“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.

“Whose black and bushy beard he had paid him for letting grow”

A couple of years ago I wrote about how the painter Joseph Wright of Derby employed a particular model when he wanted to portray bearded men.

Because beards were well out of fashion in eighteenth-century Britain, it wasn’t easy to find models for paintings of events in the past, when artists knew men wore beards.

I just ran across a relevant anecdote about Sir Joshua Reynolds, from his friend the Rev. William Mason.

Reynolds was painting “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort,” a scene taken from Henry IV, Part Two. That would have been in the late 1780s. Mason wrote:

He had merely scumbled in the positions of the several figures, and was now upon the head of the dying Cardinal. He had now got for his model a porter, or coalheaver, between fifty and sixty years of age, whose black and bushy beard he had paid him for letting grow; he was stripped naked to the waist, and, with his profile turned to him, sat with a fixed grin, showing his teeth.

I could not help laughing at the strange figure, and recollecting why he had ordered the poor fellow so to grin, on account of Shakespeare’s line,

Mark how the pangs of death do make him grin.

I told him, that in my opinion Shakespeare would never have used the word “grin” in that place, if he could have readily found a better; that it always conveyed to me a ludicrous idea; and that I never saw it used with propriety but by Milton, when he tells us that death

 grinned horribly
A ghastly smile.

He did not agree with me on this point, so the fellow sat grinning on for upwards of one hour, during which time he sometimes gave a touch to the face, sometimes scumbled on the bedclothes with white much diluted with spirits of turpentine.

After all, he could not catch the expression he wanted, and, I believe, rubbed the face entirely out; for the face and attitude in the present finished picture, which I did not see till above a year after this first fruitless attempt, is certainly different, and on an idea much superior. I know not whether he may not have changed the model. Yet the man who then sat had a fine, firm countenance of the swarthy kind…

I remember I told him so; and a few days after, when I called upon him, he had finished a head of St. Peter, which he told me he took from the same subject.

It’s a pity we don’t have the perspective of the porter himself, getting a few days’ off manual labor in exchange for letting his beard grow and contorting his face for a painter man.

TOMORROW: Another face revealed in that painting.

More Findings about a Famous Portrait

Back in spring 2019 I reported on the new scholarly conclusion that the painting shown here, for decades said to be Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington’s chef Hercules:

• was not by Stuart,
• did not show Hercules Posey or any other eighteenth-century cook, and
• probably, given the hat, showed a man from Dominica.

I wrote then:

One detail which should have made people wonder, I think, is that this painting is at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. An odd place to find an American painting linked to an American President, wouldn’t you say?

Later that year Mount Vernon published a more detailed story on those findings by curator Jessie MacLeod, and here’s a webpage adapted from that article. It answers my question of how this painting came to a Spanish museum:

What we know of the portrait’s story begins in the early 19th century, when it was owned by English painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. Sometime before his death in 1830, Lawrence gave the painting to his childhood friend John Hulbert as a wedding gift. This history is recorded in an early 20th-century file in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Here, an image of the portrait is filed under “Gilbert Stuart—Unidentified Sitters.”

In 1946, the portrait was purchased by Daisy Fellowes, an American socialite living in Paris. She displayed it in the dining room of her luxurious hôtel particulier, which was featured in a 1977 magazine. A caption identified the work as “Painting by Gilbert Stuart (an alleged portrait of the cook of George Washington).” The painting was purchased at auction in 1983 by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, who opened his namesake museum in 1992 (the Spanish government purchased the collection in 1993).

As for who really posed for the painting and who created it, the article states:

According to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,…“If the Thyssen sitter is Dominican, he probably fled to England as part of the exodus of English planters just before the French claimed the island from the English in 1778.” . . .

Considering the man’s neckpiece and the cut of his coat, as well as the painting style, researchers can date the portrait to about 1780. . . .

The latest research released by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza asserts that, with the face and hat rendered in relatively broad brushstrokes, the portrait follows the general painting style of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the first president of the Royal Academy in London.

I don’t know the art-history world well enough to know if “general painting style” means the museum is really pointing at Reynolds, at his studio or circle, or simply at artists working when his style was fashionable. But the details are fitting together better.

“Not only relishing the sociable but actively contriving it”

Like the Georgian Papers Programme, Digit.En.S is a study of eighteenth-century Britain funded by the E.U. and based at a continental university.

Digit.En.S hosts the Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century, designed to “Explore the wide range of topics related to British Sociability from 1650 to 1850 and learn about the circulation of models of sociability that shaped European and colonial societies.”

Be that as it may, I enjoyed Allen Ingram’s profile of James Boswell:

…he was, quite simply, good company – attentive, amusing, intelligent and above all lively. [Samuel] Johnson, most clearly, and [Pasquale] Paoli, once exiled in England, became lifelong friends and were pleased to see him often during his annual spring visits to London from Edinburgh. Through Johnson in particular, Boswell became friends with a set of men he might not otherwise have met, or met so soon and so favourably. These included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith; but other friends, like John Wilkes, and various members of the Scottish nobility, were already part of Boswell’s circle, and would remain so – indeed, he even contrived a dinner in London in May 1776 that brought Johnson and Wilkes, the bitterest of political rivals, together in an atmosphere of sociability and mutual good humour, though the good humour found its focus in making jokes at Boswell’s expense.

But this was part of Boswell’s talent, not only relishing the sociable but actively contriving it. He could be immensely self-promoting, often in a highly embarrassing way, as at the annual dinner of the Company of Grocers in London in November 1790, in the presence of Prime Minister William Pitt, an honorary member of the Company, when Boswell sang the semi-satirical ballad, ‘William Pitt, The Grocer of London’, six times, apparently by popular acclaim, in a misguided attempt to curry favour from Pitt in his political ambitions. But Boswell seems to have been utterly beyond embarrassment, especially at large social occasions, and especially after consuming alcohol. . . .

Drinking for Boswell almost always took place within a social context. He was not particularly choosey, though, about the nature of that context, or about the location of his drinking. As long as there was company, he would drink: with lords and ladies, as at Northumberland House, where Trafalgar Square now is, where the set surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland congregated, as he did in London during his visit of 1762-1763; or with politicians and genteel tradesmen, as at the Grocers’ dinner cited above; or with his legal friends and acquaintances back in Edinburgh, as he did all his life; or with prostitutes in London, or Edinburgh, or anywhere, as he also did all his life; or, as he did returning to Edinburgh from Auchinleck in March 1777 with an old friend, Richard Montgomery, ‘at some low ale-house’, where ‘I drank outrageously’ and ‘arrived at Edinburgh very drunk’.

Boswell’s taste in women and in female society was if anything even wider than his taste in alcohol and his expectations of the kind of sociability that was possible from it changed the further down the social scale he went. Few if any of his sexual relationships were with women of the highest social class. With such women his expectations were similar to the sociability he enjoyed with men, with the bonus of their being female: he enjoyed their company and was able to flirt as an amusement rather than as a preliminary to anything. . . . [In contrast,] His relationship with the actress ‘Louisa’ (Anne Lewis) in London in 1762-1763…observes all the polite social niceties, with a mix of gallantry, wit and deference:

‘Madam, I was very happy to find you. From the first time that I saw you, I admired you.’ ‘O, Sir.’ ‘I did, indeed. What I like beyond everything is an agreeable female companion, where I can be at home and have tea and genteel conversation. I was quite happy to be here. ‘Sir, you are welcome here as often as you please.’ (London Journal 115)

The pay-off, however, when it comes is a level of physical reality far beyond ‘tea and genteel conversation’: ‘A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy.’

Boswell published essays, travel accounts, and his biography of Johnson in his lifetime, but he came back to life only in the 1900s when his private diaries were discovered and put into print.

“The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers”

In addition to the theft of the Great Seal of Britain, discussed yesterday, the writer Lillian de la Torre took inspiration from two other details of the life of Baron Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor in 1784.

One was this fact, as De la Torre noted it at the start of her mystery story:

In August of that year, Lord Chancellor Thurlow very graciously intimated to the friends of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson that that learned philosopher might draw against him at need for as much as £600.

James Boswell mentioned that offer of credit in his Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. In an 1831 edition John Wilson Croker discussed it at more length, printing documents and his own acerbic commentary (“It is strange that Sir John Hawkins should have related… The editor cannot guess why Mr. Boswell did not print his own letter…”).

The circumstances were not actually that mysterious. In early 1784 Dr. Johnson, aged seventy-five, had a serious health crisis. His friends wanted him to take a trip to Italy to recover. Money was tight. Boswell and others hoped the government would increase the pension granted to Johnson for his work as a lexicographer and propagandist during the American war.

In July Boswell wrote to Thurlow, asking for that favor. Thurlow responded positively. In a conversation with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Lord Chancellor offered to personally loan Johnson the money, based on a mortgage against his future pension. Thurlow later said he was trying to get the lexicographer money quickly rather than wait through the uncertain pension process.

Dr. Johnson declined the offer when he learned about it. He never set out for Italy. He died on 13 December.

The other detail of Thurlow’s life that De La Torre used involved his household. The Lord Chancellor lived with a woman called “Mrs. Hervey” and had children by her, all illegitimate. This didn’t seem to affect his government career, social standing, or visits from his brother, an Anglican bishop. Thurlow did have to pass on one of his baronies to a nephew.

Because Thurlow’s children weren’t legitimate, it’s hard to find vital information about them. De la Torre wrote:

The tantalizingly respectable reticence of contemporary chroniclers about Thurlow’s irregular household has forced me to invent his daughters, known to me by name alone, out of whole cloth.

Her story’s characters include Catharine, aged eighteen, and Caroline, “not more than fifteen,” while a younger sister is off with her mother at Bath.

Genealogists have since nailed down when those daughters were born:

• Caroline in 1772.
• Catherine in 1776.
• Maria in 1781.

That accords with a picture George Romney painted of the two older girls around 1783, shown above courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

However, it doesn’t accord with De la Torre’s story, set in 1784. Her mystery depends on the two oldest girls being adolescent at the time of the Great Seal theft with Dr. Johnson still alive. Such is the challenge of writing historical fiction with imperfect historical sources.

Had De la Torre but known the actual ages of Thurlow’s daughters, she may never have imagined her debut story “The Great Seal of England” as she did. Or she might have proceeded with the same plot and added a note informing readers about how she’d shifted from strict historical accuracy, as she did in this very story in regard to the last hanging at Tyburn. Such is the freedom of writing historical fiction.

TOMORROW: De la Torre’s books.

Campaigns for Two Portraits in the U.K.

A couple of news stories about British art caught my eye recently.

In 1727 Sir Robert Walpole, then defining the post of prime minister, commissioned the thirty-year-old engraver William Hogarth to paint a portrait of his youngest son, Horace.

The result is “the earliest-known commissioned picture of an identifiable sitter by Hogarth and his first-known portrait of a child.” The painting’s creator, subject, and commissioner were three of the century’s most notable Britons.

Horace Walpole grew up to design and commission his Strawberry Hill mansion, a pioneering Gothic Revival structure. He also pioneered the Gothic in fiction with The Castle of Otranto.

Horace Walpole’s childhood portrait is still in private hands, and Strawberry Hill House & Garden, now a museum, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to buy it. The trust that runs the museum says:

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has generously awarded the Trust £115k and Art Fund has kindly offered £90k, but we now need to raise the final £25k by 14 April 2022, to meet the total cost of £230k.

For a look at the portrait and the fundraising campaign, go to this page.

In 1774, a young man called Omai (Mai to his compatriots) from Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, arrived in London. He had traveled on H.M.S. Adventure, commanded by Capt. James Cook, and was introduced to London society by the naturalist Joseph Banks.

Several leading British artists made portraits of Omai. In 1776 Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a full-length picture of the young man in robes and turban (shown above). In 1777 Omai returned to the South Pacific, and he reportedly died two years later.

In 2001 the Earl of Carlisle sold the Reynolds portrait of Omai to an Irish horse-racing magnate, John Magnier, for £10.3 million ($15 million). A few years later the British government sought to buy the painting for £12.5 million for the Tate Museum, but Magnier declined. He was able to have the picture displayed in Ireland from 2005 to 2011. Since then it has been in a “secure art storage facility” in London.

According to ArtNews, it’s unclear if Magnier still owns the painting, but last year the owner applied to export the picture from Britain again. The U.K. government temporarily barred its removal, designating Raynolds’s portrait as of “outstanding significance in the study of 18th-century art, in particular portraiture,” and “a signal work in the study of colonialism and empire, scientific exploration and the history of the Pacific.”

The latest estimate of the painting’s market value is £50 million ($65 million). Under British law, if any of Britain’s public museums commits by 10 July to try to raise that money, the painting will stay in the U.K. until next March to allow time for that campaign. But the Art Newspaper says, “it is unlikely any cash-strapped national museum can afford the hefty price tag.”

The Art of War in Two Short Videos

As long as I’m linking to videos, here are two from museums about eighteenth-century military art.

The British National Gallery is restoring Joshua Reynolds’s portrait (shown here) of Capt. Robert Orme, one of Gen. Edward Braddock’s aides during the ill-fated expedition west. 

Reynolds didn’t make cleaning easy, as conservator Hayley Tomlinson explains in this behind-the-scenes video. Reynolds’s technique of mixing resin into his paints, especially later in his career, makes it hard for a cleaner to distinguish the original colors from varnishes overlaid in the decades since and now misting the intended view.

On this side of the ocean, the American Revolution Institute at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., shared a short video of collections manager Paul Newman showing off a powder horn carved for Capt. Thomas Kempton.

As Newman shows, this horn was made in Roxbury during the siege of Boston and includes simple images of some local landmarks, such as Castle William.

In 2013 I researched Capt. Kempton and spoke about the horn at Anderson House, as I discussed back then. (I keep meaning to write up my notes in a more presentable form.)

One curious aspect of this horn is that it was originally carved to say “carved by” Kempton. That was changed to “carved for,” with the alteration still visible. There were professonal horn-carvers plying their wares along the provincial lines, and apparently this one thought Kempton would like full credit for the horn, but the captain preferred otherwise.