37. Choice 26: Walpole’s Annotated Print of His Portrait by Reynolds, 1757

37. Choice 26: Walpole’s Annotated Print of His Portrait by Reynolds, 1757

Portrait of Walpole standing three-quarter length to left and leaning his right elbow on table, his right hand to his cheek, eyes to front, wearing plain coat and waistcoat, lace collar and cuffs;

Horace Walpole

We come now to the final Choice, the copy of McArdell’s print of Walpole engraved after Reynolds in 1757, which Walpole hung in his bedroom at Strawberry Hill. The Strawberry Hill sale catalogue records that “A Latin inscription, in the handwriting of Horace Walpole, is at the back of the engraving, rendering it particularly interesting.” It was bought in 1842 by the Rev. Hon. Horace Cholmondeley, Walpole’s cousin, and thanks to the friendly offices of Owen Morshead came to me in 1962 from General Sir Henry Jackson of Dorset, Horace Cholmondeley’s grandson. The Latin inscription on the ack in Walpole’s most elegant hands is from Historia sui temporis by Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617), historian and statesman. The Warden of All Souls, Mr John Sparrow, kindly translated it for me:

In far distant times, one will look with wonder on the green turf that covers the                grave where my ashes are buried, and will say: “It was his lot to be born in a bed           of down, blessed with ample means, with favor and resources surpassing those             which nowadays all wonder at from their earliest years: the glories of his time, his           natural ambition, and the fresh fame of his illustrious father, all gave grounds to               hope that he would excel the example of his ancestors which he strove to imitate;           yet, despite all this, he preferred to seek the obscure, easeful retreats of the                   Muses, to shun the   rocks and storms of Court and to despise the insubstantial               vanities that men contended for: he chose the ivy and the laurel that grow wild                 rather than the spoils of   battle of triumphs that batten on a hungry peace.”

inscription by Horace Walpole

Inscription by Horace Walpole

One feels Walpole’s pleasure as he copied out that passage with its remarkable parallels to himself. Like de Thou he would be talked about “in far distant times,” not for the insubstantial vanities that men strive for, but for the enduring awards of the Muses; he would be remembered for his letters and memories as well as for his contributions to the arts, literature, and antiquarianism. The future owners of the objects mentioned in the Description of Strawberry Hill would enjoy them the more because he had owned them.

John Pinkerton in his Walpoliana, in 1799, says that McArdell’s print of Walpole “must have been very like, as strong traces of resemblance remained, particularly about the eyes.” Earlier Pinkerton wrote, “The person of Horace Walpole was short and slender, but compact and neatly formed. When viewed from behind, he had somewhat of a boyish appearance, owing to the form of his person, and the simplicity of his dress. His goodness of his eyes, which would often sparkle with sudden rays of wit, or dart forth flashes of the most keen and intuitive intelligence.” One is reminded of General Fitzwilliam’s witness to Walpole’s “natural talents, his cheerfulness, the sallies of his imagination, the liveliness of his manner.”

The accessories that Reynolds chose to suggest Walpole’s interests give us the virtuoso and writer as well as the man of the world. The tall table on which he is leaning and displaying the ruffles at his wrist has a print of his antique marble eagle that was dug up in Rome in 1742. The Description of Strawberry Hill calls it “one of the finest pieces of Greek sculpture in the world,” and assures us that “the boldness and yet great finishing of the statue are comparable. The eyes inimitable. Mr. Gray has drawn the flagging wing. It stands on a handsome antique sepulchral altar, adorned with eagles too.” Reynold’s portrait also gives us the writer with a quill and inkpot and two or three of his books tumbled together on the tall table.

Lewis, Wilmarth S. Rescuing Horace Walpole. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978.

To see the full chapter from Rescuing Horace Walpole called “Choices 24 and 25: Ramsay’s Portrait of Walpole and Berwick’s of Conway” download or expand the link here:

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N.B. The collection of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British satires in the LWL’s collection have been cataloged in Orbis, Yale’s online library catalog, and through the Quicksearch Books+ interface, and digital images can be found in the Digital Collection.

36. Choices 24 and 25: Ramsay’s Portrait of Walpole and Berwick’s of Conway

Choices 24 and 25: Ramsay’s Portrait of Walpole and Berwick’s of Conway

portrait of a young Horace Walpole

Ramsay’s portrait of Walpole

by Wilmarth S. Lewis

“One day in the summer of 1931 Annie burr and I had tea at Nuneham Park with the dowager Lady Harcourt. Nuneham was a place of pilgrimage for me because it was the house I think Walpole most enjoyed visiting. He delighted in everything about it, its ‘own beauties’ its gardens, which he called ‘the quintessence of nosegays,’ and its talented owner, George Simon 2d Earl Harcourt and his wife who wrote verses.

Harcourt was an amateur artist who Walpole said etched landscapes ‘in a very great style’ and whose views of his other house in Oxfordshire, Stanton Harcourt, were ‘the richest etchings I ever saw, and masterly executed.’ Walpole begged Lady Harcourt in vain to let him print her verses, which he said were written ‘in a very natural style.’ I was eager to see ‘the paradise of earth’ and Walpole’s letters to Harcourt, fifty-seven in number, which were there. On our first visit Lady Harcourt asked the housekeeper to produce them, a request carried out with marked distaste. The housekeeper told us darkly that an American who said he was a professor came to see the letters years before and she was sure he had made off with some of them. The most common explanation for the disappearance of family papers in England is a fire; the second most common explanation is the visit from an American professor.

I didn’t touch the letters, but admired the portraits in oval frames about the library shelves, Locke, Pope, Gray and so on, including an unrecorded portrait of Horace Walpole, ‘By Gogain, after Allan Ramsay.” Since it was the custom in the eighteenth century to give copies of one’s portraits to friends it was not surprising to find Walpole at Nuneham, but in 1931 I was still uninitiated in the science of iconography and assumed the copy couldn’t be of Walpole because it doesn’t appear in the Toynbee’s edition of his letters. When a few years later I found in the house of a Walpole relation a second Gogain of Ramsay’s portrait inscribed on it frame ‘The Hon. Horace Walpole copied from an original picture of him at  Nuneham,’ I was still too uninstructed to do more than wonder mildly about the original Ramsay.

I found it ultimately through the Agony Column of the Times when in 1936 my advertisement brought this letter:

            Dear Sir,                                                                                                                                Accidently I heard you were interested in Strawberry Hill. My family and I                        have a larg [sic] number of painting and watercolors from the great sale and                    by inheritance. Angelica Kaufmans and Paul Sandbys. Aylesbury tapestries                    etc If you are sufficiently interested I shall be glad to show you some of them                  at least My grandfather and Anne Seymour Damer were close connections.                    Nothing for sale                                                                                                                                                                            Yrs faithfully                                                                                                                        H. Campbell Jonhston

Campbell Johnston was a promising name, allied to the Argyll family in which were Lord Frederick Campbell, Walpole’s executor, and his sister Lady Ailesbury, Conway’s wife. They were uncle- and aunt-in-law of Sir Alexander Johnston of Carnsalloch, Dumfriesshire, the enlightened reorganizer of Ceylon early in the nineteenth century.

H. Campbell Johnston was one of the descendants, as I discovered when I called on him in Kensington. His flat (third floor back), his clothes, his chastened manner, indicated one of who had seen better days. He admitted that the Walpoliana did not belong to him, but to a younger brother, D. Campbell Johnston. However, he went on earnestly, his brother would show them to me at tea, and he did so a few days later in his big house in Hans Road. Also present in the drawing-room besides the elder brother was a younger sister. my entrance was irregular because on walking into the room I saw several objects from Strawberry Hill and acknowledged them by a cry of recognition before greeting my host. There are dead-pan collectors who suppress such cries hoping to pay less for the coveted objects, but I think I have gained by my undisguised delight on seeing them. In the drawing-room were Muntz’s sketch of Walpole in the library at Strawberry Hill, two drawings of Conway, Lady Ailesbury, and Mrs Damer, when a child, and two of Lady of Ailesbury’s needlework tapestries in silk. The flame of hope rose in the elder brother as my enthusiasm invested the family treasures with transcendent value. I was aware of this and also that in the bosom of the younger brother no friendly response stirred, a disappointment, since it was clear that his was the deciding voice in the family councils. The sister was amused by my and her elder brother’s eagerness to have something come of the call besides tea and by her younger brother’s evident decision that nothing should. I made notes of the Walpoliana, but not, unfortunately, of the conversation. My inquiries in 1937 and 1938 to the younger brother about Walpole’s letters to Lord Frederick Campbell received terse replies that he did not have them.

When I was in London in 1942 the Campbell Johnstons had disappeared from all works of reference and I did not pursue their Walpoliana until 1951 when, fortunately, i mentioned them to Owen Morshead who discovered immediately that the objects I saw in Hans Road had descended to Commander Colin Campbell Johnston, who was living at Brighton, and there they were in his drawing-room when I arrived for lunch in a few days. In answer to the question about other members of family who might own Walpoliana, my host suggested I write to the g=head of it, the Laird of Carnsalloch, Mr David Campbell Johnston. He replied that he had no Walpole letters, but kindly wrote out a list of contents of the five volumes of Lord Orford’s Works, 1798, a not uncommon work. As an afterthought he mentioned that he owned Ramsay’s portrait of Walpole. I urged him to get an appraisal from the most reputable dealers and auctioneers if he ever decided to part with it, but this gratuitous advice went unacknowledged. After a year I wrote again, sending a copy of my earlier letter, which I feared had gone astray. This time the Laird replied at once, saying there was no use in discussing the matter further unless I was prepared to give him £120 for the picture. When it reached Kingsley Adam’s office at the National Portrait Gallery in London en route to Farmington it was discovered that much of it had been cut away–how much appears from Ramsay’s preliminary sketch in the National Gallery , Edinburgh, that shows Walpole at his desk holding a quill pen, only the tip survives. Despite its mutilation, the portrait ranks among the best known of Walpole because Professor George B. Cooper used it on the dust jacket of the selection of Walpole’s letters he encouraged me to make for his large class at Trinity College, Hartford, and that is used in other classrooms as well.

Portrait of Henry Seymour Conway

Portrait of Henry Seymour Conway

The Laird of Carnsalloch informed a cousin in London, Miss Scholefield, that there was a mad American at Brown’s Hotel who would pay anything for Walpoliana and that here was a chance to see her Gainsborough of Henry Seymour Conway and repaint her dining room. Miss Scholefield wrote me she would be happy to show me the Gainsborough. I turned to Kingsley Adams for guidance and support. He had succeeded Hake as Director of the Portrait Gallery and the Gallery’s records of Conway’s portraits were in his brief case when we rang Miss Scholefield’s door-bell a few days later. Among the Conways portraits was one that had been exhibited at the New Gallery in 1890-91. It was signed “A. Berwick,” who was a copyist, according to Whitley’s Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700-1799. Miss Scholefield opened her door promptly. Miss Scholefield led Adams and me to the small dining-room and the commanding three-quarters-length portrait of Conway that dominated it. As its head and shoulders had been engraved for Lord Orford’s Works, 1798, they were familiar, but the engraving gives us only Conway the soldier wearing a cuirass; in the portrait he is also the statesman, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department that included the American Colonies. He is standing at a table on which is a red dispatch box, a copy of the bill, which he also fathered, for the repeal of the Stamp Act. A dark red curtain is at his back; a classical colonnade stretches away on his right. Could the picture be taken down to see what was on the stretcher? Polly screamed assent from the drawing-room and the picture was taken down, a precarious business with Adams standing on a light chair, his arms spread across the picture embracing the frame as he teased it off the hook while Miss Scholefield and I, squatting below, heaved it up with little cries of caution and apprehension. The picture and Adams safely down, we found on the stretcher “A. Berwick pinxit,” and the label of the Hanover Exhibition at the New Gallery in 1890-91. There was also a note that the picture belonged to “Mrs Campbell Johnston.” Everybody was relieved and delighted. The moment had come to cross the valley of reticence and talk money.

The two principals were what auctioneers call, “A Willing Seller and A Willing Buyer.” The latter advised Miss Scholefield to get the best professional advice for a valuation. She looked bank. I rolled off five possibilities: Agnew, Colnaghi, Leggatt, Christie’s, Sotheby’s.”

“Oh Sotheby’s!”                                                                                                                   “You know them?”                                                                                                             “No, but I’ve always liked the name.”

I telephoned Vere Pilkington, at the time the senior partner of Sotheby’s. “Is he in a red coat?” he asked.                                                                                                                 “Yes.”                                                                                                                                 “Bad luck, I’m afraid that will add £20.”

After the portrait reached Farmington I told Robert Vail, who was then Director of the New York Historical Society, that the Campbell Johnston family believed the original was painted for “the Town Hall of New York.” He kindly explored the matter and found that it was the people of Boston, not New York, who on 18 September 1765, voted their thanks to Conway and requested his portrait for Faneuil Hall. The picture reached it after a delay of nearly two years–while the copy was being made for Conway’s Family?–but the original was lost during the Revolution. The copy descended to Miss Scholefield, who wrote its new owner to say how happy she was it had found such a good home. Her letter concluded, ‘Polly send you the enclosed,” which was a snapshot of Polly himself.

Who painted the portrait? Family tradition is not necessarily wrong and a very important critic has said the head at least may be by Gainsborough. The pose is similar to Gainsborough’s portrait of Conway owned by the Duke of Argyll, head of the Campbell clan. The trees seen through the colonnade have a Gainsboroughesque look. My guess is that before Conway sent his portrait to Boston he had the copy made in Gainsborough’s studio where I understand A. Berwick was employed and of course I I like to think that that the head was painted by the master.

Lewis, Wilmarth S. Rescuing Horace Walpole. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978.

To see the full chapter from Rescuing Horace Walpole called “Choices 24 and 25: Ramsay’s Portrait of Walpole and Berwick’s of Conway” download or expand the link here:

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35. Choice 23: Hogarth’s First Oil Sketch for “The Beggar’s Opera”

Choice 23: Hogarth’s First Oil Sketch for The Beggar’s Opera

original sketch of the Beggar's Operaby Wilmarth S. Lewis

“This is the first of six oils by Hogarth of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Act III, Scene IX with Lucy Lockit, her father the Warden of Newgate, Macheath the highwayman, Polly Peachum, and her father. The scene shows the two girls begging their fathers to save their lover from hanging. Walpole wrote a note on the back of the picture that he copied in the Description of Strawberry Hill: “Sketch of The Beggar’s Opera as first performed: Macheath, in red, by Walker. Polly kneeling, in white, by Miss Fenton, afterwards Duchess of Bolton; Lucy in green, her face turned away, by Mrs. Eggleton; Peachum, in black, by Hippisley; Lockit, by Hall. Amongst the audience, on the left hand, Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby, a tall gentleman with a long lean face; on the right Sir Robert Fagge, profile, a fat man with short grey hair, much known at Newmarket. Painted by Hogarth. H.W.” Walpole added in his copy of the ’84 Description, “Bought at the sale of John Rich, well-known harlequin, and master of the theatres in Lincoln’s-inn-fields and Covent-garden, for whom the picture was painted.” He also added in his copy of the ’74 Description, “with prices of such pieces as I can recollect” that he paid 5 guineas for the picture. When it was sold in the Lowther Castle Sale in 1947 Annie Burr bought it for me through Messrs Spink and it now hangs in the long hall at Farmington beside a black and white chalk drawing of Sir John Perrott, an Elizabethan Deputy of Ireland, that Walpole hung next to it in the Great North Bedchamber at Strawberry Hill.”

“Walpole believed he had the largest collection of Hogarth’s prints in existence, 365 in number. It may have been the largest when he made the claim, but after the painter’s death Walpole wrote Cole that George Steevens ‘ransacked’ Mrs. Hogarth’s collection of prints. Steeven’s collection is now at Farmington. It has 469 prints with 236 additional copies of Hogarth’s prints by Bickham, Ireland and Paul Sandby. Steevens pasted the prints into three elephant folios. cover of Steevens volume and page from folio with print of HogarthHe discriminated the states of the early tradesman’s cards and exhibition announcements and included lists of the prints priced by Hogarth and his widow. Steevens bequeathed his collection to William Windham of Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, where it remained until Wyndham Ketton-Cremer’s uncle sold it at Sotheby’s in 1919 to Dyson Perrins whose estate resold it at Sotheby’s in 1959. I bought it in memory of Annie Burr and so it has joined the collections of Hogarth at Farmington formed by Queen Charlotte and Lord Kinnaird. According to Ronald Paulson, we are now second only to the British Museum’s collection, which includes a large proportion of the prints from Strawberry Hill. Thirteen of them are at Farmington. They include drawings of Dr. Misaubin and Dr. Richard Mead, prints of ‘the Black Girl in Bed,’ and ‘Humours of Oxford,’ which turned up in Lady Ossory’s copy of Walpole’s Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose. We also have copperplates for ‘The Sleeping Congregation,’ and Hogarth’s portrait of himself painting the Comic Muse. His plates are rare because so many of them were melted down for bullets in the dawn of the New Dark Ages.”copper plate

 

Lewis, Wilmarth S. Rescuing Horace Walpole. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978.

To see the full chapter from Rescuing Horace Walpole called “Choice 23: Hogarth’s First Oil Sketch for The Beggar’s Opera” download or expand the link here:

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Welcome to the Lewis Walpole Library’s blog HORACE WALPOLE AT 300

Welcome to the Lewis Walpole Library’s blog HORACE WALPOLE AT 300.

In this year 2017-2018, the Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, is celebrating the life, works, and collections of Horace Walpole through a variety of programming including lectures, seminars, an exhibition, conference, dramatic reading, and more.

This year-long blog will feature items from the Lewis Walpole Library’s collection associated with Walpole. Each week, a new blog post will look at something that Walpole either owned, wrote, had printed at his house in Twickenham called Strawberry Hill, or in some way was closely connected with him. Alternating with entries by current Lewis Walpole Library staff and former Fellows will be chapters from W.S. Lewis’s Rescuing Horace Walpole, reproduced here with permission of the Yale University Press.

As noted in the dustjacket blurb of Rescuing Horace Walpole, “Leslie Stephen wrote, ‘The very large segment of the eighteenth century is simply a synonym for the works of Horace Walpole.’ In the early 1920’s Wilmarth S. Lewis began to collect not only Walpole’s own writings, but the publications of his private press at Strawberry Hill, books from his library, and pictures, prints, and drawings he owned. Today the Lewis Walpole Library, in Farmington, Connecticut, is one of the most extraordinary collections of eighteenth-century books, papers, and works of art to be found anywhere in the world.”

WSL and HW

W.S. (“Lefty”) Lewis, Yale ’18, in his autobiography One Man’s Education, described the beginnings of his collecting of Horace Walpole, “…in London Walpoliana were everywhere, lying about unwanted, the books that Walpole wrote and printed, and unique items, which Lefty later called ‘Bits of the True Cross’: presentation copies of the Strawberry Hill Press and books from Walpole’s library. The harvest was ready and Lefty reaped and gathered it in.”

As Lewis wrote about the 250th anniversary of Walpole’s birth, “There will be celebrations throughout Walpoleshire–bonfires and dancing on the green….Walpole would be pleased, embarrassed, and not at all surprised by these tributes to his memory.” We hope Walpole would feel the same about this current tribute to Walpole at 300.

–Susan Walker, Head of Public Services, the Lewis Walpole Library