted until 1925 when it was sold again, this time for demolition, to the dismay of many in England. Fortunately, a large proportion of the earlier house, including the interiors, was sold to an American diplomat and his wife who successfully re-created the Priory in Virginia.29

Plate 2. Gainsborough, circa 1773, Portrait of Mary Wise.

(Image courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art)

Although the Priory contents sale of 1809 included a great many pictures, the Wise family portraits were not among them. The family Gainsboroughs eventually descended to George Wise of Woodcote,30 a great-great grandson of the sitter in the present portrait. Upon his death without issue, the Warwickshire estates, and family collections, passed to George Wise’s cousin Maj-Gen Sir George Waller, 3rd Bt, whose mother was a Wise.31 In due course, they passed to his younger son, Sir Wathen Arthur Waller of Leek, the 5th baronet, who died unexpectedly at Woodcote in 1947. Although Sir Wathen had children and was a very rich man,32 the decision was made to sell most of the family heirlooms, including some splendid jewels33 and a collection of important manuscripts.34 Among the paintings his trustees consigned to Christie’s in December 1947 were the Gainsboroughs of Henry Wise,35 and the present portrait of Henry Christopher Wise.36 The sale came in the aftermath of the war when the contents of so many great houses were being dispersed. However, even in those dark days, auctions which included works by the great painters could still attract the attention of the press, and what were considered to be high prices 7

were being achieved for the best pictures in important sales.37 On 20 November 1947, The Illustrated London News carried a preview of the upcoming sale, featuring several photographs of the lots with the highest pre-sale estimates, accompanied by the promise that ‘The Old Masters which will come up for sale at Christie’s on Friday December 12 include numerous works of the highest quality, many with long pedigrees, and from famous collections.’ Other newspapers drew attention to the auction with a short notice, entitled ‘Notable Picture Sale.’ It read: ‘Christie’s will look like the wing of the National Gallery on 12 December when Old Masters from famous collections are being sold. Gainsboroughs, Rubens, Reynolds, a Tintoretto and a Cuyp, which was shown in the Dutch exhibition at Burlington House before the war, are being offered. Most important of 30 pictures being sold by Lord Halifax is a Rubens. Lord Normanton has a number of paintings for disposal, including a view of Bolton Bridge by Vickers and Gainsboroughs and Knellers are from the collection of Sir Wathen Arthur Waller of Leek.’38 Sir Wathen’s Gainsboroughs were the portraits of Henry Christopher Wise and his parents.

After its post-war sale at Christie’s, Gainsborough’s portrait of the young Henry Christopher Wise disappeared from view and, over the course of the following decades, both the identity of the sitter and the celebrated artist who painted him were forgotten.39 Consequently, when the painting appeared in the 2019 catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough’s portraits, it was described as Whereabouts Unknown, and it was only possible to illustrate it with a black and white photograph dating from the 1940’s.

Now, following transformative cleaning and conservation of the painting, Hugh Belsey has warmly welcomed its rediscovery, and the re-establishment of a fine example of the portraiture of Gainsborough’s early Bath period.

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1 It is listed in Hugh Belsey’s 2019 catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough portraits as no. 955, ‘Whereabouts Unknown’, illustrated with a black and white photograph dating from around the time of the 1947 sale.

2 The success of this trial was sufficient to convince him that his decision was the right one and in the autumn of 1759, the Gainsborough family settled in Bath. They would remain there, with Thomas working to ever-increasing acclaim, until they moved to London in 1774.

3 As was customary in this period, their arrival was noted in the local press. Belsey, p. 883.

4 Henry Wise’s portrait is Belsey 953. The original of Mary Wise, Belsey 954, is lost but is known from copies, Belsey 954a/b.

5 Warwickshire Record Office, Lucy Mss. L6/1454.

6 Gainsborough’s great virtuosity in painting fabrics is apparent far more often in his female portraiture during this early Bath period.

7 George Lucy is depicted in a very similar blue suit. It appears in several of Gainsborough’s male portraits of this period and may well have been a studio prop.

8 His portrait by Kneller was lot 155 in the 1947 sale. It was bought by George VI and remains in the Royal Collection. The sale also contained a number of Henry Wise’s original garden designs (lots 126-131). Their appearance on the market prompted an illustrated article by Christopher Hussey: Henry Wise. Gardener to King William III and Queen Anne. Country Life, January 9, 1948, pp. 78-81.

9 A flourishing London business on the present-day site of the Albert Hall and South Kensington Museums.

10 The Wise family had use of apartments at Hampton Court, where Henry Christopher Wise was born in 1738.

11 The first stone house was built on the site of the former Priory of St Sepulchre, by Sir Thomas Fisher in 1576. It was enlarged and altered by Sir Thomas Puckering in the 1620’s.

12 A distinguished London physician, Dr Wathen was John Wesley’s personal doctor and probably acted as male midwife to Queen Charlotte. Lot 154 in the 1947 sale was a group portrait of the Wathen family by Knapton.

13 They were married at St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, on 20 November 1766. Mary was born in 1751 so was barely sixteen whereas Henry Christopher was twenty-eight.

14 Belsey 956. Her portrait by Hickey, dated 1794, was lot 150 in the 1947 sale.

15 Within a year or so Gainsborough would make his final move to London, where he achieved even greater acclaim.

16 The canvases are the same size and the orientation of the figures is complementary.

17 An estate rental of 1805/06, drawn up after H C Wise’s death, totals £2598.19.6. (Warwick Archives CR0556/262).

18 The nave and tower were destroyed in the great town fire of 1694, but were magnificently rebuilt by Francis and William Smith of Warwick in 1704.

19 Francis Greville, 1st Earl of Warwick (1719-1773), of Warwick Castle, sat to Gainsborough in 1765.

20 The races were a major social event and notices appeared in the Oxford Journal throughout May-August 1781.

21 The recipient was the Rev. Joseph Davie (Oxford Journal on 3 July 1784). Subsequently, H C Wise’s second son, Henry (c. 1770-1850), became Rector of Charlewood as well as Vicar of Offchurch, Warwickshire.

22 Notice of 7 February 1805. He was a member of, and subscriber to, the ‘Society for bettering the condition, and increasing the comforts of, the Poor’.

23 Edition of 2 February 1805.

24 Inscribed: ‘In the vault underneath lie the mortal remains of Henry Christopher Wise Esq., late of the Priory, who was born October 18th 1738, and departed this life January 14th 1805.

The memory of the just is blessed.’

25 Warwickshire Archives CR0026/1/3/36. His unmarried daughter Catherine received £7000 whereas his widowed daughter, Mary Nutcombe (1770-1836) received £4000. None of his possessions, such as paintings, are mentioned and presumably they all went to his son Matthew, along with the other contents of the Priory.

26 Oxford Journal, 26 October 1805. The house is described as ‘A Capital Mansion; comprising suites of elegant Apartments, with Offices of every Description, and fit for the Residence of a genteel Family of the first Distinction; with the Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, Park, and other Lands now occupied therewith, containing, together, about seventy-seven Acres.’

27 A copy of the catalogue, for the sale of 17-21 October 1809, is in Warwick Archives (CR0556/183). It includes over 75 lots of paintings but very few of the subjects are specified.

28 Much of this account of the Wise family is taken from William Field’s An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Town and Castle of Warwick (publ. 1815).

29 The purchasers, Mr and Mrs Alexander Weddell, lived in what they christened Virginia House, until their accidental deaths in 1948. Today their creation remains largely intact and is operated as a country house museum by the Virginia Historical Society. For details of this remarkable rescue see www.virginiahistory.org/learn/historical-book/chapter/house. By a somewhat surreal turn of fate, the modern buildings of the Warwickshire Archives, where the Wise papers are to be found, are situated among the few remaining fragments of the Wise’s former Priory home.

30 A large Jacobean-style country house at Leek Wootton, just north of Warwick. It was built from 1861 by George’s father Henry Christopher Wise MP, to replace the Priory as the Wise family seat.

31 Katherine (1804-1861), eldest daughter of the Rev. Henry Wise, vicar of Offchurch, Warwickshire.

32 His estate was valued at £467,901 before tax.

33 A necklace of 42 cushion shaped diamonds was sold for £3,900, a high sum at that time.

34 These included a collection of letters by the poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771) and Horace Walpole, and also a large collection of important Jacobite papers.

35 Lot 147, together with a portrait said to be of Henry Wise’s mother, Patience Banks.

36 Christie’s stencilled stock numbers, together with the chalk markings (sale date & lot number) remain on the stretcher.

37 A well-known Reynolds portrait of the famous Irish courtesan Nelly O’Brien was widely reported to have sold for 3,300 guineas in Christie’s 12 December 1947 sale.

38 The Nottingham Journal, and also the Bradford Observer, 20 November 1947. Lord Halifax’s Rubens made £6,930.

39 Sometime in the 1970’s or 1980’s the portrait was subjected to some clumsy restoration. This included the addition of unnecessary overpaint particularly in sensitive areas of the face. In combination with expanses of darkened varnish, which had not been removed, the whole image was deadened and inevitably Gainsborough’s authorship was disguised. All of this has been successfully addressed and Gainsborough’s superb brushwork and colouring have been revealed once more.

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2.

ATTRIBUTED TO JOAN CARLILE (circa 1606-1679) Portrait of Abigail Stephens (1628-1688), later Lady Harley, holding a lily Inscribed verso: ‘Abigail Stephens, Lady Harley. Dobson’ Oil on oval panel, 7½ x 5½ inches In an antique gilt frame This enchanting little portrait dates between the later-1640’s and early 1650’s, when the sitter, Abigail Stephens, would have been between about eighteen and twenty-five years old.1 She was born at Eastington Manor in Gloucestershire (Plate 1), seat of her father, Nathaniel Stephens, MP (1589-1660), who also inherited Chavenage House, near Tetbury. He took the Parliamentary side in The English Civil War and served as colonel to a regiment of horse which he raised. However, he was lukewarm in his support for the execution of King Charles I. According to family legend, Abigail herself was so horrified by her father’s de facto acquiescence to the regicide, however reluctant he may have been, that she laid a curse upon her father which resulted in his own death soon afterwards.2

Plate 1. Eastington Manor, Gloucestershire (after Kip).

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On 25th February 1661, Abigail Stephens married Sir Edward Harley, MP (1624-1700), the son of Sir Robert Harley, KB and his wife Brilliana, who famously defended the family seat Brampton Bryan Castle during a Royalist siege in 1643. Like Abigail’s father, Sir Edward Harley took up the

Parliamentary cause, although upon the Restoration he found favour with Charles II, who appointed him Governor of Dunkirk. He was closely involved in the politics of Herefordshire and Shropshire for most of his adult life and had a reputation as a man of integrity and good character. Edward and Abigail Harley had four sons and one daughter, the most notable of whom was their eldest boy Robert (1661-1724), who achieved greatness as an English statesman during the later Stuart and early Georgian periods. He was Treasurer to Queen Anne and was raised to the peerage as 1st Earl of Oxford.

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appear to have been painted on a small, even miniature, scale, but by the 1640’s she was certainly capable of producing much larger canvases, some including multiple sitters. She also painted a series of distinctive portraits featuring small full-length female figures in white satin dresses and with landscape backgrounds.

The sitter in one of these is believed to be the Countess of Berkeley, painted in the 1650’s,4 and it may well be significant that Berkeley Castle is only a few miles from the Stephens estate of Eastington Manor, where Abigail Stephens was brought up.

The early 1650’s appear to have been a productive period for Joan Carlile and in 1654 she moved, together with her family, Plate 3. Carlile, 1650’s, Portrait of a Lady. to the artistic hub of Covent Garden so Oil on canvas, 43½ x 35½ inches that she could continue to advance her (Image - Tate Britain) career as a professional painter. However, the venture was not a success and within two years, they had returned to Richmond.

None of the pictures currently attributed to her have been dated to after 1660.

Plate 2. Carlile, the Countess of Dysart.

Oil on panel, 8¾ x 6¾ inches.

(Image courtesy of Thirlestane Castle)

The artist Joan Carlile was painting professionally as early as the late 1630’s. As such, she is lauded as the first professional female painter in England for whom a body of work survives.3 Her life and paintings, together with those of the artists Anne Kiligrew (16601685) and Mary Beale (1633-1699), were examined in a ground-breaking exhibition curated by Dr Bendor Grosvenor in 2019. The catalogue, ‘Bright Souls’ The Forgotten Story of Britain’s First Female Artists, includes a list of all Joan Carlile’s known works. In 2019, this amounted to some 18 extant paintings and several more have subsequently been identified.

Carlile’s husband was an amateur playwright and poet and he had been Keeper of Richmond Park under Charles I. They lived in Petersham near Richmond, where Joan’s early patrons included Sir Lionel Tollemache of nearby Ham House. Her earliest pictures 12

Prior to the mid-20th century, Joan Carlile had been very largely forgotten. However, as interest in female artists has grown enormously in recent years, her significance in the story of British art has now been recognised. In common with most painters of her period, Carlile did not sign her pictures and so the reconstruction of her oeuvre is almost wholly dependent on connoisseurship, underpinned by documentary research.5 This is an ongoing process and as further information comes to light, and potential new paintings emerge, assessment of Carlile’s stylistic development and the complex nature of her patronage (at a time of great societal upheaval) continues to be refined. For instance, Joan Carlile and her husband were clearly Royalists, as were her early patrons such as the Murrays and Ishams.6 However, the impetus for professional engagement, financial necessity and the onset of the Interregnum may have meant that by the 1650’s, she was willing to paint sitters such as Abigail Stephens, who came from a Parliamentarian family.

A particular challenge with painters such as Joan Carlile, whose catalogues are still relatively limited and who left few if any securely dated works, is that of laying down

the timeline of chronological development, in terms of style. This difficulty, which faces all art historians attempting to get to grips with previously-overlooked painters, is unsurprisingly evident in the short catalogue raisonné of Carlile included in the Bright Souls exhibition catalogue. The series of medium-sized full-length portraits of ladies in white satin dresses are convincingly grouped together in the 1650’s.

However, in my judgement, there is not yet enough evidence to date Joan Carlile’s earlier works with precision.

For example, in ‘Bright Souls’, a fine Portrait of a Lady, believed to be Catherine Bruce, Countess of Dysart (Plate 2), is ascribed a date of circa 1640, and as such it is stated to be ‘probably the earliest known portrait by Carlile’.7 However, in my judgement, this painting is far more accomplished and stylistically advanced than another anatomically awkward small double portrait shown in Bright Souls, of Sir Thomas and Lady Dorothy Browne,8 and that is ascribed a similar or later date of ‘1640’s’. Furthermore, the painting of the Countess of Dysart’s face is strikingly similar to that of another illustrated bust portrait of an Unknown Lady, dated to the 1650’s.9

Plate 4. Detail of plate 3

In relation to known portraits by Joan Carlile, this present image of Abigail Stephens also has many similarities to that of the Countess of Dysart. They are both painted on elongated oval wooden panels, a format which was not a common one in the period, apart from in the conventional scale of portraitminiature painting.10 While about one third of the background in the Dysart portrait is

taken up with a landscape, the background in Abigail Stephens is divided up in similar proportions, but with a fountain urn being introduced to enliven the otherwise plain backdrop. The two sitters are dressed in similar blue dresses, with chalky white highlights and the same plum coloured drapery. They are posed at a very similar angle, and directly engaging with the viewer, each with an arm across their waist and with remarkably similar elongated fingers. In the case of Abigail Stephens, she holds a single white lily, exquisitely delicate and very finely painted, signifying purity and reflecting her youthful bloom. Furthermore, the delicate way in which textures, hair and physical features are painted are closer to some of Carlile’s ladies in white satin dresses, particularly the fine example in the collection of the Tate Gallery (Plates 3 & 4).11 This picture is dated to circa 1650-55, so based on stylistic comparison, I believe it is quite conceivable that this picture and Abigail Stephens’ portrait were painted at around the same time.

As is frequently the case with discoveries made at auction, it has not yet been possible to discover any meaningful provenance for this painting of Abigail Stephens. However, the subtleties of style and technique displayed in the portrait, in addition to aspects such as the character of the panel, all of which have been described above, present persuasive arguments in support of my proposed attribution to Joan Carlile.

1 A detailed account of Stephens family of Eastington and Chavenage is contained in C. Ellis Stevens’ Stevens Genealogy. Some Descendants of the FitzStephen Family in England and New England (Privately Printed in New York, 1904). This records the date of Abigail Stephens’ baptism as 25 September 1628. It is notoriously difficult to accurately assess the age of sitters in painted portraits, so a fairly broad range has been suggested. The Portland Collection at Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, owns a number of portraits of the Harley family, including two of Abigail Stephens. One is a 30 x 25 inch canvas by an unknown painter inscribed ‘Abigail Stephens Wife to Sr Edward Harley’. In that picture, she is certainly somewhat older than in the present portrait but her appearance is a good match. The other is a portrait miniature, attributed to Nicholas Dixon, showing her as a young woman. Again, the likeness is convincing.

2 Information from the Chavenage House website: www.chavenage.com.

3 A number of other female painters were working in this period but they are known only from written records.

4 Berkeley Castle Collection, Gloucestershire.

5 Much of this research is being undertaken by Dr Jane Eade, a Curator with the National Trust.

6 William Murray, 1st Earl of Dysart of Ham House and Sir Justinian Isham, Bt (1610-1675), of Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire.

7 Bright Souls catalogue no. 1 (p. 8 & 43, illustrated). The dating of this portrait is made considerably more difficult by uncertainty regarding the identity of the sitter (discussed on p. 9).

8 Bright Souls catalogue p. 44.

9 Bright Souls catalogue p. 43 (UK Government Art Collection).

10 The present Stephens portrait is somewhat smaller than the Dysart portrait which measures 8¾ x 6¾ inches. However, it is considerably larger than Carlile’s oval Portrait of a Lady (5 inches high, on copper) which is currently dated to the ‘1640’s’ (with Philip Mould & Co. 2021). A less elongated oval portrait of Charles I by Carlile (after Dobson, oil on panel, 5 x 4 inches) is at Belton House. No date is ascribed to that picture in the catalogue raisonné.

11 Tate no. T14495. Illustrated in the Bright Souls catalogue, p. 43.

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3.

ALEXANDER GEEKIE (1655-1727) A Portrait of John Locke (1632-1704) Inscribed verso ‘Mr Lock by A Geekie, 1696’ Pastel on paper, 12¼ x 9¾ inches In a carved and silvered Lely pattern frame Provenance: Bequeathed by the artist to his son, the Rev. Dr William Geekie (1690-1767), Perhaps given to his brother John Geekie (1695-1747), His son John Geekie (1724-1822), Probably by further descent in the Geekie family, Private Collection, Scotland.

The rediscovery of this previously unrecorded ad vivum portrait constitutes a very significant addition to the iconography of the philosopher John Locke who, alongside Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), was largely responsible for laying the foundations of the Enlightenment. Universally acknowledged as one of the greatest thinkers of all time, Locke is considered to be one of the intellectual fathers of the American Revolution.1 In 1697, John Evelyn numbered Locke among the people he considered most worthy of commemoration in the form of medallions or by means other visual representation.2 In fact, Locke had already been painted by Greenhill, Verelst and Dahl (Plate 1), and would be painted by Kneller later; all of these well-known oil portraits have long been in public collections.3 Other than a small graphite drawing by Greenhill,4 a study for his portrait of 1672, no original portrait of John Locke has appeared on the art market for many decades.5 Alexander Geekie was born in south-eastern Scotland where his family were longestablished landowners, albeit on a modest scale. He settled in London where he became a celebrated surgeon, and where he was able to develop his abiding interests in science, history and painting. He became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries as well as the Royal Society, whose prominent early members included Boyle, Wren, Hooke and Newton, as well as John Locke, who had been elected in 1668. Dr Geekie’s professional success also allowed him to become a serious collector of paintings, his primary interest being in portraits of eminent doctors and philosophers.6 He greatly 14

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In addition to his activities as an art collector and philanthropist, Alexander Geekie was himself an accomplished portrait painter.11 In 1711, he subscribed to Kneller’s Queen Street Academy, the forerunner to the all-important St Martin’s Lane Academy, creative crucible of the Georgian art world.12 However, as the dates of Geekie’s surviving portraits attest, he was active as an artist in his own right from at least the second half of the 1690’s. His chosen medium was pastels and in terms of both quality and style, they are comparable to the work of some of the best late seventeenth-century practitioners of that medium, such as Edward Luttrell (1650-1737).13 It is extremely fortunate that Geekie habitually signed, inscribed and dated the back of his portraits.14 As a result, those that survive, though few in number, shed valuable light upon his artistic practice.

Plate 1. Dahl, 1693, John Locke. Oil on canvas, 29½ x 24 inches.

(Image – National Portrait Gallery)

admired Sir Godfrey Kneller, who painted both Geekie and his wife Jane (died 1702), and he owned a number of Kneller’s portraits. Among them was a 30 x 25 inch canvas of John Locke, acquired directly from the artist in 1703/4. On 26 February of that year, the surgeon wrote to Locke: ‘Sir G Kneller has been so kind to let me have that picture he did of you Upon some consideration’.7 That portrait subsequently passed into the ownership of Alexander Geekie’s son William (1690-1767), latterly the Archdeacon of Gloucester,8 who sold it to Sir Robert Walpole for £100 in 1745.9 Alexander Geekie was also a generous benefactor and among the pictures he gave away was a portrait of the Protestant martyr Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, donated to St Martin‑in‑the‑Fields in 1678, and a Van Dyck school canvas of Inigo Jones,10 which he gave to the Barber‑Surgeons Company during his Mastership in 1719-20.

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Prior to the rediscovery of this present portrait of John Locke, Geekie’s earliest known work was a very fine quality pastel of a man, dated 1697 (Plate 2), believed to be the celebrated Huguenot physician Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573-1655).15 A damaged portrait of a young man in a periwig, probably a member of the Geekie family,16 is dated 1698. Finally, two other surviving portraits by Alexander Geekie are both copies of a work by other painters, and it is important to note that each is clearly inscribed as a copy in the artist’s own hand. One, an excellent head of Inigo Jones, is the artist’s latest known surviving work.17 It is inscribed: ‘Inigo Jones Architect/ 17 after Dobson by A. Geekie 21.’ The other, dated 1704,18 is a pastel copy of Kneller’s oil painting of John Locke, the one which Geekie had acquired directly from the artist the previous year. Geekie’s image is reduced from Kneller’s original, focussing on the bust only, and it is far less carefully finished than his other know pictures, perhaps because it was only ever conceived as a sketch of a picture he already owned. However, it is also fully inscribed verso: ‘A copy of John Lock Esqr/after Sr Godfrey Kneller/Drawn

by A.G; 1704.’19 In contrast to his rather lifeless copy of the Kneller, Geekie’s present portrait of the sixty-four year old John Locke was clearly drawn with great care and from life. By the 1690’s, Alexander Geekie was ideally situated, both personally and professionally, to draw the portrait of one of the greatest men of the age. In 1689, Geekie was married to Jane Churchill, whose brother Awnsham Churchill, MP (1658-1728), an important London bookseller, was also John Locke’s publisher, and Churchill was closely involved in managing Locke’s business and financial affairs.20 Not only would this close familial relationship have given Dr Geekie access to the man he so admired, but Locke was also trained in medicine21 and, while he had discontinued that profession, this shared interest is likely to have helped cement their friendship. In 1701, it became particularly relevant as Locke began to suffer from an alarming decline in his hearing, brought on by a bad cold, in conjunction with both asthma and bronchitis. Alexander Geekie did his utmost

to treat the deafness with a variety of extraordinary applications, such as a poultice made from a roasted onion wrapped in a colewort leaf. The surgeon’s efforts were apparently in vain but Locke was greatly relieved when an internal abscess burst and his hearing gradually returned, aided by the silver ear trumpet that Geekie lent him.22 This treatment is recorded in detail in sixteen letters written to Locke from Geekie between January 1701/2 – February 1702/3.23 While they contain many fascinating details about the sort of remarkable medical interventions practised in the period, the main value of the letters in the context of Geekie’s portrait is in confirming the warmth of their relationship. The reader is left in no doubt about the friendship and respect existing between doctor and patient, but also the lengths to which Geekie was prepared to go in order to effect a cure.

It therefore comes as no surprise to find that Alexander Geekie’s own portrait of his friend John Locke, drawn several years earlier, was one to which he attached a particular significance. This is evidenced by the fact that it is the only one of his own works singled out for special mention in his will, drawn up on the 15th July 1727.24 Among the pictures left to his son William, including portraits by Kneller of King William and Dr Compton, late Bishop of London, is one specifically itemised as ‘John Lock, My Own, Drawne in a Periwigg.’25 This describes a very different image to that of the oil by Kneller, which depicts Locke bare-headed and seven years older.26 The format Geekie favoured, in which the sitter’s face dominates a notably restricted plane27 serves to heighten the psychological impact of his portrait. As a friend with a personal admiration for the great philosopher’s mind,28 and working on his own account, Geekie was unlikely to have been troubled by fears about his artistic reputation, and he had no client to satisfy. His primary concern must surely have been to capture as closely as possible Locke’s genius and character, as much as his considerable abilities as an artist would allow.

The portrait’s backboard retains a late 19th century label for the Edinburgh art dealers & framers Doig, Wilson & Wheatley,29 suggesting that they reframed it at that time in its history. In all likelihood, it was at this point that in order to preserve the original paper support, the portrait was laid down onto a thin sheet of card. Critically, the new support was then inscribed: Mr Lock by A. Geekie, 1696.30 In common with each of his other surviving portraits, Alexander Geekie would undoubtedly have signed and dated the back of his original drawing of John Locke, and also inscribed it with his subject’s name, particularly given the significance of this special sitting. There can be little doubt that the inscription added to the support was faithfully copied from the artist’s original wording.

Plate 2. A Geekie, 1697, Portrait of a Gentleman, probably Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne. Pastel, 11½ x 9¼ inches.

(Image courtesy of Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd.)

As mentioned above, under the terms of his will of 1727, Alexander Geekie’s portrait of John Locke passed to his son, the Rev. Dr William Geekie. In turn, it probably 17

descended to William’s nephew and heir John (1724-1780),31 a lawyer of Middle Temple, the sole executor and beneficiary under the terms of the clergyman’s will of 1767.32 An element of doubt concerning the exact path of descent exists because of the mention of a portrait of Locke in the will of John’s father, Dr William Geekie’s brother. This gentleman, another John Geekie, was a rich East India Company merchant, who died in India in 1747. Under the terms of his will, his son John received not only Kneller’s portrait of Alexander Geekie (the recipient’s grandfather), but also ‘three crayon portraits of Erasmus, Dr Needham33 and Mr Locke, and his own picture when a boy.’ It seems very likely that these pictures were the work of Alexander Geekie, particularly given the medium, but even if that was the case, it is impossible to know whether this portrait of Locke was this original pastel of 1696 or Alexander Geekie’s copy of his Kneller oil, drawn in 1704. If the former then William Geekie must have given it to his brother John sometime between 1727 and 1747,34 if the latter then John Geekie senior probably received it as part of the division of his father’s residual pictures in 1727.

In February 1771, Langford’s of Cavendish Square sold the posthumous collection of the painter Francis Cotes (1726-1770). Lot 4 was a group of pastel portraits, including those of Locke, Erasmus and Newton and it has been suggested that these may be the same ‘crayons’ mentioned in the merchant John Geekie’s will.35 Given that the younger John Geekie was unmarried and apparently childless, and none of the pictures he inherited are mentioned in his own will,36 then the possibility clearly exists that he had sold them. However, as a man of property with no immediate family to provide for, John Geekie is unlikely to have needed the funds. It is surely more likely that the family pictures in his possession, including the Kneller of his grandfather and Alexander Geekie’s own works, would have passed into the possession of the extended Geekie family, members of whom continued to prosper as landowners on their Scottish estates around Baldourie.37 Indeed, the presence of the 19th century Edinburgh dealers/framers label, and the modern Scottish provenance, tends to suggest that Dr Geekie’s previously unrecorded portrait of his friend John Locke probably remained in the hands of his descendants for over three hundred years after it was drawn.38

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1 The American statesman and third President, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), believed [Sir Francis] Bacon, Newton and Locke to be ‘the three greatest men who have ever lived, without exception.’ John Locke’s writings were central to the political thinking of the Founding Fathers of America and Jefferson displayed a copy of Kneller’s portrait of the English philosopher at Monticello, his country home in Virginia.

2 Evelyn, Numismata, London 1697, pp. 257-8, 260.

3 All are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, except the two Knellers, one of which is in the Hermitage and the other is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the USA. 4 Owned by Historical Portraits Ltd., London, in 2012. Now in a private collection, USA. 5 None of the oil portraits of Locke cited above were actually offered on the open market.

Those which have occasionally appeared have been copies, often of dubious quality and invariably of the Kneller of 1704.

6 The antiquary and engraver, George Vertue (1684-1756) recorded that Geekie owned a portrait of the Dutch philosopher Van Helmont, by Isaac Fuller, and also that he had tried to buy a portrait of John Locke by Greenhill, but his offer of £50 was declined. Geekie’s will mentions a portrait by Kneller of ‘Doctor Coles(?) an eminent physician, and, one of my best friend Dr Luke Rugeley drawn by Mr Thomas Murray.’ The latter (1617-1696) ran a successful medical practice in London. National Archives, Kew PROB 11/616/243.

7 E S de Beer (ed). The Correspondence of John Locke (Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). Vol VII, letter no. 3260.

8 He was also a Fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge and chaplain to the Duke of Somerset.

9 In 1779, it was sold, together with the majority of Walpole’s collection, to Catherine the Great, and it is now in the Hermitage. See Edward Moore & Andrew Bottoms, A New Walpole Discovery, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 148, No. 1234 (Jan., 2006), pp. 34-37.

10 Geekie was said to have been descended from a niece of Inigo Jones.

11 The Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, Neil Jeffare’s invaluable online resource, contains the best overview of Alexander Geekie as a ‘painter’ in pastels, & illustrates the four surviving portraits referred to in the catalogue text.

12 Geekie probably met George Vertue (1684-1756) at the Academy. Vertue joined in 1713, the year in which he engraved Geekie’s Kneller portrait of John Locke.

13 Luttrell was director of the Kneller Academy in 1711 when Geekie became a subscriber.

14 Locke himself appreciated the value of this practice. Writing to Anthony Collins on 11 September 1704, concerning a copy of Kneller’s portrait, he wrote; ‘pray get Sir Godfrey to write… on the backside of mine, John Locke, 1704… this is necessary to be done, as else the pictures of private persons are lost in two or three generations and so the picture loses its value, it not being known whom it was made to represent.’ (De Beer, Vol. VIII, no. 3624).

15 Jeffares J.3419.102. The drawing is signed and dated verso but Geekie did not identify the sitter or the image from which his portrait was derived. The identification, which seems entirely credible, was proposed by Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker in the catalogue to their 2018 exhibition The Spirit & Force of Art, p. 64. This is also very close in size to the Locke pastel portrait in discussion here.

16 Jeffares J.3419.101. It is inscribed verso ‘Mr Geekie Chirurg’.

17 Jeffares J.3419.1013. Dated 1721.

18 Jeffares J3419.1015. Geekie may have made the copy in response to Locke’s death in 1704.

19 It is also rather rubbed which makes it harder to judge its original qualities.

20 Churchill may have owned Dahl’s portrait of Locke, painted circa 1693. (National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG114). In the year of the Geekie/Churchill marriage, Awnsham Churchill published two of Locke’s most important works to date: Two Treatises of Government, and, A Letter Concerning Toleration.

21 In 1667, Locke joined the household of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, as his personal physician.

22 Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632-1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London: The Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963), pp. 287-288.

23 E S de Beer (ed). The Correspondence of John Locke (Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). The relevant letters are all reproduced in Volume VII (of VIII).

24 The will provides for the remainder of his art collection to be divided among his children, including the rest of his own pictures.

25 The entry in the will for Geekie’s own portrait of Locke has previously been confused for Kneller’s oil, despite the picture being clearly described as ‘drawne in a periwigg’ (Locke is bareheaded in Kneller’s canvas). Indeed, Geekie may well have added these words precisely to distinguish his work from that of Sir Godfrey. In fact, Kneller’s portrait of Locke is not mentioned in the document, inferring that Alexander Geekie had given it to his son William prior to making his will.

26 Geekie’s portrait is closer to Dahl’s oil of circa 1693, which also shows Locke in a periwig.

27 This is also characteristic of Geekie’s Portrait of a Gentleman in Plate 2 (Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne?), dated the following year, 1697.

28 In October 1740, the Long Acre bookseller William Sare published a catalogue offering for sale the libraries of ‘Dr Rathbone and Mr A Geekie, surgeon (both deceas’d)’. Geekie’s books includes ‘Locke’s Works, 3 vols.’, which is evidence of his interest in Locke’s ideas.

29 When I discovered this drawing, it was in a plain black & gilt frame consistent with a late 19th century date. The Doig, Wilson & Wheatley partnership was established in 1895 and since the label states that the company operated under the Royal warrant of the Queen, the label can be dated between 1895-1901. Regrettably the company’s records do not survive. When removed from the backboard, the label was found to be covering an inscription reading Mr Lock/sale(?)/1761. A second, rather faint inscription, was also noted, which includes the date 1696, the year the portrait was drawn. One interpretation of the first inscription is that it relates to the death in 1761 of Joshua Geekie (1697-1761), one of Alexander Geekie’s younger sons and a lawyer of Middle Temple. If Joshua Geekie was given the Locke portrait by his older brother William, then it is conceivable that it was sold after Joshua died. The fact that the late 19th century framer’s label was covering this apparently earlier inscription strongly suggests that the backboard of an earlier frame was re-used when the picture was reframed.

This backboard has been preserved and incorporated into the newly commissioned Lely pattern frame. The 19th century framer’s label has been repositioned so that the important inscriptions are visible.

30 The hand writing is entirely consistent with a late 19th century date.

31 John Geekie died at his house in Canterbury in September 1780 (reported in the Kentish Gazette, 16 September 1780). He left much of his estate to his ‘dear and worthy friend Mrs Catherine Castle of the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, widow.’ However, his short will makes no mention of any pictures.

32 National Archives, Kew PROB 11/932/145. The only exception was five pounds which was left to each/any of his servants living at the time of the Rev. Dr William Geekie’s death.

33 Dr Walter Needham (died 1691), physician to the Charterhouse, and member of the Royal Society.

34 The Rev Dr William Geekie sold his father’s Kneller of John Locke so he may have been equally happy to have parted with another portrait of the philosopher, albeit one drawn by his father.

35 National Archives, Kew. PROB 11/757/448. The Cotes sale is noted by Neil Jeffares in his entry for Alexander Geekie on www.pastellists.com.

36 National Archives, Kew. PROB 11/1069/216.

37 For instance, on 30 November 1836 the Inverness Courier reported that ‘We understand the estates of Pitkindie and Ballairdie, belonging to Mr Greig, have been purchased by Alexander Geekie Esq, of Baldourie’.

38 As is so often the case, with the passage of time the identity of the sitter had clearly been forgotten. Furthermore, as described in footnote 29, Locke’s name on the backboard had been covered and the definitive identification noted on the support may well not have been seen for over a hundred years.

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4.

THOMAS JONES (1742-1803) A Capriccio of the Wye with the Pont du Gard Oil on panel1, 13½ x 18½ inches In a carved and gilded English period frame Provenance: John Jacob Myers, his sale, Christie’s, 7 July 1890, probably lot 242, Private Collection, England.

In September 1776, Thomas Jones recorded in his Memoirs2 ten pictures he had painted at Pencerrig during the previous year, prior to leaving for Italy.3 This was a particularly innovative, varied and productive period in Jones’s career and among the pictures listed is one enigmatically entitled ‘An idea taken from ye Wye, for Taylor. 8Gns’. To date, no convincing candidate for this work has come to light,4 nor has the ‘Taylor’ for whom it was painted been convincingly identified. However, as will be shown, there are good reasons to believe that the present rediscovered painting may well be Jones’s lost work, in part at least because of the newly-revealed identity of Jones’s patron.

Between 1772-1776, Thomas Jones executed a series of small to medium-sized oil paintings of river and mountain landscapes, most of which follow a broadly similar pattern in terms of both subject and composition. These are generally considered to have been inspired by his observations on the river Wye,5 to which he added figures, livestock and elements of classical architecture, the latter apparently in anticipation of his travels to Italy. While these pictures display a coherent and distinctive character which is very much his own, the profound influence of his highly-regarded master Richard Wilson, under whom he had studied a decade earlier, is ever present. In combining Wales (‘ancient Britain’) with ‘ancient’ Italy, Jones followed the lead Wilson set out in seminal works such as ‘Holt Bridge on the River Dee’ (Plate 1).6 Jones would have seen Wilson’s celebrated picture when it was exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1762, and its structure is clearly echoed in the present landscape. Jones’s view also contains distinct echoes of other Wilson landscapes such as ‘River Mouth with Peasants Dancing’.7 That picture dates to the early 1770’s and Jones is believed to have seen a version of it at Rousham House, Oxfordshire, a house he was commissioned

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composition which is absent from Jones’s altogether quirkier pre-Italian landscapes.

Works such as this present rediscovery necessarily rely on the projected powers of Jones’s imagination rather than first-hand experience, and it is the eccentric, dreamlike quality found in many of Jones’s early works which makes them so appealing to modern eyes.

When Thomas Jones finally realised his ambition to follow in Richard Wilson’s footsteps and go to Italy, he recorded his heartfelt response to the land he had so longed to see.

In late 1776, he reflected upon an early excursion from Rome, past the Lake of Albano, and on to Gensano, on the shores of Lake Nemi itself. What he wrote helps makes sense of his earlier Welsh/Italian landscapes: ‘…I can not help observing with what new and uncommon Sensations I was filled on my first traversing this beautiful and picturesque Country – Every scene seemed anticipated in some dream – It appeared a Magick Land – In fact I had copied so many Studies of that great Man, & my Old Master, Richard Wilson, which he had made here as in Other parts of Italy, that I insensibly became familiarised with Italian Scenes, and enamoured of Italian forms, and, I supposed, injoyed pleasures unfelt by my Companions.’9

Plate 1. Richard Wilson RA, before 1762, Holt Bridge on the River Dee. Oil on canvas, 58½ x 76 inches. (Image – National Gallery)

to paint in 1773 or 1774. Another important Wilson in this context is ‘Lake Nemi with Dolbadarn Castle’,8 which was painted during Jones’s pupillage in 1764/5. In that composition, Italy and Wales are depicted as essentially continuous and sharing in an equivalent antiquity; Wales is unambiguously presented as Britain’s own ‘classic ground’. Thomas Jones is very likely to have assisted with the Lake Nemi picture and, as is clear from the subject matter contained in his Welsh/proto-Italian landscapes of 1772-1776, his personal experience of these paintings by Wilson profoundly affected his development as an independent artist.

One important contextual difference between these landscapes by Richard Wilson, and the pictures Jones painted in response to them, is that Wilson had already spent several years in Italy, whereas Jones had yet to go there. Pictures such as ‘Holt Bridge on the River Dee’ are characterised by a sophisticated harmony of light, subject matter and 22

In his reverential anticipation of Italy, Thomas Jones created the present painting by fusing together a number of visual vignettes, almost like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.10 For all his eccentricities, it is a testament to Jones’s creative abilities that the result is so successful. The lower-right section of the composition clearly reflects his familiarity with farming and everyday life on the Wye. A farmer ferries cattle and sheep across the river, in the direction of some old agricultural/industrial buildings, of a sort which were common along its banks in Jones’s time. This scene is conceived almost as a picture within a picture and it provides a realistic visual anchor to the overall composition. Thereafter, the river seamlessly widens to fill the middle ground with a broad expanse of water, in just the same way as each of the landscapes by Richard Wilson, discussed above.

The rest of Jones’s painting consists of visions drawn from his long-imagined ‘Magick Land’. Spindly Wilsonian pines rise from the rocky left bank and under them boys oversee their goats.11 The double waterfall, surmounted by a grouping of classical buildings, is highly evocative of Tivoli, the visual epicentre of Wilson’s classical Italy.

Most remarkably, occupying the middle-centre of Jones’s composition, is the colonnaded form of the Pont du Gard aqueduct, celebrated for centuries as a masterpiece of ancient Roman architecture.12 While the adjacent tower is imaginary,13 very few of Jones’s capricci feature such a clear representation of a real classical building and his choice of a structure so rarely depicted in British eighteenth century art is particularly special

and intriguing.14 Both the falls and the aqueduct serve to draw the eye to the middle ground, beyond which the gently wooded hills and the distant blue mountains recede into a dreamy and softly focussed haze. Finally, Jones has taken particular care with the cloud formations in his calm blue sky, his intention probably being to suggest Italy rather than Wales.15 Lawrence Gowing summarised Jones’s achievement in relation to his Wye landscapes of the early/mid 1770’s when he wrote: ‘He came as near to Italy as he could in Radnorshire… Many must have felt that the River Wye had something Italian about it. It is more than a little reminiscent of the Tiber in the Campagna, but I do not know who has drawn the likeness as well as Jones did.’16 While several of Jones’s other pre-Italian oils blend the Wye with elements of Italian landscape and architecture,17 in none of them are the differing elements defined with such clarity as in the present composition. The result is a remarkable picture stamped with that peculiar originality for which Jones is rightly celebrated.

Frustratingly, Thomas Jones’s Memoirs themselves reveal very little concerning the inspiration which gave rise to his more enigmatic and individual works, such as ‘The Bard’,18 and indeed this present landscape. However, with regard to the latter, he was clearly both interested in, and influenced by, the thoughts and impressions of other travellers who, like Richard Wilson, already had first-hand experience of the classical world he dreamt of. For instance, in his book ‘Travels through Italy; Containing New and Curious Observations on that Country’, Capt. John Nuttall (c. 1723-1759) noted that when he viewed ancient statuary in Rome, he felt that it gave him ‘a gaze of almost 2000 years backwards, and mixes the past ages with the present.’19 In juxtaposing, within one composition, a contemporary scene on the Wye with Tivoli-like falls and the ancient Pont du Gard, Jones succeeds in presenting in visual form just such a mixture of the past and the present.

Further clues as to what message Jones intended to convey in this present composition may lie, in part at least, in the identification of the ‘Taylor’ cited in Jones’s Memoirs, who very probably commissioned this painting.20 In common with a number of the commissions Jones obtained in the early/mid 1770’s, it appears that this one came through his friend and gentleman pupil, Oldfield Bowles of North Aston, Oxfordshire.

Jones stayed with Bowles numerous times, by far his longest stay being from March 1773 until March 1774. As well as spending a good deal of time painting together, much of life at North Aston Hall revolved around its private theatre. Fortunately, Jones recorded his activities at the house in considerable detail. He includes a list of those ‘principal visitors’ who stayed while he was there, and specifies those who performed in

the theatricals. The roll of names concludes with those of ‘occasional visitants, among the neighbouring gentry’, these being Mr Page of Middle Aston MP, Sir Charles Cottrell of Steeple Aston, and crucially, one ‘Mr Taylor’.21 This ‘Mr Taylor’ can now be named as the young Edward Taylor (1741-1797), who was indeed one of the ‘neighbouring gentry’, as he was another resident of nearby Steeple Aston.22 The son of an Archdeacon of Leicester, and the grandson of a Bishop of Salisbury,23 Taylor was a man of letters, a brilliant linguist and, significantly, also a playwright. Indeed, one of his plays, the Siege of Scutari, was performed at Oldfield Bowles’s private theatre in the winter of 1776.24 Edward Taylor was close in age to Thomas Jones and was cut from a very similar cloth to the artist’s youthful mentor in the arts, Charles Powell (1712-1796) of Castelmadoc, Brecon. Taylor was also a considerable scholar of Shakespeare,25 an interest shared by Jones, and which is likely to have brought them together when they met at North Aston.

After Eton and Cambridge, where he studied law, Edward Taylor enrolled at the new University of Göttingen in Germany. His travels took him all over Europe and indeed he may well have seen the Pont du Gard aqueduct himself.26 He would certainly have been well aware of prevailing thought about the ideals of the classical world, and the inclusion of this great Roman building in the present landscape may well have been at his own request. Indeed, Edward Taylor was just the sort of highly-educated and intellectual patron to whom a painting called ‘An Idea Taken from Ye Wye’ would have appealed. He is likely to have received his newly-completed commission from the artist himself, as Jones spent three days with Oldfield Bowles at North Aston after he left Pencerrig in September 1776, shortly before departing for Italy. This short visit provided an opportunity to deliver the pictures he had been asked to paint for his Oxfordshire patrons, and to receive the payments he needed before he went abroad.27 Edward Taylor was unmarried and after his death all of his property devolved to his niece Mary, the daughter of John Lock, an attorney in Chipping Norton, and the wife of William Mister Esq, of Shipston-on-Stour. Mary had lived with her uncle since being orphaned as a girl. She shared Edward Taylor’s literary tastes and was an accomplished poet in her own right. In 1799, she gave birth to a son, named Edward Taylor Mister, in honour of her uncle, and soon afterwards the Oxfordshire property was sold, whereupon Mary and William Mister moved to Carmarthenshire. Prior to their move, they had disposed of the bulk of Edward Taylor’s library28 and it is likely that other contents were sold at the same time, possibly including the present painting. At whatever point it was disposed of, it was eventually acquired by John Jacob Myers (1813-1889) of Conduit Street.29 Myers owned several dozen mostly nineteenth century English and 23

Continental drawings and paintings, and the overall impression is of a collection which was accumulated purely for the pleasure of this prosperous owner.30 Following his death, Myers’ widow Rebecca (1823-1896) sent them to Christie’s, where they formed the final fifty-five lots of the sale of Ancient and Modern Pictures on 7 July 1890.31 The cataloguing of all but the most important paintings was extremely cursory at this time, with no mention of media, supports or sizes. However, among a collection consisting largely of later Victorian paintings, one among the handful of eighteenth-century works stands out as by far the most likely candidate for this present picture: lot 242, described as ‘Smith (of Chichester) River scene with bridge’. In this period, Christie’s use of an artist’s surname only was indicative of what is now described as ‘Circle of’ a certain painter. Given that George Smith of Chichester (1714-1776) painted numerous classical landscapes, the mistaken description of this lot is unsurprising by the standards of late nineteenth-century cataloguing.32 It was bought by one ‘Heppenstall’, the purchaser of nine lots in total and perhaps a minor dealer.33 Thereafter, it disappeared once more before recently resurfacing in a private collection in the south of England, described as a work by an unknown English painter.

The significance of the rediscovery of this fascinating landscape is twofold: it not only makes an important addition to the catalogue of one of the most enigmatic, original and thought-provoking British artists of the eighteenth-century, but it also presents a genuinely credible candidate for Jones’s lost painting ‘An Idea taken from Ye Wye’.34 I am grateful to Dr Greg Smith, co-editor of the 2003 Thomas Jones exhibition catalogue and Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, for his help in cataloguing this painting.

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1 Only two other oil paintings on panel by Jones are currently recorded, both also date to the mid-1770’s.

2 Memoirs etc.Thomas Jones, Penkerrig, Radnorshire, 1803. Original text, National Library of Wales Mss. 23812D. All references are to the transcript published by the Walpole Society, Vol. 32, 1946-1948.

3 Memoirs p. 38. In September 1775, Jones returned home to Radnorshire to work intensively for a number of months in order to settle his debts. He produced some of his most memorable work during this time.

4 Two landscapes, each inspired by the Wye, were proposed in the catalogue of the bicentennial Exhibition. (Ann Sumner & Greg Smith. Thomas Jones, An Artist Rediscovered.

National Museum of Wales & Yale, 2003). These are catalogue numbers 34 & 35. However, neither is in any way unusual by Jones’s own standards of landscape painting and neither conveys any particular sense of an ‘Idea’, as specifically alluded to in Jones’s own title.

5 The Wye ran within a couple of miles of the Jones family’s Pencerrig estate. It was a great source of inspration to Jones, particularly prior to 1776 when he travelled to Italy.

6 The National Gallery, London.

7 There are a number of versions, including one in the V&A and one in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.

8 Also called Diana & Callisto as the figures relate to this legend from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Bristol City Museum).

9 Memoirs p. 55.

10 On 27 May 1801, Jones dined with the artist Joseph Farington at the latter’s house in London.

Farington noted in his diary that Jones ‘observed that Claude & Nicolo Poussin never painted views of places. They collected their materials from nature and combined them according to their fancy.’ Farington Diaries, Vol. IV, p. 1554.

11 They are very similar to the goats depicted in a number of Jones’s Italian landscapes, which are also frequently shown on rocky outcrops. While goats were also long associated with Wales, none of Jones’s Welsh views includes them.

12 Although Roman, the Pont du Gard is actually located in south eastern France. It is near Nimes where the Emperor Augustus founded a new city in 121 B.C. Nimes is home to some of the best-preserved Roman buildings, including the Maison Carree temple and a splendid amphitheatre.

13 It is reminiscent of the tower in Claude’s ‘Rome and the Ponte Molle’, of 1645, the picture which had such an influence on Richard Wilson’s ‘Holt Bridge on the River Dee’.

14 Jones has distorted the aqueduct somewhat to fit his composition, primarily by elevating the centre of the lower section to more clearly suggest a bridge. The question of his source is a fascinating one as there are few early prints of the subject. The Pont du Gard does not appear in any of Wilson’s paintings although a number of studies of aqueducts and viaducts drawn when he was in Italy in the early 1750’s suggest that he appreciated their picturesque qualities.

Jones’s contemporary, the British landscape painter William Marlow (1740-1813), exhibited a view of the Pont du Gard at the Royal Academy in 1770, a picture Jones is highly like to have seen.

15 However, the sky in his view of Maeslough House, Radnorshire, dated 1776, offers the closest stylistic comparison.

16 Sir Lawrence Gowing ‘The Originality of Thomas Jones’, p. 29. (Thames & Hudson, 1985) 17 Sumner & Smith, catalogue numbers 24, 26, 27, 28 & 29.

18 The birds in that picture of 1774 are very similar to those in the present painting. They are not a common feature in Jones’s landscapes.

19 Published posthumously in 1766, with a dedication to David Garrick, who had been in Italy in 1763/4. Jones admired Garrick and was introduced to him by the poet Evan Lloyd in 1769. (Memoirs p. 21).

20 Another well-known Jones commission from this period is ‘A view of John Milton’s Cottage at Chalfont St. Giles’ (dated 1774). This is painted on a similar scale to the present work and shows the same careful attention to detail.

21 Memoirs, p. 31. Jones painted Middle Aston House for Francis Page (Private Collection, Oxfordshire), and Rousham House for Sir Charles Cottrell (Charles Cottrell-Dormer Esq.).

Both of these local commissions were obtained through the recommendation of Oldfield Bowles (Memoirs, p. 32).

22 A substantial obituary to Edward Taylor appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine. (1797, Volume 67 part 2.)

23 The Rt Rev. John Thomas (1691-1766), Edward Taylor’s maternal grandfather.

24 Reported in the Oxford Journal, 9 November 1776.

25 According to his obituary, Taylor was the author of Cursory Remarks on Tragedy and on Shakespeare (publ. 1774).

26 Had he seen it, the image of aqueduct, rising up from a largely barren landscape, is likely to have stayed with him. When the French philosopher Rousseau saw it in 1738, he was so moved that the response he recorded ends with his rhetorical question: ‘Why was I not born a Roman!’

27 The price of 8 guineas for this fairly small picture corresponds well with what Jones was charging in these years. For instance, he charged Benjamin West 8 guineas for ‘a small Picture (a Storm)’ in 1770 (though West insisted on paying 12 guineas). Two other rather larger pictures, painted at Pencerrig in 1775/6 were ‘An Oval within a 3 quarters’ and, ‘its Companion (Sun Set)’, and for these he charged 12 guineas each.

28 The Oxford booksellers, W. Hanwell & J. Parker advertised the sale of Edward Taylor’s library in the Oxford Journal on 20th October 1798.

29 The Meyers (sometime Myers) family were Tailors to the Royal Family, trading as Meyer & Mortimer. Unfortunately, their Conduit St premises, together with almost all their archives, were destroyed in WWII. However, the firm is extant and owns a mortgage deed of 1854 signed by John Meyers.

30 J J Myers’ Personal Estate was calculated at £7,240, the equivalent of approximately £950,000 in 2020.

31 The present panel retains a Christie’s stencil number relating to this consignment. The majority of lots sold for under £10, the highest price for an individual lot was £42 for lot 363 ‘Lancret The Seasons – a set of four’.

32 Smith often worked in collaboration with his brother John (1717-1764). Ellis Waterhouse commented that ‘There is considerable monotony about their charming works, which make very limited demands on the intellect’. (Dictionary of British 18th Century Painters, p. 351).

33 Heppenstall has not been further identified. He paid between 10 shillings and £9 each. Lot 242 cost £1/5 shillings.

34 Dr Smith considers the present painting to be ‘a first rate example of Jones’s work of about 1775’. With regard to whether it is the lost ‘Idea Taken from Ye Wye’, Dr Smith writes: ‘It is certainly a strong possibility, but not, I suspect, quite enough to justify using it as the title for the work’. Letter to the present writer, dated 12 October 2021.

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5.

ANGELICA KAUFFMAN, RA (1741-1807) Zoraida – the Beautiful Moor Inscribed verso A. Kauffman Oil on paper laid on metal, oval, 37⁄8 x 31⁄8 inches In a carved and gilded antique frame Engraved:

F. Bartolozzi, published by Walker, Nov 1778

For many years, this enticing little painting, by one of the greatest female artists of the eighteenth century, has been considered lost, and the image has been known only through the existence of Bartolozzi’s engraving (Plate 1).1 Executed in a free but masterful manner, this rediscovered original of Angelica Kauffman’s Zoraida – the Beautiful Moor is a typically elegant example of the artist’s skill with both design and colour.

As the print’s title suggests, Zoraida was a Moorish noblewoman, a character taken from The Captive’s Tale in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.2 However, notwithstanding the title, Kauffman depicted her in recognisably English masquerade costume, holding a mask of a type commonly worn at English masquerade balls, rather than the veil featured in the original story. Kauffman conceived this Zoraida as a complement to a painted portrait of similarly diminutive scale and oval form, entitled Fatima - the Fair Sultana (Plate 2),3 the subject of which is shown in a more Eastern-inspired costume.

The Orientalism which inspired Angelica Kauffman to paint pictures such as Zoraida and Fatima had its roots in the English fashion for masquerade balls, which was at its height at the time of the artist’s arrival in England in 1766. In 1763, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters4 were published, and these had a great effect upon the imagination of the cultured and leisured classes in Britain. Among the Letters, Lady Mary described her feelings of excitement concerning the dress worn

by Turkish women in public. She believed that for Turkish women: ‘This perpetual Masquerade gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclination without dangers of Discovery.’

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It was an attractive concept to upper class Englishwomen for obvious reasons. Freed from the responsibilities that accompanied conventional femininity at the time, masquerade was a means of achieving a degree of liberty. In 1768, one of the most magnificent public masquerade balls to date took place at Sir John Vanbrugh’s Italian Opera House in Haymarket. As one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768, Angelica Kauffman was therefore ideally placed to observe and reflect this fashion, and some of the ideas behind it, in her art.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in ravishing terms about Fatima, the ‘Kahya’s Lady’ from Adrianople, in a letter of 18 April 1717. To her, Fatima epitomised female beauty in the Ottoman culture. The fact that Angelica Kauffman painted her own interpretation of the figure whom Lady Mary described, and as a pendant to this painting of Zoraida, indicates the artist’s familiarity with the Turkish Embassy Letters. Kauffman’s Fatima was also subsequently engraved by Bartolozzi, and this was published a year after her Zoraida, in 1779. The dissemination of these two original paintings as prints is evidence of the artist’s business acumen, and in particular, her savviness about the market for goods surrounding this popular spectacle of masquerade, in both its Eastern and Western manifestations.

Plate 1. Bartolozzi after Kauffman, published 1778. Zoraida.

Plate 2. Bartolozzi after Kauffman, published 1779. Fatima.

With their themes of veiling and unmasking, these little-known works by Angelica Kauffman also present her attempt to explore a visual dialogue between Muslim and Christian cultures.5 In doing so, they serve to highlight Kauffman’s capacity to reflect some of the deeper themes at work in the society where she had chosen to live.

To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Angelica Kauffman compiled by Dr Bettina Baumgärtel, Chief Curator, Department of Paintings, at the Kunstpalast Museum, Düsseldorf.

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1 A significant number of Kauffman’s paintings are well known as a result of the widespread distribution of prints. However, the print of ‘Zoraida – the Beautiful Moor’ is very rare and consequently this image is very little known.

2 Originally published in Spain in 1605 (part 1) and 1615 (part 2). Published in English in 1612 (part 1) and 1620 (part 2).

3 The original painting was sold at Christie’s Sale of British Pictures 1500-1850, 23 November 2004, lot 19. Oil on copper, 3¾ x 2¾ inches. (Private Collection, Europe.)

4 The letters contained Lady Mary’s thoughts arising from her travels in the Ottoman empire during 1716-18, during which time her husband, Edward Montagu, was the British Ambassador to Turkey.

5 For further analysis and discussion of the themes explored in these pictures, see Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility by Angela Rosenthal (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006).

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6.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, RA (1727-1788) Portrait of a Gentleman in a Blue Coat Painted circa 1744-6 Inscribed in ink on the stretcher: ‘Owner F T Haggard. 1 Broadwater Down.T.Wells’ Oil on canvas, 13¾ x 117⁄8 inches In a fine carved and gilded English period frame Provenance:

Frederick Thomas Haggard (1822-1914)

Despite repeated investigation by art historians, information concerning Thomas Gainsborough’s early years in London remains stubbornly elusive. In response to his apparently precocious childhood talent, his family arranged for him to move there from Sudbury in 1739 or 1740, at the age of twelve or thirteen. After a brief apprenticeship with a silversmith, he almost certainly studied at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy1 where he was deeply influenced by the energetic new wave of artists headed by William Hogarth.2 Gainsborough continued his training in the early 1740’s as a draftsman in the studio of Hubert François Gravelot (1699-1773), before going on to assist Francis Hayman (c. 1708-1776). The painter Edward Edwards records that at this point in the mid-1740’s, ‘After quitting his master, he for some time resided in Hatton-Garden, and practised painting portraits of a small size, and also pursued his favourite subject, landscape.’3 This essay proposes that this ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ is an extremely rare example of the type of small portrait specifically referred to by Edwards.

While these years must have been a particularly productive time in the young painter’s life, much to the frustration of Gainsborough scholars, barely any pictures have survived which can be securely dated to the early/mid-1740’s. This situation was neatly summed up by Lindsay Stainton and Dr Bendor Grosvenor when they wrote of ‘…a gap, in both the chronology and the number of identified works between Gainsborough’s evident determination to begin painting on his own in 1743/4 and the supposed ‘Return to Sudbury’. We should, in theory, expect to encounter dozens of pictures from this period of study and experimentation, but few are thought to have survived, and fewer still have been 30

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established in a studio at 2 Little Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, was indeed beginning to execute portraits on his own behalf.7 Of this pair, the drawing of the gentleman (Plate 1) is closer in conception and character to this ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ than any other Gainsborough oil painting currently known to have survived.8 In both of the Dublin drawings, the unidentified sitters9 are, like this ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’, somewhat stiff,10 but their faces are sensitively and skilfully drawn and again, like the present sitter, they each possess a real sense of character. Furthermore, they both feature the same commanding gaze, they are set at the same slight angle to the viewer and they are truncated at the waist. A third drawing, of Anne Lynch, dated 1744, is broadly similar, although slightly more of her torso is shown.11 Gainsborough’s earliest signed and dated oil painting, which is his celebrated portrait of the dog Bumper, is inscribed verso with the title and the date 1745. While the subject is very different, the canvas upon which it is painted is 14 x 12 inches, almost exactly the same size as this ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’.12 This size canvas was not a common one in this period, and it was very rarely if ever used by other established painters of small portraits in the mid-eighteenth century, such as Arthur Devis (c. 1711-1787), Hogarth and indeed Hayman.13 Furthermore, the fact that the only other existing oil paintings by Gainsborough which are securely dated to circa 1744-5 (two of his earliest landscapes), are also both painted on canvases of a very similar scale points to Gainsborough’s clear preference for this size in the mid-1740’s.14

Plate 1. Gainsborough, 1743/4, Portrait of a Gentleman.

Pencil, 5 x 4 inches. (Image – National Gallery of Ireland)

identified.’4 Consequently, the rediscovery of any previously unrecorded picture from this frustratingly opaque period has the potential to reveal something genuinely new about Gainsborough’s early development as a painter. The present portrait is just such a work.

The cataloguing of Gainsborough’s earliest pictures is particularly challenging, primarily because the framework of stylistic reference offered by signed and/or fully accepted examples from this period is so thin.5 Hugh Belsey’s 2019 catalogue raisonné of portraits includes very few pictures from the early 1740’s, and those which are accepted show remarkable variation in both style and scale. Taken as a whole, they offer little sense of a clear stylistic progression towards the celebrated conversation pieces of the later 1740’s and 1750’s.6 To date, the earliest signed works are the pair of male and female portrait drawings in the National Gallery of Ireland, which are each signed and dated 1743/44.

They strongly suggest that the sixteen or seventeen year old Gainsborough, newly 32

Additional evidence for the proposed dating of the ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ is provided by his costume and wig.15 The slit sleeve is of a style which first appeared in the 1730’s and is a distinctive feature which can found in some other portraits of the mid-1740’s, for instance in Thomas Hudson’s 1744 portrait of George Gibbon.16 Also, his embroidered waistcoat is of the sleeved variety, which remained fashionable until the late 1740’s.17 A useful comparison can be made with Hayman’s Jacob family group of 1743/4418 in which the figure of John Jacob (1723-1776) wears a suit of a similar cut and also a similar long bob wig. This sort of ‘undress’ wig was a solid and unflashy variety generally favoured by the professional classes19 and the absence of lace on the present sitter’s shirt and sleeves also denotes a middle-class sitter rather than one aspiring to high fashion. Thus the costume evidence corroborates what is known of the young Gainsborough’s earliest independent professional life; he was mixing primarily among artists and the professional classes and his earliest portrait commissions are highly likely to have been from middle-class sitters, painted on a suitably modest domestic scale.

This addition of the ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ into the small body of Gainsborough’s earliest works may help to contextualise what is now widely accepted as Gainsborough’s

earliest surviving portrait: his ‘Self-Portrait with Palette’, variously dated between 1739 and 1742.20 This newly-discovered picture not only provides the first really clear stepping-stone between that Self-Portrait and his series of ‘portraits-in-little’ which began in earnest around 1745, but it also helps to demonstrate the rapid progress made by the young Gainsborough during these few years. Notwithstanding the clear advances in both his style and technique, it is striking that in both compositions, the sitter is truncated just below the waist. This was an unusual way of depicting the figure in small-scale portraiture in oils in mid-18th century Britain.21 Another distinctive feature of this newly-discovered work Plate 2. Gainsborough, 1745/6,Young Man in a Wood is the use of a semi-painted with a Dog. (Image Courtesy of Gainsborough’s House) oval, occupying only the lower section of the canvas.22 Whereas the painted oval had long been a common feature in British portraiture, a semi-oval was far less so and its inclusion demonstrates the young Gainsborough’s willingness to experiment on his own terms. Nonetheless, the format of the present canvas suggests that it was painted before he felt confident to tackle the fulllength figure, even on this small scale.23 The impression that he was still developing is re-enforced by his continued use of a plain background, as opposed to a more advanced composition featuring a landscape. Nonetheless, the assured modelling of the figure, together with some very accomplished details, such as the waistcoat, strongly suggest that this is a picture the young Gainsborough painted when he was on the verge of breaking through on both of these fronts.24 Once he did so, he probably didn’t go back, as none of his ‘portraits-in-little’ or conversation pieces which are currently dated to 1745-6 and later have truncated figures or plain backgrounds.25 However, stylistically, Gainsborough did not need to

progress much further in order to paint portraits such as that of Seth Jones (1745/6),26 the unidentified ‘Young Man in a Wood with a Dog’ (1745/6 – Plate 2)27 and Mr and Mrs John Kirby (1747).28 Indeed, given the dearth of definite evidence to securely date most of the paintings of the 1740’s, the present rediscovery raises the distinct, and entirely plausible prospect that, for a period at the beginning of his independent career, the young Gainsborough may have offered his patrons for small-scale portrait commissions a choice of a plain or a landscape background.29 Indeed, it also tends to point towards the present commission having been undertaken in London, where an urban sitter would presumably be less likely to want a rural landscape backdrop to his portrait.

A further notable feature of the ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ is its distinctly Hogarthian character, arguably more so than any other early work by Gainsborough. The sitter is four-square and exudes that air of roast beef which lends many of Hogarth’s middleclass male sitters a distinctively solid Englishness.30 At the same time, his stance, slightly turned and with his right hand tucked into his waistcoat, demonstrates his aspirations to politeness and gentility. The same pattern is found a good deal in British portraiture from the 1730’s to the 1760’s, but it is known that Gainsborough drew upon particular visual sources during the early/mid-1740’s. For instance, in 1744, John Bowles published a series of prints of ‘Figures de Modes’ by Louis Truchy, after original drawings

by Gravelot, one of which depicts a gentleman in a very similar pose.31 The present portrait is apparently the earliest in which Gainsborough depicts a gentleman with the hand-in-waistcoat stance, something which became a common feature of his early male portraiture. Other examples include the seated figure of John Kirby, depicted with his wife, circa 1747;32 also the standing figure on the right of the Muilman, Crokatt & Keable group of circa 1748;33 and finally, the figure of John Gravenor in the Gravenor Family Group of 1754.34 In terms of how he posed his sitters at this time, Gainsborough may also have taken his lead from his old tutor Francis Hayman.35 Lindsay Stainton and Dr Bendor Grosvenor have drawn particular attention to the figure of John Grant in Hayman’s ‘Grant Family Group’, of circa 1740-42, specifically as it relates to the figure of Gainsborough’s ‘Young Man in a Wood with a Dog’.36 With regard to this last canvas however, John Hayes has highlighted aspects of anatomical weakness, which the pupil Gainsborough may also have picked up from his master. Hayes observed the sitter’s ‘…broad, rounded head, with its clearly defined contours and features, its staring eyes and generally mask-like countenance [which] can also be seen in Hayman’s Master John Wightwick…’ [of circa 1747].37 While similar criticisms may be levelled at the head of the present sitter, it is just this quirky and unconventional characterisation, present in almost all Gainsborough’s earliest portraits, that endows them with such an enduring appeal.

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Although the identity of the ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ is as yet unknown, the portrait’s provenance provides a direct connection to Gainsborough himself. The stretcher carries an old inscription, apparently added at the end of the nineteenth century, by the owner at that time, Frederick Thomas Haggard (1822-1914). Haggard was a member of the Stock Exchange and active in Tory political circles. He was also a descendant of a Huguenot family named Debonnaire. For most of his life he lived in Buckinghamshire but by 1890, he had moved his family to a substantial villa in the old Broadwater Down area of Tunbridge Wells, as noted by the inscription.

F T Haggard’s father was William Debonnaire Haggard FSA (1786-1866), the Principal of the Bullion Office of the Bank of England in the 1840’s.38 However, the important figure with regard to the provenance of the ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ is not F T Haggard’s father but his wife. In 1852, he married Emily Caroline Anstey, who was a direct descendent of the gentleman poet, Christopher Anstey (1724-1805).39 Christopher Anstey was not only a significant figure in the cultural life of Gainsborough’s Bath, but he was also a patron of the artist. His roots were also in East Anglia but, having established a regimen of annual visits to Bath from the late 1750’s, he and his family settled there permanently in 1770. They were one of the first families to take up residence in the Royal Crescent, a few minutes’ walk from the Gainsborough family household in the Circus. Christopher Anstey became a celebrated figure in the town, primarily due to the publication in 1766 of his satirical poem about society there, the New Bath Guide. This best-selling volume has a particular place in the history of Gainsborough’s art, as the artist was impressed by the smooth quality of the paper on which it was printed, and he took pains to obtain a supply of it for drawing.40 In 1756, Christopher Anstey married Anne Calvert (1732-1812) and in 1759, Gainsborough received a commission to paint her portrait in Bath.41 Anstey himself may well have been painted by Gainsborough either at the same time or later on, but if any such portrait survives it remains unidentified.42 There are no records of F T Haggard as an art collector, and given the Anstey family’s historic connections with the artist, it seems more than likely that the ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ came into Haggard’s possession through his wife.43 Furthermore, it is quite possible that there was an Anstey-Gainsborough connection which predated Bath altogether. The Anstey family seat was Anstey Hall in Trumpington, near Cambridge, only around sixteen miles west of Sudbury, and, prior to Eton, Christopher Anstey, the heir to the estate, had been at school in Bury St. Edmunds, which is a similarly easy distance to the north of Sudbury. Therefore, wherever the picture was actually painted, the Ansteys were clearly based well within the young Gainsborough’s area of operation.44 While the apparent age of the sitter corresponds with neither Christopher 34

Anstey himself nor his father,45 the provenance leaves open the possibility that he is a relative or close friend of that family, albeit perhaps one from the professional classes. 46 Thomas Gainsborough’s early small-scale portrait groups were described by Sir Ellis Waterhouse as ‘…among the eccentric masterpieces of British 18th century portraiture…’47 The rediscovery of the painter’s ‘Gentleman in a Blue Coat’ adds a significant new piece to the incomplete jigsaw that is our understanding of the young Gainsborough’s development. In doing so, it helps illuminate his progression towards the realisation of his celebrated and much-loved conversation pieces, such as Mr and Mrs Andrews (circa 1750, National Gallery) and the Gravenor Family (circa 1754, Yale Centre for British Art).

I am grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in cataloguing this painting as a previously unrecorded work by Thomas Gainsborough. I am also grateful to Rica Jones, the foremost expert on the science of Gainsborough’s painting techniques and materials, for her conservation and technical analysis of this painting.

1 The surface of the present portrait is covered in a network of tiny drying cracks, craters and islands, a feature known as microcissing. This is characteristic of numerous British paintings of the 1740’s, particularly those associated with the second St Martin’s Lane Academy.

The ground is grey, Gainsborough’s preferred colour in the 1740’s and early 1750’s. While grey grounds are not unusual in this period, the present one is also rich in chalk, which was a characteristically personal preference of the artist. Pigments present include pale smalt, chalk, green earth, Cologne earth, and a yellowish brown translucent lake, all favourites of Gainsborough. This information is taken from the technical report by Rica Jones, which was written following her conservation of the painting, and dated 30 September 2020.

2 Although no record survives of direct contact between Hogarth and the young Gainsborough it is highly likely that their paths would have crossed. Hogarth was the key figure in the decoration of the Foundling Hospital, to which Gainsborough contributed in the later 1740’s.

Furthermore, they shared a close mutual friend, Joshua Kirby.

3 Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters who reside or have been born in England, London 1808, p.

130. It is now generally believed that Gainsborough was painting in both London and Sudbury during the mid-1740’s.

4 Lindsay Stainton & Dr Bendor Grosvenor, Tom Will be a Genius, Philip Mould Ltd, 2009, p. 23.

5 Of course, Gainsborough is by no means unique in this respect. My compilation of the catalogue raisonné of the work of William Parry (1742-1791) was built around comparisons with just two or three signed pictures from the earliest years of his independent career. See Miles Wynn Cato, Parry:The Life and Work of William Parry ARA (2006).

6 Hugh Belsey, Thomas Gainsborough. The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies After Old Masters.

(Yale, 2019), Vol. 2, see nos 974, 975, 979 and 980. One common feature is that they all have plain backgrounds.

7 These drawings may have been intended as preliminary studies for oils, but no clearly related oils have yet been identified.

8 According to his obituary in the Morning Chronicle of 8 August 1788, Gainsborough was charging ‘from three to five guineas’ for portraits at this time.

9 The identities of most of Gainsborough’s sitters from the early/mid 1740’s are unrecorded.

10 Gravelot used dressed-up dolls as models and this practice is evident in many of Gainsborough’s earliest portraits.

11 Gainsborough’s House collection. This is a considerably less accomplished work than the Dublin drawings but variations in quality are less surprising in the work of a very young artist than a more experienced one.

12 The painting of Bumper’s measurements are generally given as 13¾ x 11¾ inches.

13 Measurements have been checked against those listed in the catalogues of the 1983-84 Devis exhibition (Preston & London) and Brian Allen’s 1987 biography and catalogue of the works of Francis Hayman (Yale, 1987).

14 John Hayes, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, (Sotheby’s, 1982), Vol. 2, p.

327-28. Catalogue no. 2 measures 12¾ x 141⁄8 inches. Catalogue no. 3 measures 11¾ x 13¾ inches.

15 I am grateful to the historic costume expert Professor Aileen Ribeiro for her analysis of these aspects of the portrait. She has concluded that they are consistent with a British painting of the early to mid-1740’s. Written report dated 1 September 2020.

16 The Box Gallery Collection, Plymouth. Gibbon (d. 1745) was Lieutenant Governor of Plymouth.

17 Much of the original decoration on the coat itself was abraded by over-cleaning, albeit at an early date. Some of the decorative highlights now visible are additions, probably from the same early intervention. However, some traces of the coat’s original decoration remain visible and the meticulously detailed waistcoat is entirely Gainsborough’s own work.

18 Private Collection. See Brian Allen’s Francis Hayman, (Yale, 1987), p. 89-90 (illus).

19 As opposed to the more fashionable tie wigs, in which the back hair was tied in a black silk bag and which often has curls added at the sides.

20 Belsey, 2019, vol. 1 no. 366. A contender for an earlier self-portrait of circa 1736-37 was proposed by the art historian Stephen Conrad, but it was rejected in the recent Belsey catalogue raisonné. See Stephen Conrad, Thomas Gainsborough’s First Self-portrait, The British Art Journal Vol X11, No. 1 (Summer 2011).

21 Gainsborough revisited this format, described by John Hayes as a ‘three quarter length in little’, around 1756, for a 13 x 12 inch portrait of Lambe Barry (Belsey no. 49). While it was normal practice to depict a figure in this way in a standard 50 x 40 inch canvas, the great majority of artists of the period painting ‘portraits-in-little’ produced either simple head and shoulders studies, or small whole-length figures. Small scale portraits truncated below the waist are much more commonly found in the work of various painters from the next generation, such as Francis Alleyne (1750-1815).

22 Rica Jones found no evidence that an upper section of the oval ever existed. The semi-oval works well in giving additional structure to the image, while avoiding a sense of the figure being unduly cramped in its allotted space. Gainsborough deployed the same device again in the late 1760’s in the portrait generally known as The Pitminster Boy (Gainsborough’s House).

23 Gainsborough’s inexperience is apparent in the portrait of Bumper as he has struggled to render the visual transition between the foreground and the broader landscape beyond. Yet Bumper remains a work of startling originality by an eighteen-year-old boy.

24 The canvas has suffered some abrasion from over-cleaning, so the head as originally painted would have been more even and smooth in appearance, and probably with the ground showing through less prominently in the shadows.

25 Gainsborough’s portrait of Bumper proves that he was able to include a landscape background by some point during the year 1745. An alternative for such small-scale portraits was an interior setting but no such picture by Gainsborough is known.

26 Belsey, (2019), vol. 1, no. 530. There is some uncertainty about the identity of the sitter.

27 Belsey, (2019), vol. 2, no. 981. Arguably, the modelling of this head is less accomplished than in the present portrait.

28 Belsey, (2019), vol. 1, no. 550.

29 If this was the case then any surviving plain-background portraits-in-little are more likely to have remained unidentified, being apparently less characteristic of Gainsborough’s early style.

It is notable that the size of the canvases Gainsborough used for all his portraits increased substantially from the later 1740’s. He invariably began to deploy minor variations on two standard English sizes – 25 x 20 inches and more commonly 30 x 25 inches.

30 Broadly similar portraits can be found in several of Hogarth’s conversation pieces, for instance, the figure of Henry Popple in the Ashley and Popple Family Group of 1730 (Royal Collection).

31 Hugh Belsey has drawn attention to the similarity between this print and the figure of Peter Muilman in Gainsborough’s Muilman, Crokatt and Keable group of circa 1748. See Gainsborough at Gainsborough’s House (2002), pp. 18-19.

32 Belsey (2019), vol. 1, no. 550.

33 Belsey (2019), vol. 2, no. 666. As Brian Allen has pointed out, the style of the figures in groups such as this is still largely dependent upon the formula learnt from Hayman. (Allen, 1987, p. 40).

34 Belsey (2019), vol. 1, no. 412.

35 The primary evidence of Hayman’s influence lies not only in the style of Gainsborough’s small figures but also in his forthcoming adoption of landscape backgrounds.

36 Tom Will be a Genius, pp. 21-22.

37 John Hayes, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (Sotheby, 1982), Vol. 1, p. 34.

38 Haggard senior lived in Kensington and had a fine library which was sold at Sotheby’s after his death.

39 Emily Caroline Anstey was a daughter of the Rev. Charles Alleyne Anstey (1797-1881), whose father was John Anstey, a barrister (died 1819), whose father was the poet Christopher Anstey (1724-1805).

40 Gainsborough wrote to the bookseller James Dodsley on the subject on 10 November 1767.

MS. Gainsborough’s House (1968.018).

41 Belsey, (2019), Vol. 1, no. 21.

42 Mrs Anstey’s portrait was itself unrecorded until an identified copy was sent to auction by Anstey descendants in 2015. Various newspaper references to a Gainsborough portrait of Christopher Anstey exist. For instance, on 10 October 1901, the Gloucester Citizen reported on the unveiling of a tablet at 5 Royal Crescent, Bath, recording Christopher Anstey’s residence there from 1770-1805. The report noted that Anstey was ‘one of the celebrities who sat to Gainsborough during the latter’s residence in Bath’. However, these reports contain no additional information about specific pictures.

43 Frederick and Emily Haggard had seven children. No information has yet been discovered regarding the subsequent descent of the picture.

44 By way of comparison, the Rev. Henry Hill, owner of Bumper (painted by Gainsborough in 1745), was rector of Buxhall, near Stowmarket, about fourteen miles from Sudbury.

45 While it is notoriously difficult to judge accurately the age of any sitter, the present sitter’s appearance suggests that he is in his thirties or possibly his forties. In 1745, Christopher Anstey was only twenty-one, surely far too young to be the subject. His father, also Christopher (1678-1751), on the other hand is clearly far too old at around sixty-seven. The poet’s wife, Ann Calvert, came from a wealthy Hertfordshire family with close connections to the London brewing trade, so it also possible that the sitter could be one of her relations.

46 Rica Jones notes that the sitter’s blue coat contains ultramarine, an expensive pigment. This is unusual in Gainsborough’s early work and may attest to the status, or at least the means, of the sitter. It is notable that Mr Trimmer, a descendent of the painter’s great friend, Joshua Kirby, listed ultramarine as one of the colours on Gainsborough’s palette. Analysis has proven Mr Trimmer’s list of pigments to be entirely correct. Extracted from Rica Jones’s technical report of 30/09/2020. (See Walter Thornbury, The Life and Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner, second edition, 1877, reproduced in Ward Lock Reprints, 1970, pp.250-251.)

47 Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of British Eighteenth-Century Painters (1981, Antique Collectors Club) p. 135.

35

7.

JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY, ARA (1734-1797) Portrait of a Gentleman, a Fellow-Commoner of the University of Cambridge Oil on canvas, 29¾ x 24½ inches In the fine original Carlo Maratta carved and gilded frame Provenance: Christie’s, London, Important British Pictures 19 November 1976, lot 157 Private Collection, England

This superbly preserved example of Joseph Wright’s portraiture represents a significant addition to his oeuvre, having been unrecorded prior its rediscovery in 2019. It dates to the mid-1760’s, a critical period in the artist’s career which saw him leave behind the stiff Hudsonian mannequins of his youth and begin to create lively images with a polish and sophistication that reflect his particular admiration for the work of Allan Ramsay.

These years also saw Wright’s emergence as the leading European painter of candlelight scenes, such as ‘Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight’, of 1764‑65, and also ‘A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery’, of 1766. These, and similar works executed into the early 1770’s, are some of Wright’s most celebrated paintings, and his formidable reputation, as one of the most original British artists of the eighteenth century, is founded upon them.

The present canvas belongs to a group of portraits commissioned in Cambridge around 1762‑64, the most celebrated of which is of The Hon. Richard Fitzwilliam (1745‑1816), founder and benefactor of his eponymous museum (Plate 1). Other sitters include the Hon. John Grey (1743-1802),1 and Sir Brownlow Cust, Bart, (1744‑1807).2 These young men are each depicted in their finely embroidered academic robes, differing in design according to their social rank at the University. Those worn by the unknown gentleman in the present picture indicate that he was a Fellow-Commoner.3 This was a middling rank, below Noblemen but above Pensioners (commoners), the latter of whom paid for their own tuition and ‘commons’ (i.e., food and drink).

Fellow-Commoners were usually wealthy individuals and the designation derived from

36

37

the fact that, unlike the Pensioners, they took their commons in company with the Fellows of their college. They also enjoyed various academic privileges in relation to examinations and graduation. While the great majority of members of this rank were young undergraduates, a few were older members of colleges who had chosen to stay in Cambridge to retain the benefits of University life. The sitter in the present portrait appears rather more mature than Wright’s other Cambridge sitters, which suggests that he is one of those who had opted to remain. In the Christie’s sale of 1976, the sitter was named as one Richard Edwards. However, the fact that his costume is that of a Fellow-Commoner has shown this old identification to be incorrect. There was only one potential candidate named Richard Edwards at Cambridge in the mid-1760’s but his rank was that of a Scholar.

In 1976, the present portrait bore an attribution to Tilly Kettle (1735‑1786), although Christie’s catalogue also recorded that it had previously been thought to be by Francis Cotes (1726‑1770). While both of these painters were accomplished British portraitists of the period, neither attribution is convincing in terms of either style or technique.

Joseph Wright of Derby’s more obvious candidacy was noted as early as the late-1970’s

by Jacob Simon, subsequently Chief Curator of 18th-Century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.4 In March 2020 the canvas was examined first-hand by Lucy Bamford, Senior Curator of the Joseph Wright Collection at Derby Art Gallery, who has kindly confirmed her unequivocal support for the cataloguing of this portrait as by Wright and dating it to the mid-1760’s.5

Plate 1. Wright, circa 1762/4, the Hon. Richard Fitzwilliam.

Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches.

(Image – Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge/Bridgeman Images)

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1 National Trust, Dunham Massey, Cheshire.

2 National Trust, Belton House, Lincolnshire.

3 I am grateful to both Alex Kerr (Secretary of The Burgon Society, founded to promote the study of academic dress), and Gemma Field (Archivist at Ede & Ravenscroft, established in 1689) for their help in identifying the costume.

4 Annotation to the photographic mount in the National Portrait Gallery archives.

5 Letter dated 17 March 2020. The cataloguing is also supported by Matt Edwards, Curator of the Joseph Wright Study Room.

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8.

WILLIAM DANIELL, RA (1769-1837) View of the Isle of Eigg, from Skye, with the Scurr of Eigg beyond Oil on unlined canvas, 12 x 16 inches In a carved and gilded English period frame Provenance: Private Collection, Gloucestershire

William Daniell is best known for his monumental publication Oriental Scenery,1 produced in partnership with his uncle, Thomas Daniell, RA (1749-1840).

Sponsored by the East India Company, the Daniells undertook three long tours of India over seven years, producing a remarkable and historically-important record of that vast country. Many of their original drawings and paintings, which were made to be engraved for this publication, were exhibited at the Royal Academy and these are very highly sought after today.2 Following the success of that great undertaking, William Daniell embarked on a journey around the coast of Great Britain, making drawings of the British scenery he rightly considered to have been neglected. Starting at Land’s End, he undertook several tours over the next ten years. The result was his Picturesque Voyage around Great Britain, published in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, the text being accompanied by no fewer than 308 aquatints. Unsurprisingly, this extraordinary work was very well received and in 1822, Daniell was elected to be a Royal Academician.

He had been exhibiting at the RA since 1795 and continued to do so until his death, showing a remarkable 168 pictures in total during these years.

This present view was almost certainly painted during the summer of 1815 when Daniell was touring the northern coast of Scotland, and in 1816 and 1817, he exhibited several oils of views around the Isle of Skye at the Royal Academy. An Scurr, a volcanic formation, is the highest hill on the Isle of Eigg, which is considered by many to be the most beautiful of the Hebridean islands. William Daniell has succeeded admirably in capturing the rugged drama of this landscape, an effect made 40

all the more atmospheric by the billowing clouds, which are brilliantly reflected in the loch.3 However, the bathers, the buildings and the boats all bear witness that, even in this far-flung and apparently wild corner of the British Isles, man is ever present.

A second, very similar version of this view by Daniell was sold at Christie’s, 9 July 2014, lot 211.4

1 Published between 1795-1808.

2 A watercolour by William Daniell of ‘The Palace of Rohtas Garh, Bihar’ was sold for £302,400 (inclusive) at Sotheby’s sale of the Carlton Rochell Collection on 27 October 2021 (lot 23). This high price illustrates the commercial premium attached to the Daniells’ Indian subjects.

3 Daniell may well have observed similar effects in the work of Richard Wilson, to whom this painting owes much.

4 This was also a 12 x 16 inch canvas. It is more laboured and lacks the very painterly quality of the present work, particularly in the sky.

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9.

ROBERT THORBURN, ARA (1818-1885) Portrait of a young lady, perhaps the artist’s wife, seated with a landscape beyond Watercolour with gum arabic, on ivory 5¾ x 4¼ inches Provenance:

Mr & Mrs Stallard, Regent’s Park

This exquisite portrait is a testament to the remarkable skill of one of the pre-eminent miniaturists of the mid-nineteenth century, Robert Thorburn.1 He was one of the artists who adopted the ‘new style’ of miniature painting at the time, which used gum arabic extensively in order to endow watercolours with an intensity of colour and gloss reminiscent of oil paint. While Thorburn was not a Pre-Raphaelite as such, these qualities, in combination with his strongly-lit and meticulous detail, are highly evocative of the radical artistic techniques which were typical of the ‘Brotherhood’ in the late 1840’s.

Robert Thorburn trained in Edinburgh and began to exhibit at the Royal Scottish Academy aged just seventeen, before progressing to the Royal Academy schools in London in 1836. His prodigious talent was such that by the early 1840’s, he was competing with Sir William Charles Ross as the most fashionable miniature painter in Britain. His status was underpinned in particular by the patronage bestowed upon him, as a native of Dumfries, by the 5th Duke of Buccleuch. However, what really secured Robert Thorburn’s success were the numerous commissions he received from the Royal family. On 23 February 1844, Queen Victoria recorded her reaction to seeing the painter’s work for the first time: ‘He is a young Scotchman, of great talent, who studied 2 winters in Italy, & has painted some splendid miniatures, with such depth of colouring & such power, as I have never before seen in a miniature.’2 Consequently, that same year Thorburn painted several important miniatures for the Queen and Prince Albert; she described one of herself, given to her by the Prince, as ‘so like and so beautiful.’ Also in 1844, Thorburn was paid £123/15s. for five works, including portraits of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales; Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg 42

and Gotha; and Duke Ernest of Württemberg. A Thorburn miniature of Prince Albert in full armour was said to be the Queen’s favourite.3 In the Royal Academy exhibition of 1848, Thorburn exhibited a portrait of ‘Her Majesty with Princess Helena and Prince Alfred’, painted ‘by command of the Queen’ and that same year, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

The high praise Robert Thorburn received from the monarch was more than matched by the positive critical response to some of his finest exhibits at the Royal Academy, particularly in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s when he was at the peak of his powers and before photography began to undermine the market for painted miniatures. One especially appreciative critic was the painter Charles Rosenberg (1818-1879), who published a comprehensive Critical Guide to the Exhibition4 for both 1847 and 1848. In the first of these years, Rosenberg described many exhibits, including all of those by

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Thorburn. From his critiques of other artists, it is clear that Rosenberg’s praise was hard won, since he did not hesitate to be harsh when he felt it was deserved. However, when he judged Thorburn to be at his best, he was especially lavish in his praise. In his review of 1847, he was particularly enthusiastic about no. 775, a portrait of The Hon. Mrs Maynard. He wrote: ‘Nothing can be more delicious in point of sentiment than this ivory. Mr Thorburn’s generally solid colour has given place to a delicacy and feeling, in parts scarcely a remove beyond mere indication, and yet so beautiful that it would be impossible to wish for more careful and complete making-out. It is one of the best female portraits he has ever painted.’

By 1848, according to Rosenberg, Robert Thorburn’s skill had improved yet further.

Describing his Portrait of Miss Fitz-Gibbon (again no. 755) the critic wrote: ‘Mr Thorburn, though dealing with only ivory and watercolour, is a great artist – perhaps the greatest, as a painter of miniature portraits, who ever lived. As a study of portraitcolour, and workmanship in miniature, this is a most masterly work. The man who was capable of producing it should be an Associate. Compared with the work of any other portrait painter of his day, whether in oils or watercolour, size of life or miniature, this painting, in many respects defies rivalry… It is, and this is a rarity in modern English portraiture, a work worth criticism and study. The same can scarcely be said of any other portrait on the walls of the Academy, with the exception of the miniatures from the same hand.’

Thorburn attracted equally extravagant praise from other contemporary sources. For instance, following the painter’s election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1848, the London newspaper John Bull stated: ‘Mr Thorburn has raised miniature painting to a pitch of power and grandeur which it has not attained since the time of Oliver, and Cooper, the Vandyke of miniature art; indeed for depth of tone and richness of colouring, Mr Thorburn’s miniatures surpass those of any other artist; they may be compared to fine oil-paintings of life-size viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, so bold and forcible is the style of painting, and so refined the artist’s skill.’5 In this present portrait, both the sitter’s costume and hair are consistent with fashions of the mid-to-late 1840’s. Therefore, it is especially exciting that this painting can be dated to this very same period of exceptional accomplishment in Robert Thorburn’s long career.

Thorburn often worked on a notably larger scale than most of his rival miniaturists, to an extent which necessitated the joining together of more than one large piece of ivory in order to form the support.6 However, the present work is relatively small, and 44

its compact size only serves to intensify its jewel-like qualities. In the absence of any inscription or other surviving information regarding the sitter, it is this intimate scale, the date of execution, and details within the picture itself which provide the strongest clues about the likely identity of the sitter.

A notable aspect of the portrait is that Thorburn took such pains to depict his sitter’s jewellery in the minutest detail. Although the majority of his sitters were female, and Thorburn certainly painted many of the celebrated aristocratic beauties of his age, they are often depicted relatively unadorned. However, in this present work, the jewellery is very prominent and its meaning would have been readily understood by cultured Victorian viewers. The sitter not only wears a wedding ring, but also another ring set with turquoise and diamonds. The significance of the first is plain but, in the language of the jewels, the second ring is also striking since turquoise symbolises true love and diamonds are forever. Equally notable are her topaz and pearl brooch and topaz and diamond earrings, topaz being associated with goodness, faithfulness and love.

Furthermore, she wears a coral bracelet, and corals, like pearls, are one of the attributes of Venus.7 Coral also has a close association with the Mediterranean and as such, it may well relate to the distinctly Italianate landscape which appears in the background of the portrait. As Queen Victoria noted in her journal, Robert Thorburn had spent two periods of study in Italy, and Naples was a popular honeymoon destination for cultured and artistic Victorians. These elements suggest that the sitter may have had an association with Italy, something history records as being shared by the artist himself.

Considered as a whole, the symbolism of these jewels is overwhelmingly indicative of Love. The image speaks strongly of devotion and the ideal qualities a new young bride, all of which makes the greatest sense in the context of Robert Thorburn’s own marriage. This took place in Edinburgh on 16 October 1846 when he was twenty-eight and his bride, Elizabeth Robertson (1824-1909), was twenty-two. The Italian elements, taken together with the evidence of the jewellery, strongly suggest that this touching image was inspired by the Thorburns’ nuptials, and the artist may well have painted it as an expression of love for his bride.8 Please note that under the terms of the Ivory Act, 2018, the sale of this portrait miniature is allowed as an exempt item.9 Certification will be provided to the buyer.

1 I am grateful to Alan Derbyshire (Head of Paper Books and Paintings Conservation at the V&A, and a leading expert on the conservation of portrait miniatures) for first suggesting that this miniature was painted by Robert Thorburn, and for his conservation of this picture.

The identification of Robert Thorburn as the artist was confirmed by Dr Stephen Lloyd, Curator of the Derby Collection, Knowsley Hall, and formerly Senior Curator at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, to whom I am equally thankful.

2 Queen Victoria’s Journals are available online at www.queenvictoriasjournals.org. This quote is from Journal 17, p. 58.

3 All these miniatures remain in the Royal Collection.

4 A Critical Guide to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy MDCCCXLVII (Publ. W S Johnson, 1847).

5 John Bull, Monday 20 November 1848.

6 Unfortunately, these very large works rarely survive in good condition as they tend to warp and crack. The present painting has been subject to cracking but on a far less detrimental scale and with far fewer visible results.

7 I am grateful to Geoffrey Munn for his invaluable help in identifying the sitter’s jewellery and explaining its meaning.

8 It has not been possible to trace another extant portrait of Elizabeth Thorburn for comparison although, unsurprisingly, her husband certainly painted other portraits of her. For instance, in 1894, an exhibition of Robert Thorburn miniatures was held at the Dickinson Gallery of 114 New Bond Street. Exhibits recorded included a number of portraits of the artist’s family, including one listed as ‘Mrs Thorburn and Child’. One of the Thorburns’ sons was the celebrated wildlife painter Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935).

9 The exemption from the sales ban covers Portrait Miniatures painted before 1918 which measure less than 320cm2.

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10.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, RA (1727-1788) A Suffolk landscape with a track leading past a cottage and towards a church tower Drawn in the late 1750’s Black chalk heightened with white, 71⁄16 x 81⁄16 inches On buff laid paper with watermark In a carved and gilded English period frame Provenance: Private Collection, Shropshire

Thomas Gainsborough is the first English artist for whom a substantial and comprehensive body of landscape drawings have survived. Now numbering over a thousand in total,1 those from the earlier decades of his career, the 1740’s and 1750’s, broadly reflect Gainsborough’s profound interest in seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan Wijnants. At least some are believed to have been executed directly from nature, and as such they reflect his growing interest in naturalistic and pastoral subjects, rather than the topographical commissions and ‘Ideal’ landscapes which had dominated this type of painting in Britain in the earlier eighteenth century.

Later in Gainsborough’s career, from the mid-1760’s, his landscape drawings take on a far more imaginative character and generally display his formidable inventiveness in concocting variations upon his own compositions.

Gainsborough undertook landscape drawing primarily for his own pleasure,2 and as his success as a portrait painter grew, they represented an ever more important release from the pressure of commissions. As a result, the freedom of expression displayed in his finest drawings shows an immediacy and beauty which brings us closer to the character of one of England’s greatest artists – more so than many of his more formal oil paintings.

In 1752, in search of new clients, Gainsborough moved from his home town of Sudbury to Ipswich. Moderate success followed but work remained irregular, and by

46

the mid‑1750’s, he appears to have been falling into debt. Indeed, financial necessity was the ultimate catalyst for his move to Bath in 1759. However, while in Suffolk, the absence of the sort of professional pressure which accompanied his later success in Bath and London allowed him to produce some of his most attractive and ambitious landscape paintings.3 It was also during this period when he painted some of his bestloved portraits, such as ‘The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly’.4 Most of Gainsborough’s drawings from the 1740’s and 1750’s were executed in pencil, and the use of either black and/or white chalk was less common during his Suffolk period.5 Furthermore, the great majority of his early works are working studies, usually on a small scale and certainly without any attempt at real finish. They include numerous studies of foliage and groups of trees, cottages, sandy banks, patches of ground or vegetation, and the effects of light on water or solid ground. When making a stylistic comparison, two drawings are of particular value in helping to date this present work. Firstly, there is the ‘Study of Trees with a Hill Behind’ in the British Museum.6 This clearly displays the looping foliage which becomes a mainstay of Gainsborough’s

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drawing technique in the middle-1750’s. Likewise, it shows his distinctive technique of combining hard lines for the branches with a softer rendering of the leaves – characteristics which are also associated with his later Suffolk period.7 Secondly, there is a more developed landscape, ‘A Path around a Knoll, Cottages beyond’,8 which is very similar in subject, style and overall composition.

This latter example, and the present drawing, belong to the fairly small number of more ambitious landscape drawings from these years, a few of which were worked up in more meticulous detail with a view to engraving.9 While the relative ambitiousness of the present composition sets it broadly within this more sophisticated category, it has not been fully completed. The absence of fine details, such as foreground plants, figures or animals, points to a work which, like numerous others, Gainsborough left at an early stage of design. Nonetheless, the careful addition of several areas of white chalk heightening,10 a rarity among even finished landscape drawings from these years, suggests that this was an idea which received, albeit briefly, his full attention. As such it is a significant addition to the studies from nature which were inspired by his native Suffolk landscape. His composition of a path winding through undulating wooded fields, past a simple cottage nestled amongst trees, and towards a church tower, is broadly typical of a number of his more finished pastoral drawings of this period.11 Indeed, a church tower is a common feature in the majority of Gainsborough’s Suffolk period landscapes, both in oil paintings and finished drawings. It evokes a particularly English ‘mood’ in a way only Constable would ultimately rival. It is also suggestive of a topography,12 although there is no evidence that many of these drawings were ever intended to be accurate records of particular places.13 Rather, they should be viewed as Gainsborough’s spiritual response to both the natural and man-made beauty of his native county.14 I am grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in cataloguing this drawing as a previously unrecorded work by Thomas Gainsborough.

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1 The Second Supplement to John Hayes’s The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, published in Master Drawings in 2008, brought the total to 1098. Those categorised as landscapes vastly outnumber the portrait & figure drawings, although many of the former, prior to the 1760’s, are records of individual features rather than complete landscapes.

2 Some landscape compositions were drawn with the intention or ambition of being turned into prints.

3 For example ‘Landscape with a Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid’ and ‘Landscape with Peasant and Horses’. (Both were commissioned by the Duke of Bedford, c. 1755 and both are still at Woburn Abbey.)

4 Circa 1756. National Gallery, London.

5 Whereas it later became the rule, and after 1770, Gainsborough almost never used pencil even for outlines.

6 Hayes 1970, cat. no. 169, pl. 54.

7 The paper of the present drawing has a partial watermark of a fleur-de-lys in a shield beneath a crown, the initials LVG below. The same mark appears on other Gainsborough drawings of the period, such as Belsey (2nd Supplement) no. 1022, c. 1754.

8 Hayes Supplement no. 952. Sold Christie’s, London, 2 July 2013, lot 42. (£4,000 hammer.)

9 For instance, Morgan Library, New York: Hayes 1970, cat. no. 150, pl. 40, & Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, Winchester VA; Hayes cat. no. 154, pl. 43. In fact, only a couple from this period were ever engraved.

10 The reverse of the sheet contains several squiggles where Gainsborough has tested the point of the white chalk.

11 A track leading the viewer into a wooded landscape was a key feature of many of the works

by Ruisdael & Wijnants, which were such an influence on the young Gainsborough.

12 Gainsborough’s recurrent inclusion of a road towards a church has also been interpreted as representing the road to salvation. See Gainsborough’s Vision, Asfour & Williamson (1999), pp.

25-26.

13 However, a number of commissioned oil paintings from the 1740’s and 1750’s are certainly largely, if not wholly, topographical. Subjects include The Charterhouse (1748), Holywells Park, Ipswich, St Mary’s church, Hadleigh (both of circa 1748-50) as well as Gainsborough’s early masterpiece; Mr and Mrs Andrews (circa 1750).

14 In a similar way, in the next generation, the celebrated Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742-1803) painted views in Radnorshire and on the Wye. But they were inspired by those places, rather than being intended as an accurate record of them.

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11.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, RA (1727-1788) A village scene with a house and stables by a church Black and white chalk on buff laid paper, laid onto card, 6 x 8¼ inches In a fine carved and gilded English period frame Provenance: From one of the sketch-books purchased by George Hibbert at the Gainsborough family’s sale, 11 May 1799, Lot 82, 84 or 88; by descent to the Hon. A H Holland-Hibbert; Holland-Hibbert sale, Christie’s, 30 June 1913, lot 35 or 46; bought H W Underdown; Underdown sale, Sotheby’s, 7 July 1926, Lot 113, bought Parsons.

Literature: John Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, 1970 No. 539, plate 172.

John Hayes, ‘Gainsborough and the Gaspardesque’, The Burlington Magazine, May 1970, p. 308.

Fifty years ago, when John Hayes compiled his monumental catalogue of Gainsborough’s drawings, he catalogued this striking work as ‘Ownership unknown.’1 Following the lapse of another fifty years, it has happily resurfaced. The vivacity and quality of this original drawing is a revelation in comparison to the dark and smudgy book illustration, which must have been the best image available at the time of Dr Hayes’ publication.2

Having reconsidered this complicated question, in light of further evidence which had been provided by Sir Ellis Waterhouse, Dr Hayes noted that: ‘Certain of Gainsborough’s sketching techniques seem to have remained consistent throughout his career, and a greater breadth of treatment, where noticeable in such techniques, may be attributed rather to the use of chalks instead of pencil than to the elapse of time.’

The lively and free-flowing technique which is displayed here with such verve, with its rapidly drawn foliage and scattered black outlines interspersed with staccato highlights of white chalk, has generally been associated with Gainsborough’s mature style, from the 1770’s and 1780’s. Indeed, in 1970, John Hayes grouped this image together with a handful of notably similar works which he dated at the time to the early 1780’s.3 Hayes further expanded upon the nature of these drawings in an article published in May 1970 in the Burlington Magazine, where he suggested that a number of the artist’s later drawings, these sheets among them, showed the clear influence of Gaspard, an artist whom Gainsborough first encountered after he moved to Bath in 1759. However, in 1983, in his introduction to a Supplement to his catalogue, Hayes revisited this question of dating, particularly the pages from the later ‘Hibbert’ sketchbook (see Provenance), which includes this present drawing.4

Allowing for a degree of ongoing uncertainty about the dating of many Gainsborough drawings, his revised opinion suggested that the present work dates from the later 1750’s, rather than the early 1780’s.5 Furthermore, the visual evidence which we are now able to study in this original suggests that this may well be a relatively rare drawing in Gainsborough’s oeuvre; a record of real place rather than a Gaspardesque concoction.

If so, then this also supports a date from the artist’s earlier Suffolk years, when he appears to have had more interest in drawing real places.6 (For more context regarding Gainsborough’s early landscape drawings, please see Catalogue No.10.)

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In fact, throughout his career, Gainsborough was inspired to compose village landscapes.

As a true countryman it was a subject which resonated deeply with him, both personally

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and artistically. In a famous letter written from Bath, probably in 1769, he wrote: ‘I am sick of portraits and wish very much to take my Viol de Gam and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness & ease’.7 In some of Gainsborough’s landscapes, both paintings and drawings, the presence of a village is only indicated by a distant church tower. However, in the late 1760’s and early 1770’s, Gainsborough drew and painted a whole series of landscapes with villages as the primary subjects, each featuring middle-ground views of a church and nearby cottages.8 But these are thematic variations on an ideal and none of the places has ever been identified conclusively.9 The present drawing, with its far narrower focus on a small group of buildings and trees, tells a potentially more interesting story.10 To the left is a church set at approximately 45 degrees, with the tower nearest, at the west end, surmounted by a parapet enclosing a gabled roof. This arrangement was not unusual in the 18th century.11 Originally, the parapet would probably have been battlemented and the Victorians may well have restored it as such. On the left edge of the paper, very sketchily drawn, is the door under a porch.

To the right of the composition stands a good early-Georgian gentry house. This is datable to the early/mid 18th century because it has a parapet roofline and its upper floor window is tall and thin, like those on the (obscured) ground floor. It is therefore still somewhat English Baroque in design, albeit in a watered-down country way.12 This house is typical of many in East Anglia and, given its proximity to the church, it may have been the vicarage or rectory. The entrance drive to the house is at an oblique angle, as indicated by the higher section of wall in the foreground. In the centre of the drawing, highlighted in white chalk, is the small stable block. It is a fine piece of work, later than the house and architect-designed, or at least copied from an architectural pattern book. It has a carriage arch in the broad centre bay, set slightly forward from the two single bays on each side with square-headed entrance doors into the stables themselves. This stable block would have housed a single carriage and four horses, suitable for a single-family home. Once again, there is a parapet above, but a vestigial one, to go with the house. However, the roof is hipped, which indicates a post-1750 date with an early touch of the neo-classical. There is clearly a separate entrance to the stable block, between two gate piers topped by ‘ball and square’ (or Vanbrugh) finials. In the centre of the road, by the entrance to the house is an upright cruciform post. These were often found in village streets in the eighteenth century and were simply designed to prevent carriages being driven too fast. The purpose of such a feature here is evident as the owners of the house would be pulling out of their drive blind.

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This scene, with its unruly trees, jumbled angles and untidy relationships between its various elements, is far removed from the harmonious ideal which characterises almost all of Gainsborough’s village subjects.13 To date, the setting has eluded identification, but if it is indeed a place which the artist drew first-hand, rather than solely from his imagination, then in time it will surely be recognised.14 If so, new stories of inspiration and patronage in the life of Gainsborough may be revealed.

1 Sotheby’s noted the size in the Underdown sale as 6½ x 8½ inches. If correct then the drawing must have been slightly trimmed post-1926. The paper colour is given as grey-green but this has also changed, fading to buff.

2 Hayes’ plate 172 may well date back as far as the Underdown sale of 1926. The purchaser at that sale was the firm of E. Parsons & Sons, a South Kensington-based dealership in drawings, prints and books, which was active between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. The Hayes catalogue of 1970 includes twenty-five Gainsborough drawings which passed through Parsons’ hands but unfortunately their records do not appear to survive.

3 Particularly catalogue numbers 537 & 538.

4 Published in Master Drawings, Vol 21, No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 367-391.

5 Hugh Belsey also supports a date of the later 1750’s.

6 Views of real places are not confined wholly to the pre-Bath years. In 2002, Richard Dorment proved that a topographical landscape of the late 1760’s had been painted from life at King’s Bromley, Staffordshire. (Hayes, 1983 no. 94).

7 Hayes, John. The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, Yale University Press, 2001. No. 40, pp. 6768.

8 These are illustrated and discussed in Gainsborough & the Landscape of Refinement, the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition held by Lowell Libson Ltd in 2014, pp. 32-35.

9 A drawing dated 1771-72, in Tate Britain (T00989), was previously identified (and is still named as such on their website) as Old Weston, Bath. I am grateful to Dr Susan Sloman for confirming that the village depicted is not Weston.

10 I am grateful to the architectural historian Thomas Lloyd OBE, FSA, for his invaluable analysis of the buildings.

11 Sometimes called a Saddleback tower, very few of these remain in East Anglia today. They are not common anywhere in England but a fair number survive in the Cotswolds and in counties such as Northamptonshire. Nineteenth-century restoration/rebuilding could easily have resulted in the loss of this distinctive feature from the church depicted here.

12 Later Georgian houses had eaves and shorter first floor windows. Such precise architectural detail is generally absent from grander houses in Gainsborough’s drawings, which are often stylised, making little sense in their own right.

13 Nonetheless, the drawing succeeds admirably as a poetic composition and is not constrained by topographical precision.

14 With the mercurial Gainsborough anything is possible, so a third option must be considered - a real place re-imagined. Dr James Bettley, the author of the Pevsner volumes for East & West Suffolk, has kindly examined an image of this drawing, as have other historians of East Anglian churches.

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12.

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, RA (1727-1788) A wooded landscape with a cottage by a pond Drawn in the mid/later 1770’s Pencil, 7½ x 9 inches. On laid paper with watermark In a carved and gilded English period frame Provenance: Private Collection, London

The composition in this previously unrecorded drawing is immediately familiar from Gainsborough’s celebrated series of ‘Cottage Door’ pictures of the 1770’s. A significant number of his paintings and drawings portray variations on the theme of a small, simple cottage with an overhanging thatched roof, sheltered by trees, and often with water nearby. The main variable in terms of composition is the arrangement and number of figures and animals.

The present drawing includes a rapidly-sketched single figure, who is holding a stick and standing close to the cottage. A horse, or possibly a cow, stands in profile beside him, facing the door. This particular juxtaposition is found in other Gainsborough drawings of the subject, such as the ‘Landscape with Cottage and a Man with a Dog’ (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, in the Kupferstichkabinett).1 The splatters of ink still present on this sheet, together with some old rubbing, particularly in the structure of the cottage,2 suggest that it may well have been a working drawing which spent some time loose in the artist’s studio. It appears that some outlines of the cottage have consequently been strengthened, at a later date, to re-establish its focus.

Nonetheless, Gainsborough’s rendering of details such as the horse and figure, and also some of the more tightly-drawn areas of the trees, succeeds in creating a lively drawing which reflects both the artist’s imagination and his skill as a draughtsman.

I am grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in cataloguing this drawing as a previously unrecorded work by Thomas Gainsborough.

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1 Dated circa 1785-90.

2 The soft and undefined areas of foliage are probably largely as Gainsborough intended. A similar technique can be found in ‘Landscape with a Cottage, a Herdsman & a Cow’, of circa 1750 (Gainsborough Drawings Supplement 2, Belsey 2008 no. 1022). Another drawing of the same date, with the similar use of soft, blended areas brought to life by a few strongly-defined dark lines, is ‘Landscape with Shepherd & Sheep on a Hillock’ (Hayes 1970, no. 166).

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13.

EMILY COMBE (flourished circa 1834-1840) AFTER THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH Wooded landscape with herdsman seated Inscribed verso ‘By Emily Combe, 1836’ Watercolour, 11½ x 16¼ inches In an antique gilt frame The present watercolour is an accomplished and relatively early copy of a Gainsborough landscape dating to the late 1740’s (Plate 1).1 The church spire in the distance is believed to be that of St. Mary’s, Great Henny, a couple of miles south-west of the Gainsborough family’s home in Sudbury.

A previously unrecorded work, its primary interest lies in the connection between the painter and the first recorded owner of Gainsborough’s original oil painting which is now in the collection of Gainsborough’s House. This was the Reverend Thomas Rackett FSA (1757-1840), a learned Dorset clergyman with keen antiquarian and artistic leanings.2 A friend of numerous painters, he was a pupil of Gainsborough’s friend, Paul Sandby, with whom Rackett collaborated in later life.3 Emily Combe was the daughter of Henry and Anne Combe of Caroline Street, Bedford Square. Her mother Anne was the daughter of Charles St. Barbe FSA (1776-1849),4 a close friend of Thomas Rackett. St. Barbe, along with Rackett and John Baverstock Knight (1788-1859), another gentleman artist from Dorset, worked together on various antiquarian projects, such as a history of the manor of Ashington in Somerset, which was an historic St. Barbe family property.5 ‘Miss E Combe, Miniature Painter’, exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1834 to 1840.

One of her two exhibits in 1837 was a ‘Study from nature’ and, as the present work demonstrates, her talents were by no means confined to portrait miniatures. Her grandfather St. Barbe’s friendship with Thomas Rackett must have given her privileged access to the Reverend gentleman’s collection of pictures.6 She clearly took great trouble 56

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in reproducing this, one of at least two Gainsborough landscapes which were owned

by Rackett.7 In 1840, Emily Combe was married at the British Embassy in Paris, to a Mr M Larken of the Bombay Civil Service. The Larkens moved to India, where her husband’s judicial career progressed, and in the 1850’s he became a judge. However, her career as a professional artist appears to have ended with her marriage.

Plate 1. Gainsborough, ‘Wooded landscape with herdsman seated,’ late 1740’s.

Oil on canvas, 20 x 25 inches.

(Image courtesy of Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury)

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1 The original oil measures approximately 20 x 25 inches.

2 The circumstances and date of Rackett’s acquisition of Gainsborough’s original picture are unknown. It was sold by his descendent Col. Solly, at Christie’s on 25 April 1985 (lot 54).

3 For instance, Sandby engraved Rackett’s drawings of Kidwelly and Pentlyne Castles, in south Wales. Both prints were published in 1786.

4 He was thrice Mayor of Lymington in Hampshire.

5 Their account, with prints by Knight after drawings by Rackett, was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, volume 128, 1820.

6 A letter from Charles St. Barbe to the Rev. Rackett records that the latter sent books and prints to Emily’s mother, Anne Combe in London in January 1828. (Dorset County Records Office, Rackett Papers, Bundle 47).

7 He also owned ‘Landscape with a Country Wagon’, which is of similar size and date. That painting is now owned by the Rothschild Trust Canada Inc.

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14.

SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE, PRA (1769-1830) A View of Lulworth Castle, Dorset Pencil on vellum, 51⁄8 x 75⁄8 inches In an antique gilt frame Inscribed: Lulworth Castle, Dorsetshire, the only attempt at Landscape

by Sir Thos Lawrence at the age of 10, and further extensively inscribed verso Provenance: Mrs Eden of Kensington Ridley Edward Arthur Lamothe Corbould, (1854–1887) Victor Albert Louis Edward Corbould, MD (1866-1933) Peter Murray Hill (1908-1957)

The following lengthy inscription attached to this drawing provides a fascinating account of its early provenance: ‘For many years this drawing (done by the boy Thomas Lawrence, aged 10) was possessed by the late Mrs Eden of Prince of Wales Terrace, Kensington, who was staying at Lulworth Castle, Dorsetshire at the time it was drawn, and although she preserved it with the greatest care - time wrought slight damage, as may be seen. Mrs Eden was a remarkably Old Lady. She told me that she met Sir Thomas Lawrence (after he was President of the Royal Academy), at Lulworth Castle, and that he pressed her hard to give him the drawing - which he said was his first and only attempt at landscape - but she said to me “I dare say it was very naughty of me! For I purposely forgot to let him have it, and I am now pleased to give it to your son - !”

[Signed by] Edward Henry Corbould, R.I.,1 Jan 12th 1899.’

This text has been conserved within an earlier mount, which bears another inscription restating the title, together with the statement that it was: ‘The property of Victor Albert Louis Edward Corbould Esq MD, Kensington’.

Further details about the original owner, Mrs Eden, have not yet been found, but Prince of Wales Terrace adjoins Victoria Road where the Corbould family lived in the 19th century, and there is no reason to doubt the veracity of E H Corbould’s detailed 60

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inscription. If Mrs Eden was in her teenage years when she met the ten-year-old Lawrence at Lulworth (in 1779) then she could quite conceivably have been born in the early 1760’s. In the long inscription attached to this drawing, E H Corbould describes the Mrs Eden he knew as ‘a remarkably Old Lady’ and indeed she must have been approaching a hundred years old when she gave it to Corbould’s elder son Ridley, who was born in 1854. Ridley died in 1887 and, as is clear from the additional inscription, on the old mount, Lawrence’s view of Lulworth passed to E H Corbould’s second son Victor. Subsequently, the drawing came into the possession of the London antiquarian book dealer Peter Murray Hill (1908-1957), and then into the collection of another English book dealer from whom it was acquired in 2021.

This previously unrecorded view of Lulworth Castle, a handsome early 17th century castellated hunting lodge near Weymouth, represents a significant addition to the surviving group of Lawrence’s childhood drawings, produced prior to his move to London in 1787.2 While the earliest of these has been dated to circa 1773-4, several are dated, like the present work, to 1779, when he was about ten years old. Lawrence and his father also spent about a month in Oxford during November and December 1779.3 The boy prodigy drew a number of plumbago portraits during these weeks and the resultant publicity did much to increase his reputation. On 13 November 1779, the Oxford Journal carried a short notice stating that ‘Master LAWRENCE, who has been here for this past week, is one of the most remarkable Instances of an early Genius ever known, being only ten Years old, and yet he has taken above Fifty very striking likenesses of Gentlemen of the University.…’

Plate 1. Lawrence, 1779, Minerva. Metalpoint & graphite on vellum, 3 x 2½ inches. (Private Collection)

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The great majority of the drawings that Lawrence made at this time were small profile portraits (such as Plate 1) or, as was common in the period, copies of prints. Many utilise graphite, sometimes with metalpoint, and it is notable that most – like this drawing – are on vellum rather than paper. As such they are essentially late examples of the ‘plumbago’ miniature, a technique which had reached the height of its popularity in England in the late seventeenth century, but which clearly appealed to Lawrence’s earliest creative inclinations.

While the inscription on the Lulworth drawing isn’t strictly correct in stating that Lawrence drew no other landscapes, it is indeed unique as a topographical work. It is a remarkably accomplished performance for a ten-year-old child and it is understandable that, as Mrs Eden recounted to E H Corbould, Lawrence pleaded its significance in order to persuade her to return it to him. The drawing is very likely to relate to a commission he received to draw eight small portraits of the Weld family, who owned the Lulworth estate.4 According to D E Williams, in addition to commissioning these portraits, Thomas Weld of Lulworth (1750-1810), accompanied the boy Lawrence to both Corsham Court and Wilton House, in order to introduce Lawrence to their superb collections of Old Master pictures.5

Exposure to such paintings surely stimulated the imagination and ambition of this prodigious child artist who, at the end of his second decade, would take the Royal Academy by storm. As such, Lawrence’s drawing of Lulworth Castle captures a particularly significant developmental period in the story of one of our greatest British painters.

I am grateful to Dr Susan Sloman for her help in cataloguing this drawing as a previously unrecorded work by Thomas Lawrence.

1 E H Corbould (1815-1905) is best remembered as a watercolour painter who specialised in historical subjects which were drawn from the work of great British writers, including Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare.

2 Knowledge of Lawrence’s early career has recently been greatly advanced by the publication of Amina Wright’s catalogue to accompany an (online) exhibition by the Holburne Museum in Bath: Thomas Lawrence. Coming of Age (published 2020). Dr Susan Sloman has also published invaluable research, specifically concerning Lawrence’s early drawings, and which includes a catalogue raisonné. Unfortunately, the rediscovery of this Lulworth drawing came too late for inclusion in her recent article: The Infant Drawings of Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1769-1830 (British Art Journal, Vol XX1, no. 3. Winter 2020/21, pp. 32-41).

3 From 1773-1780, Lawrence’s father was the proprietor of the Black Bear inn at Devizes in Wiltshire, but from the late 1770’s his time was increasingly occupied in the promotion of the young Thomas’s extraordinary talents.

4 Mentioned by Basil Long in his British Miniaturists (London, 1929), p. 260. The date of publication may be significant as Lulworth Castle was badly damaged by fire in August 1929 and it is not clear whether Lawrence’s portrait drawings of the Weld family survived.

5 D E Williams, Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence, Kt., 2 vols. (London, 1831.)

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