ART: All this, and a political career as well
Masterpieces from the Walpole Collection at Somerset House
It’s a familiar story: a first-rate set of pictures ends up being sold overseas amidst lots of whining from people who want them all to go into a national collection but can’t quite manage to pay for them; left-wing MPs fulminate witlessly about it, the press becomes over-excited and the whole sad business is seen as evidence of terminal national decline. In 1779, the third Earl of Orford – ‘the most ruined young man in England,’ apparently – sold 204 paintings to Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Most of these had been collected by the first Earl of Orford, Robert Walpole, and many had hung at 10 Downing Street during his time as prime minister as well as at Houghton Hall. The worthless John Wilkes MP was amongst the first to complain about their sale. Now 34 of these works have returned to Britain, albeit briefly, as a loan from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Other material has been loaned by the Marquess of Cholmondeley, Walpole’s descendent and current owner of Houghton Hall – a marvellous Palladian creation built by William Kent in the 1720s and improbably set down in the prosaic surroundings of rural Norfolk – some of which helps to explain how these works would have fit into the broader decorative scheme there. Here, though, hanging in the handsome Hermitage Rooms of Somerset House, the result provides not only a fascinating insight into the artistic tastes of an early eighteenth century gentleman, but a refreshing holiday from twenty-first century London as well.
This is an elegant exhibition, all the better for its relative compact scale. Those of you who enjoy being bludgeoned by heavy-duty blockbuster marathon exhibitions should go elsewhere. No small part of its charm comes from the fact that its treasures – some of which are very great indeed – are so happily and quietly integrated into their smart surroundings. So instead of a sterile series of ‘masterpieces’ stuck onto a white all and festooned with an audioguide number, one wanders happily through rooms that seem meant for political scheming or flirtation or simply convivial gossip. It is only gradually, and discretely, that the odd Poussin or Rembrandt or breathtaking Reni altarpiece makes its presence known. All of which is exactly as it should be, because it brings the contemporary gallery-goer that little bit closer to the sensibility of the people – Sir Robert Walpole or Catherine the Great – who loved and collected these paintings.
Walpole, a younger son, entered parliament in 1701 at the age of 25, and by 1721 had become prime minister. He was the first prime ministerial occupant of 10 Downing Street, which remained one of his London bases between 1735 and his resignation in 1742, when he was ennobled as first Earl of Orford. He died in 1745. Throughout this time, however, he never let politics interfere with the important business of buying pictures. By 1736, there were over 60 paintings at his house in Grosvenor Street, another 80 at his house in Chelsea, more than 150 at Downing Street and a remarkable 113 at Houghton Hall. His tastes, as a collector, were apparently thoroughly representative of his age and background – hence the delightful juxtaposition here of a beautiful Rubens moonlit landscape with John Wooton's likeable beagles, or the clashing sensibilities of a Claude Lorrain with a Poussin, or a Reni with a Rembrandt. It is all here, and it all works together. When Walpole's grandson, the third earl, sold the collection to Catherine the Great, it went for an astounding £40,555. Most of these works are now in the Hermitage. Of the rest, six were sold by the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s; a few dozen are in other Russian museums. Sadly, the fate of 36 of them is unknown. Several clearly vanished during the German occupation in the Second World War. In June of this year, however, one of these works – an equestrian portrait of George I – turned up in Germany and was returned to Russia.
Of the 34 works that have travelled back to Britain this autumn, a number are out-and-out masterpieces. Particularly fascinating are a group of paintings by Sir Anthony van Dyck. Of these, Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton is perhaps the most immediately entrancing. Van Dyck painted children with a sympathy and lack of affectation rare in art, before or since. Here, despite a faintly ropey, possibly non-autograph background, his representation of these two young sisters and their little spaniel looks as fresh as real life. It’s simply a joy to see. But just as remarkable are the two smaller paintings in the corridor – portraits of Sir Thomas Challoner and Inigo Jones. Challoner was one of the judges who, years after the portrait was painted, would send Charles I to his death. Van Dyck’s portrait is inimitably elegant – the swirling pose, the magnificent lace collar – but also incisive; it’s the faintly haunted look, more than anything else, that makes an impression. The portrait of Inigo Jones, on the other hand, is more freely painted – almost Rubens-like in its execution – its apparent simplicity conveying the impression of a down-to-earth, real-life subject.
But one could not leave this corridor without being absolutely bowled over by an astounding painting, not by Van Dyck but by one of his home-grown British rivals, William Dobson. Dobson is, at his best, a brilliant painter, and I am not sure I’ve ever seen a better Dobson than the one currently hanging in the Hermitage Rooms. In the late 1630s, Dobson painted a portrait of Abraham van der Dort. Van der Dort was apparently a maker of medals at the court of the deeply appealing Rudolph II before arriving, circa 1609, in England. Here her became Keeper of the Cabinet Room to Prince Henry and then to Henry’s brother, Prince Charles. In 1625 Charles I made him Surveyor of Pictures – which, given the quality of that particular royal collection, must have been a gratifying appointment. But van der Dort apparently lost an especially valuable miniature and, unable to cope with the disgrace, killed himself. So much for the background. Dobson’s portrait is a masterpiece – loosely painted but completely persuasive in its depiction of slightly dirty grey hair and ageing skin, and full of psychological complexity. Van der Dort half-smiles out of the canvas, his dark eyes gazing out from under unruly brows, perceptive and strangely likeable. Hung amongst Van Dycks, a Kneller and a good deal else, this painting holds its own. It is a shame that Dobson did not live longer (he died age 35) and a shame his work is not seen more often. Sir Robert Walpole kept the van der Dort painting in his dressing-room at 10 Downing Street. If this exhibition had contained nothing else worth seeing, I still would have left content after ten minutes with this beautiful, rare little painting.
One of the shocks of the major Van Dyck exhibition at the Royal Academy a few years ago was how much better the Hermitage Van Dycks looked than their equivalents elsewhere – not only private collections (although someone had done something appalling to the Althorp van Dycks) but our own dear National Gallery, too. Theories abound to why this is the case, but the front-runners seem to be a preference for traditional cleaning techniques over endlessly revised ‘scientific’ ones, and the use of artists, rather than scientists, to retouch damaged passages. Who knows? In any event, another delight of this show was the marvellous condition of absolutely everything. The Dobson was clean – one could practically see the artist’s hand at work in some of the strokes – but at the same time it had a warm lustre, rather than that slightly nasty plastic sheen that afflicts so many pictures these days. Long may this continue. At this exhibition, it had the effect of making some artists seem much fresher, and more interesting, than is often the case.
One example of this is a fine kitchen scene by David Teniers II. In typical Flemish genre fashion, there is not only a lot of incident to be picked out and enjoyed, but also a fair helping of allegorical baggage – the four elements depicted through types of food, for instance – and a certain amount of social-historical interest about the organisation of a large kitchen. Given that this is the case, it was fortunate that the painting was so clear, the content so easy to read, the colour so subtly attractive, the surface so pleasing. The variety of little dogs depicted was in itself entirely enchanting. This was another painting that Sir Robert Walpole kept at Downing Street, and it is easy to imagine him enjoying its seemingly endless detail as a sort of relief from political machinations.
In an exhibition full of masterpieces – an overused word, but accurate here for once – Rembrandt’s Abraham’s Sacrifice stood out. It is a large painting, again in excellent condition, and it was a brave decision to loan it. This is the relatively youthful Rembrandt at his theatrical best – Abraham emerges out of a cloud of warm blackness that contrasts dramatically with the radiant paleness of his son’s bare chest, and the angel that stays his hand does so with real forcefulness. The composition is spikey and violent and clever as only Rembrandt could make it, but there are also bravura passages of illusionistic painting – the falling knife, for instance, or the pile of wood on which the boy is pinioned. It is a wonderful thing to be able to see this painting in London, although I suspect some of the Rembrants at the National Gallery would look disturbingly flat after seeing it. All of which is an interesting paradox. Had these paintings remained in the UK, as Wilkes wanted, they would doubtless have had the full National Gallery treatment, and would have surfaces with all the charm of cheap kitchen counters and colour as per mid-career David Hockney. Sending them to Russia saved them for all of us.
Rembrandt is, of course, a famously good painter, and this is a famously good example of his work. Few will be surprised by the fact that Wapole admired it. This exhibition did turn up some surprises, though. Guido Reni was, until fairly recently, regarded – along with the Caracci brothers – as one of the freak mistakes of eighteenth century taste, one of the prime examples of how much fashion can change in what does and does not look good. Not so long ago, the National Gallery would not even accept such paintings as gifts, and although Reni’s reputation has made something of a recovery, all sorts of things about him – the Baroque bombast, the Counter-Reformation doctrinal correctness – ensure that he remains easier to tolerate than to admire. The Fathers of the Church Disputing the Christian Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, however, showed me qualities in his work that I had not expected to find. The colour, for one thing, is marvellous – warm, luminous, almost seductive – while the conceit of the vexed scholar looking up from his headachey texts and arid debate to contemplate the Virgin is a humane, richly likeable way of illustrating a somewhat abstruse concept. Presumably, this painting was intended to be displayed over an altar, and the composition suffers a bit from the fact it is, for obvious reasons, hung much lower in a domestic setting than it would have been in an ecclesiastical one. Still, it is remarkably handsome, and does a lot to explain why Walpole and his contemporaries admired Reni so much.
It would be possible to list many more paintings that made an impression, but that would be otiose, so I shall restrain myself to only a couple more. It would be negligent to write about this exhibition without drawing attention to an astonishingly bold, almost lapidary Poussin, The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist. Here the forms are so sculptural that it is hard to take the work seriously as a two-dimensional painting. This is Christianity at its most classicised, timeless and elemental; the colours are sweet and gentle, as if to avoid competing with the monumentality of the forms. It shows Poussin at an extreme, and in doing so, seems almost to look forward to other things that Walpole would not have known – to Picasso’s classicism, for instance – at the same time as looking backwards towards classical antiquity. A complete contrast to this is Claude Lorrain’s magnificent Landscape with Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, which is all lyricism, grace and a faint, enjoyable air of sadness. Elegiac ruins frame a view of the Bay of Naples, while in the foreground two little figures – Apollo and his beloved Sibyl, to whom he is about to grant the wish that will curse her with near-eternal life without the gift of near-eternal youth – reach for each other among the long shadows. This is a painting not about timelessness, as the Poussin seems to be, but rather about the passage of time – its cruelty as well as its inevitability. To be able to look from the Poussin to the Claude and back again is a remarkable experience.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage with a Modern Edition of Aedes Walpolianae, Horace Walpole’s Catalogue of Sir Robert Walpole’s Collection edited by Andrew Moore and Larissa Dukelskaya. It is a significant work in its own right, setting out in considerable detail the circumstances by which the collection came to be created by Sir Robert Walpole, sold by his charming if hapless grandson, and preserved in the Hermitage Museum. There is a fair amount of humour in this story. The third earl, for instance, was so grateful to Catherine for rescuing him from his many debts that he paid her the unique tribute of naming his favourite greyhound bitch Czarina. One hopes the Empress was pleased.
The book also includes some sensible reflections on Sir Robert Walpole’s taste. In London, we are fortunate to have two great museums – the Wallace Collection and the Dulwich Picture Gallery – which preserve coherent private collections with an absolute minimum of curatorial revisionism. This is perhaps why they are two of the most satisfactory museums on earth. Their logic ensures that the viewer does not confront the museum as a succession of unrelated works, but rather, as an insight into a particular way of looking, which in turn not only conveys something about the sensibility of the individual who formed each collection – its peculiarities and blind spots – but also, in revealing the gaps between our own taste and the alternatives to it, something about our own way of looking at the world. Through a combination of careful scholarship and aesthetic good sense, the curators of this exhibition have managed to achieve something of the same effect. This is a beautiful, memorable show which benefits from its civilised surroundings and elegant lack of hype. I recommend it highly.
Painting, Passion and Politics: Masterpieces from the Walpole Collection is supported by the Open Russia Foundation. It runs from 28 September 2002 - 23 February 2003 at the Hermitage Rooms, Somerset House from 10 am - 6 pm. Admission costs £6.
Bunny Smedley, September 25, 2002 11:37 AM