“The Imp at the Cardinal’s bolster”

Sir Joshua Reynolds completed his painting of “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort,” based on a scene from Henry IV, Part 2, in 1789.

The Shakespeare Gallery in London had commissioned this canvas for 500 guineas (£525).

Immediately some colleagues criticized the canvas for including the face of a demon.

In Shakespeare’s play the king says: “O! beat away the busy, meddling fiend that lays siege unto this wretch’s soul.” But people said that was just a metaphor; no real fiend appeared on stage, much less at the historical event.

A correspondent wrote in The Times of London on 7 May:

The Imp at the Cardinal’s bolster cannot spoil the Picture, but it does no credit to the judgement of the Painter. We rather apprehend that some Fiend had been laying siege to Sir Joshua’s taste, when he determined to literalise the idea. The license of Poetry is very different from that of Painting; but the present subject itself is complete in itself, and wants not the aid of machinery from Heaven or Hell. In this enlightened period astonishment and pity wait upon it.

The landscape designer Humphry Repton said that if Shakespeare had listed an evil spirit as one of his characters, then it might deserve a place in the painting. But otherwise not.

After Reynolds’s death another Royal Academy instructor, Edward Edwards, declared:

The Death of Cardinal Beaufort is an admirable specimen of colouring, but the introduction of the little Imp or Devil on the pillow of the Cardinal, as tormenting the wretched sinner in his last moments, is too ludicrous and puerile to escape censure; and it has been matter of great surprize, that a man of Sir Joshua’s understanding could persevere in the admission of such an object, even against the advice of his friend Mr. Burke, to whose judgment he ever paid great deference.

The portraitist William Beechey told a story of hearing Edmund Burke tell Reynolds that the devil’s face was “an absurd and ridiculous incident, and a disgrace to the artist.” After some exchange about Burke’s ability to argue either side of an issue (if paid, implicitly), Reynolds said that the fiendish face “was a thought he had conceived and executed to the satisfaction of himself and many others; and having placed the devil there, there he should remain.”

One observer who agreed with that choice was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, writing in 1791:

…why should not painting as well as poetry express itself in a metaphor, or in indistinct allegory? A truly great modern painter lately endeavoured to enlarge the sphere of pictorial language, by putting a demon behind the pillow of a wicked man on his death bed. Which unfortunately for the scientific part of painting, the cold criticism of the present day has depreciated.

Soon after “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” debuted, Caroline Watson produced an engraving of the picture. However, within a year, apparently to meet public desire, the controversial demon’s face was rubbed out of the copper plate, leaving just a few light squiggles on later prints, such as this one from the Royal Collection (shown above).

I linked to an ArtNetUK image of “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” yesterday. Looking at it, you might ask: What demon? Where is this imp? What were people so upset about?

That’s because, although Reynolds never altered his painting to please its critics, over the years other people’s layers of varnish and paint did. The face of the fiend disappeared.

This year the National Trust had the painting restored, and the fiend is back, as shown in the detail below.