Part 1 (2/2)

Pierpont Morgan's collection one miniature representing _Lord Loudoun_ (Plate VII., No. 2) is in extraordinarily perfect condition, but for a couple of generations it was lost sight of behind some oak panelling and has only recently come to light. Another very fine one, in the same collection, represents _Charles II._ (Plate VII., No. 1). Cooper's method of painting is very interesting, and as he has left behind several unfinished portraits, we are enabled to study it with considerable accuracy. It is clear that he commenced to draw the head and figure in brown, and, as a recent writer has pointed out, painted in the shadows with transparent sienna, and the half-tones with a pure grey blue. His work is executed upon vellum as a rule, but sometimes upon cardboard, and his flesh tints are nearly always transparent, although occasionally they are upon a white background, and in some few rare instances, where he desired special effect, he used opaque colours.

Several of his portraits he has never carried beyond the early stages.

They are only sketches, but such sketches as no one else could have done, exquisitely rendered, full of palpitating life. This is especially the case with the portrait of the Duke of Albemarle at Windsor, and with one in the same collection representing the Duke of Monmouth; with that of Oliver Cromwell, at Montagu House, and with an extraordinary little sketch, which we ill.u.s.trate in colour, by permission of Sir Charles Dilke (Plate IX., No. 1). This also came from Strawberry Hill, where it was bought by the grandfather of its present owner, and it offers a bewildering problem to the student. Walpole declares, in an inscription on the back of it in his own handwriting, that it represents ”Miss Temple, Maid of Honour to the d.u.c.h.ess of York, second wife of Charles Lyttelton,” and that it was the work of Gervase Spencer, after an original painted by Cooper, in the possession of Lord Lyttelton, and Walpole ought to have known what he was talking about. It is quite possible that he is correct, but the original portrait from which this sketch is said to have been made is not now in the possession of the Lyttelton family, and the miniature itself bears such a striking resemblance to the work of Cooper that it is difficult to believe that it is a copy by anyone at all. We know how constantly Cooper's work was copied, one of the finest examples of such repet.i.tion being the well-known work at Montagu House by Mrs. Ross, a portrait of the Duke of Monmouth, but there is no example known to us of an eighteenth-century painter copying the work of Cooper with the exception or this one, if Walpole's statement is correct. Another curious circ.u.mstance about the inscription is that Walpole has made an error in the name. It was not Charles but Thomas Lyttelton who married Christian Temple. She was the daughter of Sir Richard Temple of Stowe, and the heir of Viscount Cobham; thus it was through her that the Viscounty and Barony of Cobham came to the family.

As we have already written very fully in another place, we are quite unable to accept the series of unfinished miniatures at the Victoria and Albert Museum as being the work of Cooper. There is no external evidence whatever in favour of the tradition. They are painted on a very smooth cardboard, quite a different material to that used by Cooper, and on the back of one of the portraits is an inscription in the same handwriting as is the one on the copy by Mrs. Ross at Montagu House, and apparently signed by the same person. It is quite possible that in the collection the portrait of Lord Brooke (which was not contained in the pocket-book when the original purchase was made) may be a genuine work by Cooper, very likely acquired by Mrs. Ross, as a guide for her own work, but all the other portraits are, we are convinced, the work of this clever copyist, and must not be attributed to the master himself. In the course of our investigations concerning a missing portrait by Cooper, representing the Countess of Exeter, we came upon two interesting letters in the Duke of Rutland's collection at Belvoir Castle, which proved that this portrait was never finished. On the 9th April, 1672, Mr. Charles Manners wrote to Lord Roos in the following terms:--”I haesten on Mr. Cooper all I can to the finis.h.i.+ng of my Lady Exester's picture, and hee will surely doe it, G.o.d willing; but at the present the King and the Duke have put severall things into his hands which take him off from all else.” Then again, on the 4th May, Mr. Manners wrote again to Lord Roos respecting the same portrait, and he then stated that although Mr. Cooper had promised ”with all imaginable respect and kindeness to finish it out of hand, and actually begun it, he just then fell dangerously sicke, and confyned to his bed, and I very much feare hee cannot possibly outlive three days.” As a matter of fact, Cooper did not live a day after this letter had been sent, for from Mary Beale's diary we have the information that he died on the 5th May, the diarist writing as follows:--”Sunday, May 5th, 1672, Mr. Samuel Cooper, the most famous limner of the world for a face, dyed.” The two letters from which these quotations are taken are to be found in facsimile in the catalogue of Mr. Pierpont Morgan's collection of miniatures. Other odd facts concerning this great painter we learn from Pepys and certain contemporary records. We know that he was an excellent musician, playing well on the lute, and a clever linguist, speaking French with ease. He resided in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and frequented the Covent Garden coffee-house; he was a short, stout man of a ruddy countenance, was married and had one daughter. The Duke of Portland's collection at Welbeck contains the portrait of his wife Christina, and in another collection there is a portrait of his daughter, both fine paintings by the master himself. Christina Cooper was a Miss Turner, and her other sister, Edith, married the father of Alexander Pope. Mrs. Cooper was Pope's G.o.dmother and taught him his letters, and to her G.o.dson she bequeathed a ”painted china dish with a silver pot and a dish to set it in,” as well as the reversion of her books, pictures and medals, with Samuel Cooper's ”grinding stone and muller,” and some of his portrait sketches.

It is not quite certain that Cooper was born in England; we know the date of his birth, 1609, but we have no certain evidence that he was an Englishman by birth, although there is every probability that this was the case. He was, however, for a while in France, and he was certainly in Holland, and possibly in Sweden also, where his brother, Alexander Cooper, also spent some time. It was in Sweden that we were able to discover a good deal of information respecting Alexander Cooper, and notably a statement concerning his account for certain royal portraits in his own handwriting. Samuel Cooper's appearance is known to us by the portraits in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but an even more interesting sketch of him is in the Pierpont Morgan collection, painted in sepia, on a piece of paper which has been twice folded. An inscription, which we believe to be in his own handwriting, is at the back of a portrait at Welbeck Abbey, and is to the effect that the picture in question, and one or two previous ones, were done for a Mr.

Graham, but had not been paid for at the time the artist was writing.

There is hardly a miniature by this eminent man which is not worth careful consideration, and in the power of delineating character and setting before us the actual feelings of his sitters, Cooper had no rival, while one of the great features of his work is its amazing variety. Moreover, the manner in which he adapted his technique, his colour scheme, and his ideas of composition to the special circ.u.mstances of the person whom he had to delineate, is very remarkable. His portraits of men are perhaps more attractive than those of women, although he was well able to convey the fascination of a woman's face; but the strong, rugged men of his period were portrayed by him with quite extraordinary power, and he created a method of portraiture entirely his own, and filled it with individual characteristics. Two splendid examples are amongst our ill.u.s.trations in colour (Plate VIII.), _Lady Fauconberg_ and _Colonel Lilburne_, both from the collection of Mr. Hodgkins.

Of his contemporaries it will suffice to mention one or two, and perhaps the best of them was David des Granges, whose work is represented in our ill.u.s.trations in colour by a portrait of _Rachel Fane, Countess of Bath_, from the collection of Mr. Hodgkins (Plate IX., No. 2). Of this artist and his parentage we know a little, thanks to the researches of Mr. Lionel Cust in the registers of the Huguenot Church in London. It seems probable that Des Granges, although baptised in the Huguenot faith, did not continue in that communion, because in 1649 he is mentioned in some papers belonging to the French Dominicans as a Catholic, and he was a very close friend of the celebrated artist Inigo Jones, who was also a Catholic. The portrait of the architect by David des Granges, representing Inigo Jones at the age of 68, is at Welbeck Abbey, signed with the initials D.D.G., and is one of the best works by him with which we are acquainted.

For the works of Faithorne or Loggan, Flatman or Lens, we must refer our readers to more elaborate books on miniature painting, and hasten forward towards the eighteenth century. Before we do so, however, it may be of interest that we should refer to an ill.u.s.tration in colour of a miniature which has not hitherto been represented in any book on this subject. It is a portrait which has been bequeathed through various owners as a likeness of _John Milton_ (Plate X.), and there is a good deal of evidence to support this very interesting attribution. It came from the Woodc.o.c.k family, who state that it has been handed down in direct succession from Catherine Woodc.o.c.k, whom Milton married as his second wife on the 12th of November 1656. She was the daughter of a Captain Woodc.o.c.k, of Hackney, and the former owners of the miniature stated that their family home was in Hackney. Mrs. Milton had a baby girl on October 19th, 1657, and she and her child died in February 1658, when the miniature was given to her niece, who is stated to have been present at the confinement, and from her it came to its late owners, who only parted with it when actually compelled so to do. It therefore belonged to the Mrs. Milton who is immortalised by the poet in his twenty-third sonnet, where he speaks of her as

”My late espoused saint, Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,”

And adds

”... once more I trust to have Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint.”

He says she

”Came vested all in white, pure as her mind Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person s.h.i.+ned So clear, as in no face with more delight.

But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

If, as seems most probable, the attribution of this portrait is correct, it gives us a view of Milton at a period of his life of which we have no other portrait, for it must have been painted when he Was about 48, and it bears out Aubrey's remarks about him, in which he speaks of his reddish hair, of his ”exceeding fayre complexion,” of his oval face, and tells us that he was ”a spare man.” Apparently it was never engraved, and Deborah Milton seems to have known nothing about it, but as she was quite a child when her father's second wife died, and as the portrait pa.s.sed away from the Milton family so quickly, it is very natural that we should have no other record of it than the miniature itself.

We now come to the eighteenth century, and without referring in detail to the men who preceded the foundation of the Royal Academy, would just mention one of the prominent miniature painters of the early days of the century, Christian Richter by name. He was the son of a Swedish silversmith who came to England in the time of Queen Anne, and settled down with his brother, who was a medallist and a die-sinker. His work is luminous and distinguished, marked by rather an excessive brilliance of red in the carnations, but by a very handsome colour scheme as a rule; the example we give in our colour plates, the portrait of _Prince George of Denmark_, the consort of Queen Anne (Plate XI.) from the Hodgkins collection, setting forth his characteristics in a satisfactory fas.h.i.+on.

The catalogues of the Royal Academy are full of the names of miniature painters. The period of its foundation was prolific in the number of limners it produced. Miniature painting was the fas.h.i.+on. There were half-a-dozen important painters, and two or three hundred lesser men.

The greater men stand out distinctly. Of the lesser men, many are only names to us. Here and there we have sc.r.a.ps of information respecting their history, details concerning the place where they resided, a few dates, and now and again an inscription on the back of a miniature to guide us; but of the vast majority of those who exhibited at the early exhibitions we know little, and of many of them it is not necessary that we should know very much, as their work was neither especially remarkable, nor especially praiseworthy. In considering this period, however, one comment must be made. As a rule, each painter was individual and characteristic. He allowed the personal equation to take an important part in his work, and when the expert is once familiar with the characteristics of the painter, his miniatures can be found quite readily whether signed or not. It is this special personal quality which distinguishes the painters of the period from the host of miniature painters of the present day who have striven to revivify the art, but who in many cases have become mere copyists, and have not allowed personal characteristics to distinguish their work. With the names of the great painters many are familiar, Cosway, Plimer, Smart, Ozias Humphry, Engleheart, Edridge, and Grimaldi are all well known, and the collector is more or less familiar with the names of a few of the minor painters whose works are worth collecting, as, for example, Nathaniel and Horace Hone, Vaslet, and others. There is neither opportunity nor need, in an essay of this sort, to refer to them in detail, because we are not concerned here with anything more than a broad survey of the miniature art, and must not confine our attention to England only. The painters of the eighteenth-century offer a sharp contrast to those of the seventeenth, and comparison only makes the contrast the more evident. In the work of Cooper we have strength, power, dignity; in that of Cosway and of the artists of his period is refinement, dexterity, fascination, a spice of flippancy and at times a certain meretricious quality, but this latter is far less seen in Cosway himself than in the work of his followers and admirers. The public demanded something quite different from the artists of the eighteenth century from that which they asked of the earlier school; the work had to be done more quickly, and it must be more charming, sensitive, and radiant. In his skill for giving his sitters exactly what they wanted, and in setting forth on the ivory the dainty grace of the women of the eighteenth century, there was no one who could approach within measurable distance of Cosway himself; and there is a marvellous fascination about his exquisite work, an individuality which belongs exactly to the period and represents it in all its grace, lightness and flippancy.

Undoubtedly the nearest in merit to Cosway was Andrew Plimer, and some of his works are fascinating in their beauty, but in charm they are never equal to those of Cosway, and the peculiar mannerisms of the artist prevent them from being altogether satisfactory. Plimer had very little power of composition, and he invariably over-accentuated the eyes of his sitters, and constantly repeated a favourite pose either of head or figure, while the extraordinary wiry manner in which he delineated the hair marks out his work at once. Quite as noticeable is his affection for the appearance of his own daughters, and the very shape of their necks and brilliance of their eyes can be seen repeated over and over again in his portraits of other sitters. Less than most of his contemporaries was he able to break away from a strong personal characteristic; and eventually it became a species of obsession with him, so that his female portraits strikingly resemble one another.

John Smart was a painter of a different type, serious, solid, painstaking. His facial modelling is extraordinary in its accuracy, and his works, like those of Engleheart, appear to have been preferred by the more serious persons in society, whereas those of Cosway and Plimer were particularly appreciated by the gay and frivolous ladies of the Court circle, whose sun and centre was the Prince Regent.

There are miniatures by Cosway which are of pre-eminent beauty, so lightly and with such exquisite skill are they floated upon the ivory.

The quality of the material had, of course, an intimate connection with the art of the painter. The seventeenth-century artists knew nothing of the brilliant surface of ivory, although it is possible that one at least of them had an inkling that a more luminous material than vellum, cardboard, or chicken-skin, could be found. There are two miniatures in existence, one of which is in the possession of the author of these pages, the work of Cooper, which are not painted on any of the materials usually adopted by him. This latter is painted on what was at first thought to be a piece of ivory, but microscopic investigation has revealed the fact that it is polished mutton-bone, and the painter has so altered his technique to adapt it to this curious experiment, that for the first moment one would hardly believe the miniature to be by Cooper at all. Its pedigree is, however, una.s.sailable, and a closer investigation reveals many of the master's characteristics, but it is painted with a very fine brush, quite different to the usual broad, full sweep of his work, and it stands out as an interesting experiment on the part of the great painter, who was searching for some material more suitable for a particular style of work. Ivory was not employed until the time of William III., and it seems probable that one of the Lens family was the first to make use of it; but, once adopted, its use became very general, and in the prolific period of the eighteenth century, almost universal.

Cosway is said to have experimented in enamel, and certainly one enamel portrait, with his initials, is in existence. He drew very skilfully on paper, and a few of his miniatures are on that material. One of his works, signed and dated, is on silk, but all these were only experiments, and the greater number of his miniatures are on ivory, which material lends itself perfectly to his craft. In our opinion the finest miniature Cosway ever produced was his unfinished sketch of _Madame du Barry_, one of the greatest treasures of Mr. Pierpont Morgan's collection, and by his kind permission ill.u.s.trated here in monotone (Plate XII.). It was painted in 1791 on the occasion when Madame du Barry came over to England to recover her jewels, and on her third visit to this country in that year. From this portrait a stipple engraving was made by Conde in 1794, but the miniature itself came into the possession of the Vernons, having belonged to a Miss Caroline Vernon who was maid of honour to Queen Charlotte. It was sold in London in 1902, when it pa.s.sed to its present owner, and in grace, sweetness, and fascination, is unrivalled, even amongst his wonderful treasures.

Another delightful portrait from the same collection represents the oft-painted _Henrietta, Lady Duncannon_, who was afterwards Countess of Bessborough (Plate XIV., No. 2). She was sister to Georgiana, d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re, and seems to have spent a great deal of her time in sitting for her portrait, all the artists of the day having painted her. This miniature is remarkable for the fact that it still remains in its original frame, a very magnificent one, richly set with superb diamonds.

Yet another charming portrait by Cosway (Plate XIV., No. 1) came from the Truro collection to Mr. Morgan. It represents _Lady Augusta Murray_, the daughter of Lord Dunmore, who became the wife of the Duke of Suss.e.x, the 6th son of George III. It was her marriage which, although twice performed, in Rome and at St. George's, Hanover Square, was declared null and void under the Royal Marriage Act (12 Geo. III. cap. 11). Her daughter was Lady Truro. Lady Augusta was only painted twice, and on both occasions by Cosway.

Our coloured ill.u.s.trations include three portraits of women by Cosway, _Viscountess St. Asaph_ (Plate XIII.), the _Countess of Rochford_ (Plate XV.) and _Princess Charlotte_ (Plate XVI.), all of them distinguished by Cosway's special method of painting the hair, and marked by that inimitable grace in which he excelled.

We also ill.u.s.trate from Lord Hothfield's collection one of Cosway's more serious portraits of men, _The Earl of Thanet_ (Plate XVII.), set upon the usual blue cloudy background, in this instance a trifle paler than usual, and painted with convincing force in a very remarkable colour scheme.

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