Friday 24 April 2015

Introduction: Collecting, Art & the English Aristocracy



Between Grand Tour & Country House: The Fate of Panshanger House.

George Nassau Clavering (1738-1790), M.P. for Hertford (1759-1761), and Third Earl of Cowper, died in Florence in 1790. The Third Earl of Cowper was a keen collector and connoisseur who succeeded to the house and estates at Panshanger in which he kept about 200 Old Masters, including this famous Madonna and Child by Raphael. In addition to Raphael, the Earl possessed paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Titian, as well as family portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Peter Lely, and Sir Godfrey Kneller, all of which would be sold when Panshanger was marked for demolition in 1953.[1] The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna is one of the most famous art treasures acquired by an aristocrat abroad in the eighteenth- century; it is inspected by an eager group of connoisseur’s in the German artist Zoffany’s Tribunal at the Uffizi in Florence which shows English artists and aristocrats in a gallery containing some of the most celebrated works by Titian, Raphael, Holbein, and others. It was also catalogued by one of the most famous connoisseurs of the nineteenth-century, Dr Gustave Waagen, who made a tour of country house collections in Britain, and described in detail the painting that is now in Washington.[2]    

Unidentified watercolourist, Panshanger House, South Front, Hertford, demolished 1953-4.
Raphael, The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, 1508, oil on panel, 80.7 x 57.5 cm, National Gallery, Washington.

 Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna degli Uffizi, 1772-89, oil on canvas, 123.5 x 155 cm, Royal Collection. 
Group in Tribuna: George 3rd Earl Cowper, Sir John Dick, Other Windsor 6th Earl of Plymouth, Johann Zoffany, Charles Loraine- Smith, Richard Edgcumbe, Mr Stevenson, companion to Lord Lewisham, George Legge (Lord of Lewisham).
A selection of Panshanger pictures.
Fra Bartolomeo, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, about 1509, oil on panel, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Aristocracy and Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-century England.

“To those who are resolved to be Criticks in spite of nature, and at the same time have no great disposition to much reading and study, I would recommend to assume the character of a Connoisseur, which may be purchased at a much cheaper rate than that of a Critick in poetry. The remembrance of a few names of Painters, with their general characters, and a few rules of the Academy, which they may pick up among the Painters, will go a great way towards making a very notable Connoisseur.”[3]

Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 
Though aristocrats have existed since time immemorial, it is in the eighteenth-century that  class distinction and taste becomes widespread. In the seventeenth-century in England there were only a handful of aristocratic “mega-collectors” such as the Earl of Arundel and Charles I who forged new tastes and laid the foundation for more widespread collecting in the following century, as was shown in a previous course. What is more, attitudes towards collecting art were changing in the eighteenth-century due to a number of factors, amongst which is found the cultural and historical occurrence known as the Grand Tour, also a topic of an earlier course.  The Grand Tour through Europe, mainly Italy, admitted to one class, and that social group had the money to buy art for their houses back in Britain. However, it would be wrong to assume that owning a townhouse or a large country estate automatically qualified one a judge of good and inferior paintings, able to differentiate between originals and copies. Obviously really discriminating connoisseurs and collectors like the aforementioned Cowper were to be found, but they were in a minority. There were collectors like Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745) who apart from his record of the longest serving prime minister in British history, owned a distinguished collection, most of which unfortunately was sold to the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great as the British government turned it down. Some of Walpole’s art collection could be found at his country seat, Houghton Hall (Norfolk) but most of it hung or was stored in his London residencies including Downing Street. An inventory of Walpole’s collection is illuminating: 1736 items in toto; 114 pictures at Houghton; 149 in Downing Street; 64 in Grosvenor Street; 78 in his suburban retreat in Chelsea.[4] 

Not everybody was enamoured of connoisseurs and collectors whatever their station in life. Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) whose views of art were formed in a more critical tradition penned the acerbic observation (at the top of this section) in a paper he wrote for his friend Dr Samuel Johnson in 1759. As we shall see, the issue of connoisseurship became bound up with the question of access to country-house collections in Britain. What was there to see? What was of quality? Who was allowed to view it? 


Matthew Darley, A Connoisseur Admiring a Dark Night Piece, etching, 1771, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
 
Thomas Patch, The Cognoscenti, Including Captain Walcott, Mr Apthorpe and Thomas Patch, late 1750s, Oil on canvas, 77 x 113 cm, National Trust, Petworth House.

Studio of Jean- Baptiste van Loo, Sir Robert Walpole, 1739/1742, oil on canvas, 210 x 140 cm, Lyme Park, (Cheshire), NT.
View of Houghton Hall, Norfolk.
Jean Baptise Oudry, The White Duck, stolen from Houghton Hall in 1990.
 Viewing Country House Collections. 

As Brewer says, if one wanted to go and see painting in early eighteenth-century England, there were limited options compared to Europe. Since the power of the monarchy and the church had been weakened by civil wars and the English Restoration, many of England’s public and ecclesiastical buildings were undecorated. Grand projects such as painting Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s, or creating a “rural equivalent to Versailles” for Charles II had been aborted due to unrest over the power of the monarchy; there was also the factor of growing concern about Catholicism. The charge of popery was leveled at many altarpieces and paintings in ecclesiastical buildings with the exception of Reynold’s stained glass windows for New College, Oxford. There was the royal collection, but access to the collection of George III who had acquired the paintings of Consul Joseph Smith, (Canaletto’s patron) was restricted because it was a private residence. If one wanted to see the best works of art, these were to be found in aristocratic collections in country houses. However, the quality of these collections could be variable due to the “triumph of Puritanism.”[5] For example, a 1766 guidebook to Chatsworth House (Derbyshire) proclaimed that "very little in it can attract the eye of the connoisseur."[6]  On the other hand, the Duke of Devonshire's (Chatsworth’s owner) pictures in Piccadilly were described as "unsurpassed by very few either at home or abroad." The situation began to change in the mid-18th century when "a few outstanding country-house collections (Sir Andrew Fontaine's at Narford, Earl of Exeter at Burghley, Earl of Pembroke's collection at Wilton) were joined by more systematically organised pictures, "many of which had were catalogued and displayed for public viewing." Then, as now, country-house art collections had a mixture of fine Old Masters and woefully bad paintings in terrible condition. Inside such houses one could expect to see the following: portraits "preserved as family memorials," woefully executed "Old Masters" or copies (or both) acquired from dealers on the Grand Tour.[7] In addition to this there might be a few landscapes and prints. Not until the 1780s did the quality of paintings improve in country houses when they were singled out for quality, not as decoration which was how they were viewed until the “art for art’s sake” climate of the eighteenth-century.[8]

View of Chatsworth House.
Rembrandt van Rhyn, King Uzziah of Judah, c. 1639, oil on panel, Chatsworth House.
George Hayter, Venus supported by Iris, exh. 1820 at R.A., ceiling of Ante Library, Chatsworth House.
View of Hardwick Hall.
David Cox, Long Gallery at Hardwick Hall, 1838, watercolour over pencil, 275 x 394 mm, Birmingham Art Gallery.
Access All Areas? 

On the occasion when Nicolas Poussin’s canonical masterpiece, the first set of Sacraments were removed to the Duke of Rutland’s country seat, Belvoir Castle, Reynolds wrote to the Duke expressing his concern that because great works of art “were dispersed around the country” such art treasures would not be seen by foreigners, so as to impress them with an adequate idea of the riches in virtu which this nation contains."[9] As John Brewer points out, there was some response to Reynold’s crie de coeur on the part of the aristocracy. William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey was visited daily between twelve and four; Chatsworth was open two days a week; and many houses (so long as their owners were not in residence) could be open for much of the year. However, times had changed by the end of the nineteenth- century: Chatsworth then claimed to “entertain 80,000 visitors a season, the most visited private house in England before the first world war.” Previously, at Belvoir, the 7th Duke of Rutland openly welcomed the tourists and charged no fee. But his inheritors weren’t of the same calibre. After the war the 9th Duke closed down Belvoir and nearby Haddon to tourists. This also happened at Chatsworth which the 9th Duke inherited in 1908 and subsequently wound down the tourism and restricted visiting. There was a history of this barring of tourists to country houses since not every peer of the realm would accommodate tourists. The traveller John Byng, ironically a future lord, was turned away by Lord Guiford and the Earl of Macclesfield from their country seats at Wroxton and Sherborne Castle. Other owners fearing their possessions imperilled by the visiting public, took the precaution of locking up their treasures, or like the Duke of Somerset, put their best pictures on the back stairs.[10] Sometimes connoisseurship itself would be a requirement for access: the Earl of Stafford restricted access to what he called "persons of the first rank, to first rate connoisseurs and first rate artists."[11] One would assume that artists would have been welcomed in houses full of pictures, but painters were never sure they would be welcomed. If they enjoyed the status of a Reynolds or West, then access would be a foregone conclusion; obscure provincial painters, however, with no status would need to seek a letter of introduction, especially if they wished to make copies. These individuals would also need to ensure that they put some money in their wallet; tipping servants would ensure their studies were uninterrupted by the general public. 


View of Belvoir Castle, begun, 1257.
Ozias Humphrey, Portrait of John Byng, diarist and visitor to country-houses, including Belvoir.


Nicolas Poussin, The Seven Sacraments I: Ordination, 1636-40, Oil on canvas, 96 x 121 cm, (prev. collection of the Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle), now Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas.
 


Alan Warren, 10th Duke of Rutland outside Belvoir Castle.
Into the Nineteenth- Century

At the start of the nineteenth-century, interest in classical architecture declined; but “in polite circles” there was still the appeal of the great art collections. For visiting tourists, the pictures could only be seen at set times: Longford Castle (Tuesdays and Fridays); Stourhead (Mondays); Wardour Castle (Mondays & Fridays); Wilton (Wednesday & Fridays).[12] Wilton already in the 1820s was reduced to a few dozen parties a season. Viewing conditions were not ideal: some visitors complained that the maid had not pulled the blinds up so that the pictures could be seen. Access to some country houses remained difficult. At Blenheim, the owners demonstrated “truculence” towards visitors. Blenheim’s art was only shown between 11.am and 1.pm on weekdays to “small parties under the influence of a real love of art” for a one shilling fee. The Baedeker of stately homes, Murrays, criticised Blenheim’s architecture (“heavy and imposing”), but in contrast, Petworth was considered by Murrays to be “a resort of art pilgrims from all parts of Europe,” though the Guide disapproved of the architecture. Then there is the case of Knole, near Stevenage, famously owned in the twentieth-century by its chatelaine, Vita Sackville-West. At the start of the nineteenth century Knole was attracting hundreds of visitors a year: 500 in 1805, and in 1819 it acquired its first guidebook. Knole was to prove a magnet for sketchers and painters who flocked to what the Victorian realist painter Frith called “that delightful hunting ground for artists.” However, Knole was shut up in 1874 until Sackville’s death in 1888 resulting in the Knole Park Access Dispute which included such episodes as a scholar “of high university and literary standing” denied access to a portrait of Dr Johnson. Perhaps the most successful commercially was Warwick Castle which was not much visited before 1815; but the lull of peacetime and the novels of Sir Walter Scott lured the holiday crowd from nearby Leamington Spa.[13] And by the mid-1820s shop-keepers and tradesmen were pouring in from Leamington and Birmingham resulting in at least 6,000 visitors to Warwick in 1825-6. Leamington credited Warwick with making it prosperous despite claims about the spa. Warwick (and Kenilworth) began to attract American visitors such as Henry James who at Kenilworth ran the gamut of “a row of ancient peddlers outside the castle wall hawking two penny pamphlets and photographs.” Other centres like Hardwicke Hall (Derbyshire) became a stop for Americans, probably for its historical Old Time atmosphere, wonderfully evoked by the Midland artist David Cox’s depiction of the galleries. Gradually, more houses attracted the general public; for example, Temple Newsam (near Leeds) was open on Thursdays and visited by local people regularly.[14]

View of Knole, NT, Kent.

Interior of Petworth with Reynolds paintings.
View of Petworth House.



Thomas Gainsborough, Cattle at a Fountain, 1786, oil on canvas, 61 x 73, Petworth House NT, West Sussex.
Slides


1)      Unidentified watercolourist, Panshanger House, South Front, Hertford, demolished 1953-4.

2)      Rembrandt van Rhyn, Equestrian Portrait Frederick Rihel, about 1663, oil on canvas, 294.5 x 241 cm, National Gallery, London.[15]

3)      Raphael, The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, 1508, oil on panel, 80.7 x 57.5 cm, National Gallery, Washington. 

4)      Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna degli Uffizi, 1772-89, oil on canvas, 123.5 x 155 cm, Royal Collection. 

5)      Johann Zoffany Group in Tribuna: George 3rd Earl Cowper, Sir John Dick, Other Windsor 6th Earl of Plymouth, Johann Zoffany, Charles Loraine- Smith, Richard Edgcumbe, Mr Stevenson, companion to Lord Lewisham, George Legge (Lord of Lewisham).

6)      Photograph of galleries of paintings at Panshanger House.

7)      Fra Bartolomeo, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, about 1509, oil on panel, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

8)       Unknown Artist, Dr Gustave Waagen, Director of Berlin Museum of Art.

9)      Two shot showing Fra Bart & Waagen’s comments.

10)  Two shot showing Raphael & Waagen’s comments.

11)  Thomas Patch, The Cognoscenti, Including Captain Walcott, Mr Apthorpe and Thomas Patch, late 1750s, Oil on canvas, 77 x 113 cm, National Trust, Petworth House.

12)  Matthew Darley, A Connoisseur Admiring a Dark Night Piece, etching, 1771, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

13)  Studio of Jean- Baptiste van Loo, Sir Robert Walpole, 1739/1742, oil on canvas, 210 x 140 cm, Lyme Park, (Cheshire), NT.

14)  View of Houghton Hall, Norfolk.

15)  Jean Baptise Oudry, The White Duck, stolen from Houghton Hall in 1990.

16)  Ozias Humphrey, Portrait of John Byng, diarist and visitor to country-houses.

17)  View of Temple Newsham, Leeds County Council. [16]

18)  Aert van der Neer, Moonlight Scene, oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81.3 cm, Temple Newsham, Leeds.

19)  Matthias Stom, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1633-39, oil on canvas, 124.5 x 175.5 cm, Temple Newsham, Leeds.

20)  View of Chatsworth House,

21)  Rembrandt van Rhyn, King Uzziah of Judah, c. 1639, oil on panel, Chatsworth House.[17]

22)  George Hayter, Venus supported by Iris, exh. 1820 at R.A., ceiling of Ante Library, Chatsworth House.

23)  View of Hardwick Hall.[18]

24)  David Cox, Long Gallery at Hardwick Hall, 1838, watercolour over pencil, 275 x 394 mm, Birmingham Art Gallery.

25)  View of Belvoir Castle, 1257.

26)  Nicolas Poussin, The Seven Sacraments I: Ordination, 1636-40, Oil on canvas, 96 x 121 cm, (prev. collection of the Duke of Rutland, Belvoir Castle), now Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas.

27)  Alan Warren, 10th Duke of Rutland outside Belvoir Castle.

28)  View of Warwick Castle.[19]

29)  Canaletto, Warwick Castle, East Front from the Outer Court, 1752, oil on canvas, 73 x 122 cm, Birmingham City Art Gallery.

30)  Interior of Warwick showing portrait of Henry VIII, not Holbein.

31)  Two shot with Henry VIII portrait & Dr Waagen’s comments.

32)  Blenheim Palace from the Air.

33)  Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678), 1635, oil on wood, 203.8 x 158.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

34)  Another View of Blenheim.

35)  View of Stourhead.[20]

36)  Michael Dahl I, Henry Hoare I (1677- 1725), c. 1722, oil on canvas, 127 x 101.5 cm, Stourhead, NT.

37)  Louis Jean François Lagrenée The Spartan Mother, 1770, oil on canvas, 110.5 x 86.5 cm, Stourhead NT, Wiltshire.

38)  View of Petworth House.[21]

39)  Thomas Gainsborough, Cattle at a Fountain, 1786, oil on canvas, 61 x 73, Petworth House NT, West Sussex.

40)  Joos van Cleeve, Portrait of an Unknown Man in Black with a Letter, 1537, oil on panel, 48 x 35 cm, Petworth House NT, West Sussex.

41)  Two Shot with van Cleeve & Waagen’s comments.

42)  Interior of Petworth.

43)  View of Knole, NT, Kent.[22]

44)  Interior of Knole with English portraits including Reynolds.

45)  George du Maurier, “Professional Beauties of the Past,” 1897.

46)  Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, c. 1770, oil on canvas, 75 x 62, Knole, NT, Kent.

47)  Philip de László, Portrait of Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), 1910, oil on canvas, Private Collection.



[1] On the fortunes of Panshanger, follow this link. 
[2] Waagen’s comments on Panshanger- link
[3] Joshua Reynolds, Paper in Dr Johnson’s, The Idler, No. 76, Sep. 29th, 1759.
[4] Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 220.
[5] The phrase is James Lees-Milne’s. As Lees-Milnes said in 1945 : “Thus we are left in our own astonishingly barren and barbarous century with some of the past centuries’ choicest collections, on the grand scale at Knole, on a lesser but more intimate scale as at Wallington and Gunby Hall, “The Country House” in The National Trust: A Record of Fifty Years’ Achievement ( ed) James Lees-Milne, (Batsford, 1945), 61-78, 67.
[6] Brewer, Pleasures, 220.
[7] Brewer, Pleasures, 220.
[8] Lees-Milne, “The Country House,”66: “Until the eighteenth-century it is questionable whether the English gentry for the most part looked upon pictures other than furnishings and portrait paintings than we do photography.”
[9] Joshua Reynolds, (Cited in Brewer, 221): “I hear people continually regret that they are not to remain in London; they speak on a general principle that the great works of art which this nation possesses are not (as in other nations) collected together in the capital, but dispersed about the country, and consequently not seen by foreigners, so as to impress them with an adequate idea of the riches in virtu which this nation contains." Of course Poussin’s first set of Sacraments have not had a happy history. Penance was destroyed in a fire at Belvoir in 1816; Baptism was sold to the NGA, Washington; Ordination was sold to the Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth; Extreme Unction at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge; the rest are still with the Duke of Rutland. Seen by Dr Waagen in 1835 who gave his preference to the series in Belvoir Castle compared to the Duke of Bridgewater’s (now Edinburgh, NG of Scotland). The Poussin scholar Tony Green reports that when he saw them at Belvoir no date), they were not in the same room, but some in the chapel. “They are usually displayed there in a dispersed way: three in the picture gallery, two in the chapel, Nicolas Poussin paints the Seven Sacraments Twice, (Paravail, 2000).  
[10] Brewer, Pleasures, 221.
[11] Recent scholarship claims that visiting became more open between the connoisseurship era of the 18th century and the heritage period of the 20th. A hundred houses around England could be described as “show houses, “particularly in the Midlands because most of the houses were on the beaten track. Eaton Hall, Alton Towers, Chatsworth, Hardwick, Haddon, Newstead, Belvoir, Warwick.
[12] Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, 86.
[13] Mandler, Fall, 87.
[14] Mandler, Fall, 88.
[15] Bought with a special grant and contributions from The Art Fund and The Pilgrim Trust, 1959. Misidentified by Waagen as Turenne, corrected by Bredius.
[16] Temple Newsam House is a magnificent Tudor-Jacobean house and was the birthplace of Lord Darnley, the infamous husband of Mary Queen of Scots. For 300 years it was also the home of the Ingram family until it was bought by Leeds City Council from Lord Halifax in 1922.
[17] The painting was purchased by the 3rd Duke of Devonshire in 1742 for the sum of £78 15 shillings.
[18] Hardwick Hall – more glass than wall’ goes the old saying. It was not just glass that competed with pictures for wall space in the early days of this saying however. They had to contend with one of the finest and most extensive collections of tapestry in the country too. Nonetheless, Hardwick Hall has always had pictures and is the oldest collection in the British Isles – other than parts of the Royal Collection – still in situ. The will drawn up in 1601 by its builder ‘Bess of Hardwick’, Elizabeth (c.1527–1608), Countess of Shrewsbury, enumerates 89 pictures, virtually all portraits.
[19] Fire at Warwick Castle in 1871 and a restoration fund set up. Ruskin’s scornful riposte. “If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle, in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch until they can.” Letter to Daily Telegraph, 22nd Dec, 1871.
[20] Stourhead was given to the National Trust by Sir Henry Hoare (1865–1947), 6th Bt and his wife Alda, in 1946. They had brought a number of pictures from their seat at Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, which replaced those sold in 1883.
[21] Petworth House is a great house with an immensely distinguished collection. It is set in a superb location in a ‘Capability’ Brown deer park on the South Downs. The central figures in its creation were Algernon Percy (1602–1668), 10th Earl of Northumberland and Charles (1662–1748), 6th Duke of Somerset, who inherited Petworth by marrying Lady Elizabeth Percy, heir of the last Duke of Northumberland. Later owners included Sir Charles Wyndham (1710–1763), 4th Bt and 2nd Earl of Egremont, and George O’Brien Wyndham (1751–1837), 3rd Earl of Egremont, who was a great patron and collector of Turner, Thomas Phillips and other British artists of his time, and whose mistress and later wife, Elizabeth Iliffe, commissioned pictures from William Blake.
[22] For an introduction to the Sackvilles and Knole, see David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, (Yale University Press, 1994),  210f.

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