Aristocrats (21 page)
No such philosophy dignified the accumulation of interior furnishings. Gratification, display and (in cases like Caroline’s) francophilia were the deities who presided over the decoration of great houses. But Caroline did not alter the interior of Holland House. She took an unfashionable delight in its heavily coffered plaster ceilings, dark oak panelling and mullioned windows. Emily privately disliked Holland House, decried Caroline’s taste and avoided commissioning her to buy furniture, wallpapers or chintz for Carton. Caroline resolutely went her own way. She was well aware that she was regarded as eccentric in her love not simply of the quaint (which might have been praised as newly fashionable Gothicism) but the outmoded. ‘I love these old-fashioned comfortable houses,’ she said.
Concessions to modernity were made in furniture and painting. Caroline chose fashionable Parisian furniture and accumulated, by commission and purchase, a large and up-to-
date picture collection. Like many of her aristocratic contemporaries, Caroline favoured upholstered French furniture decorated with gilt or ormolu; pieces that were light but loaded with gold. In 1764 she told Emily that she was ‘all for the magnificent style – velvet, damask etc. I have three immense looking glasses to put in my drawing room, and propose hanging it with a damask or brocatelle of two or three colours.’ In niches and cupboards, on mantelpieces and bureaux stood curvaceous Sèvres nicknacks. ‘I hope Lord Kildare has made a good report of my blue gallery and my dressing room fitted up with a great deal of pea-green china and painted pea-green. I have been extravagant enough to buy a good deal of china lately, but I am in tolerable circumstances,’ she reported to Emily in 1759, adding a few years later, ‘My dressing room in London is thought pretty; with Horner’s paper and the carving, of which there is a good deal, painted two greens and varnished.’ As Fox’s fortune accumulated so did Caroline’s china. By the mid-1760s her dressing-room was chock-a-block and the mantelpiece was ‘covered with small pictures, china [and] Wedgwood’s imitations of antiques’. There were three large ‘mazarine china bottles’, two blue and one pea-green, their handles hung with chains and stoppers in their mouths. There were five ‘fish shaped’ Sèvres vases, painted in the bluer, less harsh ‘sea-green’, ornamented with ormolu and intricately painted. Their sharp bottoms rested on gold circular mounts. Four gold-spangled cups festooned with golden flowers completed Caroline’s collection of display pieces. But she also had a Sèvres tea and coffee service painted in blue wreaths of flowers from which to take breakfast and serve visitors. The whole collection was rounded off with a complete blue dinner service.
Caroline took a sometimes guilty delight in the accumulation and display of furniture and ornaments that were redolent of wealth. But she did not invest much of herself in them. They were not heirlooms, which came replete with
ghosts and responsibilities. Neither were they gifts reminiscent of friendship. Some reminded her of jaunts to Paris in the mid-176os, others reassured her of her own wealth and taste. But for that one object could serve as well as another.
The picture gallery at Holland House was quite another matter. It was designed to show to the world the image of a happy and successful marriage, family and career. Caroline invested time, money and herself in it. It constituted a kind of self-portrait. Displayed on the gallery walls were those people, those lives, that made up her own life and personality. Everyone who really mattered to her was there.
Round the gallery hung the extended Richmond-Fox family, augmented by friends and mentors and presided over by ancestors. Charles II and Louise de Kéroualle looked down from the walls. So did Sir Stephen and Lady Fox, carefully painted by Kneller. Caroline’s parents, her brothers Lord George Lennox and the third Duke of Richmond, the latter painted by Batoni on his grand tour were also there. Fox’s brother, the Earl of Ilchester, his wife Elizabeth and their daughter Susan Fox-Strangways hung close by. Hoare had painted Ste as a little boy and Reynolds painted him as an adult. Caroline and Henry themselves, Charles and Harry Fox, Louisa, Conolly, Emily, and Kildare, Sarah and Bunbury: all those whom Sarah called ‘one of us’ eventually crowded on to the walls.
In a world where dynastic considerations counted for so much, reverently arranged family portraits were everywhere from the grandest nobleman’s house to the parlours of modest merchants and shopkeepers. But Caroline’s gallery was not simply a tribute to the Fox and Richmond families. It stressed particularly her beloved children and her sisters. Louisa’s full-length portrait by Ramsay hung over one fire-place. Over the other went Reynolds’s triple portrait of Sarah, Susan Fox-Strangways and Charles James Fox. This huge canvas celebrated the young Etonian’s poetic precociousness. Round the walls of the gallery connecting the two central
portraits like beads on a necklace were all the other paintings, links in Caroline’s familial chain of alliance, love and friendship.
Of course paintings and sculpture were scattered throughout Holland House. Caroline had a portrait of her mentor Madame de Sévigné in her private rooms and Fox had a bust of his, Voltaire. There were paintings by Steen, Van Loo, Murillo, Salvator Rosa and Hogarth, as well as a very large collection of English, Flemish, French, Dutch and Italian prints that the children used to dip into. But the gallery housed the family, the portraits of her relatives that Caroline thought ‘most like’ their originals and those that reminded her of past happiness. When she started the gallery in 1761 there was already a fine family gathering to be moved in. Caroline had been painted by Reynolds in 1758, Fox by Reynolds and by Hogarth. Louisa was there (in Ramsay’s sumptuous portrait of 1759), so were the third Duke of Richmond, Charles, Ste and all the august ancestors. But Caroline was choosy. She wanted only the best and she did not want pictures that no longer met the criterion of likeness to their originals. Her own portrait by Reynolds was a case in point. Reynolds had painted Caroline as a woman of fashion. She wears a ribbed and ruched bodice and sleeves with extravagantly deep ruffles. Around her neck is a tippet of shining blue ribbon which tucks into her bodice behind a nosegay of two fresh old-English roses, pink with yellow stamens and centres. Nestling between Caroline’s bodice and petticoat was the little water bottle in which the roses sat. With nervous determination Caroline stares out at the viewer as if she has looked up for a moment from the work on her lap: her right hand holds a needle which she is pulling through her embroidery.
Since the completion of Reynolds’s portrait in 1758, Caroline had decided she was getting old. Already in 1759, when she was thirty-five, she had written to Emily, ‘I never liked a racketing life, but now I grow old and I think when one is
nearer forty than thirty, which is now my case, one has an excuse to indulge oneself in the way of life one chooses. That among many other reasons I think makes the middle age the happiest time of one’s life. I’m sure mine is; and middle age everyone must allow thirty-five to be, though many women choose to put themselves on the footing of being young at that time.’ By 1763, when she was forty, Caroline had settled into the persona of a woman of ripe years, looking forward to a ‘long and comfortable old age’ and declaring that she no longer need ‘drag
un visage de quarante ans
’ into the ballroom. Caroline asked Ramsay to paint her for the gallery in a manner that fitted this new image of herself. Ramsay obliged; Caroline sits in a gilded and upholstered French chair, turning her face and half turning her body towards us from her work-table. The intense gaze that Reynolds gave her has softened. Now she appears further away, deeper into the picture’s space and her own world, dignified and a little aloof. Her sewing – something Reynolds favoured for its sumptuousness, but Caroline rarely took up – has been discarded in favour of a letter. Reynolds painted Caroline as she thought she ought to be, a woman of fashion. Ramsay painted Caroline as a dignified grey-haired woman, a letter writer and reader, dressed in warming furs and distanced from us by her social position and experience of life. Both paintings contained elements of fantasy. Caroline was more bookish than Reynolds showed but far less comfortable and serene than Ramsay suggested. But this was Caroline as she liked to think of herself, and it was the portrait destined for the Holland House gallery.
It was rare for women to ask painters to make them look older than they were. Usually, as Caroline herself pointed out, painters erred on the side of youth and towards the standards of beauty agreed by the age. When Emily declined to sit for her gallery portrait in 1762 on the grounds that at thirty she looked too old and tired, Caroline replied, ‘as for its being not so young and blooming as it once would have been, that makes very little difference in a picture, except
quite old people and children. Painters make their other portraits, I think, look much the same age. You’ll be handsome enough these twenty years to make the best picture in our room if the painter does you justice.’ Emily prevaricated. She was almost continuously pregnant in the 1760s, producing Louisa in 1760, Henry in 1761, Sophia in 1762, Edward in 1763, Robert in 1765, Gerald in 1766 and Augustus in 1767, and could justinably claim exhaustion and incapacity. Eventually Caroline settled for a copy of Ramsay’s 1765 portrait of Emily which tucked her pregnant form under a table and a large, folio volume. ‘Your sweet face is come home and put up in my gallery,’ Caroline wrote in June 1766. Once the picture was hung, Caroline became more hopeful about the painter’s capacity to produce a good likeness (or perhaps the image came to stand for its original and Caroline began to think that Emily was like her picture rather than the other way round). ‘Opinions about pictures are so various I never mind any but my own with regard to portraits. I like it of all things and think it very like.’
Sarah did not have her own portrait in the gallery and Reynolds’s triple portrait was still unfinished when she came back to Holland House in the winter of 1762, although she had had nine appointments. It was proving very expensive. Painters charged according to the proportion of the sitter they showed, bust, half, three-quarter or full length. The triple portrait had Sarah in half length and Charles and Susan in three-quarter. When the painting was eventually delivered in 1764, Henry Fox received a bill for £120. But the same year this figure was put in the shade by an even more spectacular portrait bought from Reynolds by Charles Bunbury. As the first president of the Royal Academy on its foundation in 1768, Reynolds championed history painting as the highest form to which painters could aspire. History paintings displayed – usually with classical plots and props – heroes who sacrificed themselves for their countries, men and women who gave their children to save friends or cities from destruction and many other personifications of the virtues
conventionally believed to be necessary to a good citizen. Critics and painters alike spilled much ink on the value of history painting, but few buyers wanted pictures of minor deities or classical heroes throwing themselves about stony ruins, and painting was dominated by economic rather than moral forces. What patrons like Fox (who bought eight paintings from Reynolds, at least four from Ramsay and three from Hogarth) wanted were portraits of friends they loved and icons of political mentors and heroes.
With his patrons’ connivance Reynolds gradually merged the subject matter of history painting with the figures of his portraits, coming up with a hybrid known as ‘sublime portraiture’. In sublime portraits modern subjects posed as classical figures in appropriate costume. Sublime portraiture became a way of marrying nudity, theatricality and the unimpeachable virtues of the history painting. ‘Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces’ was one of Reynolds’s first and most flamboyant examples.
Reynolds painted Sarah throwing a libation into a smoking serpent-ringed urn. Statues of the three graces stand on a carved pillar just beyond her; behind her a handmaiden pours the next offering into a shallow dish. Sarah is wearing a pink gown lined with blue, tied under her bosom with a blue-fringed sash, a garment Reynolds designed especially for the painting. Like the costumes worn at some Holland House theatricals (and this painting is nothing if not theatrical) the gown displays as much as it conceals. The invitation the painting offers to admire Sarah’s body is only partly retracted by the prominently displayed wedding ring on her left hand. Whatever the painting’s ostensible theme – a tribute to friendship, a sacrifice to love, an elaborate compliment to her beauty – its effect is more fleshy than ethereal, redolent of boudoir rather than temple. For this magnificent concoction Bunbury paid £250, an eighth of his annual income and a sum that would have bought a small Salvator Rosa, a clutch of Old Master drawings or a passable Rembrandt. Sarah’s
portrait was admired by men and women alike. Louisa wrote to her, ‘my sister Kildare has set me quite distracted about a picture of you that she says is quite delightful, done by Reynolds … and when I see it, if it answers my expectation, I will go to gaol rather than not have it, but I’ll persuade Mr. Conolly to buy it for his gallery – I mean a copy, for I hear Mr. Bunbury intends to have this. In short I am wild about pictures of you and my sister Kildare, I don’t think I shall ever be satisfied without dozens of them.’
At Reynolds’s large studio on the west side of Leicester Square, he and his sitters were the still centre of an ever-moving crowd of onlookers. The artist frequently held open house. Visitors chatted and milled about, moving between his painting room and his gallery where his latest portraits and collection of paintings were put up on the walls and furniture was scattered about to give the air of a gentleman’s residence rather than a place of business. In tiny back rooms along corridors a small army of assistants worked on backgrounds and drapery, disgruntled and out of sight. In Reynolds’s workroom servants handed books of engravings to prospective customers. Politicians leafed through these volumes searching for poses and props that would lend them an air of statesmanship. Women also looked for the symbolic detritus so necessary to society portraits: books to show that they were critical or absorbed readers, sewing, embroidery, lace, flowers and, increasingly, children. Reynolds’s engraving books offered patrons a chance to create an image of themselves to show the world. Orchestrating this show, chalk in hand, was Reynolds himself, equal parts artist, gentleman and host. Despite Reynolds’s air of worldly propriety, his studio was a place where everyday social conventions were flouted or ignored. Because entry was without invitation to Reynolds’s clients, carefully planned meetings could take place there and be passed off as chance. Women who had lost their reputations might meet estranged friends for hurried conversations. Lovers bumped into one another, assuming stagy poses of
indifference and surprise that concealed churning stomachs and beating hearts. Actors, actresses and courtesans came face to face with their audience, each side agog with curiosity.