684. EAST VESTIBULE the English SCHOOL (Continued) RALPH SCHOMBERG, M.D. T.Gainsborough, R.A. (1727-1785). See under XVI. 760, p. 396. Dr. Schomberg belonged to the family of Field - Marshal Duke Schomberg (killed at the Battle of the Boyne), whose house in Pall Mall was taken by Gainsborough. The doctor was something of a courtier, and had his portrait taken in a court suit of velvet, with his cocked hat and cane in his hand. 144. BENJAMIN WEST, P.R.A. Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A. (1769-1830). Lawrence" the second Reynolds," as he was called by his admirers, or "an attenuated Reynolds," as he is called by later critics -was one of the infant prodigies of art. His parents were gentlefolk who had fallen on bad times, and at the date of his birth his father was landlord of the Black Bear at Devizes. When the boy was only five, he was already on show both for his drawings and his powers of recitation. "Come now, my man," said Garrick once, when putting up at the inn and listening to the boy's performances, "bravely done! whether will ye be a painter or a player ?" At nine he was able unaided to copy the most elaborate pictures, and soon after ten he earned money in different provincial towns as a taker of portraits in crayons. "His studio before he was twelve years old was," we are told, "the favourite resort of the beauty and fashion and taste of Bath: young ladies loved to sit and converse with the handsome prodigy; men of taste and vertu purchased his crayon heads, which he drew in vast numbers, and carried them far and near, even into foreign lands, to show as the work of the boy-artist of Britain." The child in Lawrence's case was father of the man. His success when he came up to London was instantaneous, and for forty years he was the idol of fashionable society. At nineteen, he had already been received into favour at court. At twenty-two, he was elected "a supplemental A.R. A.” (the limit of age in ordinary cases being twenty-four), and four years later he was elected full R.A. He had already been appointed painter to the king. In 1820, upon the death of West, he was unanimously elected President of the Academy. His manners to the lady-sitters who flocked to him were all too fascinating, and he was even suspected of undue attentions to the Princess of Wales, who had asked him to stay in her house whilst painting her. He wrote the prettiest of notes and They have Reynolds himself with them. "This young man," he is reported to have said of Lawrence, "has begun at a point of excellence where I left off."' paid the neatest of compliments. He was an admirable reciter, and passed round copies of verses. But he was not merely a lady's man. Byron has celebrated his praises as an artist: "Were I now as I was, I had sung What Lawrence has painted so well"; and in one of his letters has noticed "Lawrence's delightful talk." The painter's affection for his own family, to whom he made handsome allowances, was never weakened, and there are many pleasant records of his generosity to young artists. He was on the Continent in 1818-1819, painting various foreign princes for the series of portraits which the king commissioned him to take after the conclusion of the French War, and which now hang in the Waterloo Gallery at Windsor. It was on a visit to Sir Robert Peel, with whom he was on intimate terms of friendship, that Lawrence was seized with the illness from which he soon afterwards died in his house at 65 Russell Square. He was buried with much pomp-Peel being one of the pall-bearers—in St. Paul's, beside Reynolds and Barry and West. Lawrence is seen at his best in his male portraits, especially those where he was not burdened by freaks of passing fashion in costume.1 In his pictures of women and children, especially those which belong to his earlier years, there was often a meretricious affectation which gave the point to the remark of the poet Rogers, "Phillips (see XX. 183, p. 529) shall paint my wife and Lawrence my mistress." Lawrence, at the beginning of his career, had been introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds. "Study nature more, the old masters less,' was his advice to Lawrence, advice exactly opposite to that given by him to many another student, but advice," adds Mr. Humphry Ward (English Art in the Public Galleries, p. 46), "which showed that he had at once detected the real danger that lay in the path of the young aspirant. Unluckily the hint was not taken, and the cleverest portrait painter of the time-the cleverest, indeed, that appeared in England for two generations-parted ever more widely from nature as he grew in power and fame, till he became identified with Court, and the style of the Prince Regent, and the false elegance and the false sentiment of that day." Fortunately, however, for Lawrence's public fame, his male portraits are so far confined in the National Gallery to sitters— West, Angerstein, Romilly—who did not expose him to his besetting sin. A characteristic portrait of Lawrence's predecessor in the presidential chair, of the most ambitious and least successful, perhaps, of all noted English painters. The portrait was taken for the Prince of Wales in 1811, when West was seventy-three. But the venerable painter is represented as still intent on big " 1 Utterly unlike Reynolds or Gainsborough, particularly the latter, who, although never giving in to any freak of fashion, yet so quickly and always found some safe means to represent it by which it might be divested of its ephemeral character, Sir Thomas Lawrence himself sets the fashion; he paints on a canvas that will last for centuries a style of dress, a particular cut of coat, which will only last for a day" (Chesneau : The English School, pp. 52, 53). designs. On the easel beside him is a sketch of Raphael's cartoon of the Death of Ananias-one of those large compositions which West attempted to imitate, either in historical or Biblical story, on ever larger scale as he grew older. The fortunes of his pictures are one of the curiosities in the history of taste. In his lifetime his fame was very great. When he died he was buried in full state in St. Paul's, and his biographer declared that "he was one of those great men whose genius cannot be justly estimated by particular works, but only by a collective inspection of the variety, the extent, and the number of their productions." Lawrence's portrait of the "great man,” still intent in his old age on great things, has a pathetic interest when one contrasts the verdict of posterity with royal patronage and contemporary fame. Twenty years after his death some of his pictures, for which he had been paid 3000 guineas, were knocked down at a public sale for £10; and such of his pictures as had been presented to the National Gallery have now been removed to the provinces. West's life (which is more interesting than his art) may be read in Allan Cunningham, vol. ii. He came of an old Quaker family, which had emigrated to America in 1715, and was born in Pennsylvania in 1738. When he was twenty-two, some friends and relatives clubbed together to send him to Italy. In 1763 he settled in London, sent for the girl he had left behind him in Pennsylvania, married, won the favour of George III., was one of the original members of the Royal Academy, and in 1792 succeeded Reynolds as president. The knighthood which is offered to all holders of that post was declined by West. Mrs. Moser was a candidate against him, but only received one vote, that of Fuseli, who met the remonstrance of a brother academician by declaring that "he did not see why he shouldn't vote for one old woman as well as another." West's best claim to remembrance in the development of English art is that he was the first to introduce modern costume into the representation of contemporary history-an innovation which created much stir in artistic circles at the time, and called forth at first the protests of Reynolds. 1146. PORTRAIT OF A LADY. Sir Henry Raeburn, R.A. (1756-1823). Raeburn has been called "the Scotch Reynolds," and it is pleasant to know that he was kindly received by the great English painter. After serving an apprenticeship to a jeweller in Edinburgh, he came up to London and made the acquaintance of Sir Joshua, who urged him to go to Italy, and offered him both introductions and funds for the purpose. Raeburn, however, had married a rich widow, and with her he resided for two years in Italy. He then established himself as a portrait painter at Edinburgh, and soon "led the fashion" there, much as Sir Joshua did in London. In 1822 he was elected R.A. (A.R.A in 1812), knighted and appointed "His Majesty's Limner for Scotland." There was an exhibition of 325 portraits by him in Edinburgh in 1876, which included nearly all the eminent Scottish men and women of two generations ago. "I heard a story," says Mr. R. L. Stevenson, in his essay on the exhibition (in Vir ginibus Puerisque), "of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after an absence of sixty years: 'I could see none of my old friends,' she said, 'until I went into the Raeburn Gallery, and found them all there.' It is much to be hoped that before long there may be more than this one picture in the National Gallery by the great Scottish portrait painter of whom the patriotic Wilkie, in recording his impressions of Madrid, said that "the simple and powerful manner of Velazquez always reminded him of Raeburn.” The lady is a member of the Dudgeon family: "gowned in pure white," "half light, half shade, She stands, a sight to make an old man young." 143. PORTRAIT OF LORD LIGONIER. Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723-1792). This distinguished officer, of whom there is a monument in Westminster Abbey, was a French Huguenot by birth, but was educated in England and at an early age entered the British army. He fought at Blenheim and at Marlborough's other great battles. He was knighted (Sir John Ligonier) after the battle of Dettingen, in which he commanded a division under George II. He was afterwards made a peer, field-marshal, and commander-in-chief. He died in 1770 at the age of ninety-two. At the battle of Laffeldt in 1747 he rescued the allied army from destruction by charging the whole French line at the head of the British dragoons. Reynolds, with his usual felicity, painted him therefore on horseback and in action. The portrait is one of Reynolds's earlier works, its date being about 1760, and was one of the painter's favourites. According to an anecdote told by Nollekens, Reynolds, at a sale of prints, was once expatiating to a friend on the extraordinary powers of Rembrandt, and proceeded to observe that the effect which pleased him most in all his own pictures was that displayed in his Lord Ligonier on Horseback; the chiaroscuro of which he found, he said, in a rude woodcut upon a half-penny ballad on the wall of St. Anne's church, in Princes Street. 681. CAPTAIN1 ORME. Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (1723–1792). See under XVI. 111, p. 399. Richard Orme (Coldstream Guards) was aide-de-camp, with Washington, to General Braddock (with whom he was a great favourite), in America during the campaign of 1755. He is described by his comrades as "an honest and capable man, who made an excellent impression on all he encountered." He was wounded in the attack on Fort Duquesne on July 9, 1755, and shortly afterwards returned to England. This portrait was taken in 1761, and Sir Joshua paints him on foot, as one whose fighting days were over; for in 1756 Orme married the Hon. Audrey Townshend and retired into private life. He died in 1781. His MS. journal of the campaign is in the British Museum, having been presented by George IV. The visitor should now descend the steps. Ascending those opposite, he will come into the West Vestibule, which leads to the remaining rooms of the English School. WEST VESTIBULE the English SCHOOL (Continued) 789. A FAMILY GROUP. T. Gainsborough, R.A. (1727-1785). This picture "the best Gainsborough in England known to me," says Mr. Ruskin (Art of England, p. 211 n.)—is a group of the family of Mr. J Baillie, of Ealing Grove-one of the many such groups that Gainsborough and Reynolds were employed to paint. "The two great-the two only painters of their age-happy in a reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind, demanded no higher 1 So he was commonly called, though in fact he never rose above the rank of lieutenant. |