Part 27

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

[Illustration:

_Collection of Mr. Jules S. Bache_

LADY DERBY

--_George Romney_]

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

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

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

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

EMMA, LADY HAMILTON.

_George Romney (1734–1802)._

_Collection of the late Mr. Henry E. Huntington._

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration:

_Collection of the late Mr. Henry E. Huntington_

EMMA, LADY HAMILTON

--_George Romney_]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sept. 5 Mon. Mrs. Hart at 9. Sept. 6 Tues. Lady Hamilton at 11.”

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

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

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

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

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

How beautifully Humphrey Ward sums up the whole situation:

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

ANNE, LADY DE LA POLE.

_George Romney (1734–1802)._

_Collection of the Hon. Alvan T. Fuller._

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

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

[Illustration:

_Collection of the Hon. Alvan T. Fuller_

ANNE, LADY DE LA POLE

--_George Romney_]

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

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

THE HON. MRS. GRANT OF KILGRASTON.

_Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823)._

_Collection of Mr. C. Fisher._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration:

_Collection of Mr. C. Fisher_

THE HON. MRS. GRANT OF KILGRASTON

--_Sir Henry Raeburn_]

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

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

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

QUINTON McADAM.

_Sir Henry Raeburn (1756–1823)._

_Collection of Mr. A. W. Erickson._

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

[Illustration:

_Collection of Mr. A. W. Erickson_

QUINTON McADAM

--_Sir Henry Raeburn_]