Patrick Bade
Regency Portraitists: Lawrence and Raeburn

Patrick Bade | Regency Portraitists Lawrence and Raeburn | 06.12.21

- [Wendy] So Patrick, while are we waiting for people to join us, we have a question from Elaine. It says, “Patrick, do you have any idea where I can buy a good quality print of ‘Miss Murray?’ She is my favourite painting, thanks.”

• I’ll think about that. It must be possible ‘cause it’s such a popular picture. I’m going to share it today, but where is it? I’m just trying to think where it is. Well, I have to find out where it is. I think it’s Kenwood, but it should be possible. And actually, there are all sorts of firms on the internet where, if you actually type it in, they will offer you reproductions.

• [Wendy] Well, Elaine, I hope that answers your question. Thank you, Patrick. Well, Patrick, good afternoon, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. And Patrick, over to you.

Images are displayed throughout the presentation

• Thank you, Judy. As you can see, I’m back in my daytime job as an art historian, and I’m back in, what the Germans would call, my fach, my specialty, which is 19th century painting, over my many years of teaching at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. 'Cause I was always quite glad that I could escape from my fach because Trudy would always let me talk about anything really. She gave me great freedom to talk about anything that interested me and anything that interested our audiences there. And my great dread in life is to be, what the Germans call, a fach idiot, I think it’s such a wonderful word. It sounds so good, fach idiot. It just actually means somebody who’s so trapped in their specialty that they can’t really relate what they know to anything outside that specialty.

So I’m talking today about Regency portraiture, and the Regency is a period, I think, that many British people feel a great fondness for, kind of nostalgic. It has an aura of glamour and elegance and romance, and that, I think, is partly down to our favourite novelist, Jane Austen 'cause “Pride and Prejudice” was published in 1813, and that, of course, gave rise to a whole industry, really, of Regency romances with authors like Georgette Heyer, which are still immensely popular. Of course, it’s also a period that has, like any period, I suppose, it’s got its darker side. It’s the period of the Napoleonic Wars, it’s the period of the press gang, when men just walking down the street could be seized and pressed into service in the Navy, a kind of slavery. It is the era of slavery. We’ve been hearing a lot about that recently with all the controversies about English country houses in the Jane Austen period that were partly financed with the ill-gotten gains of slavery.

It’s the period, the worst period, of course, of completely uncontrolled capitalism and industrialism, you know, the beginnings of Industrial Revolution, children sent up chimneys, down mines, all that kind of thing. But I’m not going to get, that’s it, I’m not going to mention those things again today. We’re going to look at the portraits.

Now, this is “The Prince Regent” by Sir Thomas Lawrence. The Regency period, strictly speaking, runs from 1811 till 1820. It’s the period where George III was incapacitated, mad in inverted commas, whatever illness that he had. And so his successor, George IV was appointed Prince Regent. So strictly speaking, it’s a short period of less than a decade, but of course, estate agents, what’s the American for estate agent? Is it realtor? Anyway, people who sell houses in England, they love Regency 'cause you can sort of add a lot to the price of any building if you can describe it as Regency. So any building in England that has white or cream stucco on the surface and has columns is likely to be dubbed Regency from the period, say, 1800 to 1840. And it’s the high point of the very elegant Neoclassical style.

Looking back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, these are typical Regency objects here, but it’s also the period of Romanticism. Here I’m using Romantic in a different way. I hope this is not too confusing for you. I started off using it in the very popular way, romantic novels, you know, romance, candle lit dinners, all that kind of thing, But Romantic with a capital R, Romanticism with a capital R, is a cultural movement in the late 18th, early 19th century. So as well as all those nice rational, elegant Regency terraces that I’ve just shown you, this is the period of William Beckford looking very romantic here, actually, in the 1790s, with his, you know, windblown hairstyle, you have to be windblown if you want to be romantic, and he built this absolutely insane folly, Fonthill Abbey, which eventually collapsed.

And it’s a period of Lord Byron. In 1813, he published “Child Harold.” Famously he said he woke up one morning and found himself famous, and he wrote all these autobiographical poems about damned poets teetering on the brink of precipices and having suicidal thoughts and so on. This is a painting of illustration of his poem, “Manfred.” “Manfred on the Jungfrau.” And it’s also at the period, the birth of the historical novel, creator of the historical novels, Sir Walter Scott, “Waverley” was his first novel, and his next novel, “Guy Mannering,” that’s 1815, became an incredible publishing sensation. It sold 2000 copies in one day, which was completely unprecedented.

So here are the two artists that I’m going to be talking about today, Sir Thomas Lawrence on the right-hand side, these are self portraits, and Henry Raeburn, who is, of course, of Scott, and he was based in Edinburgh. And both these artists, they straddle these different contemporary movements. There are Romantic elements in their work. There are also Classical elements in their work. This is a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and you can see how he’s posed her. There’s a kind of torsion in the body. So the head is in profile, and the central part of the body is facing towards you. This is a very Classical device. You find it in Classical relief sculpture, and in Greek vase painting.

And this is, interestingly, this is the only painting by Henry Raeburn in the National Gallery in London, called “The Archers,” and you get the same Classical device here with the head in profile and the body facing towards you, and a strong sense of contour. I point out that it’s the only painting by Raeburn, and Raeburn is, well, to my mind, a rather greater painter than Lawrence, so it’s strange that he’s only represented in the National Gallery by this one painting. And this was only acquired really quite recently in the last few years. This is a period where there’s a very strong sense of Scottish identity, and Raeburn did not exhibit very much in London. Obviously, didn’t feel that London was all that important to him.

So Romanticism, but there’s a kind of domesticated version of Romanticism that you find, again, in the novels of Jane Austen. And there’s an equivalent to that, I suppose, in continental Europe with the Biedermeier style, which I always think is a domestic version of Romanticism. And this couple here painted by Raeburn, a Scottish couple, they could really have stepped, completely stepped out of the pages of Jane Austen.

But we’re starting with Sir Thomas Lawrence. And so he is born in 1769 in Bristol, and he was a true wunderkind. I mean, this is a self-portrait he made when he was a child. And by the time he was 14, he was working in the fashionable resort of Bath, and he was turning out pastel portraits at three guineas a go. That’s a lot of money for a portrait in the late 18th century, and rather astonishing for a 14-year-old to be able to command those kind of prices. Then, age 17, he came up to London and he briefly studied at the Royal Academy, but, essentially, he was just a natural and he was a self-taught artist. Obviously, lots of confidence.

At the age of 17, he claimed that, with the possible exception of Sir Joshua, Sir Joshua Reynolds, he felt that he, that “For the painting of a head, I could risk my reputation with anyone.” So these are the paintings, the two paintings that really did make his reputation, and they were both shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1790. They’re his first two masterpieces, big pictures, ambitious pictures, completely amazing for a 21-year-old. I don’t think he ever painted anything better than these two pictures. He reached his peak very, very quickly. So it’s Queen Charlotte on the left, and an actress called Elizabeth Farren on the right-hand side. She was the mistress of the Earl of Darby. I’ll tell you a bit more about her in a minute.

So here is Queen Charlotte. This is in the National Gallery in London. My theory about Lawrence that I’m going to promote during this lecture is that he had this phenomenal, fantastic facility as an artist. It was so damn easy for him. And this is actually a danger, and he’s rather like Sargent later on, he’s often been accused of being flashy and superficial, and he can be. There are a lot of paintings by Lawrence like that, but when he’s challenged, he can really come up with the goods, and I think he was seriously challenged with this picture. It was painted in the summer to autumn of 1789.

That’s a date that should ring bells with you, 1789. It’s the outbreak of the French Revolution, so I’m sure the English monarchy were also feeling a bit nervous, and George III was having his first serious about of illness, or insanity, or porphyria, or whatever it was. So Queen Charlotte was not in a good mood, and she was apparently very impatient and not very cooperative with this young 20-year-old artist. And she was a challenge in herself anyway because there are a lot of portraits of Queen Charlotte 'cause everybody of the time painted her. And people liked her. I think she was quite popular and they respected her 'cause they knew she was a good wife to George III, but she wasn’t very bright and she certainly wasn’t very pretty. She was a plain Hausfrau with not a lot going for her as a subject for a portrait.

Of all the portraits, I think, I think that he does pull off quite a trick with this one, as Sargent could later, in the sense that it looks like a likeness. You know, we don’t feel that this is any person. We feel that we would probably recognise her from this portrait. It feels quite individualised, but he’s certainly, he’s made her look, I think, attractive and quite intelligent, which is probably in neither of them the case. I’ve got some wonderful details here. I love these details. It is so phenomenally painted, so it’s easy to see in the National Gallery. So next time you’re in the centre of London, just pop in and have a look, and drool over this absolutely amazingly luscious and confident paint surface.

Where does this come from? How does a 20-year-old get to paint like this? Really, not even van Dyck, I think, could paint quite as well as this when he was 20 years old, maybe Velasquez. And the wonderful way, the luscious freedom of brushwork on the dress, and the background. And I just had a message from somebody asking me about a landscape by Rubens that I showed at the end of my Ruben’s lecture last year, and I think it was this picture on the left, it was the detail of it. It’s the Rubens autumn landscape.

And on the right, we have a detail of Lawrence’s portrait of Charlotte. She is apparently posed on the terrace of Windsor Castle with the view towards Eaton. So you can see Eaton College in the middle distance. And then you have this wonderful, atmospheric, misty autumn landscape. And I’m sure that Lawrence looked at this painting, 'cause it was already in an English collection. He would’ve been familiar with it. I think he looked at it very carefully and he learned a lot from it, and the detail that convinces me of that, I think you can see it here, is the way the church spire in the distance catches the rays of the setting sun. It’s a very interesting and specific detail.

This is the other, this portrait that was a sensation in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1890 of Elizabeth Farren, who was the mistress of the Earl of Darby, and after his first wife died, she married him, and it was apparently a very happy relationship. She was a very popular actress in London and considered to be very beautiful. So this is probably his first encounter with a problem that any fashionable portraitist has to deal with, a client who doesn’t think he’s made her beautiful enough, and who doesn’t think it looks like her. And her complaint, which might seem a bit odd to us, was that he’d made her look too thin 'cause nobody really before, you know, Coco Chanel and the Duchess of Windsor wanted to be thought of as thin. There are lots of comments about that, of course, in Jane Austen, about young women, about, you know, being not too thin and not too fat, and having a little bit of , a little bit of flesh on their bones.

This is another, oh, so I gave you the quote where he said he thought he could compete with anybody except Sir Joshua, but in fact, in this exhibition, he did compete with Sir Joshua 'cause this was the most important portrait sent by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the same exhibition, portrait of the singer “Mrs. Billington.” And I must say, he must have looked askance at this young artist and thought, “Oh God, I’ve got to look to my laurels,” 'cause the Lawrence is so much more brilliant and accomplished and dazzlingly painted that it makes the Reynolds look really quite dull by comparison. So again, I’ve got some wonderful details to show you.

This incredible freedom of the brush work in painting her powdered hair and the fur. He loves painting fur. You’ve got lots of wet in wet painting here, which takes a lot of control, and you can see just beneath her hand, he’s scumbling, where you use quite dryish paint, usually of a lighter hue over a slightly darker ground, and it goes on in a kind of a bumpy way. And he’s doing a trick that I think he’s learned from Rubens again of, if you look further up just beneath her chin, where he’s obviously using a very coarse brush, and he’s allowing the coarse hairs of the brush to leave trails of paint that suggests the individual hairs of the fur. The gloves here, oh, I think, well, he’s certainly be looking at van Dyck for these elegant hands and gloves. Ooh, look at that. Isn’t that amazing? I must say, I get very, very excited when I see amazing, lush, brilliant brushwork like this. I wish I could do it. It’s not an easy trick.

So here is a handsome gentleman. This is Lord Charles Stewart. This is painted some years later, in 1813, and he was the adjutant to Wellington in the Peninsula Campaign. So he’s the ultimate dashing military hero. Obviously, a very beautiful man as well, very handsome man. And once again, oh, Lawrence has had such fun with the uniform, the gorgeous reds, the gold braiding, and of course, once again, having a lot of fun with the fur draped casually over his shoulder. How about this for just exciting and amazing brush work? And this is interesting, that’s 1813, and we’re in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, as I said, the Peninsula Campaign, on the left is a painting shown in 1812, the year before at the Paris Salons.

This is the other side of the Napoleonic Wars, and this is a painting of a chasseur, a French cavalryman by the young Géricault, and it’s quite, of course, these two artists, at this point certainly, didn’t know each other, would’ve had no opportunity to see each other’s work, but there’s quite an interesting similarity. Maybe the paint, I think you can tell even from these illustrations on your screen that the paint brushwork of Sargent is more fluid, and the application of paint in Géricault rather more dense, with a rather more solid matier of paint. Unfinished paintings are always very, very revealing of how an artist works.

So this is a portrait started by Lawrence, and for whatever reason, maybe the subject didn’t like it or whatever, he didn’t finish it. So what we can see here is that he’s working on, actually, it’s interestingly on a pale canvas, just a more or less white off-white canvas, which is not absolutely typical of the time. You’d say it’s more common to use a warm neutral ground colour. But, again, it shows you the bravura, the extraordinary confidence, and that he’s following the methods that were used by Reynolds, where you, if you hired him for a portrait, you’d go to his studio and he, without making drawings or preliminary sketches, he would brush your face directly onto the canvas and everything else would be filled in afterwards, not necessarily in the presence of the sitter.

Here’s another example. And it’s quite interesting also with these images, you can see that it’s quite a strongly textured canvas that he’s using. This portrait was left unfinished. I can’t remember which one of them died. Anyway, yeah, it’s late in his career, so it could be either or both of them. But this is Lord Wilberforce, who was a great campaigner against slavery. Now, he had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the prince regent, and with his wife Caroline of Brunswick. He painted this portrait of the prince regent. Of course, prince regent was already, I suppose, a middle-aged man. When he was young, he was considered quite an Adonis. He was considered to be handsome, but a lifetime of excess in every possible way had left him less than beautiful by this time. And there was, indeed, quite a lot of mockery of this portrait, that it was so outrageously flattering compared with the reality of the prince regent.

Notice, once again, of course, you had to muzz up your hair and make it look like a little tornado going through it if you wanted to be fashionable in the Romantic group. On the right hand side is his wife, Princess Caroline. And they had one daughter together, Charlotte, who everybody adored and thought wonderful, that she sadly died in childbirth, otherwise it would mean that the era, not the Victorian era, the era of Charlotte. Now, this was definitely not a love match. And famously, when, of course, it was an arranged marriage, and when the prince saw the woman he was supposed to marry, he apparently staggered backwards and ordered a very large brandy. He was a man who loved beautiful women. He was also very fastidious. And even by the standards at the time, she was, how can I put this delicately? Notorious for her very poor personal hygiene. When she had been in a room, you knew it for a long time afterwards. Oddly enough, this doesn’t seem to have put men off.

Of course Napoleon, as you probably know, used to write Josephine saying, “I’m going to be home in three weeks. Don’t take a bath between now and then.” But she was neglected, and she apparently took lots of lovers. Well, we can’t be sure about this, but she was accused, the prince divorced her and he accused her of, he cited 70 correspondents, and one of them was Lawrence, who painted these two pictures. And the basis of that was that when he was painting this portrait, he spent the night in her house. And I suppose nobody could believe in the early 19th century that a man would spend a night in a woman’s house without the presence of her husband, with some kind of hanky-panky going on.

This is another very famous portrait of Lawrence. It’s in the Frick collection in New York, so I’m sure a lot of you know it. It’s of Lady Peel. And yes, it’s a very accomplished piece of work. To me, this is, if we’re going to accuse Lawrence of being flashy, this might be evidence for it, and obviously flattering. I don’t know how old you think she looks. She was actually in her '30s when she posed for this. And of course, he’s done that trick that all flattering portraits do of adding an inch or so to her neck. It’s amazing what a difference that makes. And here are some details.

And oh, you see, this is a portrait of an elderly lady, Mrs. Lock. This is a theme I’m going to develop in this lecture that, you know, sometimes it’s a real handicap for an artist to paint somebody who’s young and pretty and beautiful, and of course, every age has its beauty. And I think, you know, old people, old women can be very beautiful in a different kind of a way, but it’s a bit more of a challenge to an artist like Lawrence, and I think he’s risen to the challenge. I mean, I personally, if I had the choice which one of these two paintings would I like to own and which one do I respond to, it’s certainly Mrs. Lock on the left who interests me a lot more than the rather bland and flashy.

Here you can see his brushwork at its most flashy in this detail from “Lady Peel.” This painting was, it’s of a woman called Rosalind Crocker, and this was an absolute sensation in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1827. And apparently, the painting was constantly surrounded by a circle of young Regency bucks, all drooling over her. This is the ideal babe of the Regency period or the early 19th century. Obviously was a very pretty woman. I think, once again, he might have cheated just a little bit with her neck and added an inch or two to the neck.

And this is Sarah Moulton, this painting known as “Pinkie.” It was actually a picture that was commissioned in the 1790s, so this is quite early in his work, by her grandmother. Grandmother, I think, was going to go to the West Indies, sugar plantation, I suppose, and thought she wasn’t going to see her granddaughter again, and commissioned this picture. And actually she was right. The girl died very soon afterwards. It’s one of a series of paintings. I’m probably going to upset people here 'cause I really don’t like them very much, but they were his most popular pictures through the 19th century and into the 20th century of very beautiful children and adolescents.

This is a purely personal criticism, and please don’t hold it against me, and you are totally free to disagree, but I find these pictures kind of really too chocolate boxy and sugary for my taste. And I’ve just had an inquiry about this one, Louisa Murray on the left-hand side, which I think this is in Kenwood House. All my ex students at LJCC will know that 'cause they mostly live around there, and Master Lambton on the right hand side. These paintings were hugely, massively popular. Endless reproductions, mezzo tints, engravings, later colour lithographs, and endlessly copied. And what can I say, they obviously do it for a lot of people, but they don’t for me.

This is the Calmady children. I think he knew he was onto a really good thing with this because, this is painted in the 1820s, where he could command very, very high fees, and he dropped his fee very considerably for this one because I think he knew that this was going to be a successful subject for him. He was absolutely right. This was a sensation not only in England, but it was also a sensation in France and endlessly reproduced, and he probably made an awful lot of money on this picture in addition to the original fee through all the reproductions that were sold. Circular composition.

I think, in the back of his mind, he’s thinking of the Raphael, “Madonna della Seggiola,” which was possibly the most famous and loved painting in the world at the time, endlessly copied and reproduced. I remember in my days at Christie’s, South Kent, they used to have these kind of cheaper old masters sales, and there’d be a whole wall of copies of the “Madonna della Seggiola” coming up for sale. So getting away from the sweetness and sugar, and all things nice, sugar and spice, I think this is a wonderful portrait. I find this really moving. He’s got something to get his teeth into here.

This is the great inventor Humphrey Davy, who was a very important scientist, is probably best remembered as the inventor of the Davy lamp, which saved hundreds and hundreds of lives because the flame was shielded by glass, and so the risk of an underground explosion in a mine was greatly reduced by the introduction of the Davy lamp. And I find this, and cause it’s a much more modest painting, we’ve got none of that flashy, plush red and guild and jewels and furs. We’re really concentrated on the face, and what a wonderful face, you know, a really interesting, sensitive face. And I think we’re talking a great portraiture here.

In pictures like these, yes, we can compare him with Velasquez and Goya, and well, maybe not going as far as Rembrandt, but you know, this is a very sensitive and insightful portrait. And this one too. This guy is called Thomas Campbell, and I think he’s enjoyed painting his curly hair. Of course, he’s enjoyed painting cravats. He’s the great master of the cravat. Beau Brummell is the most famous dandy of the period, and he famously used to sit in the bow window of his club in St. James’s, showing off his amazing cravat to admirers passing by. One visitor to Beau Brummell arriving at mid-afternoon about the time when Beau Brummell was going to emerge and show himself off to the world, he walked past as he entered a vast pile of crumpled, soiled cravats. And he said to the valet, “What’s that? What are those?” And the valet said to him, “Oh, those are today’s failures.”

We’re going back in time to the 1790s, and this gentleman is called William Locke of Norbury. This is actually quite an early portrait. It’s 1790, and I think probably, if I were very unscrupulous, I could have slipped this into, at my next lecture on Goya and persuaded you that this was by Goya. I mean, at this point, again, they’re working in parallel and there are certainly common influences on both of them. And they must have come across each other’s work later, but not really for another decade and a half at least. I don’t think they can possibly have known each other’s work as early as 1790.

But here is Goya, “Don Andres del Peral,” which I’ll be talking about on Wednesday, and remarkably similar, actually even similar restrained palette of colours. And once again, it’s an interesting, challenging face. Now here is a direct comparison of the same person. That’s the Duke of Wellington, the Iron Duke, painted by Lawrence on the left-hand side, and painted by Goya. It’s the famous portrait, of course, that was stolen from the National Gallery in ransom. You probably remember that story from decades ago. Yeah, I’m not sure, really. I’ve never really thought this is one of Goya’s greatest efforts. My guess is, the Lawrence shows the Iron Duke as he wanted the world to see him. Maybe the Goya is interesting 'cause it hints at insecurities, and a less arrogant, and a less confident personality.

Now, Lawrence was one of the few British artists who had an international reputation and influence. I mean, they’ve been few and far between. Lawrence, Constable, of course, had a big reputation and influence in France, then later in the 19th century, Burne-Jones, had a huge influence there internationally. And then you have to really wait till Francis Bacon to find another British artist who makes the French sit up and look, and, oops, I’m just looking for my clock 'cause I want make sure I don’t overrun.

So Delacroix on the right-hand side, this is his portrait of Baron Schwiter who was, obviously, a fashionable French aristocrat, and at this time, the dandy was very much, the trends were set in Britain, and there’s a portrait by Lawrence on the left-hand side of David Lyon. So it was Delacroix who came to London a couple of times and was very impressed by British painting, and certainly very, very impressed by Lawrence’s portraits. And again, this is Lawrence on the left, and Delacroix on the right, and the point I want to make here is the cravat. This is the great period of the cravat and nobody gives better cravat than Lawrence. He obviously loves that.

There are different ways of painting cravats, of course. You can do it in a very precise linear way, in the way that Unger does, but Lawrence and Delacroix are just slapping on the paint and really enjoying it. And of course, I have to show you this because this is a portrait of me by Michael Leonard. This is about 10 years ago, I suppose, and Michael Leonard decided to, I was very disappointed, I really wanted to be in Unger, but I think I was probably a little bit too Hanoverian looking for it to be an Unger, so he did me as a Lawrence. And of course, the the striking feature of this drawing is wonderful. In a pencil, think to do that in pencil, his evocation of the swishy painterly treatment of a cravat by Lawrence.

So Lawrence really hit the big time internationally with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the famous Conference of Vienna. I mentioned that, what was that? Yes, a couple of lectures ago I was talking about the film, “The Congress Dances,” which is this congress in Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars where everybody had such a good time. It was a ball every night and lots and lots of romances and fabulous meals, and everybody really had a good time at the Vienna Conference, probably rather more than the current conference in Cornwall. And so Lawrence went on, he went there, all the people who were involved in redrawing the map of Europe, recreating Europe after 20 years of French wars, were painted by Lawrence.

If you go to Windsor Castle, of course, there’s the Waterloo Chamber, and I don’t know how many portraits, all these people. And he not only went to Vienna, he travelled to other parts of Europe to paint all the important people. On the left is General Bluecher. If you ask a German who won the Battle of Waterloo, they will say Bluecher. In fact, he probably did play a greater role in winning the battle than Wellington did. And on the right-hand side is Prince Metternich, who effectively ruled the Habsburg Empire.

And here, this is Pope Pious VII, who’d been taken prisoner by Napoleon and was now returned to Rome. I think this is a fantastic portrait. I think this is really a great portrait. He’s consciously in a tradition of papal portraits that runs back through this famous Velázquez, of Innocent X, back to Raphael’s Julius II, all these portraits always shown with the Pope on a throne, with his arms resting on the arms of the throne. What a fantastic characterization this is. And I really think you can, let’s compare it with Velazquez. Oh my God, look at these two popes. Which one of these two popes would you be more happy buying a used car from? I don’t think I’d be very happy buying a used car from either of these two. They both look very wily and sly and complicated. But two wonderful pieces. I mean, you can hardly believe, I think in both these paintings, that what we’re looking at is just coloured sticky stuff on the surface. This is the secret of truly great portraiture, when it comes alive in this way.

Now on to Henry Raeburn, and I start off straight away with a big problem with this picture, which is Raeburn’s most famous picture, and it’s probably the most famous picture ever painted by a Scots artist, but is it by Raeburn, and is it by a Scots artist? There have been claims recently that I find very, very convincing, actually, that this picture is not Raeburn at all. It’s by a French artist called Danloux, who came to Britain and worked in Edinburgh. Now, the problems with this picture is that it’s not like anything else painted by Raeburn. It’s on a smaller scale, it’s much more highly finished. It doesn’t have that breadth and freedom that most Raeburns have.

This is a documented painting by Danloux, which, as you can see, is much tighter and more smoothly painted. And the thing that really, actually, I thought, “Ah, yes, I do see this,” it’s that the man in the background who’s running across the deck, this kind of slightly frozen, diagonal leaning way of depicting the movement is really similar to the skating, what’s he called? Skating reverend, they call it a “Reverend Robert Walker.” And it’s quite smoothly painted. When you get up close like this, you can see the craquelure in the surface, which, again, is not really typical of Raeburn.

You can also see evidence here, 'cause it’s very thinly painted, of pentimento, and that’s where the artist has changed his mind. He’s actually changed the profile of the hat. Here is a Raeburn. He’s half a generation older, in fact, than Lawrence. He’s born in 1756, came from quite a humble background, trained as a miniaturist, and that’s really surprising 'cause this, as I said, his style is characterised by its, why am I showing you that? Oh yes, because he went to, he went on the grand tour. He went to Rome, and he was in Rome from 1784 till 1786. And Rome was really a very small city in the 1780s. And the artists colony was quite a close one. I mean, the artists all knew each other. They were all visiting each other’s studios.

So I think it’s very, very likely that when Raeburn was in Rome, he went to the studio of David and he saw David working on this picture. So this is, in a way, the ultimate, almost like a manifesto of the Neoclassical style. And I think Raeburn, although his style is so different, as I said, it’s so free and so painterly, but I think he picks up one thing from this kind Neoclassicism, which is a very powerful sense of contour. And again, this portrait of Sir John and Lady Clark, this is 1792, so this is like seven, eight years later. Very, very different in mood and atmosphere. But maybe something with the outstretched arm. And oh, isn’t this wonderful? I mean, her face, well, what a sympathetic face. And she is illumined, she is literally enlightened. Her face is lit up by the evening sun, and Raeburn is a great master of light. He often likes quite a strong oblique light source that will flood the picture, as I said, illuminate or enlighten the subject of the picture. This painting, we’ve got really quite an extreme, raking light coming in from the left.

This is, what’s his name, William Ferguson, painted in the 1790s. And so he paints, he’s very much a Scott, and this is a period of very strong Scottish national consciousness. Of course, this is a big issue at the moment. The Union with Britain, which was a voluntary union on part of the Scotts in 1707, and it was for financial gain, but it allowed the Scots a considerable degree of independence and to keep many of their own traditions. Although interestingly, this kind of Scottish tradition, the tartan, wearing of tartans, was actually forbidden in Scotland up till 1780s. But at the end of the '80s, the 18th century and into the 19th century, there’s a big revival as a Scottish national identity and revival of interest in all these traditional types of costume that Raeburn obviously enjoys painting very, very much indeed. “The Macnab,” this is on the left-hand side, and this is one of the rare occasions when Raeburn actually exhibited in London at the Royal Academy.

And Lawrence saw it, and Lawrence was a generous character to other artists, and had an extraordinarily wide range of sympathies. He even liked and helped William Blake, who must have seemed a real oddball to him, very different kind of artist. And when Lawrence saw “The Macnab,” he was really balled over by it. He said he’d never seen anything that looked so natural, so real. And we’ve got a painting by Lawrence on the right-hand side of another Scottish aristocrat, Lord Mountstuart, and I have to say, when you put them side by side, the Lawrence does look very artificial and unnatural in a way, compared to Raeburn. Talk about natural.

Now, I’m amazed that he could get away with a portrait like this. Who would pay to have themselves depicted like this? It’s James Hutton. This is, as Pope Innocent X said of the Velázquez painting, , “It’s really too true.” I’m going to move on quickly 'cause I’m running out of time. This I love. This could be a scene from Jane Austen. This is General Dundas and his wife playing chess together. I suspect that she has just checkmated him. Look at their facial expressions. I mean, this is so subtle and so insightful. This is a painting about a relationship between a man and a woman. I think it’s just amazing. There’s the chests there. I think, again, to some extent, we have the same issue with Raeburn. I think these are very lovely paintings of attractive young women. I personally don’t find them very interesting as works of art. And he also paints cute children, not quite as icky.

This is Raeburn’s portrait of his grandson on the left-hand side, which was his diploma work at the Royal Academy. It’s not quite as chocolate boxy as Lawrence. This I think is an interesting picture of children. There’s a lot going on in this picture. The son and heir of the family is the boy on the pony. And he is emphasised. He’s got a kind of halo of light around him, and obviously the focus is on him. The other little boy who looks up to him, and the two other children sort of look up to him in a very deferential way. One is an adopted brother, and the other is his sister. So I mean, there’s a kind of a hierarchy, isn’t there, of the three children in this picture.

And I want to finish just by talking about his painting of women of a certain age, so shall we put it. You know, over the centuries, most portraits have been commissioned, have been by men and have been commissioned by men, and I think women have very often lost out on this. If they weren’t a babe, like Ms. Crocker, artists tended not to be terribly interested in them, or sometimes they felt forced to, in inverted commas, improve them. What I really love about Raeburn’s portraits of middle-aged and sometimes elderly women is they’re total honesty and a really strong sense of empathy and sympathy for the human being. This is not a portrait of a woman, in inverted commas. It’s a portrait of a human being.

I’m going to go through these fairly quickly, but what a likeable, sympathetic group they make. There’s a French artist called Perronneau, who can do the same thing. This is Perronneau on the left-hand side. This is actually one of my favourite portraits in Paris. This is in the Musée Jacquemart-André. I always stop and look at this painting, and I feel I’m having a conversation with somebody who is sympathetic and who I would like. And here again is Perronneau. This is a pastel portrait. And it’s Raeburn on the right-hand side.

And this is where I come to an end. And we do have a few questions, so let me see. Can I bring them up?

Q&A and Comments

Behind you, the paintings behind me, well, actually, yes, let’s see if I can, but this one is, these two are quite relevant. These are French sanguine drawings of the 18th century. This one, I think, dates from the 1770s, and he’s a real aristo, and he’s got a slightly aristocratic smirk on his face, what Kenneth Clark used to call the smile of reason. And this one, he’s, I think it’s about 1790, and he’s got, this one has either a wig or yeah, I think he’s probably got a powdered wig. This one has his own hair, which is all kind of romantic and tousled. And he looks a bit rough and a bit mean. My guess is he lost his head in 1792, and he was probably a young revolutionary. And those are probably only two. What else can you see here? Let me see, I’ll bring this over. This is my latest purchase, which is from the flea market, which is a 17th century carved frame, probably Spanish.

Q: Will I be discussing Spanish art of the 18th and 19th century? A: I’ll be certainly discussing Goya. I’ve just settled with Judy. I was going through my Goya lectures and thinking, “Oh God, I can’t do this in one go. This has to be done in two.” So I’m going to actually talk about Goya in two sessions.

Details of Peninsula Campaign, yes, well, 'cause the French invaded both Spain and Portugal and took them over. And the Brits landed in Portugal in 1808. It was a long, drawn out, extremely bitter campaign. It was a real war of attrition, very destructive. Actually, I’ll save it till next time 'cause it fits in better with Goya.

Yes, thank you, that is in Kenwood House.

“The children seem a parody on innocence.” Yeah, I’m afraid that’s the way it strikes me, but it’s obviously not the intention of the artist, and a lot of people don’t find that.

“I have recognised some paintings from chocolate boxes, tins of toffy. They’re fascinating.” All right, thank you, thank you.

“Sir Humphrey Davy, abominated gravy, lived in the odium of having discovered sodium.” That’s a good one. Thank you. I’d never heard that one before. Yeah, I mean it’s not particularly my area of specialty, but I find the arguments that it’s by Danloux and not by Raeburn really quite convincing. It’s a real oddball painting if it’s by Raeburn. It doesn’t fit in.

Yeah, somebody’s thanking me for my, well, I’m going to, also Goya, boy, he’s wonderful at painting older people and older women, so we’ll have more of that next time.

So “Will you include,” well, I’ve done, I think, have I done, for Wendy, Sargent? I think I did a lecture in which he was a major figure. I love talking about Sargent. He’s one of my favourite artists to talk about, so I’ll certainly get back to him at some point in the future.

And that seems to be it for questions today. Thank you all very, very much.

• [Judy] Thank you, Patrick.

• Yeah, we’ll be on to, yeah. So is that Judy?

• Yes, it’s me. Thank you so much Patrick. And thank you to everybody you joined us today, and look forward to your Goya’s part one part two next week, Patrick.

• Yep, thanks Judy.

• [Judy] Thanks everybody, bye-bye.

• [Patrick] Bye-bye.