Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment (Studies in British Art) [1 ed.] 0300056907, 9780300056907

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ALLAN RAMSAY Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment

Alastair Smart

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Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment Alastair Smart Allan Ramsay, Court painter to King George III, was one of the major portrait painters of the eighteenthcentury British school. Born in Edinburgh, he was also an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment; his Dialogue on Taste merits an honoured place among eighteenth-century belles lettres. This book, by the world’s foremost authority on Ramsay, gives an entirely fresh account of Ramsay’s life and sheds new light on his artistic and intellectual development. A classical scholar and master of several modern languages, Ramsay was unquestionably the most erudite artist of the age. His friends included such celebrated men of letters as David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; he also came to know the French philosophes Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach and Rousseau (whose portrait he painted). Alastair Smart describes Ramsay’s early years, his artistic training in Scotland, England and Italy, his rise to prominence as the leading portrait painter in England, his two marriages, his travels abroad, and his appointment as painter to the King. He discusses Ramsay’s ideas, especially as revealed in the Dialogue on Taste. He analyzes the various phases in Ramsay’s development as a painter and explores his relationship to such established painters as Hogarth and Highmore and to the younger painters Reynolds and Gainsborough. Smart’s extensive discussions of Ramsay’s major works are accompanied by numerous reproductions of his paintings, many appearing for the first time. Smart’s biography of a remarkable Enlightenment figure — the fruits of sustained research over many years — fills a considerable gap in our knowledge of British eighteenth-century art.

Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment

Alastair Smart

Published for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by

Yale University Press New Haven and London 1992

Dedicated in affection and gratitude to the memory of my parents Isabel Macquarrie Smart (nee Carswell) poetess

and William Marshall Smart (.sometime John Couch Adams Astronomer at the Cambridge Observatory, and subsequently Regius Professor of Astronomy in the University of Glasgow)

Copyright (C) 1992 by Yale University All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Sally Salvcsen Set in Linotron Baskerville by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Hong Kong through World Print Ltd. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 92-50340 ISBN 0-300-05690-7

Contents

Preface I II

Early Years in Edinburgh and Studies in Eondon: 1713—1736

vi 1

Eirst Visit to Italy: 1736-1738

27

III

The Eirst Style and Success in Eondon: 1 738-1751

41

IV

Second Marriage, Return to Edinburgh, and the Select Society: 1752-1754

V VI VII

94

Second Visit to Italy: 1754-1757

115

The Dialogue on Taste (1755)

139

Eord Bute’s Patronage and Eirst Court Appointment: 1757-1763

149

VIII Final Decade as a Painter, and Appointment (1767) as Principal

IX

Painter in Ordinary: 1762-1773

184

East Years: 1773-1784

241

Appendices

280

Abbreviations

284

Notes

285

Bibliography

307

Index

309

Preface The present book may perhaps be best introduced by a brief narrative of reminiscence, on which I shall be enabled to hang some acknowledgement of my indebtedness to others. Many years ago, as a student at the Edinburgh College of Art, I devoted much of my spare time to the copying of pictures in the National Gallery of Scotland, setting up my easel in front of works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Raeburn and Ramsay - my Tour Rs’, as I called them. This traditional discipline — once considered an essential part of a painter’s training - has long since lost its appeal to the modern student (and indeed its relevance to much contemporary pretension to art is manifestly slight); but it most assuredly helped my understanding when I turned to writing about the arts. At a time when the art schools in Great Britain had ceased to provide much instruction in technical methods, it was all the more valuable to me to have the advice of the Gallery’s director, the late Sir Stanley Cursiter, who besides his eminence as an artist (and not least as a portrait painter in the great tradition) possessed a profound knowledge of the techniques of the Old Masters and it would be impossible for me to forget, inter alia, his illuminating analysis of Allan Ramsay’s procedures in painting his celebrated portrait of his second wife Margaret Lindsay, which of all the pictures that I attempted to copy was the one that came to intrigue me the most, arousing not only admiration but also the desire to learn more about its painter. At that time I was even ignorant of the important, pioneering essay on Ramsay published in 1937 by a previous director, Sir James Caw, but it had occurred to me that one way of finding out about Ramsay’s life and circumstances would be to attempt his biography myself. It was my good fortune therefore that that resolution coincided with the arrival in Edinburgh of another Director of distinction, Sir Ellis Waterhouse, who was already known as the supreme authority on British painting of the Classical Age. Under his guidance I was made aware of Ramsay’s particular importance in the history of portraiture in England, his adopted country, besides receiving, informally, a unique education in the history of eighteenth-century British painting. The book I had set out with such temerity to write was published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1952 as The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay. At the same time, with equal optimism, I announced the preparation of a catalogue raisonne of Ramsay’s portraits, which I vainly imagined could be completed within a few years. But this was far from being a project concerning an artist whose works were mostly known and largely documented: the identity and whereabouts of the majority of Ramsay’s portraits had first to be discovered; hundreds of attributions had to be assessed, and visits made to innumerable private collections. It soon became clear that the task required not years but decades. Only now has the preparation of what has become a very large work reached a stage sufficiently advanced for my publishers, Yale University Press and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London), to envisage its appearance next year. What is directly germane to the present new biography of Ramsay is that in the course of work on the catalogue raisonne more and more information of a biographical nature steadily came to light, much of it consisting of letters of the period which had entirely escaped notice. Such discoveries made it obvious that my earlier book, in addition to other inadequacies, not only gave a very limited account of Ramsay’s life and work and a somewhat partial

PREFACE

VII

estimate of his character, but also contained factual errors of various kinds which I am glad to have the opportunity now to correct. Besides this mass of new material, entirely fresh light had been thrown upon Ramsay’s important visit to Italy in 1754-57 by the appearance in 1962 of John Fleming’s Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, a work making extensive use of the architect’s letters from Rome to his family in Scotland, and revealing in fascinating detail his day-today association with the painter and such mutual friends as Clerisseau, Piranesi and the Abbe Peter Grant. Likewise it has been largely from Scottish archives - most notably those housed in the Scottish Record Office at H.M. Register House in Edinburgh and in the National Library of Scotland — that Dr Iain Brown has drawn his new insights into Ramsay’s early years, his relationship with his father, the poet, and his debt in his youth to the encouragement and patronage ol his fellow countrymen. These he has made available in various important publications, such as his major article, ‘Allan Ramsay’s Rise and Reputation

(Walpole Society, vol. L, 1988), and his elegant essay, Poet & Painter: Allan

Ramsay, Father and Son (1984). For some time Dr Brown and I were consulting the same documents independently, prior to our beneficial sharing of our findings. Our numerous discussions together during the lapse of many years have been enhanced by sympathetic understanding born of an instinctive assumption of a common outlook and - certainly on my part - by the experience of rare intellectual stimulus. I am also much indebted to Dr Brown for his willingness to read one of several drafts of the present book and for his useful comments on various parts of it. A hitherto virtually untapped archive, of prime importance to the history of Ramsay’s Court appointment, as painter to King George III, is to be found among the Bute Papers at Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, and I am most grateful to the present Marquess of Bute, and to his late father, for access to the various letters therein from Ramsay to his patron John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, and for permission to quote them; an indebtedness which I would wish to couple with the name of the former archivist at Mount Stuart, the late Miss Catherine Armet, whose helpfulness spared no pains. Among the manuscripts preserved in the National Library of Scotland, I am now able to publish for the first time the contents of a letter from Ramsay’s second wife describing the accident to her husband’s right arm which put an end to his career as a painter, and so to establish that this fateful event occurred early in the year 1773. In addition to such sources as the Mellerstain and Chevening manuscripts respectively made available to me for use in my earlier book by the late Earl of Haddington and the late Lord Stanhope, some family letters in the possession of Mr John Campbell of Canna contain interesting information about the marriage of the painter’s daughter Amelia, together with a pleasing anecdote pertaining to the familiar terms on which, as has long been known, Ramsay stood with King George III. We have also known, from the contemporary Notebooks of the engraver-critic George Vertue, that during his first few years of professional practice in London Ramsay owed much to the support given him by the great physician, connoisseur and collector Dr Richard Mead. The extent of Mead’s promotion of Ramsay’s interests can now be illustrated in much more detail from the unpublished diary of Dr Thomas Birch in the Department of Manuscripts of the British Library, Birch having been one of the group of eminent scholars, antiquaries and cognoscenti who formed Mead’s closest acquaintances. As this important source contains numerous accounts of visits to the studios of many ol the leading painters of the period - such as Richardson, Hogarth, Highmore and Ramsay himself, - I have interrupted the narrative sequence of the present book in order to give space to matters likely to be of general art-historical interest, but also in order to demon¬ strate the nature of the artistic, scholarly and literary circles in which, from his middle twenties, Ramsay was accustomed to move. Likewise, the Dalrymple of Newhailes papers and the Clerk of Penicuik muniments, housed respectively in the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Record Office, have disclosed much new biographical infor¬ mation, besides adding to our knowledge of a number of commissions and their dates.

VIII

PREFACE

In consequence of fortunate personal circumstances, I was given the opportunity in 1954 of spending some months in Edinburgh on the task of cataloguing and determining the chronology of the Ramsay drawings belonging to the Department of Prints and Drawings of the National Gallery of Scotland, at that time held in its former offices at Ainslie Place, where its then Keeper, the late J.R. Brotchie, lent me every possible assistance. My manuscript catalogue subsequently became the basis for the relevant entries in the National Gallery of Scotland’s Catalogue of Scottish Drawings (1960) compiled by Mr Brotchie and his successor the late Keith Andrews. That hiatus in my commitments to university teaching in England enabled me to identify numerous drawings as previously unrecognized studies for known portraits. Since then I have kept my manuscript catalogue up to date by adding a good deal of new information of the same kind, and this would not have been possible without the generous co-operation of successive Keepers of Prints and Drawings at The Mound. The past half-century has seen the publication of some notable books on the history of eighteenth-century painting in Britain, together with others confined to painting in Scotland. In addition to Waterhouse’s classic Painting in Britain 1530 tol790 (first published in 1953), a special place of distinction must be accorded to David and Francina Irwin’s Scottish Painters At Home and Abroad (1975), which contains by far the best and most scholarly account of Ramsay’s development as a painter, his art being properly adjudged both in its Scottish and its English context. Among passages that seem not to have attracted due attention, I would point to Professor Irwin’s proposition that Ramsay was superior as a colourist to all his major English contemporaries, such as Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. A claim of this nature could scarcely have been made fifty years ago, when Ramsay was still generally considered — at any rate outside Scotland - to have been a quite secondary figure rather than one of the most distinguished portrait painters of the British School. Meanwhile in his magisterial Hogarth, His Life, Art, and Times (1971) Professor Ronald Paulson had elucidated for the first time Ramsay’s artistic and intel¬ lectual relationship to Hogarth, devoting, like Irwin, considerable attention to Ramsay’s writings on questions of aesthetics. In his Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age (1986) and in his more recent Scottish Art 1460 to 1990 (1990), Duncan Alacmillan has provided a new basis for the appreciation of Ramsay’s Scottish roots; and while Dr Macmillan gives correspondingly less attention to Ramsay’s London career and his Italian training, his philosophical approach has borne interesting fruit in his thesis that Ramsay - the close friend and disciple of Hume - attained to an ideal of‘empirical portraiture’ which not only reflected the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment but made its own humane contribution to it, and which possesses affinities with the Humean understanding of the nature of perception. Among recent works devoted to the larger field of British portrait painting, the most exciting and richly illuminating is unquestionably Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s The Georgians: Eighteenth Century Portraiture and Society (1990). It would be impossible to do justice in a few lines to the wealth of insights contained in that splendid book, but it may be simply remarked, in illustration of the changing perceptions of the present day, that here, at long last, Ramsay takes his place, as one of the pre-eminent artists of the century, in the company of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Cotes and Romney. Exhibitions of paintings and drawings by Ramsay have been held from the year 1949, when Sir Ellis Waterhouse put together at 7 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh - at that time the premises of Messrs Whytock and Reid, and now The Georgian House, National Trust for Scotland - a delightful selection of mostly small-scale portraits of Scottish sitters, several of them members of Ramsay’s social circle. Since then it has been my privilege to advise on the more extensive exhibitions held in 1958 at The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, and Nottingham University Art Gallery, and in 1964 at the Royal Academy of Arts, together with the large exhibition now in preparation for showing at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery during this year’s Edinburgh Festival and thereafter at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Over and above these events, special importance attaches to

PREFACE

IX

the exhibition Allan Ramsay, his masters and rivals held in the National Gallery of Scotland in 1963 and prepared by Dr Colin Thompson and Mr Robin Hutchison (respectively sometime Director and Keeper of the National Galleries of Scotland and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery), who made a highly original and lastingly valuable contribution to the study of Ramsay’s art and its relation especially to his British and foreign con¬ temporaries by showing examples of his portraiture alongside the work of over thirty Scottish, English, Italian and French painters, in the process demonstrating the range of influences to which Ramsay was susceptible and highlighting the international character of his aesthetic interests. The present book introduces its subject in the years of his youth, when at about the age of eighteen he set up as a portrait painter in Edinburgh, proving himself by the mid-1730s to be the superior of all his Scottish contemporaries. Knowledge of this unfamiliar and previously unexplored phase in Ramsay’s career was opened up a few years ago once the charming, unassigned portrait of Peggy Calderwood, which has for some years been on loan from Arniston to The Georgian House, had been identified as a picture mentioned in one of the poet Ramsay’s letters as having been painted by his son in 1735. This clue to the nature of Ramsay’s very early style - which had previously been wholly obscure - has made possible the authentication, as products of the same youthful period in Edinburgh, of a considerable number of other pictures. These discoveries have shed new light on Ramsay’s origins in the Scottish School, on his debt to his London master HanS Hysing, and on his professional standing at the time of his studies in Italy from 1736 to 1738, when, so far from being a mere student commencing his training, he had already acquired something of a reputation and had been in successful practice for about five years. As regards the other end of his career, I

have endeavoured to correct a serious

misapprehension concerning Ramsay’s final years in practice - the years immediately preceding his accident towards the beginning of 1773. Again and again one finds repeated in the literature (and not least in dictionaries of art) the assertion that after about 1766 (or even earlier) he painted virtually nothing apart from replicas of his State portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. In actual fact the period of his life beginning around 1767, when he received his second Court appointment, as Principal Painter in Ordinary to Their Majesties, saw the creation of a considerable number of his supreme masterpieces, several of them works commissioned by members of the royal family, who continued to employ him until his enforced retirement from painting. Every biography of an artist must necessarily accord due prominence to his work within the context of his life and career. I have attempted to meet this essential requirement without going into much discussion of issues of particularly specialist interest, reserving these for more detailed attention in my forthcoming catalogue raisonne, while at the same time offering an outline of Ramsay’s artistic development which focuses on the nature of his principal achievements and their place in the history of British portraiture. As to the character of the man, careful consideration of the total available evidence suggests that here also there have been misunderstandings, due largely, it would seem, to uncritical acceptance of statements made by persons outside his intimate circle who did not know him well, and some of whom were evidently prejudiced for one reason or another. In consequence he has come to be represented as a man of a somewhat cold nature who was also rather mean where his purse was concerned, and whose acknowl¬ edged virtues, such as his staunchness as a friend, have not generally been related to their foundation in an outgoing and lovable personality. Careful indeed he was with his money, as Scotsmen of his time were brought up to be; but in his entertainment of his friends he appears not to have spared expense; the heroic journey abroad which he undertook in his sixtieth year, for the sake of a sick friend and her distressed sister, recalls Boswell’s admiration of Ramsay’s ‘benevolence’ of character and the trouble he would put himself to for the sake of a friend. The portrait painted of him in the present book offers the picture of a person of exemplary conduct, great warmth of feeling for others, and of exceptional

PREFACE

X

charm and wit; a man who lived by the high moral ideals of Enlightenment ethics. How far 1 have succeeded in that portrait must be left to the judgment of my readers. It would be impossible for me to forget the constant encouragement given me, in the earlier years of my researches, by my late friend Basil Taylor, at that time Director of what was then The Paul Mellon Foundation for Studies in British Art and British Culture (subsequently renamed the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art). Without the facilities which he placed at my disposal, and which included the provision of research assistance and secretarial help, my work would have advanced far more slowly and with much greater difficulty. I likewise acknowledge with gratitude the help I have received from numerous scholars and experts in divers fields, and especially, among those not already mentioned, the following: D.G.C. Allan; Brian Allen; Marita Allwood; Beard; Joyce Einberg;

Boundy;

Lindsay

Mungo

Errington;

Campbell;

Ian

G.

Malcolm

Finlay; John

Patricia R. Andrew; Geoffrey

Cormack; John Hayes; James

Dick;

Elizabeth

Holloway;

Robin

Hutchison; Margaret Kelly; Shelagh Kennedy; John Kerslake; Michael Kitson; David Mannings;

Rosalind Marshall;

Ellen Miles; Sir Oliver Millar;

Evelyn Newby; Anne

Nimmo; Patrick Noon; David Raynor; A.E. Reffold; Aileen Ribeiro; Jacob Simon; Robin Simon; Basil Skinner; Lydia Skinner; Seymour Slive; Helen Smailes; Duncan Thomson; Robert Wark; John Wilton-Ely; Harry Woolford; the late Andrew McLaren Young. I am also deeply obliged for various kindnesses to the following: Brian Allen, Deputy Director, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London; His Grace The Duke Argyll; Patricia Barnden; Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue; Eberhard Boenke, German ConsulGeneral in Edinburgh; The Most Honourable The Marquess of Bute; The Dowager Marchioness of Bute; Sir Ilay Campbell of Succoth, Bart.; John L. Campbell of Canna; Margie Christian; Sir John and Lady Clerk of Penicuik; Timothy Clifford; Clement E. Conger, Curator of The White House, Washington, D.C.; the late Earl of Crawford and Balcarres; Lady Antonia Dalrymple; the Dick Cunyngham of Prestonfield family; Mrs A. Dundas-Bekker; The Right Honourable The Earl of Haddington; His Royal Highness the Prince of Hannover; Lord Home of the Hirsel, P.C.; Martin Hopkinson; Joyce Hughes; Phillip Jago; Evelyn Joll; Susanna Kerr; Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures; MacLeod of MacLeod; Donald MacLeod of Glendale; David Mannings; Karen McDonald;

Barbara

Milner;

David

Moore-Gwyn;

The

Honourable

Mrs

Charlotte

Morrison; Jane Moseley; Steve Palmer; Sue Parkes; Duncan Robinson, Director of The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; Pamela Robinson; Ray Smith; Willi Stubenvoll; John Sunderland; Helen Watson; The Right Honourable The Earl ofWemyss and March; Hilary Williams, Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum. Among public galleries and museums and other institutions I wish to record my par¬ ticular debt to The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; The National Portrait Gallery, London; the Tate Gallery, London; the Holburne Museum and Crafts Study Centre, Bath; the British Academy, in respect of the provision of a research grant in support of studies in the United States; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; H.M. Register House (Scottish Record Office), Edinburgh;.The General Register Office for Scotland, Edinburgh; the British Library; The Department of Prints and Drawings, The British Museum; Edinburgh University Library; Yale Lhiiversity Library; The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; The National Trust; The National Trust for Scotland; Coutts’ Bank, The Strand, London; Thos. Agnew & Son; Christie’s; Sotheby’s; Phillips, London. My warm thanks are due to all the private owners and authorities of public institutions for the privilege of reproducing the works in their possession which form the plates in the present volume. Works in the Royal Collection are reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen. The colour plates adorning the present volume require a tribute to the photographic

PREFACE skills of the following:

A.C.

Ellington, Crovie, Banffshire;

Cooper

Etd,

London; Antonia

XI

Reeve,

Edinburgh;

Eric

The Earl of Haddington; Baxter Nishet, Lochgilphead;

Photo Creations Ltd, London; T he Pilgrim Press Limited, Derby; Joe Rock, Edinburgh; The Royal Studios, Wimbourne, Dorset; Tilzey Studios, Yeovil, Somerset. For much help in obtaining other photographs 1 am particularly indebted to Antonia Reeve and Douglas Smith. I also wish to express my deep sense of gratitude to my young friend Angus Kennedy, whose proficiency in typing enabled me to present my publishers with decent-looking copy. It is not every author who is in the position of employing in this respect the services of an Oxford graduate in Greats, let alone a Scholar of Christ Church, as it was my good fortune to be able to do — gaining thereby not only the benefit of a conscientious concern for accuracy but also the added advantage of the presence at my elbow of a critical intellect, an eye alert to errors and inconsistencies, and an inquiring mind with a dis¬ position to discuss all manner of issues, from matters of a factual nature to questions of Latinity. It was a happy circumstance indeed that brought me such welcome assistance on my return to Scotland from a long absence, and which also enabled me to revive the old pleasure of writing with a pen. From that point I had the good fortune to be in the helpful hands of the most sympathetic of publishers, and my profound thanks are due to John Nicoll and Sally Salvesen for all the care that has gone into the production of this book, and not least for their determination to ensure its appearance in time for the Edinburgh showing of the Ramsay exhibition. Edinburgh January 1992

CHAPTER ONE

Early Years in Edinburgh and Studies in London: 1713-1736 Allan Ramsay is now recognized as one of the supreme portrait painters of the British School; but this estimate, which corresponds entirely to his reputation during the greater part of his working life, has received general assent only after a century and a half of neglect, during which the true nature of his art, together with its importance in the history of painting in England and Scotland, virtually ceased to be understood. By the middle years of the reign of George II, Ramsay had established himself as the leading portrait painter working in London; with the accession of George III, his pre-eminence (now being disputed by the young Joshua Reynolds) was recognized by his appointment as painter to the new king, and it was in this crowning period of his life that he perfected the exquisite style which represents to the full his distinctive contribution to British painting. The causes of the ensuing decline of Ramsay’s reputation are nevertheless not hard to perceive, and they are various. The process had begun in his own lifetime, in consequence of an accident to his right arm which compelled him to retire from practice some eleven years before his death; but for many years prior to that calamity he had shown a peculiar indifference to public favour by his disinclination to exhibit either at the Incorporated Society of Artists, of which he was elected vice-president, or at the subsequently founded Royal Academy of Arts, so that it was perhaps inevitable that his fame should have come to be obscured by that of his younger contemporaries, and not least, by the new generation of painters whose work was to be seen at the annual Academy exhibitions. No critic writing during the hundred years of so after his death betrays more that the scantiest knowledge of his art; and this is understandable, since most of his pictures were scattered among palaces and country houses. Furthermore Ramsay may be said to have been a victim of certain tides in the history of taste and aesthetic theory that tended to drown the delicate virtues of his art. On the one hand we may consider the virtually universal admiration accorded in his day to the essentially alien principle of the ‘Grand Style’ advocated and practised by Reynolds; and on the other the almost total collapse of aesthetic values in our own times, accompanied as it has been by a craving for raw expression and presuming experiment, to the neglect of those very qualities of visual refinement and unpretentious meditativeness that inform Ramsay’s art at its most characteristic, but to which the modern critic is liable to have become strangely blind. Yet while, for the most part, modern criticism has failed to formulate principles capable of withstanding the general decline of aesthetic standards, the historian has become the torchbearer of the ancient values; and Ramsay’s own rehabilita¬ tion owes everything to the attention, long overdue, that has at last been given to the history of British painting; nor, in Ramsay’s case, can we overlook the importance of recent studies devoted to the history of the arts in his native Scotland.

1 Self-Portrait at the Easel, probably 1756 (Private Collection)

ALLAN RAMSAY

2

In consequence of such investigations we now know far more, not merely about Ramsay’s development and achievement as a painter, but also about bis life and character; and it has been possible in addition to reassess to his advantage the merits of his literary endeavours, which increasingly engaged his energies in his later years, and by which he was always ambitious of a secondary fame. Indeed in inquiring into the reasons for his eclipse as an artist towards the end of his life, we should at least take account of the opinion of some of his contemporaries that he allowed himself to be too much distracted from the pursuit of his art by his literary and political interests. It is a striking fact that his obituarists paid primary tribute to his writings and to his intellectual and social accom¬ plishments; and to some extent this was natural, since after his enforced retirement from painting he had been content to be known principally as a man of letters, himself contributing to the obscuration of his most refulgent title to fame. Although too much can be made of speculations of this nature, Ramsay must certainly have been conscious of that intellectual superiority which made him the most learned and most widely cultivated artist of his times, and to that extent a man apart, drawn constantly, in what time he could spare, from the studio to the study. A classical scholar and linguist, with a strong archaeological bent, he became in his youth a privileged member of the learned society of which the great Dr Mead was the central figure; the philosophical cast of his mind earned him the friendship and respect of Hume, who not only sought his advice on his History but showed him some of his philosophical writings prior to their publication; and he shone in the literary circles of London, impressing Johnson and many others by his erudition and conversational powers. His various publications show us much of the man; and in drawing his character we cannot fail to observe an essential compatibility with the ideal of the man of reason which we have come to acknowledge as a commonplace of the Age of Enlightenment. The standard of rationality and benevolent humanity upheld by that ideal is taken for granted in his writings as a whole, and there can be no doubt that it was by the same ideal that Ramsay lived. On coming to know him, Boswell was most struck by his benevolent nature. An element of impulsiveness in his personality, as well as over-sensitivity, is reflected in the pen-portrait written by his first biographer Allan Cunningham. According to Cunningham ‘he was hasty and irritable, passionate and headstrong, but easily smoothed down and pacified; a steadfast friend, and a most agreeable companion’. His youthful letters exhibit enthusiasm, good humour, a pleasing and often bookish wit, and that driving ambition to succeed in his ‘business’ (or, as we should say, profession) which soon brought him great wealth as well as fame, and enabled him to purchase considerable properties in Scotland. He was called a ‘money-getter’ by Strange, the engraver; and Boswell said that he was not one to give away even half-a-crown; but it is questionable whether his desire to better himself and his family, coupled with a scrupulous care over money matters, went beyond accepted notions of prudence or the kind of ‘canniness’ exhibited by many of his Scottish contemporaries. As the oldest member of a large family of brothers and sisters subsisting on the not very considerable earnings of a booksellerpoet, he would have been brought up by his father to value the virtue of prudence in the handling of his personal finances as an absolute priority. On the other hand his watchful¬ ness over his purse was counterbalanced by a generosity of spirit which showed itself especially in his relationships with his friends, and to which his second wife, Margaret Lindsay, paid tribute as being a feature of his character and conduct at all times. And as Boswell also testified, Ramsay was the sort of person who, while being close with his money, would get up in the middle of the night and ride ten miles in heavy rain to serve a friend. As a young man he seems to have had his share of the vanity of youth, and in later life his pride could evidently express itself in a certain touchiness and a tendency to stand on his dignity. But ultimately the truest mirror to his personality lies in the affection which he

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

3

so generally inspired: he was the best of companions, and one who constantly gave pleasure by the charm and wit that informed his conversation. Many of his friendships in his mature years were formed with much younger men, whom he treated without the least trace of condescension. Ramsay’s outgoing nature, his humanity and his very faith in reason as a guiding principle in life — but not such as to deny the role of intuitive feeling — may be said, finally, to have provided the foundations of his greatness as a painter, for on the one hand no portrait painter ol the period was more deeply concerned with the evocation ol individual character, and hence with the potential status of portraiture as a humane discipline (very much in the spirit of the aesthetic theory of Jonathan Richardson), while on the other hand a retrospective survey of his artistic development reveals the singlemindedness of his quest of a mode of portraiture capable of containing feeling within an ordered and rational whole. Allan Ramsay was born in Edinburgh, in the parish of New Kirk, on 13 October 1713 (New Style), being the eldest of the numerous (and still uncounted) children of the Scottish poet of the same name.1 His mother, born Christian Ross, was the daughter of one Robert Ross, an Edinburgh ‘writer’ (or lawyer’s clerk). The poet, who had been brought up in the country in the humblest circumstances, liked to boast that he was descended from the earls of Dalhousie, whose family name is Ramsay; and the painter himself, in a brief manuscript Life of his father, was to lend his own authority to this claim to a distinguished ancestry:2 there may well be truth in the tradition, but it is not in actuality possible to trace the poet’s forebears beyond his great-grandfather, a certain John Ramsay, whose son Robert became factor to the Hopes of Hopetoun, being succeeded in that office by his own son John, the poet’s father. This second John Ramsay was made responsible for superintending the famous gold and lead mines which Sir James Hope had developed on the Hopetoun estates at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, a hamlet situated far to the south-west of Edinburgh; and there he had met his future wife Alice, the daughter of a mining engineer from Derbyshire, Allan Bower, whom Sir James had invited north to inaugurate the Leadhills workings.3 While too much weight should not be placed upon the value to the younger Ramsay of such connexions with the Hopes of Hopetoun, respectable enough though these connexions were, it must have been far from coincidental that the 2nd Earl of Hopetoun became one of his earliest patrons in Scotland; and a sense of deep indebtedness on Ramsay’s part almost certainly lies behind his gift to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1748 of a full-length portrait of the earl, a benefactor of the hospital (Plate 72). It is particularly suggestive that the patronage of the Hopes had commenced at the very outset of Ramsay’s career, in the period prior to his studies in Italy, when he had begun painting portraits in Edinburgh. Among a number of works that we can now assign to these years, but which had largely been forgotten, an early bust-length portrait (one of three recorded in the eighteenth century) of Catherine Hope-Vere, the young wife of the Honourable Charles Hope brother to the 2nd Earl of Hopetoun, - is particularly interesting in showing Ramsay’s style at its very beginnings (Plate 2). This is presumably a marriage-portrait, datable about 1733. It was the same Charles Hope who was to invite Robert Adam to accompany him to Italy, installing him, together with the architect’s friend Clerisseau, in the fine house he had taken in Rome, the Casa Guarnieri. At about the age of fifteen the poet Ramsay had lost his father, and his mother had remarried; and in order ‘to get him out the way’4 his stepfather, a farmer from Leadhills named Crichton, had sent the boy to Edinburgh to be apprenticed to a periwig-maker and so to learn the trade by which he was to earn his living during the first two decades of his working life. His vocation as a poet, however, had become clear to him early on; and his easy mastery of lyrical and epistolary verse quickly established him as the most admired poet in Scotland, besides earning him, in England, not only the esteem of such con¬ temporaries as Pope and Gay, but a general fame nurtured especially by the popular

ALLAN RAMSAY

4

2

Catherine Hope- Vere,

c. 1733 (Collection of Ian

Henderson)

appeal of his pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd. About 1721, the year of publication of his collected poems, the elder Ramsay was able to abandon the occupation of perruquier for the more congenial profession of bookseller and publisher, in which capacity he occupied successively various properties on the High Street - that famous, mile-long thoroughfare which formed the heart of the eighteenth-century town, reaching down from the Castle on its towering volcanic rock, past the Parliament Building - now deserted, - the law courts and the medieval Cathedral Church - or High Kirk - of St Giles, to the recently rebuilt Palace of Holyroodhouse. The creation of modern Edinburgh, with the building of the New Town to the north, still lay many decades in the future: although the poet would not live to see it, his son was to witness its early stages of development, if not its greatest glories, George Street and Charlotte Square. Some years before then the poet had acquired rooms in a five-storied house on the High Street, an old timber-fronted structure situated at the head of Halkerston’s Wynd, and displaying the sign of‘The Mercury’ (Plate 3). This picturesque but dingy dwelling must have been associated with many of the painter’s earliest memories. From its narrow windows young Allan would have looked out upon a street which, while impressing visitors by its breadth and by the imposing height of its ancient ‘lands’ (or tenements), was notorious for its filth and squalor. That the poet soon moved - in 1722 - further along the street to a house between Borthwick’s Close and the Old Assembly Close, and finally, a few years later, to more capacious quarters in the Luckenbooths (Plate 4) — ‘rotten, noisome and offensive’ though these dwellings were acknowledged to be (as well as con¬ stituting an obstruction to the traffic in the High Street, jutting as they did into the middle of the roadway) - can be explained not merely by his rising prosperity but more parti-

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

5

3

W. Forest after D.

Wilson: The High Street, Edinburgh, showing the poet Ramsay’s shop ‘At the sign of the Mercury’, from the Fullarton edition of the Poems, vol. in (1852) (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh) 4

W. Forest after D.

Wilson: The High Street, Edinburgh, showing (to the centre) the Luckenbooths, with St Giles Church (to the left), from the Fullarton edition of the Poems, vol. n (1851) (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh)

cularly by his need to accommodate a family that (as he boasted with some pride) increased by one every twelvemonth. Of the painter’s numerous brothers and sisters not a great deal is now known, and while we hear again of four sisters - Annie, Cecilia, Janet and Catherine - only the last two survived into maturity, living on into extreme old age and continuing to reside at the Luckenbooths until 1798 (fourteen years after the painter’s death), when the property was purchased by the Town Council with a view to its demolition. Although normally resident in Edinburgh, both Catherine and Janet, neither of whom married, were to maintain a close relationship with their famous brother: Catherine, indeed, was to accompany the painter on his second journey to Italy in 1754, as his wife’s companion and helpmeet, and Janet acted as chaperone to the Earl of Haddington’s sister the Honourable Rachel Hamilton when, with Ramsay as her escort, Miss Hamilton travelled to Geneva in 1773 to look after her married sister Lady Stanhope, who was suffering, in great pain, from a fractured hip. Catherine Ramsay seems to have been notable for her pleasing voice, being apparently adept at the rendering of old Scottish airs. No likeness of her is known, but there is a portrait of Janet in the Tate Gallery, ascribed to her brother, but close in style to the work of William Millar (who copied many portraits by Ramsay). This has been repainted for the apparent purpose of beautifying a very plain and rather masculine¬ looking lady, with a certain resemblance to the painter, as we see from an old photograph of the picture, prior to its prettihcation (Plate 6). It was from the house in the Luckenbooths that the elder Ramsay published the volumes of his Tea-Table Miscellany and the famous Evergreen, collections of old and new Scots poems and songs which constitute one of the earliest products of the Scottish literary renaissance of the eighteenth century, besides redounding to Ramsay’s reputation both as a poet and as an editor of inspired discernment. His success reflected what his son recognized as ‘one of the extraordinary instances of the power of uncultivated genius’.5 The poet, whose vanity was equal to his genius, prided himself on what he had been able to achieve without the benefit of more than the most rudimentary education, and spoke of himself with a touching ingenuousness as ‘ane of the warld’s wonders’. His shortcomings did not trouble him; he regarded himself always with intense satisfaction, and although

5 William Aikman: Allan Ramsay the Elder (Scottish

ordinary in feature and small of stature he applied the same principle to his appearance,

National Portrait Gallery,

5) shows us an expressive face, suggestive of a lively intelligence, and the painter was not

Edinburgh) 6

Janet Ramsay (before

restoration) (Tate Gallery, London)

claiming that he was one who pleased The best and fairest’. His portrait by Aikman (Plate at a loss in conveying an impression of poetic inspiration. Not least, the elder Ramsay endeared himself to his many friends by his warmth of personality, his often earthy wit and his cheerful companionability. Thus it was that the future painter grew up the son of Scotland's most celebrated poet. An appreciation of this background is essential to an understanding of his own lifelong ambition to be recognized as a serious writer - an ambition all the more comprehensible in that his scholarly inclinations and intellectual curiosity were naturally incapable of com¬ plete fulfilment within the profession of portrait-painting. As a boy, he would never have known a time when he was not surrounded by books, nor unfamiliar with the faces of his father’s literary friends. Over and above these advantages, he received at the Edinburgh High School, which he entered in 1726,b an education such as his father had entirely lacked. At home, browsing among the shelves of his father’s shop, he would have come across many works relating to the visual arts. Their range is evident enough from the poet’s letters to his friend Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, who frequently ordered books from him for his library at Mavisbank. Those identifiable from correspondence before the boy’s seven¬ teenth year include Gravesande’s Essai sur la perspective, Francis Ferrier’s Statuae Antiquae, Kent’s edition of Inigo Jones’s Designs, and the anonymous Roma Illustrata: Or, a Description of the most Beautiful Pieces of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Antique and Modern, at and near Rome, besides several volumes on ancient history and numismatics. Among the prints sent to Mavisbank were Hogarth’s illustrations to Samuel Butler’s Hudibras — which the artist had dedicated, in part, to the elder Ramsay, - his engravings of A Harlot’s Progress, Coypel’s Don Quixote series (one of Hogarth’s own likely sources of inspiration), and a set of prints after Raphael’s Vatican Cartoons. The High School was at that time situated in Blackfriars Wynd, off the Royal Mile, and had already proved itself worthy to be called one of the finest educational establish-

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

7

ments in Britain. It was customary for the boys to be assigned to one of the Classical Masters for their first four years; after which they would normally spend two years in the care ol the Rector (or headmaster). Ramsay, however, is recorded only as the pupil of the Rector in office at the time, the excellent Dr George Arbuthnot, who had served there in his early days as a Classical Master before being appointed to the rectorship of the Grammar School in the Canongate. Arbuthnot had returned to the High School in 1717 as its greatly esteemed Rector - a position which he was to hold with distinction until his resignation some eighteen years later. As was the rule in the eighteenth century, the school syllabus placed

the principal emphasis upon the study of Latin; but there was also

instruction in the French language, as well as in such subjects as writing, mathematics and book-keeping. Latin studies were carried to an advanced level, and after the most thorough grounding in grammar, Ramsay would have early accphred an intimate knowledge of such poets as Horace, Virgil and Ovid, and would have read widely in the works of Livy and Cicero. Throughout his life he was to preserve that special affection for Horace which he shared with his father; but the difference was that, unlike his father, he was able to appreciate the Latin poets in the original. He presumably remained at the school for the customary six years; and immediately after the end of that period, in July 1732, he is first recorded in London as the pupil of Hans Hysing, from whom he received his initial training in the art of portraiture. This date is supplied by a communication to him from his father, enclosing a letter to the poet’s publisher in London, Andrew Millar. The circumstances are illuminating in themselves, for more than one reason. They offer us in the first place a picture of a young painter who had come to London intent principally upon the development of his art, yet who was possessed of intellectual gifts ranging beyond the requirements of his calling. Andrew Millar, one of those typically enterprising Scots who in this period sought to make their fortunes in London, had become the elder Ramsay’s publisher in the previous year, and the poet’s letter to him had the purpose of granting him permission to reprint his TeaTable Miscellany (which had been first issued in Edinburgh, in three volumes, in 1724-27). Millar endorsed the letter Edr July 15, 1732. In his covering letter to his son, the poet had written, ‘If you do not like the proposal tell Mr Millar so’, and in writing to Millar he had added as a postscript: ‘My son brings you this, if he approves of it’.7 The financial arrangements involved were evidently a prime consideration. That the younger Ramsay at this time not yet nineteen years of age - should have been consulted by his father on such a matter tells us much about the poet’s respect for his son’s maturity of judgment upon literary questions and business affairs. Ramsay’s schooldays evidently overlapped with those of at least three others who attained to considerable distinction in later life - William Tytler of Woodhouselee, the historian, best known for his defence of Mary Queen of Scots; William Strahan, Member of Parliament and successful London publisher; and Hugh Blair, whose standing as an arbiter of literary taste received early recognition by his election to the Chair of Rhetoric at Edinburgh. Tytler and Blair were to become leading members of Ramsay’s Select Society, the famous debating club founded by the painter in Edinburgh in the summer of 1754 - an institution reflecting in itself that range of intellectual interests which always prevented him, like the fictional Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, from being completely fulfilled by the ‘studio’ outlook upon life. And shortly after Ramsay had left the school its doors were to open to another boy of genius with whom he came to form, in later years, a warm if not always unruffled friendship - the ambitious and perhaps understandably conceited Robert Adam. It was, then, at the Edinburgh High School that Ramsay acquired his sound knowledge of Latin and French, and doubtless first displayed

the linguistic facility which later

enabled him to add to these two languages Greek, Italian and German. Perhaps it was also in these early years that he cultivated that interest in speculative questions which was to

ALLAN RAMSAY

8

attract him to the writings of Voltaire, whom he visited on two occasions, and to the philosophical tenets of his friend Hume (Plates 83, 184). Nor, in the light ol his religious scepticism — which as much as anything else makes him so representative a man of the Enlightenment, — can we discount the impression likely to have been made upon his mind in early manhood by the bigotry displayed by the Scottish Kirk in suppressing the pioneering theatre which his father had opened in Carrubber’s Close. Certainly, the issue of religious oppression was one that in later life deeply engaged his mind; and his three most substantial essays — On Ridicule, On Taste and the Essay on the English Constitution — all contain passionate animadversions upon the abuse of ecclesiastical power and on the evils of dogmatism. These sentiments Ramsay would have imbibed first from his father, who identified the Pope with the Antichrist, and they would no doubt have helped to hold in check any nascent sympathy on his own part for the Jacobite cause. On this question, however, it is hard to come to a firm conclusion, especially as loyalties among Scotsmen in the early years of the century were often ambiguous and even confused. The Act of Union of 1707 had yet to show its benefits, and the shock to national pride which it had occasioned had been accompanied by an almost immediately noticeable economic decline and a general sense of national uncertainty. It is no wonder therefore that the Union should have given rise to an upsurge of nationalism which sought spiritual compensation in a nostalgic vision of Scotland’s past as an independent nation with its own distinctive culture, a reaction all the more natural on account of the widespread conviction that the Stuarts’ claim to the throne was indisputably just. In that sense, it was possible at this time for many Scotsmen to share, to a greater or lesser degree, the patriotic fervour of the declared Jacobites; and leanings in that direction are very apparent in some of the elder Ramsay’s writings, with all their passionate love of country. In his brief biography of his father, written late in life, the painter was critical of the poet’s romantic fellow-feeling with the promoters of the Stuart cause, but qualified his criticism by pointing out that he had nursed such senti¬ ments ‘in common with many worthy men and sincere friends of their country’, and had eventually been persuaded to abandon them by his ‘good sense and observation’. The question is whether the younger Ramsay was in much the same case. In a publication of his mature years, Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government, he affirmed that the articles of the Union should be ‘religiously observed’; and in one of his letters he described himself as ‘an absolute Whig’ in his politics. Yet at the time of his youthful studies in Rome he joined a Masonic Lodge whose membership was virtually confined to professed Jacobites. Horace Walpole averred that Ramsay had originally been a Jacobite, a claim repeated in his posthumously published Memoirs of the Reigns of George II and George III, and while that assertion seems somewhat suspect, or at least may have stated the matter too positively, it is very possible that Ramsay grew up sharing with his father some inclinations in that direction which he subsequently renounced. But he could scarcely have been unaware of a certain ambiguity in his father’s own attitude: indeed, as we shall see, when the poet came to appeal to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh for his help in obtaining a grant of money for his son to allow him the means to study in Italy, he made a point of drawing attention to his own loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy. There were countless other Scotsmen of the time who (as the painter was careful to imply in his account of his father’s life) were torn between loyalty on the one hand to the Crown and on the other to their own patriotic feelings. Here we must leave the matter, but we shall return to it in due course. His fervent anti-Catholicism would doubtless have had its roots in what seems to have been a normal, but probably not very strict, Calvinist upbringing (not always a contradic¬ tion in terms). His father’s religious sympathies are hard to determine with any precision, but he regularly took his family on Sundays to hear the long sermons preached at the Tron Church or at the High Kirk of St Giles. In any case the painter’s own opinions on spiritual

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

9

7 Self-Portrait at about the age of sixteen (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

matters must have been largely moulded by an intellectual curiosity far exceeding that of his father, leading to a wide acquaintance with historical and philosophical works in various languages, and bringing him into contact with the ideas of such independent thinkers as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and, not least, his friend Hume. There can be no doubt that Ramsay exceeded in learning and general culture all the other artists of the age; and his classical scholarship, his erudite conversation and his cultivated wit were equally remarked on by his contemporaries. It is only to be regretted that he rarely employed his pen in the service of the visual arts: nevertheless he was the author of one literary work, the Dialogue on Taste of 1755, which merits an honoured place among eighteenth-century treatises on aesthetics. Ramsay inherited his father’s swarthy complexion and something of what might be termed a certain bluntness of feature; he appears to have been of average height for his times, and Allan Cunningham describes him as being well-proportioned in figure. In an early drawing of himself (Plate 7) an abundance of dark hair flows down to the shoulders, framing the strong, masculine features, in which we may detect an almost pugnacious look, such as is still more apparent in the Self-portrait in oils in the National Portrait Gallery in London (Plate 27), painted in his mid-twenties, where the deep brown eyes look out at us with an intensely studied expression. Here the strong jaw, with its dark coloration, reminds us of Robert Adam’s later nickname for him - ‘blackbeard Allan’. It is an impressive face, not precisely handsome but full of character and expressive of a keen intelligence. The brow is broad and fairly high; the lower lip juts a little forward; the nose is rather short and slightly tilted: all in all, the features as a whole are striking rather than refined or deliacte, and it would be impossible to deduce from them that they belonged to the exponent of an art notable, certainly in its ultimate stage of development, for an almost feminine grace. Perhaps, however, we can trace in them some hint of that impulsiveness which accord¬ ing to Allan Cunningham was one of the distinguishing marks of his character. On the other hand his contemporaries might have seen a correspondence between the delicacy of

10

ALLAN RAMSAY

his art and the nicety of his tastes in food and drink — and especially his abhorrence of strong liquor, which was so great that it was said that even the smell of a bottle of claret was sufficient to upset him. A further correspondence might also be suggested — in respect of his fondness for fine clothes, which led Mrs Boscawen (Plate 69) to refer to him affectionately as ‘Mr Dandy’. Of his predilections in this respect we have early evidence in the form of a set of verses entitled ‘The Sailing at the Red-Braes’, which he wrote at the age of twenty. The poem entertainingly describes an outing on the new ornamental lake at Redbraes, near Edinburgh, the estate of the Balfours of Pilrig, when, under the gaze of Medina the Third (the grandson of Sir John Medina and himself a painter), he had fallen into the water, to the amusement of a mixed party.8 The verses are less remarkable for their poetical merits than for their reflection of their author’s pride in his attractiveness to the opposite sex, which encouraged his ambition to ‘bear away’ the hearts of the girls in the party; in one stanza Ramsay portrays himself as ‘bold Allan . . . , all dressed in frock of blue and waistcoat of the Linning Green’. There was nothing in Ramsay of the bohemian, a type thrown up by a later age, with ambiguous consequences for the standing of the artist in the community: he admired the standards of etiquette and deportment that were inseparable from the eighteenth-century ideal of elegance, and was critical, for example, of the brilliant young Lord Mahon for his neglect of them. Nor could he have shone as he did in polite society, or have been regarded as an ornament to it, if he had not himself cultivated the social graces - desiderata in any case for a painter ambitious of attracting people of quality to his studio. Indeed we may see Ramsay as one who appears to have matched in his manners, as in his conversation, the sophistication of his mind. Lffilike many of his future competitors, he can be said to have approached the ideal of the portrait painter envisaged earlier in the century by Jonathan Richardson; for Richardson, besides insisting in his influential Essay on the Theory of Painting that a portrait painter should ‘think as a gentleman, and a man of sense [or sensibility]’, had also dwelt upon the desirability of his possession of‘more than one liberal art, which puts him upon the level with those that do so, and makes him superior to those that possess but one in equal degree’. A more general interest attaches to ‘The Sailing at the Red-Braes’, since it offers us an early example of Ramsay’s lifelong addiction to versifying and his ambition to achieve a respectable reputation as a poet. In this he was encouraged by his father, who evidently nursed an exaggerated notion of very modest gifts. Indeed the elder Ramsay was suf¬ ficiently proud of another of his son’s poetical efforts, dating from about the same time, to send a copy of it to his erudite friend Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (Plate 10), explaining that it was written ‘in imitation of Horace’s' 22nd Ode Integer Vitae’, that, ‘line for line and sylible for sylible’, it had ‘a merry turn’, and that it was to be read ‘as one reads the Saphick Latine’. These verses have also survived, and their merit lies in their author’s boyish delight in making play with ingenious internal rhymes. The opening line, ‘Should I by hap land on the coast of Lapland’, sets the mood, which attains comic heights in the transmogrification of Horace’s Sabine wolf into the Kirk official responsible for getting fornicators to the stool of repentance: . . . sure more horrid Monster in the Torridzone is not found, sir, though for snakes renowned, sir. He was to continue to write occasional verses throughout his life. But if, early on, he hoped to see them in print, that desire was not to be fulfilled until shortly before his death, when, during his last visit to Florence, he contributed to a volume of fugitive pieces entitled The Arno Miscellany. None, however, of his few surviving compositions suggests that he inherited anything of his father’s lyrical gift or his capacity to strike a memorable image: his talent lay rather for light verse displaying, beyond prosodic correctness, a feeling for metrical liveliness and for the capacity of verse to sharpen a witticism. The very fact that he was the son of a famous poet would have helped to make known

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

11

his pretensions to a place on the lower slopes of Parnassus; and that his youthful courtship of the Muse was already eliciting a measure of ridicule is apparent from a manuscript which only recently came to light, containing a long, satirical poem entitled ‘A Session of Poets calculated for the meridian of North Brittain 1 738’, wherein he is represented, along with an assortment of fellow versifiers, as standing trial before the throne of Apollo and shamed into a vow to desist from his efforts. In Ins case, however, the force of his condemnation might be said to be mitigated in that the poet of The Gentle Shepherd himself merits a stern rebuff; for it is he who comes forward first, boasting of his ‘High Reputation’ and his wide readership, only to see his favourite pieces marked down by the divine examiner with a

B . The author’s target is clearly, at least in part, the poet’s unashamed

vanity, but his broader intention is to question the worth of all poetry written north of the Border. The younger Ramsay then follows his father to the judgment-seat: His son who had Rhym’d in a way of Diversion, And hop’d for ye Laurell at least in reversion, Was stunn’d like a Statue at hearing ye sentence, And stood toss’d for a while betwixt Hope & Repentance. But Reflection o’er weakness soon Victory gain’d, And judging how hardly ye Bays was attain’d, He vow’d to offend in ye manner no more, So follow'd his Sire & Wheel’d off to ye door. But while the younger Ramsay might have justifiably taken these lines to heart, his deep love of poetry bore fruit in two critical works of distinction, his treatises (both unpublished) on English prosody and on Horace’s Sabine farm. The particular affection for Horace which he shared with his father developed into a lifelong passion, and the diligent researches which he carried out in his later years were inspired by more than archaeological curiosity. Horace provided him with a standard of excellence, whether in literature or in the conduct of life: Horace was for him, as he put it in his treatise on the Sabine farm, not only ‘the Prince of Roman lyric poets’ but also ‘a man who was both a philosopher and a poet’. By philosopher he meant a man of reason and virtue - integer vitae scelerisque purus - whose ideal of life embraced philosophical detachment from worldly falsities and modest contentment with simpler and more lasting joys. That ideal carried with it the prospect of a tranquil retirement as a reward for high achievement, and it was clearly in consciousness of his right to such a reward that the elder Ramsay had a fine house built for him beneath the walls of Edinburgh Castle — a dwelling, as we shall see, in whose design his son played a leading part. We may further surmise that the same expectation may account, to some extent, for the decline of the younger Ramsay’s pro¬ ductivity as a painter as he approached the age of sixty — although what he was not to know was that his retirement was soon to be forced upon him by a grievous accident to his right arm. It was then that he devoted himself to the writing of his essay on Horace’s Sabine farm, the scene of the Roman poet’s own retirement. As a young man, the elder Ramsay had himself nursed thoughts of becoming a painter, and we have it on the authority of his son that even before leaving Leadhills he had begun to devote some of his time to drawing and the copying of prints. Such inclinations are entirely consistent with his encouragement of his eldest son and the immense pride that he took in his talent. He was not the sort of father to stand in the way of a young man’s artistic ambition. Although his own true gifts lay in a different direction, in idle moments, or perhaps when attendant upon the Muse, he would sketch in the margin of a sheet of verses some caricatura heads.'1 His creative impulses, however, were more usefully fulfilled by his hobby of manufacturing dolls - an occupation reflecting his abiding love of children, in whose entertainments he loved to join, whether in the houses of his friends or at home, -

ALLAN RAMSAY

12

8

John Smibert: Colonel Douglas (National

Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

and there is an old tradition that a doll represented in a portrait by William Millar at Prestonheld House of Sir Alexander Dick’s daughter Janet was the poet’s handiwork. But he found deeper aesthetic satisfaction, especially in his later years, in the making of moulds of ancient coins, intaglio gems and cameos, which he would borrow from such eminent acquaintances as the learned Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and the great Lord Ilay. A plaster plaque in the family collection at Penicuik has recently been identified with a ‘specimen’ of medal-casting which the poet sent to Sir John Clerk as proof of his craftsmanship.10 Lord Ilay would on occasion visit the poet’s house to inspect his work; and the fact that the elder Ramsay came to be on such easy terms with him has a particular significance for the biographer of the painter, since Lord Ilay — a nobleman of austere and lofty manners who held the office of Lord Justice-General of Scotland - was not only one of the most powerful statesmen in the kingdom but, on succeeding his elder brother as 3rd Duke of Argyll, became a notable patron of the younger Ramsay: presently the poet would endeavour to enlist his assistance in obtaining a grant of money to enable his son to study in Italy. In the light of the poet’s interest in the arts it is not surprising that three of his closest friends should have been painters - the landscape painter James Norie the Elder and the portrait painters John Smibert and William Aikman. Smibert was shortly to leave Scotland for London and then New England, settling in Boston in 1728 and becoming one of the principal founders of the American School of portraiture. It is from a letter written by the poet to him after his arrival in North America that we learn that the younger Ramsay had begun drawing, and possibly painting, by the age of twelve.11 Although Smibert was a painter of somewhat uneven attainments, there are portraits by him that even foreshadow, to a remarkable degree, whether in their directness of characterization or in their subtlety of execution, Ramsay’s work of the early 1750s (Plate 8). Although his departure from Scotland came too soon for him to have played a direct part in Ramsay’s formation as a painter, there can be no doubt that Ramsay was familiar with examples of his portraiture, especially as the poet had himself sat to him. On the other hand there are traditions to the effect that Ramsay received some training in Edinburgh under both Norie and Aikman.12 James Norie (or ‘Old Norie’) was an exact contemporary of the poet. Together with his sons James and Robert, his style appealed to the new taste for picturesque landscape which the descriptions of Nature in Thomson’s Seasons had done much to encourage,

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

13

and combined motifs drawn from the Claudian, Italian and Netherlandish traditions with allusions to specifically Scottish scenery. The Norie firm was in particular demand for decorative work in the residences of some of the leading Scottish families, such as Prestonfield House, Newhailes and the Duke of Hamilton’s apartments at Holyrood. The poet Ramsay characterized ‘Old Norie’ in one of his occasional pieces as a kind, generous and humane man, whether in the role of husband, parent, friend or master, and as being equally free from envy and vanity. A connexion with the younger Ramsay may be implied by a portrait of Norie in the possession of the Royal Scottish Academy.11 This work (at half length) is traditionally ascribed to Ramsay, but is now thought to be a self-portrait of the artist; in which case it would be the only known portrait from Norie’s hand.14 The tradition of Ramsay’s authorship cannot be excluded either, since the style is not at all incompatible with that of Ramsay in his formative years, prior to his studies in Italy (and it should be noted that the attribution to Norie was made at a time when Ramsay’s early ‘Edinburgh’ style was almost totally unknown). Ramsay was certainly well acquainted with Norie, and both became members of the Academy of St Luke on its foundation in Edinburgh in 1729, when Ramsay was sixteen. At the very least it may be surmised that Norie would have stimulated Ramsay’s interest in landscape painting and perhaps played some part in forming his taste for the classical tradition of landscape perfected by Claude and Caspar Poussin. A reflection of Ramsay’s predilections in that respect is to be seen in the admiration he expressed in his Dialogue on Taste for the work of George Lambert, an artist who infused a feeling for the particularities of Nature into the classical, Claudian tradition; and when he gazed at the silvery prospect of Edinburgh Castle from its west side, with Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags in the distance, Ramsay saw the whole panorama as through a Claude glass,15 saying that it was ‘a scene of the ideal kind and of the Poussin character’.16 Briefly, during his youthful studies in Italy, he was to try his own hand at landscape painting, and on his second Italian visit he filled pages of his sketchbook with drawings of the scenery of the Tivoli region. The feeling for landscape which is so much in evidence in the backgrounds of his open-air portraits - a sensibility already apparent in works of the early Edinburgh period, such as the Margaret Calderwood of Polton (Plate 17) of 1735 - has never received adequate attention.17 The tasteful Norie would have been an admirable mentor, and it scarcely seems fanciful to detect in the landscape features of the latter picture,

besides

echoes

of Hysing and

perhaps

Kneller,

a

pronouncedly

decorative

tendency akin to one of the fundamental elements of Norie’s essentially ornamental art. In the poet’s friend William Aikman we confront the most distinguished by far of all Scottish painters of the period. A cousin of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Aikman had travelled in Italy, as well as the Middle East, before setting up practice in Edinburgh in the year preceding the younger Ramsay’s birth. Apart from a brief return to Edinburgh in 1730, the last eight years of his life were spent in London, where he justly acquired a high reputation, and, like Ramsay afterwards, enjoyed the patronage of the Argylls and attracted the interest of the Court. Also like Ramsay, he had a marked literary bent, and became, for example, a good friend of the poets James Thomson and Alexander Pope. He was undoubtedly the finest and most sophisticated portrait painter to have been produced by Scotland prior to the advent of Ramsay himself; and in so far as Aikman had developed a style of humane portraiture characterized by prime attention to the evocation of the individual personality, and by a purity of vision innocent of modish artificialities, it may be said that Ramsay was his artistic heir. And if Aikman had not died suddenly in 1731 he would almost certainly have been Ramsay’s master in London instead of the Swedish portraitist Hans Hysing.16 The elder Ramsay considered him the best of men , and on his death penned two elegies in remembrance of him. Sarsfield Taylor, a connoisseur of the arts writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, declared that the younger Ramsay received some instruction from Aikman. From a historical point of view it would be

14

ALLAN RAMSAY

satisfying if the accuracy of this information could be established; for in one sense, il we bear in mind the important factor of Ramsay’s roots in the Scottish tradition, it is possible to see him as a kind of Aikman redivivus who rose, like his eminent predecessor, to become his native country’s supreme portrait painter and who more than matched his literary erudition. The principal objection to the case for Aikman’s role in Ramsay’s training rests upon the fact that at the time that Aikman left Edinburgh to set up his portrait practice in London - in the year 1723 - Ramsay was a mere ten years old. However, as Aikman returned to Edinburgh for several months - already a sick man - in the summer of 1730 (the year preceding his death), it is unthinkable that the poet Ramsay, on being rejoined by his friend after a long separation, would have failed to bring his son’s artistic aspirations to his attention. By then the younger Ramsay was enrolled among the artist members of the Academy of St Luke, and had already made an impression by a superb drawing of his father (to which we shall come presently). It is equally unthinkable that Aikman’s advice for the boy’s future was not sought. In a general sense, in view of the younger Ramsay’s artistic affinities with Aikman, reflected less obviously in close correspondences of style than in a shared conception of portraiture as a humane discipline, during this early Edinburgh period he can be seen in retrospect, if not as Aikman’s pupil according to the usual meaning of the word, as his truest disciple among the painters of his time. But circumstances ordained that, following Aikman’s death, other influences, from Hysing in London to Imperiali and Batoni in Rome and Solimena in Naples, were to nurture the flowering from its Scottish roots of Ramsay’s individual style. If Ramsay’s personal acquaintanceship with Aikman can only have been of brief duration, he would have been familiar enough with the works by him in the houses of his father’s friends, and not least the portrait of the poet (Plate 5) commissioned by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik,19 which Clerk inscribed on the back with those immortal lines of doggerel: Here painted on this canvass clout By Aikman’s hand is Ramsay’s snout. The picture’s value none might doubt, For ten to one I’ll venture, The greatest critics could not tell Which of the two does most excell, The Poet or the Painter. His father’s intimate friendship with Sir John Clerk brought the younger Ramsay into contact with a connoisseur and scholar of very considerable influence. Already at about the age of seventeen or eighteen he was accorded the privilege of painting a copy of the baronet’s portrait by Medina (Plate 10). 11 also appears that Clerk commissioned from him a copy of a painting of St Cecilia by Imperiali (Plate 9) - one of the pictures purchased in Rome by his son James - for presentation to the Edinburgh Musical Society.20 Later on Ramsay was to enjoy various tokens of Clerk’s interest in his advancement. Clerk was a man of exceptional accomplishments - a well-informed connoisseur of the arts, a scholar and antiquary, something of a poet (certainly a prolific one), and a talented musician whose melodious compositions are now being revived. After studying at the universities of Glasgow and Leyden, he had travelled to Italy, becoming enamoured especially of Rome, and had then completed his Grand Tour in Paris and the Low Countries. Having on his return to Edinburgh been admitted advocate, he had been appointed, at the age of thirty, one of the Commissioners for the Union of England and Scotland, and shortly afterwards had been made an Exchequer Baron. After the Union of 1707, in which his faith never wavered, he was content to devote himself to scholarly and literary pursuits. Clerk’s numerous publications include a Latin History of the Union, a long

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

15

9

Francesco Imperiali:

St Cecilia (Collection of Sir John Clerk) 10

Sir John Clerk, after

Medina (Private Collection)

poem in Miltonic verse entitled The Country Seat, and various works on Roman antiquities. His first wife having died in 1700 (the year of their wedding), he had contracted a second marriage in 1709 to Janet Inglis, the daughter of Sir James Inglis of Cramond. Of his many children by her, it was his son James, the 3rd baronet, who was to erect in the grounds of his noble Palladian house at Penicuik an imposing obelisk to the memory of the poet Ramsay. Sir John Clerk’s Miltonic poem shows the depth of his interest in architecture; in which his personal tastes are further reflected in his enlightened employment of William Adam as his adviser when he came to design the small mansion of Mavisbank on his Lasswade estate. Meanwhile he had already begun to acquire pictures, antique statues and objects of virtu of various kinds; and his well-chosen collection must have been familiar to the younger Ramsay from his early years. Some of these acquisitions had been made in Rome, including two paintings attributed to Guido Reni and a drawing ascribed to Raphael; and there was also to be seen at Mavisbank a fine group of ancient marbles. Employing William Aikman as his dealer, he was enabled to purchase through his cousin a number of historical pictures, some of them copies after Carlo Maratta, others being by the Spanish painter Sir John Medina, Scotland’s adopted son. Further pictures, including a version of Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII, were bought during a visit to London, where Clerk became friendly with Lord Burlington. Besides these acquisitions, the Mavisbank collec¬ tion already boasted some good Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, among them works by Poelenberg and Van de Velde; and there was to be added to it a rare group of paintings and drawings by Francesco Imperiali, Ramsay’s future master in Rome, among them the large picture of St Cecilia copied by Ramsay. The collection at Mavisbank as a whole would have given the younger Ramsay, during his upbringing in Edinburgh, his most vivid idea of connoisseurship at its most expert and refined. Nor, perhaps, did he fail to mark the unusual nature of his father’s intimacy with his high-born friend, for few men bound by such enduring ties of affection could have presented so striking a contrast; and he must surely have recognized in Sir John Clerk the very ideal of the man of taste and cultured amateur of the liberal arts. Prior to his studies in London, Ramsay was able to receive some training in Edinburgh

ALLAN RAMSAY

16

on the establishment, in October 1729, of the ambitiously named but short-lived Academy of St Luke, of which both Ramsays, father and son, became founding members.21 He had already shown a precocious gift for drawing, and shortly before this enterprising institution opened its doors the poet presented to Lord Minto, one of its leading founders, a remark¬ able chalk study of himself (Plate 11) for which he had just sat to the fifteen-year-old artist,22 probably tendering it as evidence of his son’s worthiness to be admitted to the new academy. The drawing reveals uncommon powers of draughtsmanship and an incisive gift for characterization. It must have been considered a particularly authoritative likeness, for it was soon engraved as the frontispiece to editions of the poet’s works, so displacing the already well-known portraits by Smibert and Aikman.22 In consequence, as the poet must have appreciated with some pride, many of his readers would thereby have become familiar with his son’s name. The Academy of St Luke was the creation of a large circle of cognoscenti and artists, embracing, in the words of the document of indenture, ‘Noblemen, Gentlemen, Patrons, Painters, and lovers of Painting’; and it had as its object ‘the encouragement of the excellent arts of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, See., and Improvement of the Students’. The importance that was attached to its establishment is reflected in the fact that so many leading figures in the arts in Scotland were associated with it: James Norie, the historypainter John Alexander and (most eminent among them) the architect William Adam all became members; the still-life painter George Marshall, a former pupil of Kneller, was elected President; and Richard Cooper, the noted engraver, was made treasurer. Three of Ramsay’s fellow students achieved considerable distinction in later life: James Norie the Younger was to continue the decorative landscape tradition established by his father; the short-lived William Denune became a successful portrait painter in both Edinburgh and Dumfries, normally working on a small scale, and developing a personal style of great charm and sensitivity; and the Aberdeen painter William Mosman, whose work Ramsay himself much admired, and who was to precede him as a pupil of Francesco Imperiali in Rome, introduced into the Scottish portrait tradition something of the elegance of the contemporary Roman school, as interpreted especially by Antonio David, painter to the Old Pretender. Another, of slighter talent, although a portraitist of some charm, was Alexander Clerk, a half-brother of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik who also went on to study under Imperiali, arriving in Rome shortly after Ramsay. That three of the students at the Academy of St Luke should have chosen Imperiali as their master almost certainly owed much to Sir John Clerk’s recommendation, for he had developed a boundless enthusiasm for the artist’s work. The Academy of St Luke was housed in rooms provided by the University (or ‘College’), classes being held between five and seven o’clock in the evening during the winter, and between six and eight in the morning during the summer. Facilities were offered for drawing both from the antique and from the life, and a portfolio of Old Master drawings - probably incorporating the extensive collection formed by Richard Cooper - was available for study or copying. A sketchbook used by Ramsay at the fledgling academy has survived.24 It contains eighteen drawings, all of them copies from prints or etchings, mostly of the antique. Several can be identified as being copies made from a celebrated anthology of plates - that contained in the Admiranda Romanorum Antiquitatum ac ceteris sculpturae vestigia of Pietro Santi Bartoli and G.P. Bellori, which was Ramsay’s source for a drawing of the figure of the Emperor Trajan on the Arch of Constantine and for four drawings after the Dionysiac frieze on the Borghese Vase. But far greater interest attaches to one of a pair of drawings copied from Salvator Rosa’s influential Figurine etchings (Plate 12). This represents a halfclothed toxophilite pointing downwards in an attitude at once dramatic and rhythmical,25 and one that nearly thirty years later inspired Ramsay’s first conception - known to us from a preliminary study of the design (Plate 13) - of one of his major compositions, the full-length of John, Lord Mountstuart (Plate 137): although Ramsay eventually settled upon a

1 1

Allan Ramsay the Elder, 1 729 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh)

less dramatic pose, it is fascinating to see him, at the summit of his career, consulting a sketchbook used during his boyhood studies in Edinburgh. By the year

1732, when on leaving the Edinburgh High School Ramsay entered

Hysing’s studio in London, the Academy of St Luke may have ceased to exist. Evidence that by then he had already begun to paint occasional portraits is provided by a poem published by his father in that year on the subject of a portrait by him (now lost) of James Forester,26 an army officer with a taste for philosophy whom the poet had befriended. Forester had set himself up as a sort of Beau Brummell of Edinburgh, an arbiter elegantiarum

12

A Toxophilite, copy

as he has been described: he is remembered as the author of a little volume entitled The

after Salvator Rosa, in a

Polite Philosopher, a work concerned less with metaphysics than manners. The portrait must

sketchbook used by

have been painted shortly before Ramsay’s departure for London, where, as we have seen,

Ramsay at the Academy of St Luke in Edinburgh, c. 1730 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

he is first documented in July 1732. He remained with Hysing, who had set up a thriving practice in Leicester Fields, for not more than about a year, for a letter written by Alexander Clerk on 27 September 1733 refers to Ramsay’s studies under Hysing as being already in the past. ' That he was still in London in the Spring of 1733 is proved by the

13

Study for the portrait

of Lord Mountstuart, 1758 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

postscript to a letter of 5 April of that year from his father to Sir John Clerk, in which the painter’s London address is mentioned as being ‘at Mistress Ross’s in Orange Court near the Meuse’.28 Hans Hysing, a Swede from Stockholm and a pupil in London of his fellow countryman

Hans Hysing:

Michael Dahl, was now at the height of his career as a society portrait painter (Plate 14):

Unknown Lady (present

indeed on the accession of George II he had been one of the first artists to be honoured

whereabouts unknown)

with the royal favour. Like Dahl, he had studied at Kneller’s Academy in Great Queen

14

Street, and had later joined the exclusive Virtuosi Club - so that his circle included such eminent figures from the ranks of painters, sculptors and architects as William Kent, John Michael Rysbrack and James Gibbs, as well as the critic and engraver George Vertue.29 He appears in Gawen Hamilton’s Conversation of Virtuosi of 1735 (in the National Portrait Gallery) as the second, stocky figure from the left, standing between Vertue and Dahl. By the early 1720s he was enjoying considerable success, and within another decade Vertue was implying his superiority to the much esteemed Dahl.1" He had already been com¬ missioned to paint full-length portraits of the three eldest daughters of the previous monarch, George I;31 and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, had also sat to him for the first of several portraits: ,2 Ramsay is known to have made a number of copies of one of his portraits of Walpole for Scottish clients.33 Today the name Hysing is not exactly a household word: but in 1732 he had a high reputation; and it was not by any means to an obscure foreign face-painter that Ramsay went in that year to learn the conventions of society portraiture. It is of interest that, shortly after Ramsay’s return to Edinburgh, Alexander Clerk, who had become the pupil in London of the not unworthy Arthur Pond, was expressing the desire to leave Pond for

EARLY YEARS IN EDINBURGH AND STUDIES IN LONDON

19

Hysing, whom he considered the best of the ‘good masters’ in the capital, adding that he greatly admired his manner of laying on his colours ‘with a broad free pencil

[i.e.

brush]’.34 Hysing’s handling can indeed at times be fairly bold, and his technique left its imprint on Ramsay’s early style: but more important, in addition to his sheer pro¬ fessionalism, was his insistence on firm drawing and searching modelling; and when one of his patrons, Lord Egmont, remarked on the beauty of his renderings of his sitters’ hands he was directing attention to a virtue that Ramsay was to make his own. ’ ’ Now that a good deal is known about Ramsay’s very early style, from the period prior to his studies in Italy, no doubt remains about the debt he owed to Hysing’s conscientious precepts. On his return to Edinburgh in the summer of 1733, Ramsay set up as a portrait painter in his father’s house on the High Street. But in addition he was soon accepting the chal¬ lenge presented by a demanding enterprise, for in the following winter he was occupied on an undertaking of a very different kind — the building of an imposing house high on the east side of the Castle-hill for his father’s Horatian retirement. This was the celebrated mansion, of octagonal construction, which became known affectionately as the ‘Gusepve’, and which although now encased in a late Victorian cladding still remains one of Edinburgh’s familiar landmarks (Plates 15, 16). In the spaciousness of its interiors the house presented the strongest contrast to the murky, rambling dwellings on the High Street, and it commanded a magnificent prospect northwards over the now vanished Nor’ Loch and the countryside stretching back towards the distant Forth and the low hills of Fife beyond. Ramsay evidently designed the house in collaboration with his father and with the advice of Sir John Clerk. Appropriately, he dedicated it to the Sister Arts; and in accordance with that familial sentiment Clerk provided a Latin inscription’" which, besides emphasizing the beauties of Nature proffered by the house’s lofty situation, con¬ cluded with a quotation from Horace’s famous passage on the ‘Sister Arts’ in the Ars Poetica?1 The inscription reads in translation: Allan Ramsay the Painter, / son of Allan the Poet, / in order that he may ponder the outstanding spectacle of Nature laid out here below / and follow the great Parent of Genius as his mistress and guide / in all things, / has erected this House of the Muses, / enclosed as he hopes more securely by his studies / than by the neighbouring

15

Paul Sandby:

Edinburgh Castle, showing

fortifications, / in the year of our Lord 1734. / ‘Painters and poets, you say, have always

the ‘Guse-pye’ house

had / an equal licence in daring invention’.

(Tate Gallery, London)

It was in this ‘House of the Muses’, which in December 1740 was to be transferred to his

16

Paul Sandby: Prospect

sole ownership,39 that Ramsay, in his twenty-first year, established his painting-room,

of Calton Hill, Edinburgh,

calling himself proudly the ‘Artist of the Castle-Hill’;4" and in later years, when he had

mid the River Forth from near

become a successful portrait painter in London, it was here, in his north-facing studio on

EAinburgh Castle, showing

the uppermost floor, that he received his sitters during his frequent visits to Scotland. Proud as he was of his achievement in seeing through his ambitious project to a

(centre foreground) the ‘Guse-pye’ house from the back, with the tenements

successful conclusion, and not least in having chosen a site for the abode of his retirement

of the High Street to the

which, however oddly placed under the walls of Edinburgh’s castle, offered from its

right (British Library,

windows a prospect of unspoilt scenery even finer than that enjoyed by Horace as he

London, Map Library)

ALLAN RAMSAY

20

looked out from his own villa in the Sabinia, it was only to be expected that the poet should have resented the derogatory appellation of ‘Guse-pye’ that his fellow citizens were applying to it. Nor was he reassured, on expressing his annoyance to his good friend Lord Elibank, by his Lordship’s retort: ‘Indeed, Allan, when I see you in it, I think the wags are not far wrong’. The origin of the name remains obscure, but Vanbrugh’s own house in Whitehall was called ‘the goose-pie’, and the term may well have acquired some currency as indicative of a building of modest scale and squat aspect. As to the octagonal structure of the ‘Guse-pye’ house, its eccentricity in this respect seems not to have much engaged the interest of historians of Scottish architecture; but the question arises as to whether the Ramsays were influenced by some particular precedent for such an unusual construction. The most famous of octagonal buildings is still the Tower of the Winds in Athens, raised in the first century as a horologium — and therefore an edifice far removed from any form of domestic architecture. Nearer at hand, however, both in a geographical and a temporal sense, there lay Twickenham — the resort, moreover, of gentlemen and ladies seeking to retire, permanently or for periods of refreshment, from the bustle of London life; and there, near by the scenes remembered now for their associations with Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole, James Gibbs had built in the year 1720, for the Secretary of State for Scotland, James Johnston, an addition to his country house which, on account of its shape, was named The Octagon - no more than a spacious room, but one designed for a suf¬ ficiently high purpose, the reception of the Princess of Wales with the dignity appropriate to a royal visit. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik is himself known to have admired the building — an item of information that is extremely suggestive; for here we are concerned with an octagonal structure designed by a Scottish architect for a Scottish Secretary, and one that had made a favourable impression upon the poet Ramsay’s chosen adviser on the building of the ‘Guse-pye’.

It seems more than possible that Sir John Clerk brought Gibbs’s

Octagon to the poet’s attention. It is indeed no less possible that the younger Ramsay was asked to ride out to Twickenham and make drawings of the Octagon. At all events, his draughtsmanship would presumably have been called into play in the process of arriving at a suitable design. The painter’s share in the project may well have been still greater, inasmuch as on his seeting up as a portrait painter in Edinburgh, he must have been considerably irked by having to use as his painting-room one of the dingy rooms in the Luckenbooths, which would not have been very suitable for the reception of people of quality. The idea of a move to a more appropriate dwelling could have come just as well from the painter as from the poet. Already, in this early period in Edinburgh Ramsay had begun to attract a fashionable clientele, and the poet was pleased to note the number of ‘young beauties’ who frequented his son’s painting-room.41 The painter himself, a self-styled beau who prided himself, as we have seen, on being something of a lady-killer, must have made a strong impression in the sophisticated circles in which he moved, whether on account of his striking presence and dark looks or by virtue of his intellectual powers and erudition, while in his profession he found himself without a superior in Scotland. The distinction that he had attained as a painter prior to his studies

in

Italy is exemplified by his marriage-portrait of

Margaret Steuart (Plate 17), painted early in 1735 on the eve ol her marriage to Thomas Calderwood of Polton.42 Here the solid virtues of Hysing are blended with that primary concern with the individual personality which distinguishes the art of Aikman and the Scottish tradition as a whole. Already in this charming composition we can detect more than slight presentiments of that special gift for feminine portraiture for which Ramsay became renowned, as well as a sense of AIiss Steuart s fascinated response to her young painter. Well might his father, addressing him at about this time in a poem beginning, ‘Painter, to thee the Gods are kind’, confidently exhort him to do appropriate honour to his fair sitters:

17

Margaret Calderwood,

1735 (Collection of Mrs A. Dundas-Bekker: on loan to The Georgian House, Edinburgh, National Trust for Scotland)

. . . .the steady hand And all the justice of thine eye Let the fair lineaments demand Till judges can no error spy. If these lines were intended to commend an unswerving devotion to the truth of appear¬ ances, eschewing the dishonesties of flattery, then it was this very ‘justice of the eye’, in the poet’s memorable phrase, that was to remain the essential foundation of Ramsay s art to the end. His father’s friends were now urging upon him the desirability of making provision for the young artist’s further improvement by a period of study in Italy; and it was with this aim in view that in April 1 735 the poet addressed a long, elaborately worded letter to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Patrick Lindsay (Plate 33), begging his assistance.43

18

Sir Alexander Dick (Dr

Alexander Cunyngham), c. 1749 (Private Collection, Prestonfield House Hotel, Edinburgh)

I am daily teaz’d with advices about sending the young man abroad. I am persuaded, my Lord, they are in the right (vox pop:), and it would certainly turn out more to their advantage as well as his, if that genius which he has received from the bounty of nature were enriched with what he might acquire by an acquaintance with the works of Titian, Rafael, Correggio, and other immortal artists. What he particularly had in mind was that, as Member of Parliament for the City of Edinburgh, Lindsay would have the ear of men of influence in London: he thought especially of the powerful Earl of Ilay (afterwards 3rd Duke of Argyll), whom he knew; and above all he cherished the hope that, on learning of his son’s worthiness, the King himself might be graciously pleased to grant him the sum of 100 guineas a year towards the expense of his studies abroad. Cannily he drew to Lindsay’s attention both his own professed loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy and his son’s copies of Hysing’s portrait of the King’s Chief Minister. How this earnest plea was received is not known; but about a year later, on 10 May 1736, the poet was able to announce to his friend Smibert (now settled in Boston) his son’s imminent departure for Rome. Since his return from London, he remarked proudly, his son had been painting in Edinburgh ‘like a Raphael’; adding that while he was sad to part from him he could not stem the strong ‘current’ which flowed ‘from the advice of his patrons and his own inclinations’.44 Among these patrons we can identify two members of the Halkett Wedderburn family. Peter Halkett, the eldest son of Sir Peter Halkett Wedderburn of Gosford and Pitfirrane, whom he was to succeed in 1746 as the second baronet of Pitfirrane, had recently had his portrait painted by Hysing;45 subsequently he and his father were both to sit to Ramsay; and perhaps Hysing had spoken to him about his gifted Scottish pupil. However that may be, there is an early record of a bond for 2,000 merks (a very large sum) made by Sir Peter Halkett Wedderburn and one of his sons ‘to Allan Ramsay, painter in London’.46 In the early summer of 1736, accordingly, Ramsay left Edinburgh for London, on the first stage of his journey to Rome by way first of Paris and then of Florence. It had been

19

Mary Campbell of Lochlane,

1736 (Collection of the Author)

arranged that he would be accompanied on his travels by a medical friend of maturer years, Dr Alexander Cunyngham - better known in later life, on his succeeding to the baronetcy of Prestonheld, as Sir Alexander Dick (Plate 18). Ramsay lingered for some five or six weeks in London, largely because Cunyngham’s domestic affairs had delayed his arrival. Cunyngham was now in his early thirties. A younger son of Sir William Cunynghame, or Cunyngham, of Caprington, he had studied medicine at Leyden and St Andrews and was on the way to developing a successful practice in Pembrokeshire. When in his later years he transferred his practice to Edinburgh he already enjoyed a fine reputation within his profession, and in 1756 he was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, thereafter achieving the unique distinction of being re-elected six times to that office. Lie was to become noted for his promotion of the medicinal properties of rhubarb, which he cultivated on his estate at Prestonheld, outside Edinburgh: Samuel Johnson, whom he came to know through his acquaintanceship with James Boswell, was among those who benefited from his administrations. He became equally well known in Edinburgh circles for his sociability and his patronage of letters and the arts, and he was to make Prestonheld the scene of innumerable literary parties. The elder Ramsay was frequently his guest, and came to regard Prestonheld as a second home, especially during his many years as a widower. There could scarcely have been a more suitable companion for a young artist setting out on his hrst travels abroad. Not only did Cunyngham possess wide intellectual and cultural interests, but he was a man of outstandingly cheerful disposition, as well as common sense. His appearance reflected his personality, commending itself immediately to the beholder by its impression of good humour and kindliness - even if students of physiognomy might have detected in his rather narrowly placed eyes a trait of canny secretiveness which Ramsay himself was to have cause to consider somewhat extreme. For Cunyngham had lately contracted a clandestine marriage with a cousin, Janet Dick of Clermiston, and although his reason for secrecy was perfectly understandable, consisting as it did in his

20

Dr Richard Mead,

parents’ opposition to the match, he carried caution to such lengths that he informed only

c. 1738(?) (Bodleian

two people of his elopement, one of whom was the elder Ramsay, while keeping the secret

Library, Oxford)

from the painter during the whole course of their travels abroad. Yet on the eve of

21

Katie Hall of Dunglass,

Ramsay’s departure for London Cunyngham had been using his services, to all appear¬

1736 (Collection of Mrs

ances, as a kind of black-foot between himself and his bride, and the painter had been

E.K.M. Jackson)

faithfully riding out to Clermiston from Edinburgh and delivering letters from his friend, in complete ignorance of the couple’s actual relationship. Meanwhile Cunyngham was taking a long time to wind up certain legal affairs, and before setting out from Edinburgh for London Ramsay felt obliged to write to him urging him to make haste with his preparations for Italy. His letter, dated 25 May, opens with an assurance that ‘M.D.’ (Miss Dick), whom he had just visited, lacked for nothing necessary for her comfort. He goes on: I cannot recollect anything so material about your affairs here as to merit a place in writing; things are much in the same state that they were before you went away. As to what concerns myself, I have finished my pictures, taken leave of most of my friends, and prepared my baggage to be sent away with the carriers against Friday, with a design to set out myself on the Tuesday or the Wednesday thereafter. Pray, dear Doctor, put an end to your Law as soon as possible, for I shall be as idle in London as I am in Edr. at present writing. Your taking my friendly zeal to serve you in so just a light confirms me entirely in the good opinion I always conceiv’d of you, as your return for it helps me no less to give me a very favourable notion of myself. Except something particular occurs you’ll probably not hear from me till I shall have the satisfaction of telling you from my own mouth how much I am, dear Dr., your sincere friend, Allan Ramsay.47

22

Anne Bayne, first wife

Among the recently finished pictures alluded to in this letter, two female portraits at bust

oj the painter, c. I 739—40

length (both in private collections) are particularly illustrative of the development of

(Scottish National Portrait

Ramsay’s style within a year or so of his execution of that masterpiece of youthful genius,

Gallery, Edinburgh)

the Margaret Calderwood of 1735. The first of these, Mary Campbell of Lochlane (Plate 19),

' i- a'SWJ:1

wm

I

1

ALLAN RAMSAY

26

which is signed and dated 1736, seems to reflect a renewed study of Aikman; the other (Plate 21), a portrait of Katie Hall, the daughter of Sir James Hall of Dunglass and afterwards the wife of the poet William Hamilton of Bangour, already foreshadows in its combination of intimacy of characterization and decorative charm the more familiar works from Ramsay’s first few years of practice in London. Although he was not fully acquainted with Cunyngham’s circumstances, Ramsay had every cause to share a fellow-feeling with his friend, for he had himself come to an understanding with the girl he was eventually to marry. Anne Bayne (Plates 22, 58), the daughter of a Law professor at Edinburgh and the great-granddaughter of the eminent Scottish architect Sir William Bruce of Kinross, did not become his wife for another three years, but during the period of his studies in Italy he was already referring to her as his ‘Rib’ and his ‘Spouse’. Unfortunately the Bayne family papers are silent upon the cir¬ cumstances of Ramsay’s coming to know her and of his courtship. Soon after his arrival in London Ramsay began what was to be a long and intimate association with Dr Richard Mead (Plates 20, 61), the celebrated physician and con¬ noisseur.

He probably owed the introduction to Sir John Clerk, an acquaintance of

Mead’s. Mead now supplied him with letters of recommendation for Italy. He also took the opportunity to commission him to purchase on his behalf, in Rome, a rare book of drawings by the Italian engraver and antiquarian Pietro Santi Bartoli after ancient wallpaintings and mosaics in the Massimi collection.48 It was a flattering assignment, and when the task proved more onerous than could have been expected, involving at one stage a ride on horseback of a hundred and forty miles, Ramsay made light of it by saying that it was ‘una cosa di niente to oblige so worthy a gentleman’.49 On his return from Italy Ramsay was to become the youngest member of Dr Mead’s exclusive dining club, and so of his closest circle of learned friends, and, above all, to benefit from Mead’s generous patronage. Sir John Clerk was himself taking a personal interest in Ramsay’s fortunes, and it was through him that Ramsay and Cunyngham obtained an introduction to another influential connoisseur and man of learning, the antiquary and classicist Alexander Gordon, who had travelled widely on the Continent and had acquired an exhaustive knowledge of the antiquities of Rome, besides evincing a range of talents embracing musical ability, portrait painting and dramatic composition. After receiving the two friends, who had made a very favourable impression upon him, Gordon assured Clerk: ‘You may depend on it there shall be nothing within my power to serve them in but I shall execute’.1" Much of the time that Ramsay spent in London prior to his departure for Italy is likely to have been occupied with similar introductions. It was undoubtedly in exceptionally favourable circumstances of support and interest that on 24 July 1736 he set out with his companion in the coach to Dover.

CHAPTER TWO

First Visit to Italy: 1736-1738 1 lie outlines of Ramsay’s journey to Italy, and something of his life during his first few months in Rome, are known to us from a journal kept by his travelling-companion, who remained with him in Rome until March 1737.1 From this we learn that Ramsay and Cunyngham reached Paris on 30 July (1736), and that on 6 August they were at the Palais du Luxembourg admiring Rubens’s great series of paintings (now in the Louvre) of The History of Marie de Medicis. The next day they availed themselves of an introduction to the Cardinal de Polignac, who showed them his unique collection of ancient statues. They then made the customary outing to Versailles; but here the diarist preferred to dwell, not on the fine collection of pictures within the palace, but on the famous gardens. These they found too artificial, showy and expensive for their perhaps typically Scottish tastes, only the statuary of Girardon pleasing them. At some lime before leaving Paris Ramsay seems to have received from Pierre-Jean de Mariette, the publisher and bookseller, letters of introduction to the directors of the Florentine Academy and the Academie frangaise in Rome.2 On 29 August the two friends resumed their travels, reaching Lyons after a journey of ten days. Much travel in the eighteenth century was made by water, one of the advantages being the avoidance of the physical discomfort occasioned by the motion of a carriage upon rough roads; and on the first leg of their journey south to Lyons Ramsay and Cunyngham availed themselves of one of the horse-drawn water-coaches that were in service on the Seine — a very attractive and popular mode of transport, as was evidenced on this occasion by the crowding of the vessel by a large company of various nationalities, French, Italian, Swiss and English, comprising priests, monks, an English abbot, merchants, soldiers, sailors and a group of elderly ladies. After leaving the water-coach on 31 August, they arrived the next day at Auxerre, where on 2 September, a Sunday, they set out by diligence for Chalon, in the company of some of the previous party, including a bodyguard named Blanchette - ‘a true lively Frenchman’, to whose cheerful presence Cunyngham attributed the fact that they ‘ate, drank, sang and slept well’. On the road they encountered another Frenchman who had previously travelled some of the way with them, and ‘who received and entertained us with the best wines of the place . . . , out of his own vineyard’. At this period of his life we may suppose that Ramsay had not yet developed his strong aversion to wine: even in his middle forties he informed Mrs Montagu, on a visit to Edinburgh, that he had been indulging in ‘much drinking with David Hume and his associates’ - a description that hardly suggests a round of tea-parties. After a resumption of travel by water, they reached Lyons on 8 September, where they remained for five days before continuing their journey by carriage to Marseilles, by way of Aix. For a while a profusion of lavender and rosemary growing on the road, and crushed by the carriage-wheels, filled the air of a summer’s day with a delightful fragrance. On 15 September they were in Marseilles and admiring the busy life of that centre of NearEastern trade, and not least the splendid garments and turbans worn by the Persian, Egyptian and Turkish merchants at the Exchange. By contrast, however, they were oppressed by the sight in the port of a number of galley-slaves, mostly Turkish, ‘two and two chained together, some of them gentlemen formerly of great condition’.

ALLAN RAMSAY

28

The next immediate destination was Antibes, and they decided to board one of the little tartanes which plied the Mediterranean coast; but so uncomfortable was the accom¬ modation, especially as the weather had become oppressively hot, and so slow the progress of the vessel, that they asked to be put ashore at Cannes, so that they could make their way to Antibes on foot. The walk took them through a countryside filled with vines, almonds, figs and pomegranates. The same day they went on to Nice, pressing on to Genoa after a night’s stay made wretched by the attentions of mosquitoes and ‘not a few buggs into the bargain’. Worse was to follow in Genoa, where they took apartments at an inn called the Croce di Malta. On their first evening, after a carousal with some French and Spanish officers, they were lighted to their rooms by a servant who was found on the following morning to have stolen fourteen louis-d’ors from Cunyngham’s pocket. When the culprit was discovered by the landlord gambling with the money, he confessed his guilt and was sentenced to the galleys for life. They had reached Genoa on 21 September, and they put up there for a week: one attraction would have been the opportunity of seeing Van Dyck’s noble series of portraits of Genoese patricians, such as those to be found, for example, in the Cataneo, Raggio and Rosso Palaces, but whether Ramsay and Cunyngham had the entry to such collections we are not told. In the meantime the two travellers had been joined by a somewhat disreputable countryman, a parson named Benjamin Smith who was to be remembered by them in after years in joking allusions in their corres¬ pondence. Smith took pride in being a nephew of Sir Isaac Newton, and he had published Newton’s curious Commentary on Daniel, being in possession of the manuscript. But having dissipated

a small

fortune inherited from

his eminent

uncle,

he had

developed

an

unashamed propensity for borrowing money, seldom repaid, from all and sundry, as Ramsay learned to his cost when, after his arrival in Italy, he was unwise enough to lend him twenty crowns, never to see his money again. Smith’s motive in taking Holy Orders had been to secure a reasonable income, just as in dedicating the Commentary on Daniel to the Lord Chancellor he had hoped for some lucrative preferment; in which, however, he was disappointed. When Ramsay and Cunyngham made plans to undertake the next stage of their journey by sea, Smith invited himself along - a circumstance which the two friends interpreted as an evil omen. What followed was dramatic. Setting sail for Leghorn in a felucca (a small coasting vessel combining lateen sails and oars) on what was to prove a perilous voyage, they at first enjoyed calm seas, but a threatening storm unexpectedly blew up at night which left the boat tossing helplessly with its rudder broken and its crew overcome by panic. By the morning few on board nursed any hopes of survival. Ramsay, who was a strong swimmer, stripped, like most of the others on board, in expectation of having to swim for his life: Cunyngham, on the other hand, being unable to swim at all, prepared for the worst, but not before distributing among the crewmen what flasks of wine he could find in the holds, and bidding them, in a short speech in Italian, to have courage. Deeply moved by his own eloquence and sang-froid, Cunyngham turned finally to his ‘friend and dear travellingcompanion, Mr Allan Ramsay’, entrusting to his care his gold watch and rings. These he asked the painter to deliver to his wife (though even now not referring to her as such) if he were to swim to safety, and Ramsay gallantly fastened them to his arms. Concluding that he could do no more, the brave doctor then wrapped himself in an old sail, by way of a winding-sheet, and resigned himself to death, bidding his companions farewell and con¬ tinuing to call out ‘Courage, courage!’ to the sailors. The situation of all aboard would have been still more perilous if the advice of the Revd Mr Smith had been taken: the nephew of Sir Isaac Newton was regrettably unversed in the science of either optics or astronomy, and was urging the captain of the vessel to steer towards two stars above the horizon, having convinced himself that they were the lights of Leghorn. It required no such intervention to add to the general apprehension of disaster, and the moving farewell uttered by the captain’s little son to his mother and sister at home, together with the

FIRST VISIT TO ITALY: 1736-1738

29

supplications offered up to their saints by the oarsmen, reflected the expectations of all, although in actuality relief was near at hand. The sea by this time was ‘mountains high’: but suddenly the wind changed direction and blew towards the Italian coast; the felucca was swept violently ashore, a short distance from Pisa, every one getting safely to dry land. Afterwards Ramsay declared that Cunyngham had saved their lives by his presence of mind, and that, when things came to the worst, he ‘seemed to die like Socrates in his last moments’. The travellers now made their way to Leghorn by road, and from thence to Florence, where they were to remain for a fortnight. Dr Mead had given Cunyngham a letter of introduction to the Grand Duke’s physician, by whose good offices they were presented to the keeper of the Ducal Palace (the Uffizi): there Ramsay took the opportunity of making drawings of the Venus de’ Medici and the statues of Augustus and Cicero. It was during this brief stay in Florence that he first made the acquaintance of Horace Mann (then secretary to the British Resident, whom he was shortly to succeed, filling the office with exceptional distinction for almost fifty years): Ramsay probably renewed his contacts with Mann on all his subsequent visits to Italy, and certainly was much in his company during his final visit, undertaken in the last years of his life. On 21 October Ramsay and Cunyngham left Florence for Rome. They arrived five days later, and took lodgings in the fashionable Piazza di Spagna. The usual round of sight¬ seeing followed. Like the young Reynolds many years later, Ramsay was at first dis¬ appointed by the Stanze of Raphael: at this time his attention was drawn more to the antique - a predilection to be modified some two decades afterwards in a remarkable questioning of received taste, - and Cunyngham records his own study with Ramsay of such famous antiquities as the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol hill and the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican. (Ramsay was to adapt the pose of the Apollo to his fulllength of the Chief of MacLeod (Plate 63) of about 1747.) On another occasion the two friends were taken on a tour of the walls of Rome by Andrew Hay, the well-known picturedealer and collector of ‘virtu’, who as a fellow Scot now began to show an interest in Ramsay’s progress. Not a great deal is known about Ramsay’s master in Rome, Francesco Imperiali;3 but in his own day he enjoyed great popularity as a painter of religious and classical subjects, as well as being in occasional demand for portraits. He was born Francesco Fernandi, but adopted the name of his patron Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali (or Imperiale). Although he was not the most original of painters, his manner is pleasing and founded on refined drawing and a cultivated feeling for design and colour. While Alexander Clerk, shortly after joining Ramsay in Rome, confessed to not quite liking Imperiali’s style, he acknowledged that he was widely considered the best painter in the city, there being ‘no other so good’.4 In fact there is abundant testimony to Imperiali’s reputation in the number of pupils whom he attracted, whether from Italy, France or Britain. Now in his late fifties, Imperiali was a likeable man - ‘a person of great humanity, probity and honour’, as the painter James Russel described him,6 - and was known for the conscientiousness and thoroughness of his teaching. On Sundays and holy days, he made a point of conducting his pupils round the churches and palaces of Rome, offering his observations, as Cunyngham records,

upon all the best pieces of painting, statuary and

architecture in and about the city of Rome, from Raphael, Michael Angelo and Bernini downwards to that time’. Nothing is known of Ramsay’s personal relationship with his master in Rome, but his possessions at his death included a portrait-drawing ol Imperiali (now

assumed

to

be

a

self-portrait).7

Clearly

Ramsay

was

profoundly

indebted

to

Imperiali’s teachings and to the example offered by his elegant interpretation of the Late Baroque style and by his refined technical procedure. The evidence nevertheless suggests that it was one of Imperiali’s former pupils, the Lucchese history and portrait painter Pompeo Batoni, who more decisively influenced

ALLAN RAMSAY

30

Ramsay’s artistic development during his two years in Rome. Soon after settling there, Batoni had proved himself to be the most gifted painter in the city, later becoming the portraitist most sought after by English milords and others making their Grand Tour. He was now, at the age of twenty-eight, well established in Rome; and that Ramsay had the entry to his studio is suggested by a copy by him in chalks (Plate 23), datable to this period, of one of Batoni’s meticulous studies of hands.8 The lasting esteem in which Ramsay held Batoni is indicated moreover not only by his having continued to make copies after him on his return to Italy nearly twenty years later, and by what he took from him in developing his late style, but also by the fact that, during his final Italian visit at the end of his life, he arranged for the now aged Roman master to give drawing lessons to his fourteen-year-old son. It is very apparent that at the time of his early studies in Rome the luminous clarity and consummate polish of Batoni’s style made a profound impression upon him: the half-length portrait of his friend Samuel Torriano (Plate 25), painted in Rome in 1738, is virtually an exercise in Batoni’s manner,9 and the study in chalks (Plate 24) for Torriano’s gesturing right hand shows how thoroughly Ramsay had adopted his drawing-style.

It is not a long step from the Baroque flourish of the Torriano to its

assimilation to the English portrait tradition in some of the portraits painted by Ramsay shortly after he had opened his practice in London, such as the delightful Agnes MurrayKynynmond Dalrymple (Plate 44), painted in the following year, where artifice and Nature appear to be held in equipoise. One of Imperiali’s current pupils,

the young landscape painter Camillo

Paderni,

became Ramsay’s particular friend in Rome. Paderni had already begun to specialize in Italian scenes with classical ruins in the tradition of Gaspar Dughet, and Cunyngham himself took home from Italy a painting by him of the legendary site of Horace’s villa near Licenza10 — the precise location of which was in later years to engage Ramsay’s own scholarly attention.11

On his appointment in

1751

as keeper of the Portici museum,

Paderni was responsible for the future direction of the momentous excavations lately begun 23

Studies of hands,

after Pompeo Batoni, c. 1737-38 (National

at Herculaneum. Not long after Ramsay’s return to England, Paderni communicated to him, in two letters of November 1739 and February 1740, detailed accounts of the ancient

Gallery of Scotland,

frescoes that had been brought to light: these Ramsay immediately published in transla¬

Edinburgh)

tion in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.12

24

Hellenistic art and to countless visitors to Naples; but around the year 1740 they came as a

The frescoes described by Paderni are now familiar to every student of Roman and Study for the portrait

of Samuel Torriano, Rome, 1738 (National

revelation, offering entirely new insights into the nature of ancient painting, and Paderni

Gallery of Scotland,

did not disguise his own excitement at setting eyes for the first time on works that had

Edinburgh)

been buried for centuries. His description of the scene of Theseus and the Minotaur, one of the best known of the compositions, is representative of the enthusiasm that informed his communications to Ramsay as a whole, and which prompted comparisons with the works of the most celebrated masters of past time: And were you to see them you would by surprised, as much as I was; for you would see paintings finished to the highest pitch, coloured to perfection, and as fresh as if they had been done a month ago - particularly one piece, eight palms by nine high, the figures as big as the life, representing Theseus after having killed the Minotaur, which is wonder¬ fully fine. You see the figure of Theseus naked and standing; which in my opinion cannot be properly resembled to anything than the Antinous of the Belvidera, both for the attitude and air of the head. It is drawn and coloured with prodigious elegance. The Greek boys, who are represented as returning him thanks for their deliverance, seem for

25

Samuel Torriano,

their noble simplicity the work of Domenichino, and the composition of the whole is worthy of Raphael.

Rome, 1738 (Collection of the Earl of Haddington,

By his publication of these extracts from Paderni’s letters Ramsay placed himself, as the

Mellerstain)

agent of public knowledge concerning such important discoveries, in the forefront of

26

Academy drawing of a male model,

Rome, 1737 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

antiquarian scholarship — a position recognized by Dr Mead’s invitation to him to join his private club of cognoscenti, among whom classical scholars and antiquaries were prominent. In addition to studying under Imperiali, Ramsay regularly attended the prestigious Academic franqaise, to which he was admitted some three weeks after his arrival in Rome. The Academy was then under the direction of Nicolas Vleughels13 (whose wife, Marie Therese Gosset, was the sister-in-law of Panini). A pupil of Mignard, Vleughels had been in his early days a close friend of the ailing Watteau. It is of some interest that Watteau’s famous Fetes Venitiennes in Edinburgh, in which the oriental dancer in the foreground is a portrait of Vleughels, is recorded as having been owned by General John Ramsay, the painter’s son.14 Whether he or his father purchased the picture, the identity of the exotic figure would presumably have been known. It had been due to Vleughels that the Academie Jranqaise was moved from less adequate accommodation in the Palazzo Capranica to the magnificent Palazzo Mancini, which under his supervision was refurnished in sumptuous style and filled with works of art of all kinds — from the Gobelin tapestries adorning the walls to Old Master paintings and students’

copies,

plaster casts of ancient sculptures,

antique vases and portfolios of

drawings. As Ramsay expressed it in thanking Mariette for his letter of recommendation, the French Academy had ‘dried up the fairest springs of Italy and collected them in such good order, that one might say that it [was] at the French Academy alone that Youth [could] profit in the study of the fine arts’. Ramsay and Cunyngham had called upon Vleughels at the Palazzo Mancini on the evening of 15 November (1736), and had presented their letters of recommendation. Cunyngham records that the Director received them ‘very politely’ and showed them ‘some very elegant compositions’

(presumably the work of his students). They were

introduced at once to the Fife Class, where a male model was posing by lamplight, and where they both remained to draw for some two hours. There can be no doubt that Ramsay placed special value upon the exceptional amenities provided by the French

FIRST VISIT TO ITALY: 1736-1738

33

Academy, where he was to return to draw during his second visit to Italy of 1754-57. A number of life-drawings made by him at the Academy during the period of his early studies in Rome have survived (Plate 26), all of them of the male model.1’ While lacking the refinement of his mature drawing-style, these exercises demonstrate especially his concern to achieve clarity in the definition of form and to master anatomical structure. The latter requirement was to be attained no less by the scrutiny of antique sculpture than by observation of the living model — an aspect of an artist’s training comically alluded to at this time by a mutual acquaintance of Ramsay and Cunyngham, John Horn, or Horn Dalrymple (the son of the famous Scottish judge Lord Drummore), whom they had encountered during their stay in Paris. John Horn was on his way to Naples in the vain quest of a cure for consumption, and teasingly suggested to Cunyngham, in a letter written from Leghorn, that Ramsay’s study ot the antique would have given him a knowledge of human anatomy superior to that acquired by the doctor himself in the course of his medical training. This observation

he conveyed in a communication to Cunyngham

otherwise devoted largely to pathetic reflections upon his own condition and to brave expressions of his hope of recovery: This I suppose may find you & Allan in deep meditation upon some Antique or other ... I suppose Allan by this time will have convinc’d you that you understand nothing of anatomy, for I reckon he has so study’d the position of all the parts, the turn for example of the hipps, the wrinkles of the privy parrs, he will have so study’d them I say, in Stone, that I reckon his system of Anatomy will be better than yours who only studyed in deceiving flesh; now there you are beat out of your Mistress & physick. . . ,16 But Ramsay’s time in Rome was very far from being confined to the usual round of study. Naturally there was much to explore in the city, with visits to St Peter’s, to S. Giovanni Laterano (where one Sunday morning he accompanied Cunyngham to High Mass) and to other churches, to the Capitol, the Colosseum and the Vatican Library, together with leisurely walks with Cunyngham or Paderni in the Borghese Gardens and elsewhere; and there were evenings spent at the theatre and at concerts, or in dinner engagements with various friends. A less agreeable distraction offered itself when they witnessed the decapitation by guillotine (a version, apparently, of the ancient Scottish instrument of execution known as ‘the maiden’) of an abbe who had had the temerity, and unwisdom, to write a satire against the Pope and the Camera. As Cunyngham confided to his journal: ‘As we say in Scotland, “Beware to attack the De’il and the Laird’s bairns”.’ Cunyngham had plenty of opportunity to form his own opinion of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome and of the clergy in general (‘dirty, greasy priests’ in his eyes), for he spent much of his time consorting with that part of the Scottish community which consisted of Jacobite exiles and others loyal to the Old Pretender - the Chevalier de St George, - including many adherents of the Catholic faith. He had no sooner arrived in Rome than he sought out the Chevalier’s physician, Dr Wright - scarcely, we may suppose, for the purpose of discussing matters pertaining to their mutual profession of medicine, - and little more than three weeks after his arrival he had invited him to dine with him, when Wright had entertained him to ‘diverting histories’ of the high-spirited Prince Charles Edward (now approaching his sixteenth year), ‘viz., his jumping about among the Pope and Cardinals as it were in play, and of his refusing to kiss his Holiness’s toe’. After dinner that afternoon - a memorable one - Dr Wright took Cunyngham and Ramsay to the Villa Ludovisi, where through his good offices they were presented by Lord Dunbar to the Prince and his younger brother the Duke of York (the future Cardinal). They stayed on to watch the young prince shooting blackbirds in the gardens, while his brother looked on gravely, ‘like a little Philosopher’, impressing Cunyngham by his resemblance to his great-grandfather, King Charles I. A walk in the gardens with Lord Dunbar (a brother of the great Lord Mansfield) dosed a visit marked, it would appear, by a particular warmth of hospitality.

34

ALLAN RAMSAY

Ramsay and his friend were to catch several further glimpses of the Prince and his brother during their excursions in the city. One afternoon they came upon the young Duke of York as he was ‘entertaining himself with some of his comrades at “jumping” whereupon he desired us to partake of his diversion, which we dick. Their compliance would seem to have pleased the boy, for about a week later, on St Andrew’s Day (30 November), he made Cunyngham a present of a St Andrew’s cross. And when Prince Charles’s birthday (on 31 December) was celebrated by a grand ball held at the Corsini Palace, at which the Chevalier himself was present, they were among the privileged guests. As he surveyed the glittering company, a large international assembly dressed in the highest fashion, Cunyngham’s attention was drawn especially to Prince Charles and the Duke of York: none among all this company, he thought, danced with ‘so much spirit as they did; and even the Chevalier, while customarily exhibiting in his countenance ‘a melancholy cast’, appeared that evening ‘very gay and well pleased'. In his later years Ramsay was to be no stranger to the Court of St James, but as a young man of twenty-three he must surely have been thrilled by his admittance to the exalted society surrounding the Stuart claimant to his country’s throne — even if, as it appears, he was not on this particular occasion so distracted by the splendour of the ball as to neglect to turn his eyes upwards to the famous ceiling decorations by Pietro da Cortona. Probably to a large extent in consequence of his friend’s influence, he was being drawn inexorably into an increasingly intimate association with fellow Scots ofjacobite allegiance, as becomes all the clearer when we consider what may be described as the most striking sequel to his first introduction to Prince Charles Edward at the Villa Ludovisi. On departing that evening he had immediately repaired with Cunyngham to ‘the Coffee-house to which Lord Wintoun resorted and several persons of their stamp’; there, Cunyngham tells us, they ‘fell a-singing old Scots songs and were very merry’. The choice of coffee¬ house had scarcely been a fortuitous one: the now elderly Earl of Wintoun was one of the most prominent Jacobites in Rome; he had come out in support of the Pretender during the 1715 Rebellion, and in the light of his leading part in it he was fortunate still to be alive, for having been taken prisoner at Preston he had been condemned to death for his treason - or, more precisely, ‘to be hanged, cut down while alive and disembowelled before his face’; but in consequence of a plea on the part of his counsel to the effect that he was ‘not in his perfect intellectuals’, the sentence had been commuted to life-imprisonment; moreover he had soon afterwards been able to demonstrate sufficient possession of his faculties by sawing through the bars of his prison window and making his escape unnoticed. He had then joined the Chevalier in Rome, where he was elected ‘Great Master’ of a Masonic Lodge in the Strada Paolina largely or exclusively open to declared Jacobites and Stuart sympathizers. He now became one of Cunyngham’s closest acquaint¬ ances, along with other members of the Lodge; and when on 16 March 1737, on the eve of Cunyngham’s departure for England, Ramsay gave him a farewell dinner, the Earl of Wintoun was included, in a large company, as a particularly honoured guest on account of his intimacy with his friend. It was an occasion of mixed happiness and sadness: as Cunyngham put it, ‘As I was to set out the next day . . . , we supped with Mr Ramsay and were very merry till the hour of parting came, when friendly associations arose which affected them all as well as me a good deal’. Cunyngham had dictated his journal late in life to an amanuensis, selecting his material from the draft he had made in the course of his travels with Ramsay in France and Italy; and it is a curious feature both of the journal itself and of his other memoranda - remarked upon towards the end of last century by their editor, the Honourable Mrs Atholl Forbes that he chose to preserve a complete silence upon his personal stance towards the Stuart cause and, not least, the Forty-five Rising. Yet he must have been thought in leading Jacobite circles to be deeply sympathetic, for on the outbreak of the Forty-five he was offered the position, no less, of Private Secretary to Prince Charles Edward, and although he declined the offer it was on his recommendation that his second cousin Andrew

FIRST VISIT TO ITALY: 1736-1738

35

Lumisden was given the appointment. Cunyngham at that time had not yet succeeded to the baronetcy of Prestonheld; but on learning of the Prince’s march to Edinburgh he had gone north from his home in Pembrokeshire, interrupting his medical practice in his anxiety, it is said, over the safety of his widowed mother, who was living in the dowerhouse nearby, a few fields away from the main encampment of the rebel army. The significance of one brief and cryptic statement in his

Italian journal for 27

December 1736 has escaped, apparently, even the attention of his descendants, let alone historians of the period: ‘At night,’ he writes, ‘[I was] introduced to the Free Masons by Lord V intoun’. That is all, and yet this was but the prelude to his admittance six days later, together with Ramsay, to the Lodge over which Wintoun presided as ‘Great Master’. Wh at was totally obscured by the diarist is revealed by the bare records of the Lodge, which inform us that ‘on Wednesday the second of January at the Three Kings, Strada Paolina, was held a true and perfect Lodge, in which were received with all the due forms Alexander Cuningham [Vc] and Allan Ramsay’.17 Cunyngham and Ramsay were present again three weeks later; and on 9 May 1737, after Cunyngham’s departure lor England, Ramsay attended a meeting of the lodge for the last time — that is to say, immediately before the painter left Rome to continue his studies in Naples. It is worthy of notice that William Mosman, his fellow student at the Academy of St Luke in Edinburgh and afterwards a pupil of Imperiali in Rome, had been admitted to the Lodge in 1735. By the end of the year 1737 the Lodge had for some reason ceased to exist, but its memory was preserved by a quarto volume of its minutes which came into the hands of Andrew Lumisden; and it is of some interest that Lumisden subsequently presented it to Sir Alexander Dick, as Dr Cunyngham became known.1" (On the latter’s death, his son, Sir William, entrusted it in 1799 to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir James Stirling, for the purpose of its being placed in the archives of the Grand Lodge of Scotland.) Even after the Forty-five Rising, therefore, we find Sir Alexander Dick being associated with a

Masonic Lodge known to have been intimately connected with the Jacobite

community in Rome — so much so that it came to be believed, although without justifica¬ tion, that

Prince Charles Edward

(then only a boy)

had presided over it ‘as Right

Worshipful Master’ (as William Laurie alleged in his History of Freemasonry and the Grand Lodge of Scotland, published in 1859). It is indeed difficult, in the light of the available evidence - not very extensive, perhaps, but suggestive enough to encourage speculative readings between the lines, — to resist the conclusion that Cunyngham set out in Ramsay’s company for Rome already possessed of sympathetic feelings towards the Stuart cause, but that later on he pushed them to one side, as many Scotsmen of the time are found to have done, whether out of prudence or a change of heart. In this regard the evidence concerning Ramsay’s own attitudes is somewhat slighter. His father’s rather sentimental inclination towards Jacobitism may well have impressed itself upon his youthful mind; but ultimately he made no bones about condemning it outright. His affectionate relationship with his endearing travelling-companion could well have encouraged a sympathetic response to the predilections of a friend of maturer years and experience; and there is a passage in one of his early, enthusiastic letters to Cunyngham that is particularly suggestive. On 10 April 1740 - only three years after he had bidden farewell to his friend in Rome - he wrote this: ‘You must know that I have anticipated the Restoration perhaps half a Century at the expence [sic] of 50 pounds which I have pay’d Dr Wright for his fine picture and I expect its arrival in a few days’.1'1 To ‘anticipate the Restoration’ can mean only one thing - the expectation of the Stuarts’ restoration to the throne of the United Kingdom; and Dr Wright, whom Ramsay had known in Rome, held, after all, the position of physician to the Old Pretender, the selfstyled James III. The fact that payment for the unidentified picture alluded to in the letter was made to Dr Wright suggests that it had a connexion with the court-in-exile; and in that case it is extremely tempting to surmise that the artist was none other than the Court Painter to the Pretender, the Venetian-born Antonio David, not least because his apparent

influence on the formation of Ramsay’s early style, in addition to that of Mosman, implies some personal contact between the two artists. To carry speculation a step further, the one work by David that would meet the case would have been one of the many versions that he produced of his charming portrait of Prince Charles Edward, and which are frequently to be met with in Scotland. Otherwise we seem to have no particular evidence of Jacobite leanings on Ramsay’s part during his early years, apart from his association with the Masonic Lodge in Rome.

28 Francesco Solimena (after): Self-Portrait (Collection of the Author) 29 Archibald, 3rd Duke of Argyll, 1758 (Collection of the Duke of Northumberland)

Horace Walpole was admittedly to claim that Ramsay had originally been a Jacobite, and even went so far as to assert that during the Forty-five he had gone up to Scotland to join the rebel forces but had ‘arrived too late’: but although he was indeed in Edinburgh in the year 1745 he had certainly not ‘arrived too late’, having in fact been present early enough to witness the Young Pretender’s march into the city - soon after which he returned to London. What is clear at any rate from his writings in later life is his absolute loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy and to the terms of the Treaty of Union, which, he declared, should be ‘religiously observed’. But long before then, as a painter patronized by such eminent statesmen as Lord Hardwicke (the Lord High Chancellor) and the 3rd Duke of Argyll (Scotland’s virtual ruler), he must have been fully aware of his duty towards the throne, a duty consistent with all that we know of his thinking in the years of his maturity. In the Summer of 1737 Ramsay (Plate 27) left Rome for Naples in the company of Torriano, in order to enter the studio of the venerable Neapolitan master Francesco Solimena (Plate 28), who was generally recognized as the greatest living Italian painter and may indeed be described as the supreme contemporary exponent of the High Baroque style. Solimena lived in aristocratic style in an elegant house by the Regii Studii which he had designed himself, and delighted in being host to the cream of Neapolitan society. He was known for his witty and bantering conversation, and a younger contemporary said of him: ‘He was agreeable in his raillery, and lively in his repartees, but always kept within the just bounds of decency and good nature’. Ramsay had been recommended to Solimena by an English visitor to Naples, William Bristow, who besides being well connected was a

27 Self-portrait, c. 1 737—39 (National Portrait Gallery, London)

30

Portrait study of a young

man, c. 1737 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) 31

Study after The

Visitation, by Solimena, Naples, 1737 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Fellow of the Royal Society (and subseque

a member of the Society ol Dilettanti), as

well as an occasional guest at Mead’s dining club. Walpole described him as ‘a great pretender to taste’. Bristow was seeking a health cure in the Stufe D’Amico and the Ischia baths, and had taken advantage of his presence in the Kingdom of Naples by approaching the Marchese Renuccini for the purpose of obtaining his influence with Solimena on Ramsay’s behalf.20 Ramsay’s subsequent admission to the studio of the octogenarian painter was something of a privilege, since Solimena now took pupils very rarely, although celebrated for his past devotion to the care of his students. More than that, it was an important event in Ramsay’s training, for he clearly learnt much from Solimena, not least the use of powerful lighting as a modelling agent, such as is found in many of his best portraits of the late 1730s and 1740s. Even in his mid-forties, when he had finally rejected the Baroque idiom of which Solimena was one of the greatest exponents, he adapted the structure of his Neapolitan master’s Self-portrait in the Uflflzi (Plate 28) to a portrait of the 3rd Duke of Argyll (Plate 29). In Naples, Ramsay not only enjoyed the society of many of the English residents, at whose houses he was a welcome guest, but found himself in much demand for portraitdrawings of his hosts, all executed in chalks on blue paper: a highly accomplished drawing of a young man on light blue paper, preserved among the Ramsay drawings in Edinburgh (Plate 30), gives us an idea of the quality of such performances. These, he proudly announced to Cunyngham that August, had gained him ‘great fame’, and Solimena had himself asked to sit to him for a similar drawing. The letter to Cunyngham conveying this information rings out like a paean of triumph as Ramsay reveals his pride in the recognition he was receiving and his joy in his way of life in Naples. It begins with an expression of the affection in which he always continued to hold the companion of his early travels: Dear Doctor, - Next to the happiness of being actually with our friends in London it gives me the greatest pleasure to hear that it has fallen to your share, since it is never lost what a friend gets, and that you are such to me it is not time now to doubt. I have had a thousand instances of it which I reflect upon with infinite pleasure, as I do on the many diverting hours I have enjoyed in your company - not without flattering myself with the like whenever fortune shall order our meeting. I presume you have received

FIRST VISIT TO ITALY: 1736-1738

39

before this time a letter which I wrote you from Naples; so I need not tell you the manner ol my coming hither. I live vastly agreeably, having the best opportunity of studying under Solimena, and when I have any spare time I am always welcome to several English houses here, particularly Sir John Shadwell’s, with which the addition of the Consul’s family makes a very pretty society of friends. I have done 6 portraits finished upon blue paper for them, which have gained me great fame, and the approbation of Solimena, who has desired me to do one for him. I have over and above been writing sonnets and odes and epigrams with like success; so you may believe I am not looked upon here as a useless member of society — Solimena is employed to paint a hymeneal ceiling against the King’s marriage, which is looked for some time next winter. . . ,21 Further light is cast upon Ramsay’s standing with his master in Naples by a detailed chalk study by him (Plate 31) ol one of the figures in a painting by Solimena of The Visitation ~~ executed in Solimena’s own house."'5 Andrew Flay understood that Solimena had actually sat to him for a portrait in oils, but he may have been under a mis¬ apprehension. Hay was gratified by all that had been reported to him of Ramsay: as he later put it in a letter to Sir John Clerk, ‘I hear a very good account of young Allan Ramsay by every body that knew him abroad’.24 He went on to mention Dr Mead’s impatience for Ramsay’s return on the successful completion of his commission for the purchase of the Santi Bartoli drawings. The impression made upon Solimena by his young Scots pupil was enthusiastically conveyed by Bristow to an acquaintance who was visiting Italy and was now at Bologna. This was John Clephane, a distinguished Scottish doctor who served in early life with the British forces in the Low Countries, and who is also remembered as a friend of David Hume. Bristow told Clephalie that his ‘scheme’ for Ramsay had ‘succeeded beyond expectation’, and he continued: He is not only the first of our Country that Solimena wou’d ever receive, but he is in great favour with him. The Marquis Renuccini did this service for me immediately & in the handsomest manner. I have advised Ramsey [sic] to take all the advantage of this lucky hour in which we found Solimena, & he stays at Naples the whole summer. Thus I’m in hopes to have had a hand in forming one good Painter for our Country.25 On 1 October 1737 Ramsay returned to Rome, accompanied by his friend Torriano, who was also to travel with him as far as Lyons on his journey back to London in the following spring. Meanwhile Ramsay had received a request from George Turnbull, the antiquary and religious writer, to secure Paderni’s services for the provision of illustrations to his pioneering Treatise on Ancient Painting (published in 1740).2,1 The high expectations aroused by Turnbull’s scholarship may be judged from the number of distinguished subscribers to the volume, who included such members of the aristocracy as the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Atholl, the Earl of Bute, Lord Cathcart, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Hardwicke, the Earl of Haddington and the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry; among connoisseurs and men of learning, William Bristow, Sir James Dalrymple, Martin Folkes, Richard Mead and William Wyndham. Others included Ramsay’s friends Alexander Cunyngham and the Honourable George Baillie, his early patron the Honourable Charles Hope, and the architect William Adam. The Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh was also a subscriber. In consequence of his approach to Ramsay, Turnbull was enabled to embellish his text with engravings after drawings by Paderni of ancient works in various private collections in Italy, as well as further plates after the Santi Bartoli drawings, which Ramsay had by then succeeded in purchasing for Dr Mead. Ramsay’s dual connexion with this important publication exemplifies once more the noteworthy position in which he now found himself in the scholarly world. Nor was Turnbull the only literary figure of eminence who sought such assistance from him: another was James Thomson, the poet of The Seasons and himself a subscriber to the

Treatise. Thomson, like Ramsay, had left his native

Scotland for London, and was enjoying a European fame. Thomson now intimated to

ALLAN RAMSAY

40

Ramsay his desire to obtain drawings of some half-dozen ancient paintings and sculptures, and these Paderni agreed to undertake.'7 4 homson s request is of particular interest in the light of modern critical opinion on the sources of his poetic imagery, in which the strong influence of pictorial art on this poet of Nature has been detected. As Andrew Hay had intimated to Sir John Clerk, by the time of his return to England Ramsay had made a favourable impression upon a wide circle of cognoscenti. He had attracted the interest of men of great influence in the sphere of the arts and in the world of learning alike; and it was of no small advantage to him that his beginnings as a painter coincided with a notable rise of Scottish influence within the cultural life of Great Britain. His early success in London, as Vertue observed, was likewise to owe much to the patronage of his fellow countrymen - itself all the more available, in consequence of the Union of 1707, on account of the frequent presence in the English capital of great Scottish families, Representative Peers and Members of Parliament for Scottish constituencies. By April

1738 Ramsay was impatient to return home.

On

the 6th

he wrote to

Cunyngham in London informing him of his intention to set off in ten days’ time. The letter begins with an allusion to his negotiations in respect of Dr Mead’s commission regarding the book of Santi Bartoli drawings, the conclusion of which had been slightly delayed: I should have answered your most agreeable letter sooner had I been able to bring Dr Mead’s commission to a point: which has been protracted by the tender’s having broke his leg in the country. So that I was obliged to ride 140 miles for an eclaircissement; but that I reckon una cosa di niente29 to oblige so worthy a gentleman ... In ten days I hope to have the book delivered and to turn my nose towards the land of liberty and roast beef: te, dulcis amice, reviset cum strawberries si concedes, et gooseberry prima. There is one thing in your letter which I could wish altered, where you speak of a rural repose. Had you not better exert yourself where you are and where people make a great figure with half your capacity? Then send for your Rib, as I shall for mine, and make a Clermiston at Richmond.30 Cunyngham had settled upon Pembrokeshire for a permanent residence, and was not to comply with Ramsay’s advice concerning the superior advantages of London. He had apparently now broken the news of his marriage, prompting an understandable complaint from the painter in the same letter: ‘A proposito,’ Ramsay added, ‘was it well done to keep your marriage so long a secret from me, who have always shared so sensibly in your happiness?’ The letter ends with an account of his plans for his journey back to England and with greetings to mutual friends - and especially ‘all lovers of common sense and the Virtu’. Torriano was to accompany him as far as Lyons. They were to travel first to Venice, where Ramsay wished to study Titian and Veronese, and then to go on to Bologna to see the work of the Carracci. Their route thence was to be through Modena, Parma, Milan and Turin, and then, in Ramsay’s phrase, ‘over the Alps as hard as we can drive’. Together with his baggage he had meanwhile sent home by sea several pieces of antique terracotta, and his acquisitions included a Tuscan vase ‘of a mighty pretty form’. By the early summer he was back in ‘the land of liberty and roast beef’. How high Ramsay’s reputation stood at this time, immediately prior to his setting-up as a portrait painter in London, is indicated by a letter from Alexander Gordon to Sir John Clerk, dated 29 June 1738. ‘Young Allan Ramsay is in Town,’ he wrote, adding that he had seen the Santi Bartoli drawings; and he had also seen a head of young Allan’s painting from nature, coloured in the manner of Solimene [Ac], that quite surprized me. If he is equal to that in every other portrait he does, I pronounce him the best face painter in Britain.31 Lor the next twenty years and more — that is to say, until his younger English rival Joshua Reynolds eventually established his reputation as an artist of superior genius - Ramsay was fully to justify Gordon’s discerning judgment.

CHAPTER THREE

The First Style and Success in London:

1738-1751 Ramsay has set up his London practice by August 1738, having taken apartments in the Great Piazza on the north side of Covent Garden (Plate 32) - a residential quarter popular among artists.1 At about the same time, he enrolled at the new academy in St Martin’s Lane which had been established three years earlier by Hogarth, continuing there to draw from the life. He thus joined himself to the most progressive and influential circle of artists in England — the group from which the principal promoters of a national academy under royal patronage were to emerge. He would have had little time after his return from Italy in June to pay a visit to Edinburgh to see his parents and his four sisters — Janet, Catherine, Cecilia and Annie (the poet’s only other surviving children). The journey by stage-coach, it should be remembered, took about a fortnight, by mail-coach slightly less. The time involved could, however, be considerably reduced by making the journey on horseback, and Ramsay was a practised rider. Although no such visit to Scotland is recorded, there would have been an additional reason for it in the person of his future wife, Anne Bayne, who was living with her widowed mother in Edinburgh. Notwithstanding Vertue’s impression that his progress was at first slow,2 Ramsay undoubtedly attained very early success in his profession; and on 22 August his father was able to write to a friend: ‘I hear from my son that he is going on well in his Business’.’ He added that his son received ‘8 Guineas a head’, besides enjoying ‘the friendship of the Best and a rising reputation’. Some two months later the poet was congratulating himself that he was now relieved of the need to lend his son any financial support.4 The ‘eight guineas a head’ was a good price for a bust-length portrait by a young painter in this period, and it was three guineas more than what Reynolds was to charge on settling in London fifteen

32

j. Abaurer: A

Perspective View of Covent Garden looking west, 1751 (Department of Prints and Drawings, Crace Collections, British Museum, London)

ALLAN RAMSAY

42

years later, although Reynolds increased his charge to twelve guineas before two years had passed. ’ The latter figure was the same that Ramsay was asking within a year or two of his setting up practice. The impression made on Ramsay’s contemporaries by the portraits which he painted during his first few months in London can be gauged from the lurther praises heaped upon him by Alexander Gordon, which are all the more telling for apparently reflecting the general opinion. Gordon was writing to Sir John Clerk, in early December 1738, and his theme was young Allan Ramsey [sic], whom I venture to call one of the first rate portrait painters in London, nay I may say Europe, for only one young man, an Italian, excepted, I sincerely know not his equall in the Island of Britain, in which tis not my own opinion, but that of all the conosseurs [rzV] in London. In fine, he will soon get an estate here.*’

The young Italian was presumably Andrea Soldi, who had been in England for some three years. His cultured style, earning him a leading place among the London portrait painters, made him a worthy competitor. Within another fifteen months, however, Ramsay felt able to include him among those foreign rivals whom he claimed to have 'pm to flight , the others being the eminent Jean-Baptiste Vanloo and the not much less popular Francesco Carlo Rusca/ The success enjoyed in London by these three painters from abroad has about it a kind of ring of inevitability. From the time of Holbein onwards, painting in England had been dominated by the presence of foreign artists who had found no great difficulty, on account of the general ineffectualness of indigenous competition, in establishing themselves in their adopted country as the most esteemed painters of their day. The prestige enjoyed by foreign portrait painters during the hundred years or so preceding Ramsay’s own times is reflected most obviously in the knighthoods which successive British monarchs bestowed upon Van Dyck, Eely and Kneller (the last of whom was even advanced to a baronetcy). It may also be noted that in Scotland the Spanish emigre John Medina had been knighted in 1707 - over a decade before the same accolade was accorded to James Thornhill, the first English painter to be so honoured, although not as a portraitist but as a decorator in the grand manner. To emphasize the significance of such marks of royal favour, and of such proofs of high social and artistic standing, may simplify history, but is not false to it; and it is in the same light that we can appreciate the importance, both symbolic and actual, of the knighthood conferred upon Reynolds in 1769; for that honour, awarded to the first President of the newly founded Royal Academy, on the eve of the first of its annual exhibitions, marked the fulfilment at last of the dreams of that earlier generation of artists who had been passionately united (notwithstanding Hogarth’s personal reservations about academies based on the French model) in their determination to see native achievement accorded national recognition. The state of portraiture in London as Ramsay found it in 1738 exhibited a general mediocrity which only a handful of British painters can be said to have risen above. Among these, Jonathan

Richardson, whose theoretical writings,

more than his own

immaculate art, profoundly influenced the taste of the period, had developed a sensitive style of unaffected simplicity: Richardson was revered in his day as the most distinguished among the older generation of British portraitists, and his pupils included Knapton and Hudson; but he was now on the verge of retirement, as he announced in December 1740 (although he did not comply with the intention to the letter). Charles Jervas, as Principal Painter to both the first two Georges, and thereby Kneller’s successor, nominally held the supreme position among his contemporaries, and had had the advantage of an Italian training; but he remained no more than a competent imitator of Kneller, his master; and he was to die in November 1739. The same year also saw the death, from the effects of habitual debauchery, of the much more gifted John Vanderbank, whose formal full-length

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

1738-1751

43

of Queen Caroline of 1736 (at Goodwood) possesses a sort of latent vivacity surprising in State portraiture of the first half of the century, and gives a hint of what he might have achieved if he had lived, or had lived better. Meanwhile the fashionable Dahl seems to have given up painting a few years before his death, in October 1743, in extreme old age; and no works after 1739 by his artistic heir, Ramsay’s own master Hans Hysing, are at present known, although Hysing lived on into the 1750s - probably ending his days in the honourable retirement which many artists in the eighteenth century, no less than members of other professions (including men of letters), considered to be their due. Clearly we must look elsewhere for Ramsay’s serious competitors during his first few years in London. In his famous boast of April 1740 he was already claiming to be playing ‘the first fiddle’ himself; but the rivals whom he took such pride in vanquishing were not his British contemporaries but three fashionable foreigners. Vanloo had settled in London in 1737, Soldi in the previous year, and Rusca (after a brief earlier visit) in 1738. The first two in particular had immediately established for themselves a wide reputation for society portraits, whose appeal must have lain largely in their cosmopolitan air. Although Vanloo’s success was ascribed by Vertue, at least in part, to his concern for ‘likeness . . . without flattery’, there is a hardness about his style, and an element of contrivance in his compositions, that give his portraits a somewhat stilted character out of tune with the spirit of the new age, with its growing taste for a less formal and more vital presentation of the sitter. Nevertheless the commissions he received from such patrons as Sir Robert Walpole, the Princess of Wales and numerous members of the aristocracy made him a rival for the hand of high patronage who could not be ignored by any newcomer to the scene seeking a place for himself in what was one of the most uncertain and competitive of professions. Soldi, by contrast, was a painter of rare natural talent, an exemplary draughtsman and a refined colourist. His preference for modest designs, unaffected poses and directness of characterization brings him far closer to the progressive impulses of British portraiture of the period, while the subtlety of his modelling of his sitters’ features — an accomplishment essential, after all, to genuine excellence in portrait painting - was matched by very few of his British contemporaries. Among these — apart from Ramsay himself — only Richardson, Knapton, Hogarth, Highmore and Richard Wilson come readily to mind. Although there were numerous portrait painters working in London at the time of Ramsay’s arrival, it is difficult to think that he would have considered many of them as serious rivals; and among the more successful we may pass over such secondary figures as John Giles Eccardt, Thomas Gibson, Edward Penny (who came into his own much later), Charles Philips, Arthur Pond, John Robinson and Hamlet Winstanley; while the gifted George Beare, Thomas Bardwell and William Hoare worked entirely or largely outside London. When we turn our eyes higher, we find that the field is surprisingly small. Hogarth, the greatest genius of the age, stood apart: he had made his name by his engravings, by his invention of the Comic History, and by his conversation-pieces, but had only lately, and irregularly, turned to single portraiture on the scale of life; there were no signs that his frankly plebeian and highly personal style would ever attract a fashionable clientele; and his superlative achievements in portraiture, of which the full-length of Thomas Coram of 1740 (Plate 34), the Graham Children of 1742 and David Garrick and his Wife of 1757 were to remain the absolute masterpieces, still lay in the future. Such earlier works as the Duke of Cumberland, the Thomas Western and the seated full-length of Benjamin Hoadly had all been on a small scale; and neither the later Hoadly, at three-quarter length, nor the Coram itself, great portraits though these are, brought Hogarth nearer to the central founts of patronage. It was one thing to possess genius, and quite another, in early eighteenthcentury England, to aspire as a portrait painter to the favour of society. In two of his own publications, the essay On Ridicule and the Dialogue on Taste, Ramsay extols Hogarth as a painter of Comic Histories and the contemporary scene: if he had praised him equally for his portraits, it is questionable how many of his readers would have understood him.

33

Patrick Lindsay, 1739

That is not by any means to suggest that Ramsay was indifferent to Hogarth’s achieve¬

(Collection of the Duke of

ments as a portrait painter. In fact the contrary is true. Even in some of his very early

Atholl)

works, such as the Patrick Lindsay (Plate 33) of 1739,8 we can detect a definite hint of

34

William Hogarth:

Captain Thomas Coram,

Hogarth’s influence in the sheer forthrightness and frank realism of the portraiture; and by 1753, when the two painters had grown closer to one another, there can be no doubt about

1740 (The Thomas

Hogarth’s part in the radical change of direction in Ramsay’s style, even if, in the process

Coram Foundation for

of stylistic transformation, Hogarth’s down-to-earth manner was soon left behind in favour

Children, London)

of French sophistication. But there was never any need for professional rivalry with Hogarth, who, besides despising the common run of ‘phiz-mongers’, as he was pleased to call them, was unfitted both by temperament and by the very range of his genius to become a society portraitist: he remained in the eyes of patrons and public alike the incomparable master of the Comic History and the satirist and moralist of his times, the Swift of painting. Among the long-established portrait painters working in London in 1738 the leading figures were largely men of Hogarth’s own generation, born in the 1690s and now middleaged, and consequently far senior to Ramsay, who on his arrival in London from Italy was not yet twenty-five. The most prominent were Joseph Highmore, Bartholomew Dandridge, George Knapton, Stephen Slaughter and Philip Mercier. The slightly younger Thomas Hudson (born in 1701) had now begun his rise to the immense popularity which he was to enjoy for some fifteen years (prior to the advent of his pupil Joshua Reynolds), and soon proved to be Ramsay’s principal rival for the most prestigious patronage, while genially sharing with him the services of the accomplished drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaecken, of whose estate both painters eventually became executors. Ramsay’s exact contemporary

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

1738-1751

45

Richard Wilson, who had been trained as a portrait painter, was in practice as such before devoting himsell, in the 1750s, entirely to landscape; but his earliest dated work comes from so late a year as 1744, and his previous history remains fairly obscure. If, however, he failed to match Hudson's success, he at least equalled him in the quality of his art: his three-quarter-length of Admiral Thomas Smith, one of his best-known portraits, has been justly compared by Waterhouse with the work of Hogarth ‘in its genial interpretation of character and in the attractive quality of its paint surface’.9 Nevertheless, like Hogarth, Wilson does not seem to have been suited by inclination (as Waterhouse also observes) to the demands of fashionable portraiture, and by the mid-1740s he was already turning his attention to landscape, in which his true genius lay. We must also take account, if only in passing, of James Wills, whose date of birth is unknown. Although now an almost forgotten figure, Wills was well respected in his day: besides enjoying the distinction of being one of the directors of the St Martin’s Lane Academy, he contributed - with his Little Children brought before Christ - to the group of religious paintings hung in the Foundling Hospital in the 1740s, and as a portrait painter he had considerable standing, like Ramsay, within the learned circles of which Richard Mead and Thomas Birch were leading members. (In later life he was ordained, but did not entirely cease to paint.) Before considering briefly the variety of styles represented by the work of these painters, it is desirable to consider not merely the general state of portraiture during this period but what was demanded of it. Any such inquiry inevitably brings to the fore a sense of gradual change in the climate of taste, due in large part to the appearance of a more enlightened and wider circle of patronage, extending beyond the aristocracy to a prosperous and educated middle class. On a theoretical level, the critical works published by the elder Richardson between 1715 and 1722 may be said to have set the standard of aesthetic taste for decades to come; and it was by that standard that the work of an aspiring portrait painter would be judged by the best connoisseurship of the period. One of the more telling aspects of Richardson’s most important literary work, the Essay on the Theory of Painting, consists of his recognition that whereas in the past the art of painting had been regarded generally as ‘a pleasing superfluity’,

the educated public was now ready for serious

instruction in questions of aesthetics. In turn, the change of attitude which made the visual arts accepted as a fit study for a person of rounded culture must have owed much to the precepts and guidance he offered. Richardson, of course, fell heir to values that had long been taken for granted.10 No one questioned the verdict, which seemed self-evident, that - the Ancients apart - the arts had reached their highest level of perfection in sixteenth-century Italy, and especially in the great works undertaken in Rome by Raphael and Michelangelo, in which were united the supreme ideals of Grace (grazia) and Greatness, or Grandeur (grandezza). Along with this fundamental premiss, Richardson accepted the traditional division of subject-matter into categories of merit, whereby history-painting (istoria) - taking its subjects primarily from classical mythology and biblical legend — assumed a place at the top of the scale, as the highest branch of painting, and as the measure of such other specializations as landscape, portraiture and still-life, which were the more to be valued the more they partook of the virtues associated with istoria. A strong moral element coloured appreciation; and Richardson goes to some lengths in preaching the spiritual benefits to be gained by an education in the arts. ‘Supposing,’ he declares, ‘two Men perfectly Equal in all other respects, only [that] one is conversant with the Works of the best Masters . . . and the other not; the former shall, necessarily, gain the Ascendant. And have nobler Ideas, more love to his Country, more moral Virtue, more Faith, more Piety and Devotion than the other; he shall be a more Ingenious, and a Better Man’.11 As we should expect, Richardson recommends above all the study of the great Italian masters, from Michelangelo and Raphael to their illustrious successors in Rome and Bologna. Following Du Fresnoy, he accounts for the supremacy of the Italians by the fact

ALLAN RAMSAY

46

that, like the Ancients who inspired them, ‘they have not servilely followed common nature, but raised and improved it, or at least have made the best choice of it . Just as the first of these implicit alternatives was to form the guiding principle for Reynolds, whose boyhood reading of Richardson had fired him with the desire to become a painter, and whose declared ideal was the elevation of portraiture to the dignity and grandeur of history-painting, so by contrast the second alternative, involving an ideal of selectivity, can be related to the more modest intentions underlying Ramsay’s ultimate manner: whereas Reynolds became the supreme exponent in British painting of grandezza, Ramsay, while at one stage in the later 1740s - in such portraits as the Chief of MacLeod (Plate 63) and Richard Mead (Plate 61), foreshadowing the Grand Manner of Reynolds,1" - came to cultivate par excellence the particular values of grazia. Yet while Richardson does not deny the superior status of the istoria, he goes far to exalt the value of portraiture: the likeness of some hero or great man, he declares, would inspire its owner with noble thoughts; and did one possess a picture of an absent relation or friend, it would help to ‘keep up those Sentiments which frequently languish by Absence’; it might be ‘instrumental to maintain, and sometimes to augment, Friendship, and Paternal, Filial, and Conjugal Love, and Duty’. This moral capacity inherent in the art of portraiture carried with it an obligation on the painter’s part to be truthful to his subject and to avoid flattery: if he should give his sitter youth or beauty which he or she did not possess, or any quality that was unmerited, the sitter’s reward would only be to become a target for ridicule. The ideal of truthfulness, however, is not to be seen as being incompatible with the striving after grace and greatness of style. As to these desiderata, Richardson places particular emphasis upon Grace - with which he associates the polite virtues of Elegance and ‘the genteel’.13 And insofar as Ramsay and Highmore satisfied this requirement, and Hogarth and Wilson in varying degrees failed to do so, their relative appeal to contemporary taste was in large measure determined. The Augustans’ elevation of portraiture to the place formerly occupied in the canonical hierarchy by landscape, as second in importance to history-painting, is also implicit in the writings of Richardson. At the time that Richardson was writing, history-painting — whose subsequent demise George Vertue and Horace Walpole were equally to lament — still continued in a flourishing state in England. The decorations by Verrio and Laguerre at Marlborough House, Chatsworth, Burghley, Blenheim and elsewhere, and by Sebastiano and Marco Ricci at Burlington House and in the chapel of Chelsea Hospital, although still manifesting England’s dependence upon artists from abroad, had been followed by the no less impressive works executed on walls and ceilings by an Englishman of comparable ability, Sir James Thornhill, who on his death in 1734 was justifiably extolled by the Gentleman’s Magazine’s obituarist as ‘the greatest History Painter this Kingdom has ever produced’. In early eighteenth-century London every English visitor to St Paul’s Cathedral could look up at its painted cupola with pride in a countryman found worthy to share some part of Wren’s renown. One such was Thornhill’s own son-in-law William Hogarth, whose admiration of this final embellishment of England’s counterpart to St Peter’s in Rome had inculcated in him the ambition to excel as a history-painter. His Pool of Bethesda and Good Samaritan for St Bartholomew’s Hospital, his Moses brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter for the Foundling Hospital, and his New Testament scenes for Lincoln’s Inn and for St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol all possess qualities of a high order which have yet, even now, to be given their full due - not least as profoundly considered revisions, in terms of the sentiments of his own times, of traditional iconography. But the istoria was scarcely his proper metier, nor did his ambitions as a history-painter bring him much acclaim. As it was, his supreme achievement, which did receive the recognition due to it, lay rather in his creation of an entirely new type of istoria,

the ‘Modern Moral Subject’, as he named it, in which

dramatic invention, applied to contemporary life, replaced the stale interpretation and re-

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

1738-1751

47

interpretation ol sacred text or ancient myth. The great series of the Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress and Marriage a la Mode tacitly acknowledged the irrelevance of the istoria, in its traditional sense, to the Augustan age, which, in the upsurge of confidence in its own attainments, especially required of its artists and poets a faithful mirror reflecting the values of contemporary life. Thus it was that Highmore illustrated the fortunes of Pamela, and Hayman portrayed the healthful recreations of his day. With these considerations in mind we can appreciate more fully the reasons for the rise of portraiture in public estimation and for its advance to become the principal branch of painting in Great Britain during the greater part of the eighteenth century. It was by its achievements in portraiture, rather than in history subjects or landscape, that the British School first acquired its European reputation. An inspirational advantage lay in England’s claim to Van Dyck as her adopted son: just as Raphael had been enthroned as the perfect exemplar of 'high art’, as represented by the istoria, so Van Dyck came to be regarded as the absolute ideal of the portrait painter - an apotheosis all the more certain on account of his courtly manners and gracious style of living. In the early years of the eighteenth century, however, the distant radiance of that incomparable luminary had been dimmed by the proximity of a far lesser but all-pervasive light: the star of Sir Godfrey Kneller, the German favourite of successive English courts, had been in the ascendant for nearly half a century. Kneller had died in 1723 (the year of Reynolds’s birth), but his influence was to persist for several decades afterwards. The variable quality of his portraits makes him a difficult painter to estimate justly. At his best, as in the melancholy Philip, Earl of Leicester at Penshurst, or in his Jacob Tonson and other portraits belonging to the famous Kit Cat series,14 he was capable of creating a profound and memorable image of an individual human being. On the other hand he was too often content to turn out a succession of vapid and repetitious compositions which were very largely the handiwork of a large band of assistants, specialists in the painting of drapery, landscape, architecture and other such necessaries. In studio products of this kind Kneller may be fairly accused of having substituted for true portraiture what has been aptly called the ‘social mask’ - a superficial although accurate enough likeness commonly derived from a drawing made at a single sitting, and as often as not enhanced by a ‘stock attitude’ taken from an extensive repertoire of poses, which succeeding portraitists ransacked for their own use. Inevitably, the vocabulary of artificialities and studio conventions bequeathed by Kneller to his successors tended to stultify individual expression, and although appealing to the temporary fashion of the day, could not permanently answer the needs and tastes of the new age. Increasingly, therefore, we discern in the more forward-looking painters of the early eighteenth century the signs of conscious reaction against the dead hand of the Kneller tradition, albeit often half-suppressed under its sheer weight. Now, in the culturally unpromising but politically aggrandizing reign of George II, the country was awaiting the appearance of British artists who would be capable of responding to a more enlightened patronage than had existed before, and who might do justice on canvas not only to the dignity of the heads of her great families and to the elegance of their consorts, but to the triumphs of her generals and admirals, to the distinction of her statesmen and her men of letters and science, and to the prosperity of her merchants and men of business. A more searching characterization was required than that proffered by the Knelleresque ‘mask’ - a demand that can be plausibly related to the rise of an informed middle class proud of the achievements of unprivileged merit and the qualities of character that were their founda¬ tion: the most profound portrait painted in the first half of the century had had as its subject the humble sea-captain and unpretentious philanthropist Thomas Coram. Even so, the eighteenth century - if only at the upper levels of society - is very properly named the Age of Elegance: the ideal was the type of the English Gentleman which Chesterfield was to anatomize; and while the primary duty of the portrait painter was to

ALLAN RAMSAY

48

35

Mary Stewart, Lady Fortrose,

1749 (Collection of Christopher Moorsom)

produce a good likeness and a penetrative interpretation of character, that was far from being his whole task. Certainly Richardson had insisted that ‘a Portrait-Painter must understand Mankind, and enter into their Characters, and express their Minds, as well as their Faces’; but he had added that ‘as his Business is chiefly with People of Condition, he must Think as a Gentleman, and a Man of Sense,1’ or ’twill be impossible to give Such their True, and Proper Resemblances’."’ This social ideal, we may say, had been incarnated in Van Dyck, who had matched Raphael himself and his own master Rubens in grace of manners, and had exhibited the same ideal no less impeccably in his art. Hogarth’s

Captain Coram

(Plate 34)

had been painted in emulation of Van Dyck,

although not in a stylistic sense; and throughout the century, as is seen in the work of Knapton, Hudson, Ramsay, Reynolds, Gainsborough and many others, the memory of Van Dyck continued to haunt the artists’ studios. It was ever-present likewise in the great houses that contained family portraits from his hand (or believed to be such); and the eighteenth-century portrait painter might often be required, as it were, to enter the same company, and to produce a painting equal to being hung in the same room. Just as it was the height of elegance for ladies and gentlemen, when attending fashionable masquerades, to dress in costumes reminiscent of Van Dyck portraits, so we may partly explain the vogue for contemporary portraits in which the sitter is represented in ‘Van Dyck’ dress: even if the intention was not necessarily to display it in the vicinity of a Van Dyck, such a picture, as Reynolds remarked, would possess something of the ‘air and effect’ of a Van Dyck.18 Thus on the one hand Van Dyck stood in the eyes of the artist as the ideal of the portrait painter, and on the other represented for the patron an exemplar of superior elegance and distinction. Both aspects are reflected from time to time in Ramsay’s own portraiture - whether in his employment in the 1740s of‘Van Dyck’ costume in works such

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON: 1738-1751

49

as the Honourable Philip Yorke (Plate 54)19 and Lady Fortrose (Plate 35)20 or in some of the masterpieces of his maturity, such as the full-length of Lady Mary Coke (Plate 150)“1 and the group-portrait of Queen Charlotte and her Children (Plate 157),22 in which the Court portraiture of Van Dyck was clearly a principal source of inspiration. When Richardson laid it down that a portrait painter ‘must think as a gentleman’ he meant that he should pay due attention, inter alia, to those rules of deportment that distinguished the well-mannered, and which required that a sitter be represented in such a way as to reflect that person’s own exemplification of them. What these rules were we know from contemporary manuals of etiquette and from such works of instruction for artists as Charles LeBrun’s Methode pour apprendre a dessiner les passions, first published in Paris in 1698, and especially Gerard de Lairesse’s Groot Schilderboek of a few years later. LeBrun’s treatise, encapsulating his teachings as director of the French Academy, soon appeared in a number of English editions, as A Method to Learn to design the Passions, one of them with engraved versions by Hayman of the original illustrations; it became widely known in England, and Hogarth refers to it in his Analysis of Beauty as being in general use for the instruction of students of painting. Although LeBrun addresses himself essentially to the history-painter, his treatise undoubtedly exerted some influence upon portraiture, especially in the case of exercises in the ‘grand manner’ or in depictions of actors or actresses in specific roles. However, Lairesse’s very long book, translated into English in 1738 as The Art of Painting in all its Branches, has a greater relevance, in being more concerned with social etiquette and with the distinctions to be observed by a painter in the representation of the different classes.2 ’ Among manuals of etiquette themselves, the most illuminating is another work trans¬ lated from the French, and reflecting France’s position as the leader of European manners - Francois Nivelon’s Rudiments of Genteel Behavior, published under this title in its English edition in 1737, with engravings after Bartholomew Dandridge. The purpose and contents of this fascinating work are sufficiently defined by its subtitle, An Introduction to the Method of Attaining a Graceful Attitude, an Agreeable Motion, an easy Air and a genteel Behavior.2I From

36

Plate from Gerard de

Lairesse, The Art of Painting in all its Branches (1738)

Lairesse and Nivelon especially we obtain a very complete picture of the manners of the age; and we may note, with regard to Ramsay, that their works appeared in print at just

37

about the time that he was setting out as a portrait painter in London.

Detail of A Rake’s Progress,

Lairesse devotes much attention to the differences between the manners of gentlefolk on the one hand and ‘rustic’ behaviour on the other.25 An upright stance, with gracefully

William Hogarth:

Scene in: The Orgy (Sir John Soane’s Museum, London)

arched back, was the sign, he explains, of a gentleman or lady; a stoop that of a peasant, who also tended to adopt a ‘staring’ look (which would be unseemly in most drawing¬ rooms). Good deportment required a pleasing variety in the disposition of one’s hands,

38

William Hogarth:

Marriage a la Mode, Scene i: The Marriage Contract

which should not, therefore, in company, display identical gestures. When taking a drink

(National Gallery,

from a wine-glass, the upper classes, we are told, always held the glass by its foot, the

London)

ALLAN RAMSAY

50

lower classes by the bowl (Plate 36) — as we see, in the former case, from the tavern scene in A Rake’s Progress (Plate 37), where Tom Rakewell, if unable to hold his liquor, still remembers in his besotted state how to hold his wine-glass like a gentleman. In holding most things, Lairesse tells his readers, it is preferable to do so lightly, and in appropriate instances to extend one’s little finger elegantly — a convention followed with exaggerated affectation by the foppish Viscount in the first scene of Marriage a la Mode (Plate 38) (and one that retained its vogue until quite recent times, although latterly reserved in the main for the social art of tea-drinking): we observe this convention regularly in eighteenthcentury portraits, for example in the delicate manner in which a male sitter is shown holding a letter, or a lady a flower or music-sheet, often with little finger extended. Ramsay himself, as his style develops in the direction of an increasing informality, can be seen to be seeking a reconciliation between the socially elegant and the ’natural’ - an ideal typified by the graceful but unselfconscious gesture adopted by his second wife, Margaret Lindsay, as in the famous picture in Edinburgh (Plates 135, 136) she is shown in the everyday act of arranging a bowl of flowers.20 Not least, a gentleman, whether standing or seated, demonstrated his breeding by turning his feet elegantly outwards at right-angles, whereas a person of inferior class betrayed his lack of it by habitually standing or sitting with his feet clumsily parallel - a distinction carefully drawn by Hogarth, again in the opening scene of Marriage a la Mode (Plate 38), in the contrasting postures of the high-born Viscount and the plebeian Alderman; which in various respects, including the further contrast between the arched back of the former and the latter’s pronounced stoop, might perfectly serve to illustrate Lairesse’s treatise. Full-length portraits of men painted during the eighteenth century usually conform to this convention regarding the correct, gentlemanly stance; which is one that it is particularly salutary to take cognizance of, since modern eyes may readily mistake what to eighteenth-century eyes appeared appropriate and customary as merely stilted. Where Ramsay seems on occasion - as in one of his earliest full-lengths, the Francis, 2nd Duke of Buccleuch (Plate 39) of 173927 — to have been mindful of a Scottish patron’s natural distrust of anything approaching affectation, the elegant attitude is still preserved beside the most uncomprisingly frank characterization. The following passage in Nivelon, illustrated by Dandridge with a drawing of a fashion¬ ably dressed man in a standing posture (Plate 40), brings home to us the seriousness with which every detail of the eighteenth-century ideal of correct deportment was taken: The Arms must fall easy, not close to the Sides; and the Bend of the Elbow, at its due Distance, will permit the right Hand to place itself in the Waistcoat easy and genteel, as in this Figure is represented; but any rising or falling the Hand from that Place, will make it appear lame, and consequently disagreeable; the Hat shou’d be plac'd easy under the left Arm, and that Wrist must be free and straight, and the Hand support itself above the Sword-hilt; the Sword exactly plac’d as shewn in this Figure, is the only proper and genteel Situation for it; the whole Body must rest on the right Foot, and the right Knee, as also the Back be kept straight, the left leg must be foremost and only bear its own weight, and both Feet must be turn’d outwards, as shewn by this Figure, neither more nor less, but exactly.28 The straight or arched back, the hand tucked into the waistcoat, the out-turned feet and other conventions of deportment here specified are all common characteristics of the poses found in portraits by Ramsay, Hudson, Highmore and their contemporaries. Furthermore, their abiding presence indicates how deliberately Hogarth flouted such conventions in his own portraits of middle-class sitters. In particular, the ‘mighty portrait’, as he called it, of 39

Francis, 2nd Duke of

Captain Thomas Coram (Plate 34), has nothing in common with the accepted canons of

Buccleuch, 1739 (Collection

gentlemanly deportment; and it is only necessary to note Hogarth’s revisions of the

of the Duke of Buccleuch

primary source for his design, the portrait of Samuel Bernard by Rigaud (known to Hogarth

and Oueensberry)

from an engraving), to appreciate the conscious nature of his rejection of these rules:

a?

52

ALLAN RAMSAY

Samuel Bernard sits elegantly, his hands gracefully and variously disposed, his feet turned correctly outwards; by contrast, Captain Coram, while holding himself proudly erect, as he had every cause to do, remains an awkward and ungainly figure, with his left hand ponderously grasping his unfashionable gloves and his right the Charter Seal of the Foundling Hospital which was his glory, and with his plainly shod feet set parallel to one another in careless unconcern for the modes of a social world to which he had long been a stranger — details which, when seen in the context of the times, add a touching pathos to his portrayal, as of one whose uncomplicated and kindly nature needed no adornment. Of all the portrait painters working in London at the time of Ramsay’s arrival, Joseph Highmore shows the most complete response to the new demands. An artist of very considerable range, on the one hand he had much in common with Hogarth, often resembling him in the expressive vigour of his brushwork, and on the other hand differing from him in his capacity to produce society portraits of the most polished refinement; and while sharing Hogarth’s admiration for the French rococo style, he was much more sensitive to its elegance - as is apparent most obviously from his series of illustrations to his friend Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (painted in 1744). How far Highmore had moved away from the artificial conventions of Kneller by the early 1730s can be judged from his seated full-length of 1731 of Thomas Emerson,29 a London sugar-baker who became a Governor of Coram’s Foundling Hospital and subsequently its benefactor (Plate 41). Although far less ambitious, this notably informal portrait foreshadows the Thomas Coram in its simple directness of characterization, in which dignity and good nature combine, in an almost Hogarthian manner, in acknowledgment of the sitter’s prosperity and ben¬ evolence. Already in Highmore, as also later in Hogarth, there are intimations of the 40

Bartholomew

‘natural’ portraiture which Ramsay was eventually to make his own, and which Highmore

Dandridge: Illustration to

himself developed more explicitly than in the portrait of Emerson in the astonishing Mr

Nivelon’s Rudiments of

Oldham and his Friends (in the Tate Gallery), a work equally remarkable for its realism and

Genteel Behavior

for its bold departure from the standard type of the conversation-piece.

41

Joseph Highmore:

On his own part Ramsay would have been well aware of such developments towards a

Thomas Emerson, 1731 (The

natural idiom, of which Aikman had himself been a pioneer; and many of his early

Thomas Coram

portraits reveal the same impulse. The half-length, for example, of Sir James Dalrymple

Foundation for Children,

(Plate 42), at Newhailes,30 painted in 1740, even carries the easy informality of the Thomas

London)

Emerson a stage further, but with no loss of dignity or presence. Although a baronet who

held high office, as Auditor of the Exchequer in Scotland, Dalrymple is represented as

42

being seated unassumingly by a table, in plain dress and in a markedly nonchalant

Bart., 1740 (Collection of

attitude (conceivably reflecting Ramsay’s knowledge of the Thomas Coram); and again it is the sitter’s humanity that is the essential subject. In idea the portrait may be said to look forward, by nearly a decade and a half, to the great three-quarter-length of Lord Drummore (Plate 84) of 1754,31 by which time the guiding principle of the ‘natural’ had become an

Sir James Dalrymple,

Lady Antonia Dalrymple, Newhailes) 43

Thomas, 2nd Baron

Mansel of Alargam and his

imperative absolute in Ramsay’s aesthetic. But what is still more striking about Ramsay’s

Half-Brothers and Half-

early portraiture, apart from the sheer charm of his style, is the immediacy of the

Sister (The Mansel Family

characterization. His sitters are recognizable at once as individual personalities, and his portrayals of them generally convey a sense of vital response, such as is lacking to the same degree in the work of Highmore. It is this quality that gives such distinction to so many of the quite minor bust-length portraits, usually set within the traditional feigned oval frame, which formed a large part of Ramsay’s output in the late 1730s and 1740s. Beside the portraits painted by Ramsay during his first few years in practice in London, the work of such exponents of the new rococo style, imported from France, as Bartholomew Dandridge and Philip Mercier gives an impression of poetic insubstantiality. Both artists attained special distinction in their development of the conversation-piece, while not confining themselves to it, and as such cannot properly be regarded as rivals of Ramsay, whose sole approximation to this branch of painting is represented by the Mansel Family Group of 1742 in the Tate Gallery (Plate 43). Here Lord Mansel’s gentle smile as he looks down at his young half-sister recalls, exceptionally, a favourite device of Mercier’s, borrowed from contemporary French portraiture — and typical especially of the work of La Tour, - by which to bring a sitter’s countenance to life. Mercier was Ramsay’s neighbour in Covent Garden until his departure to York in 1739. He did not return to London for another eleven years, apart from a brief visit in 1747, and even then retired soon afterwards to Portugal, as though daunted, as Waterhouse infers, by

Group), 1742 (Tate Gallery, London)

H§fg| -

Aotfwft Myi^-vy Kynnynrowo. Diiojftit.cr or IJufTlt Jialriftuplo Nt/rrtttj KijintmiiiiOh.l. 'Vi» >• ok THfcl^ioirr Hon. Sih. Oiukki^t Rl,u ot opT'Iintq flqrf- M.l\

r,r

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON: 1738-1751

55

the prospect of competition with the rising generation of English painters. His absence during virtually the whole of Ramsay’s early period in London removed him, therefore, from the circle of immediate rivals; but he may have been in Scotland in 1745 and was certainly there five years later, so that he can be accounted to some extent a competitor, however briefly, for that part of Scottish patronage from which Ramsay benefited on his visits to Edinburgh. His name is in fact mentioned alongside Ramsay’s in some light verses addressed to John Medina the Younger and apparently written in the year following his stay in Edinburgh in 1750; their author (possibly David Hume, though the attribution is doubtful) predicts the renown that Medina will achieve by a portrait he is proposing to paint, and goes on: Your Name shall rise, prophetic Fame says, Above your Merciers or your Ramsays;32 a couplet which more pertinently reflects Mercier’s own reputation in Scotland at this time. Dandridge’s most distinctive quality as a portrait painter lies in a lyricism that may be said to foreshadow Gainsborough. His finest pictures possess an airy lightness that is entirely French in spirit; by contrast the early style of Ramsay is grounded in solider virtues perfected by his Italian training. Whereas Dandridge handles his paint with an expressive fluency and freedom, Ramsay insists on a polished smoothness of execution. To French charm Ramsay at this stage opposes an unassertively Italianate grace; to delicacy, assurance; to sensitive amenity a firmer grip on actuality. Over and above these dif¬ ferences, a comparison between the two painters as draughtsmen - for example in their rendering of a sitter’s hands — brings out Ramsay’s immeasurable superiority, which is equally in evidence in his mastery of the nuances of form. But still greater importance is to be attached to Ramsay’s possession of a quality less easy to define, but one that gave him an advantage over all his potential rivals - an eloquent sophistication of manner, acquired in Italy, which was exactly attuned to the taste and connoisseurship of the time, and which was equal to the challenge offered by commissions for portraits on a grand scale. Such full-lengths as the Earl of Hardwicke (Plate 48)” and the 2nd Duke of Argyll (Plate 57),34 together with many other works on a smaller scale — among them the child-portrait of Agnes Murray-Kynynmond Dalrymple (Plate 44)3 ’ and the double-portraits of The Honourable Rachel Hamilton and her brother Charles (Plate 45)3(> and Sir Edward and Lady Turner (Plate 47),3/ - demonstrate Ramsay’s evident ambition, during his first years in London, to display his powers of design - an aspiration no less apparent in the Mansel group of slightly later date (Plate 43). A revealing feature of the latter picture and of the two double¬ portraits, in addition to the sensibility reflected in the harmonious relationship of the figures, is the interest shown by Ramsay in rendering his sitters’ hands in a variety of aspects, with the greatest possible emphasis upon close observation of natural gesture. In the 2nd Duke of Argyll (Plate 57) - the first-fruit of his long patronage by the Argylls Ramsay seems to have been matching himself against Van Dyck. Apart from Highmore, the only British portrait painter working regularly in London who was capable of vying with the sheer stylishness of these early works by Ramsay was undoubtedly George Knapton, a pupil of Richardson who had spent seven years studying in Italy and had returned to England possessed of a polished manner comparable in many ways with Ramsay’s own. Like Ramsay, he moved in intellectual circles, becoming in 1736 official painter to the newly established Society of Dilettanti, a private club composed of cultured Italophiles of which he was a founder-member. Although at first he worked chiefly in crayons, it is from his portraits in oils that we can best appreciate his exceptional

44

Agnes Murray-

Kynynmond Dalrymple, 1739

versatility. Unfortunately Knapton has been little studied, and not a great deal is known

(Collection of Lady

about him. What he was capable of by the early 1740s can be judged from his series of

Antonia Dalrymple,

twenty-three portraits of the ‘Dilettanti’, all but one of whom are represented in fanciful

Newhailes)

dress or outre context - the Duke of Dorset as a Roman consul, Sir Bourchier Wrey in a

46

ship’s cabin (grasping a punchbowl), Samuel Savage in masquerade costume, and so on.38

(Foundation Rau pour le

What is especially remarkable about these slightly eccentric but highly original pictures is

Tiers-Monde, Zurich and Marseilles)

Knapton’s easy mastery of the figure, represented in a wide variety of attitudes and with minute attention to detail (which in the accessories matches his capacity to express the

47

Lady Anne Finch, 1 744

Sir Edward and Lady

texture of things). Stock poses are for the most part avoided, and in particular the sitters’

Turner, 1740 (Collection of

expressive hands, studied from life, exhibit a quality of draughtsmanship of which Batoni

Noel Page-Turner; on

himself might not have been ashamed. Ramsay would have been likely to regard Knapton with every respect, as a painter of high ability who surpassed all his English contemporaries in cultured sophistication of

loan to the National Trust, Canons Ashby House)

style: but although Knapton went on to paint still more impressive portraits, such as the full-length at Althorp of The Honourable John Spencer and his son, with an African servant - a remarkable achievement in composition, especially in view of its early date of 1745, — he never quite achieved the dominance in his profession which his gifts merited. Nevertheless during the 1740s Knapton’s work may be said to have run parallel to Ramsay’s in its elegance and intimacy of feeling; and there are portraits by him from this period, particu¬ larly of women, which are well in advance of their time in their informality and originality of design. In these respects the ravishing three-quarter-length of Frances Macartney,39 one of numerous mid-eighteenth-century portraits that reflect the vogue for representing a sitter in masquerade costume, is unmatched by any roughly contemporary work by Ramsay on the same scale. In female portraits above the scale of the half-length Ramsay tends in this period, like Highmore, to prefer a fairly formal design: only occasionally in portraits at three-quarter length, such as the exquisitely sensitive Lady Anne Finch of 1744 (Plate 46)40 do we find anything quite comparable with Knapton’s independence of convention - allied in the Frances Macartney to a subtlety of colour-orchestration and tonal harmony which, in purely aesthetic terms, removes the picture entirely from the common run of society portraiture. Yet it must be acknowledged that in Knapton’s picture the portraiture itself depends for its appeal on a kind of surface prettiness rather than on any deeper con¬ cern with character, such as habitually engaged the interest of Hogarth, Highmore and

45

The Honourable Rachel

Hamilton and her Brother Charles, I 740 (Collection of the Earl of Haddington, Mellerstain)

ALLAN RAMSAY

58

Ramsay: and in this, and this alone, Knapton begins to look slightly old fashioned. The comparable enchantments of Ramsay’s oval portrait of his first wife Anne Bayne (Plate 58)41 in no wav exclude the portrait painter’s primary task of expressing the individual personality. Of Stephen Slaughter, who in his fascination with detail has a certain affinity with Knapton, little more need be said than that he typifies those pupils of Kneller who founded successful careers upon their appeal to conservative tastes.4"' His decision to set up practice in Dublin in the mid-1740s, after a previous visit some ten years earlier, may indicate a measure of difficulty on his part in competing with such leading rivals as Highmore, Knapton, Hudson and Ramsay, as may also his acceptance in 1744 of the post of Keeper of the King’s Pictures (in which office, for very different reasons, Ramsay was to express, eighteen years later, his desire to supplant him). Like Highmore, Wills and Pond (a Fellow of the Royal Society), he was known within the Mead circle - an indication of the regard in which he was held, although he was hardly near the centre ol it, as Ramsay and Wills undoubtedly were. What emerges from the foregoing survey of the state of portraiture in London at the outset of Ramsay’s career is that, apart from the foreigners Vanloo and Soldi, he would initially have found in Highmore and Knapton his most formidable competitors. Highmore especially enjoyed general recognition, and his reputation by the early 1740s can be judged from some lines of verse — less notable for their poetical ineptitude than for the warmth of the tribute they paid - which the engraver-critic George Vertue wrote about him in 1742: To Englands Honor Hymore’s name & merrit. he only Nature paints. Life truth & spirit. These faltering lines had been inspired by a portrait by Highmore of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr John Potter; and when, two years later, Potter sat to Hudson for the fulllength now in the Examination Schools at Oxford, Vertue wrote them out again with the comment that, in the light of this second portrait of the archbishop, they were applicable also to Hudson. It is from about this time, or a little earlier, that we can date Hudson’s phenomenal rise to popularity, which made him by the mid-1740s Ramsay’s strongest rival for public favour. Nevertheless, Hudson — the son-in-law of Richardson - was slow to realize his full powers, and his most impressive works, such as the Gopsall Handel,43 the David Garrick44 and the Sir William Browne,4j all belong to the 1750s or 1760s: it is as though he needed the stimulus of the example offered by his pupil Joshua Reynolds to be roused to do complete justice to his own abilities. His early work has many solid virtues, but rarely rises above the flat levels of competence, and shows neither the sensitivity exemplified by his master Richardson nor the command of drawing and design characteristic of Highmore, Knapton and Ramsay. Horace Walpole, in the 1760s, was to express his contempt for Hudson, contrasting him with Ramsay and Reynolds, and afterwards, in his Anecdotes of Painting in England, explained his success in not less unflattering terms: The country gentlemen were faithful to their compatriot, and were content with his honest similitudes, with their fair tied wigs, blue velvet coats, and white satin waist¬ coats, which he bestowed liberally on his customers, and which with complacency they beheld multiplied in Faber’s mezzotints. At the time, however, of Ramsay’s arrival in London Hudson had only just begun to attract the patronage of the fashionable world. During the 1740s, when Ramsay and Hudson shared the assistance of the popular drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaecken, they often approached one another in their response to the post-Kneller tradition, and to that extent had a fair amount in common. The affinities between the two painters in this period can be striking - even raising questions of attribution. On the other hand they are not such

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON: 1738-1751

59

as we should expect to find very much later, when Ramsay went on to develop a mode of portraiture ol a quite distinct character. If it were not for the eighteenth-century portrait painters preoccupation with the vocabulary of design, often prompting the revival of some admired model which was capable of imitation or improvement, it would therefore seem all the more surprising that the basic design ol two of Hudson’s portraits from the 1730s reappear in works by Ramsay of the 1750s and 1760s. The earlier of these, the threequarter-length in the Tate Gallery of the painter Samuel Scott, of about 1731-33 (Plate 93), became the model for Ramsay’s portrait of James Adam (Plate 88),46 painted in 1754, although reinterpreted in terms of a refined, and partly French, delicacy of treatment. The second picture, a half-length of a Customs official, Henry Clarke, known from an engraving as having been painted in 1739, in which the sitter is shown, somewhat bizarrely, pointing towards us through an opening in a stone wall suggestive of a battle¬ ment (Plate 94), borrows the pose from the portrait of the painter Orazio Gentileschi from Van Dyck's Iconography, Van Dyck’s original drawing for which was then owned by Dr Mead (and after his death in 1754 acquired at his sale by Hudson): Ramsay adapted the same pose to his three-quarter-length at Welbeck ol 'John Scott of Balcomie,4/ a work of the mid-1760s, creating out of Van Dyck’s design a rhythmical expression of rococo elegance (Plate 95) - being preceded in the same borrowing by Reynolds in his 9th Lord Cathcart of about 1753 — 54. Both portraits by Hudson were known in engravings by Faber, and these would no doubt have been Ramsay’s immediate source. Reliable information about Ramsay’s progress during his early years in London is to be found in the Notebooks of George Vertue, whose haphazard, syntax-defying records of the native art of his own and previous times furnished Horace Walpole with the essential materials for his Anecdotes of Painting in England. Vertue’s indefatigable curiosity about the state of contemporary painting led his steps to Ramsay’s studio on several occasions. The earliest of these visits, in the late autumn of 1738,48 would doubtless have come too soon after Ramsay’s setting up of his practice to enable Vertue to form a very complete impression of the artist’s manner, let alone his scope, and his reactions at this time are chiefly valuable on account of the information he supplies about Ramsay’s technique of beginning the head in a portrait, at the first sitting, in a vermilion underpainting — a method which had been used by Benedetto Luti and other Italian masters, with the object of making the flesh ‘clear and transparent’, as Vertue noted on a subsequent occasion. Ramsay consistently employed this technique until the mid-1760s. Otherwise Vertue thought that Ramsay had brought ‘nothing new’ from his studies in Italy. A year later, he observed that since he had first come to his notice Ramsay had achieved remarkable success, and that the interest of Dr Mead and, among various Scottish patrons, the 2nd Duke of Argyll (the elder brother of the Earl of Ilay) had made him one of the most extensively employed portrait painters in London, a rival to the fashionable Vanloo and Rusca.41 Towards the end of 1739 Vertue gave a much fuller account of Ramsay’s art, revealing, however, some difficulty in accommodating himself to the smooth surfaces of his pictures, which he characterized as being ‘rather lick’t than pencilled [i.e. ‘than brushed in’]’.’" This permanent characteristic of Ramsay’s method he recognized as having created a break with the freer brushwork of Kneller and such eminent predecessors as Van Dyck, Dobson and Lely: Ramsay’s style reminded him of the ‘modish French, German and Dutch’ manner - although in actuality its sources were primarily Italian. Nevertheless Vertue was impressed by the ‘great run of business’ which Ramsay had enjoyed during his first year in London, and again stressed the important part played by Dr Mead in his advancement, particularly in recommending him to ‘people of the first quality’. No less significantly, Ramsay had, he remarked, been ‘much cried up by the Scotch gentry’, who were declaring themselves ‘much pleased with their countryman’s performances’; but Vertue was careful to add that Ramsay had also attracted many English sitters. He

60

ALLAN RAMSAY

mentions two important full-lengths, the one of a Scottish, the other of an English patron the 2nd Duke of Argyll of 1740 (Plate 57) (which he must have seen before its completion) and the Lord Hardwicke of a year earlier (Plate 48), both of which would have played a major role in establishing Ramsay’s reputation. At the same time, he understood that when Ramsay drew from the life at the St Martin’s Lane Academy he did not show ‘any great skill’, being excelled by ‘many other young scholars’. Even as a painter, Vertue surmised, he would have ‘made but indifferent progress’ if he had not employed the celebrated Joseph Vanhaecken as his drapery-painter. ’1 There was nothing unusual in the employment of assistants, and especially ‘draperymen’, by society portrait painters in this period. The practice had a long ancestry, going back to Rubens and beyond, and was occasioned chiefly by the sheer quantity of com¬ missions which the fashionable portraitists received. Joseph Vanhaecken, an Antwerp painter who had settled in England about 1720, had already been working for several artists in London before Ramsay’s arrival - among them Vanderbank, Knapton and Jeremiah Davison, - earning for himself, by virtue of his specialization, the soubriquet of‘the tailor’, and acquiring a great reputation for the beauty of his silks and satins. It would appear, accordingly, that there was a certain cachet attached to Vanhaecken’s collaboration on a portrait. At all events, his studio became a workshop for the completion, apart from the final touches, of a continuous supply of canvases, in respect of which he had been contracted to paint the draperies. Ultimately, under a special arrangement, he worked chiefly for Hudson and Ramsay. It is curious to reflect on the fact that in the early 1740s, when the two painters were sharing the skills of‘the tailor’, the young Reynolds, who had become Hudson’s pupil in 1740, at the age of seventeen, was often engaged in the menial task of carrying unfinished canvases from his master’s house to Vanhaecken’s studio. One can understand why Hogarth was contemptuous of this practice,

remarking

bitterly as he did — with a hit at Ramsay’s technical procedure — that if an artist should ‘persuade the public that he had brought a new discovered method of colouring’, and should paint his faces ‘all red, all blue, or all purple’, he need only ‘hire one of those painted tailors for an assistant’ in order to be assured of success.52 Hogarth was later to claim Ramsay as a friend, but at first he seems to have regarded him much as he regarded most professional portrait painters who appealed to fashionable taste, and may have envied his prosperity. On one occasion a group of painters in the St Martin’s Lane circle found themselves unable to determine the authorship of a certain portrait - until Hogarth, recognizing it as a work by Ramsay, addressed the company with the sneering question: ‘Don’t you see clearly in the picture the Ram’s eye?’ At the time of Vanhaecken’s death in the summer of 1749 Hogarth was still nursing his grievance against the studio practice which had provided the deceased drapery-painter with his livelihood and had brought him such renown; for we are told that he produced a satirical design (which has not been preserved), depicting Vanhaecken’s funeral procession, with all the portrait painters of London as mourners ‘overwhelmed with the deepest distress’. Hogarth’s views on

the employment of drapery-men

by the

professional

portrait

painters of the period in general, together with Vertue’s comments on Vanhaecken’s assistance to Ramsay in particular, have often given rise to misunderstanding. Clearly Vertue must have overestimated the significance of Ramsay’s compliance with this longestablished practice. Hogarth had revolted against the thought that, as he put it, ‘nine parts in ten’ of a portrait might be the work of the drapery-man, and yet all the reputation would by ‘engrossed by the fizmonger’. But neither this criticism nor Vertue’s conclusion regarding Ramsay’s success allows for the primary responsibility of the portrait painter for the design of a picture; nor is account taken of his part in its execution, including the 48 Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, 1739 (Private Collection)

finishing process after the return of the canvas to his studio. On occasion, it is true, a painter would be content, in the rush of business, to repeat a composition by an earlier master or even one from the hand of a contemporary; and Vanhaecken had himself

62

49

ALLAN RAMSAY

Thomas Hudson:

Lady Lucy Manners, Duchess of Montrose, early 1740s (Collection of the Marquis of Graham) 50

Joseph Vanhaecken:

The Duchess of Montrose, copy after Hudson, 1740s (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

amassed an entire anthology of poses, in the form of numerous chalk drawings which he made after portraits by such artists as Rubens, Lely and Maratta, as well as others by the contemporary painters whom he assisted. But it would be a mistake to suppose that Vanhaecken was in any way responsible for the conception and design of Ramsay’s major works, just as it would be no less absurd to attribute to Peter Toms, the faithful assistant of Sir Joshua Reynolds, any such part in Reynolds’s compositions. Even where we find Ramsay adapting a design by Hudson to a portrait of his own, we observe from the beginning a process of significant revision. A typical instance is provided by Ramsay’s three-quarter-length of Jane Hale (afterwards Mrs Martin Madan),53 of 1745 (Plate 51), in which the composition follows that of Hudson’s Lady Lucy Manners, Duchess of Montrosej4 of a few years earlier (Plate 49). Both pictures are prime examples of what we know as the ‘Van Dyck costume’ portrait, a popular mode invented, according to Vertue, by the short-lived painter John Robinson, who also made use of Vanhaecken’s services. In such portraits a female sitter would be represented in a dress modelled upon that worn by Rubens’s sister-in-law Susanna Fourment in a celebrated full-length55 which had been acquired by Sir Robert Walpole (Plate 52). The painting is now correctly assigned to Rubens, but in the eighteenth century it was widely believed to be a portrait by Van Dyck of Helena Fourment, Rubens’s wife. Sometimes, as for instance in a portrait of Lady Georgina Carteret ascribed to Knapton (Plate 53), the actual design of Rubens’s picture would be sedulously repeated. Similarly, various portraits correctly ascribed to Van Dyck came to be adapted to representations of male sitters: among several examples by Ramsay we have already instanced a three-quarterlength of The Honourable Philip Yorke, painted in 1741 (Plate 54). The vogue for this class of picture can be directly related to the custom of wearing fancy dress at the fashionable masquerades or on visits to the pleasure-gardens of Ranelagh or Vauxhall, costumes reminiscent of paintings by Van Dyck being especially popular.56 At a masquerade held in 1742 Horace Walpole found himself in the company of‘quantities of pretty Vandykes’: as he recollected afterwards, ‘all kinds of pictures’ had ‘walked out of their frames’. So too Mrs Montagu, the famous ‘bluestocking’, attended a masquerade in the Spring of 1749 dressed as Queen Henrietta Maria, with her hair ‘curled after the

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

1738-1751

63

Vandyke picture’ (as she explained to her sister). Charlotte Fane, on the same occasion,

51

went as 'Rubens’ wife’ (that is to say, in actuality Susanna Fourment); and such was the

Mrs Martin Madan, 1 745

Jane Hale, afterwards

impression that Mrs Montagu made in the guise of Charles I’s queen that her husband

(Collection of Viscount

afterwards bade her keep her costume in readiness so that she could be painted in it by

Leverhulme)

William Hoare. The recent discovery of ‘Van Dyck’ costumes dating from the reign of George II

52

Sir Peter Paul

Rubens, Susanna Fourment

provides sufficient confirmation that such dresses were not merely pictorial conventions

(Gulbenkian Foundation,

but were actually worn in society. Later in the century, when the tradition of the ‘Van

Lisbon)

Dyck’ portrait had been taken up and renewed by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Zoffany and many others, the tailors employed in making the dresses would have had at their disposal, in addition to prints after Van Dyck, Rubens and Lely, a two-volume book of engravings

53

George Knapton (?),

Lady Georgina Carteret as 4Rubens’s Wife’ (Collection

of masquerade costumes which was published by Thomas Jefferys in 1757: ’' this work,

of the Earl Spencer,

which drew upon portraits by Van Dyck, Holbein and other masters, was supplemented

Althorp)

by two further volumes in 1772, by which time the fashion, after suffering a certain decline, was undergoing a revival. It is clear, however, that in many of the portraits of this type painted in the 1740s the sitter would not, like Mrs Montagu, have necessarily posed in such a costume, which might rather have been a studio property draped on a lay-figure or, conceivably, a hired model; for we find several instances of the portrayal of different sitters in the same dress - as indeed is illustrated by Hudson’s Duchess of Montrose (Plate 49) and Ramsay’s Jane Hale (Mrs Madan) (Plate 51). The same is true of a fair number of portraits of sitters wearing contemporary dresses; and it followed that, especially in the case of portraits of ladies, the painter would have been well advised to avoid such repetitions in pictures destined to hang in the same house. But less significance attaches to the studio procedure employed in the execution of portraits in the ‘Van Dyck costume’ tradition than to the reasons for the persistent demand for them. An intimation of the principal cause of their popularity, and one that would have appealed to patron and painter alike, was given by Reynolds himself in his observation in his Seventh Discourse that such portraits acquired ‘an air and effect of the works of Van Dyck’. We are returned here to a reminder of Van Dyck’s immense prestige in the eighteenth century; and we may consider further the advantage afforded to a patron by his acquisition

54

The Honourable Philip

of a picture capable of being hung without disharmony alongside the likenesses of his

Yorke, afterwards 2nd Earl of

ancestors. On the other hand the ‘Van Dyck costume’ portrait cannot be said to constitute

Hardwicke, 1741 (Private

entirely a sort of antiquarian exercise ‘in the manner of’ a past style, since the costumes

Collection) 55

Dr John Ward, 1749

worn by the sitters reflected a specific aspect of contemporary fashion; and it may well be supposed that a young gallant struck by the charms of a member of the fair sex so adorned

(The Warwickshire

would have been rather less prone, in recollection, to engage in art-historical comparisons

Museum, Warwick)

than to recall the particular occasion of yesternight, when, dressed fashionably a la mode, and in a manner shared by the company at large, she had attracted the glances of an equally fashion-conscious youth, attired, it may be, in the star and blue sash of Charles I himself. The adoption of seventeenth-century dress by contemporary fashion was often accompanied by certain modifications of the original costume in order to make them conform more to eighteenth-century taste, and such revisions are very evident in many of the ‘Van Dyck portraits’ of the period - a pointer to the way in which the sitter’s attire'was seen by the critical eye of the leaders of fashion. To revert to the two works by Hudson and Ramsay that prompted these observations on the completion of the portrait of the Duchess of Montrose (Plate 49) the pattern of Hudson’s composition was preserved by a large copy of it (Plate 50) executed in chalks by Vanhaecken,j8 and was thus available for repetition or adaptation. Very possibly, prospec¬ tive sitters would be shown examples of ‘attitudes’ such as were offered by Vanhaecken’s series of copies, so that they might choose one suited to their taste. Whatever the circumstances of the commission given to Ramsay in this case (Plate 51), he was not content merely to echo Hudson’s design. While reversing the composition, he retained the same source of light, effecting thereby a more searching modelling of his sitter’s features, since the even lighting of Hudson’s portrait was now replaced by contrasting lights and darks which assisted the rendering of form in greater relief. Other revisions are no less revealing. Wherever we look, Ramsay’s refined sensibility can be seen at work - whether in

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

1738-1751

65

the more sensitive placing of the figure within the picture-area or in the more harmonious relationship ol the various elements of the design — such as the curving line of the ostrichfeather held in Miss Hale’s hand, revising the abrupt straightness of its counterpart in Hudson’s picture, and bringing it into compositional concordance with

the rounded

forms of the sitter’s figure. Besides these differences we may note with particular interest Ramsay’s concern to correct the stiff formality of Hudson’s figure by the infusion of a tasteful naturalism founded upon the twin ideals of truthfulness and grazia. Miss Hale’s disengaged left hand (corresponding to the Duchess’s right) is shown as convincingly relaxed; and whereas in Hudson's picture the ostrich-feather common to both composit¬ ions is held by the tips of the fingers and lies back over the wrist, Miss Hale holds hers more naturally, but still lightly (as etiquette required), between forefinger and thumb; and whereas Hudson strongly emphasizes the fashionable crooking of the little finger by allowing it to catch the light, Ramsay, without rejecting the convention, plays it down, while giving the disposition of the other fingers a more pleasing variety. Vanhaecken assisted both painters with the execution of much of the drapery-work, but hardly in such a way as to obscure their distinctive styles. It is easy to understand why Hudson’s solid virtues proved to be so acceptable to contemporary taste, for he observed all the proprieties and could evidently be relied upon to produce a satisfactory and pleasing likeness. On the other hand a comparison between these two pictures, superficially so alike, brings out Ramsay’s capacity to respond to some of the deeper aspirations of the age, offering a more complete and vital presentation of the individual personality, and infusing into the conventions of gesture and deportment a new naturalness. A few years later, in his essay On Ridicule, he would define the painter’s task as being the representation of the ‘graceful in Nature’. Vertue was quite right to stress the value to Ramsay of Dr Mead’s patronage and interest. It is a mark of Mead’s attachment to Ramsay that, besides sitting to him and promoting his career, as well as welcoming him to his most intimate circle of friends, this most eminent of physicians made it his care to offer his services in a professional capacity. When, early in the year 1 740, he successfully treated the painter’s delicate sister Annie, who had gone to live with her brother in London, the elder Ramsay was moved to respond to his kindness to both his offspring by sending him two volumes of his poems, accom¬ panied by a fulsome expression of his gratitude: Being sensible how much my Dear and only Son has been, and is, obliged to the Regards of the best of Men, I could no longer contain the overflowing of my heart in greatfull Acknowledgments. The most distant parts of our Thule, and my Son does, and may justly, boast of the approbation of so excellent a Judge, who has with so much generosity endeavored to put his dawning Genious in the best Light. Nor am I more beholden to your goodness in producing my Son into the world, than for your Skill which preserved my dear Daughter from the danger that threatened her.1,1 Dr Mead was now in his later sixties. As physician to the King, he was supreme in his profession; but he had an equal reputation as a classical scholar, connoisseur and collector: his library of over 10,000 volumes and his vast collection of antiquities, paintings and manuscripts, which was housed in an extension to his splendid residence in Great Ormond Street, were famous throughout Europe, and were generously made available to artists, scholars and students of medicine and natural philosophy. Ramsay’s own privileged position within Mead’s circle, hinted at by Vertue, can now be established by new evidence, based on the diary - mostly written in Latin - of the Revd Dr Thomas Birch, who together with his fellow historian and classicist Dr John Ward (Plate 55) had been a founding member of Mead’s select dining club.1’11 Most of those who were invited to join were already - like Birch, Ward and Mead himself- Fellows of the Royal Society and had similar connexions with the lately revived Society of Antiquaries. In

ALLAN RAMSAY

66

the main, the club comprised historians and antiquaries of very considerable eminence. Ramsay, besides being by far the youngest of its members, was the only painter among them. The advantages he gained from Mead’s patronage were much greater than even so distinguished an interest might have led us to suppose; for he now joined a society which on the one hand represented the most advanced developments in classical learning and on the other hand attracted to itself, outside the actual membership of the club, a large number of the leading men of letters, cognoscenti and artists of the time - among literary figures Samuel Richardson, Alexander Pope, James Thomson, Mark Akenside and even¬ tually Horace Walpole; among critics and connoisseurs of art, George Vertue, Alexander Gordon and Andrew Hay; among artists, William Hogarth, Jonathan Richardson (a particular friend of Birch’s), Joseph Highmore, John Wootton, James Wills (another of Birch’s intimates), Arthur Pond (himself a Fellow of the Royal Society) and the sculptor John Michael Rysbrack. Another was the astronomer Edmund Halley. The range of the society into which Ramsay was thus drawn extended still further. Birch — a man eight years Ramsay’s senior - had been ordained by Hogarth’s patron Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Salisbury, with whose liberal views on Christian doctrine he sympathized, as also with the still more radical conclusions of Matthew Tindal, Conyers Middleton and David Hume, all of whom he befriended. A staunch Whig in his politics, Birch had been taken up by the family of Lord Hardwicke (the Lord Chancellor), eventually becoming tutor to one of the sons of Hardwicke’s heir the Honourable Philip Yorke (afterwards 2nd Earl of Hardwicke) - on whose Athenian Letters he appears to have collaborated. His principal literary achievement lay in his expanded edition of Pierre Bayle’s monumental Dictionary, a pioneering work of scientific biography; and it was under his inspiration that his friend Elizabeth Carter, to whose heart he had passionately, though fruitlessly, laid siege, translated Algarotti’s Dialoghi, which he saw through the press. Not least, Birch held a central and influential position within London’s three great learned societies, by virtue of his appointments as secretary of the Royal Society, as director of the Society of Antiquaries and as treasurer to the Society for the Encouragement of Learning (founded in 1736). Dr John Ward, co-founder with Birch of Mead’s club, was known at this time as the author of scholarly studies devoted to Roman civilization, of editions of Horace and William Lily’s Latin Grammar, besides other miscellaneous works, but is best remembered for his Lives of the Professors of Gresham College, published in 1740. He and his sister both sat to Ramsay many years later (Plate 55), and it was clearly on account of a close personal relationship that Ramsay also painted for him a copy of his early Self-portrait. Of the other members, Martin Folkes, antiquary and scientist, was shortly to become President of the Royal Society and subsequently President of the Society of Antiquaries. Like Hoadly, he too sat to Hogarth, whose association with Birch’s circle would probably have put such commissions in his way: Birch was undoubtedly one of Hogarth’s greatest admirer-s; he had known him since at least October 1738, when on the 30th of that month he had dined at his house in Leicester Fields, afterwards recording the occasion in adulatory terms: Pransus sum apud G. [Gulielmum] Hogarth Pictorem clarissimum. . . . The other members of the dining club included Browne Willis, a pioneer in the architectural study of English and Welsh cathedrals, and Richard Bentley, author and illustrator, who was to help to design the Gothic ornaments in Horace Walpole’s eccentric mansion,

Strawberry Hill.

Both may have played some part in inspiring

Ramsay’s

sympathetic re-evaluation of the Gothic style in architecture, as expressed (if only super¬ ficially) in his Dialogue on Taste. Two of the early travellers in the Middle East, the Revd Thomas Shaw and the Revd Richard Pococke, were also members of this intellectual society; while the now aged but still sprightly Thomas Coram appeared occasionally at the club’s dinners. These were generally held every week, on Wednesday afternoons, at Mead’s house.

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

1738-1751

67

Ramsay himself first attended a dinner of the club on 8 December 1739. Apart from the founders, he seems to have been its most faithful member during the decade and a half of its existence, which came to an end only with Mead’s death at an advanced age in 1754. It says much for Ramsay s intellectual and social maturity, and for the regard in which he was held, that already at the age of twenty-six he had been made welcome within a circle composed chiefly of men of far greater seniority who had achieved very considerable distinction in their own walks of life; and it is a measure of his standing in the scholarly world, to which his publication of Paderni’s communications concerning the discoveries at Herculaneum must have especially contributed, that in 1743 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.61 It had been to Ward that he had sent his translations of Paderni’s letters from the original Italian. Even apart from all the other benefits deriving from his intimate connexion with Alead s circle, he found himself at the centre ol that widening group of British scholars whose work, following upon the re-establishment of the old Society ol Antiquaries, may be said to have opened a new chapter in archaeological and antiquarian studies. We are here on the threshold of the movement of taste which ultimately gave rise, in the visual arts, to what we now call the Neoclassical style — a style that, in its earliest, emergent phase, was to colour, albeit discreetly, Ramsay’s final manner as a painter. But Ramsay saw himself as more than a painter. He clearly felt more at home in this scholarly company than in that of his fellow artists, and here there is a certain parallel with Reynolds. There could scarcely have been a greater stimulus to his growing ambition to be recognized as a man of letters and scholar in his own right. More immediate value must be attached to the avenues of patronage that were opened up to him as a painter by his close association with this distinguished intellectual society. Again and again Thomas Birch records his visits with prospective patrons to artists’ studios; and it is clear that within the learned circles to which he belonged advice was often sought about the respective merits of the leading portrait painters. To follow Birch on such visits is to be brought closer to the artistic world in which Ramsay moved, and adds something to our knowledge of the rivalries in which he and his contemporaries were engaged. In performing such a service Birch would presumably have been particularly receptive to the opinions of his admired friend Jonathan Richardson, eminent alike as painter and theorist, for whom he reserves the epithet celeberissimus, and to whom he himself sat in January 1742 (New Style). In addition to those who have been mentioned as being among his close acquaintances, Birch was on good terms with Pope’s friend and literary executor William Warburton - afterwards Bishop of Gloucester (now chiefly remembered for his untrustworthy character and defective scholarship). On 30 December 1740 we find Birch accompanying Warburton to Richardson’s house, apparently for a sitting. Again, early in 1741 (26 January 1740, Old Style), he took Philip Yorke to Ramsay’s studio in Covent Garden; an introduction resulting in the first of two three-quarter-length portraits, signed in that year. The likeness must have pleased, for in the following June Birch undertook the same service for Yorke’s recently married wife Lady Jemima Campbell (Marchioness Grey) and her aunt Lady Mary Grey (a daughter of the Duke of Kent): Lady Jemima then sat to Ramsay for a marriage-portrait, designed as a pendant to one of the portraits of her husband; Ramsay completed a bust-length portrait of Lady Alary Grey in the following year. These were prestigious enough commissions, coming as they did from a family now rising to great influence. Moreover they suggest that the interest of the Mead-Birch circle lay behind the slightly earlier commission given to Ramsay to paint his full-length of Lord Hardwicke (Plate 48), a work of exceptional importance and quality: this portrait, signed and dated 1739, may well have been begun within the first few months of Ramsay’s residence in London, and in any event demonstrates the swiftness of his rise to a privileged position in his profession. Sometimes a prospective patron would wish to inspect the work of more than one

ALLAN RAMSAY

68

painter before choosing his artist (the busier the painter the more pictures, finished or unfinished, he would have in his studio to show a visitor); and sometimes, of course, a patron would sit to more than one painter within the same period. Thus, having delivered Warburton to Richardson’s house in January

1741, Birch took him along, some five

months later, to the studios of three other artists in succession - Ramsay himself, Charles Philips and James Wills; by 7 July Warburton was back with Ramsay. Similarly, on 4 July Philip Yorke was also escorted to Wills’s studio, apparently about a week before he sat to Ramsay for his second portrait. Wills appears to have been a particular favourite of Birch’s, and these were not the only introductions with which he was favoured. Birch himself, after being accorded the privilege, at the beginning of the year 1742, of having his likeness drawn by Richardson, long after the aged artist’s official retirement, sat in the same year to Wills for the first of at least two portraits, one at bust length in a feigned oval frame, the other (engraved by Faber) at three-quarter length. It is easy to understand from these accomplished portraits Birch’s admiration of Wills and his desire to encourage him: in their strength of characterization they have much in common with some of Ramsay’s own portraits of the early 1 740s, and there are grounds for inferring that by then Wills had come strongly under Ramsay’s influence. Birch’s faith in Wills was rewarded towards the end of 1746, when Philip Yorke commissioned him to paint Birch’s portrait for his own house, and himself sat to Wills for his friend. Before then, besides sitting to Arthur Pond, Yorke had been showing an interest in both Hogarth and Highmore, whose studios he visited with Birch early in 1744, accompanied by members of his own family. Later in the same year, in May, the Duchess of Kent was also escorted to Hogarth’s house. Hogarth at this time was engaged upon his famous threequarter-length of Thomas Herring (then Archbishop of York; afterwards of Canterbury), which may conceivably have been one reason for her interest. The portrait reveals the impact made upon Hogarth, during a visit to Paris in the previous year, of the crayonportraits of Quentin de La Tour (Plate 80), whose merits he now brought to Philip Yorke’s attention. His opinion of La Tour must have been known likewise to Ramsay; but it was not until the 1750s that La Tour became a decisive influence on Ramsay’s own style — at a time, significantly, when Ramsay’s relationship with Hogarth had become much closer. Highmore first appears in Birch’s diary in July 1740, when Birch called on him, and a week later entertained him with other company; perhaps in consequence of his conversa¬ tions with Highmore, Birch visited Hogarth two days afterwards. Hogarth by then had just completed his magisterial full-length of Captain Thomas Coram (Plate 34), and had presented it to the Foundling Hospital in honour of its founder:

the gift had been

announced by Folkes - a vice-president of the Charity - at the annual meeting of the Court of Governors held on 14 May 1740. It is significant that in the previous March, when the portrait may have been just finished or nearing completion, Captain Coram and Ramsay had appeared together, for the first time, as fellow guests at one of Mead’s weekly dinners. (They were to do so again in December 1740 and twice towards the beginning of the year following.) Ramsay must then have recalled his own connexion with the genesis of Hogarth’s picture. The circumstances are known to us from Hogarth’s own account, wherein with characteristic frankness, and scorn of false modesty, he reveals his ambition, in under¬ taking ‘this mighty portrait’, to be recognized as the equal of Van Dyck himself: Upon one day at the academy in St. Martin’s Lane I put this question, if any at this time was to paint a portrait as well as Van Dyck would it be seen and the person enjoy the benefit? They knew I had said I could. The answer made by Mr Ramsay was positively No, and confirmed by about twenty who were present. The reason then given very frankly by Mr R: ‘Our opinions must be consulted and we will never allow it’. Upon which I resolved that if I did do the thing, I would affirm I had done it. I found my advantage in this way of doing myself justice, reconciling this violence to my

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON:

56

1738-1751

69

Sir Peter Halkett Wedderburn, 1746 (National

Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

own modesty by saying Vanity consists chiefly in fancying one doth better than one does. If a man think he does no more than he doth do, he must know it, and if he says it in this art as a watchmaker may say, ‘The watch I have made you I’ll warrant you is as good as any other man can make you,’ and if it really is so the watchmaker is not branded as infamous but on the contrary is esteemed as an honest man who is as good as his word. What had riled Hogarth was not so much the reverence paid to Van Dyck as the reputation of Jean-Baptiste Vanloo, who had fulfilled the predictions of friends that the English were to be ‘run away with’, and whom Hogarth saw, with some slight exaggera¬ tion, as a painter who had ‘monopolized all the people of fashion in the kingdom’. Vanloo’s excessive popularity, Hogarth felt, was all the more intolerable because he was a foreigner. On urging his fellow painters at the St Martin’s Lane Academy to ‘oppose’ Vanloo ‘with spirit’, he had met with the response: ‘You talk; why don’t you do it yourself?’ The challenge was not one to be refused. ‘Provoked at this,’ he tells us, ‘I set about this mighty portrait, and found it no more difficult than I thought it’. These conversations presumably took place late in 1739, after the granting, on 17 October, of the Royal Charter incorporating the Society of the Foundling Hospital, on which Hogarth’s name appears in the list of the appointed Governors. How well this masterpiece of early eighteenth-century portraiture was received by Hogarth’s associates at the St Martin’s Lane Academy is unknown: the indications are that Ramsay’s Dr Mead (Plate 61), painted for the Foundling Hospital seven years later, and hung beside the Thomas Coram, appealed more to public taste. If that was so, the reasons are not far to seek: as has been intimated earlier, Hogarth’s profound and highly original portrayal of a self-made man of somewhat eccentric and ungainly appearance, however much it deserves recognition as a work of commanding genius and rare intel¬ lectuality, possesses by virtue of the very nature of the artist’s genius little or nothing of the refinement and sophistication to which the taste of the times was attuned. It can scarcely be doubted that the exhibition of the Coram at the Foundling confirmed Ramsay in the opinion that Hogarth presented no challenge to him in respect of desirable patronage. Nevertheless it cannot be assumed that a painter of Ramsay’s discernment, whose deepest instincts were directed towards a comparable humanity and naturalness of portrai¬ ture, did not take to heart the lessons of Hogarth’s almost Rembrandtesque concern with

70

ALLAN RAMSAY

its deeper implications — and that he did so is suggested by several portraits after this date that seem to reflect his awareness of Hogarth's unique capacity to penetrate beyond his sitter’s appearance to their inner being. An early example, from the year 1739, is the bustlength portrait, already mentioned, of Patrick Lindsay (Plate 33), the former Lord Provost of Edinburgh to whom the poet Ramsay had written his passionate appeal on behalf of his son some four years previously — a portrait that may be accounted one of the artist’s minor masterpieces of genial characterization. Among works more familiar today to the public, the considerably later portrait on the same scale of Sir Peter Halkett Wedderburn (Plate 56), in the National Gallery of Scotland, dating from the year 1746, exhibits a similar realism, and has impressed generations of visitors by its sympathetic interpretation of extreme old age. In terms of patronage itself,

Ramsay was already enjoying a success comparable

perhaps only with that of Vanloo. The fact that so soon after he had set up his London practice he had received two major commissions from such great statesmen as Lord Hardwicke and the Duke of Argyll demonstrates how quickly he became recognized as one of the pre-eminent portrait painters in England. A glimpse into his busy studio overlooking the Great Piazza of Covent Garden is afforded by the journal of George Sinclair of Ldbster, a Scot of good family who called there in April 1739, staying to drink tea and to admire Ramsay’s pictures, while several sitters of both sexes came in, one of them the young Lord Beauchamp, the schoolboy grandson of the 6th Duke of Somerset/’" In the following month Sinclair returned with the Lord Lyon King of Arms, Alexander Brodie of Brodie; on coming downstairs he met Sir William Young, Secretary of War, ‘and went up again with him'.1” When John Scrope, the Secretary of the Treasury, wished to have a portrait of himself‘drawn by a good hand’, he inquired ‘where Mr Ramsay was to be met with’, and was referred to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik/’4 Here the Scottish connexion is again in evidence, for Scrope had lately spent sixteen years in Edinburgh as a Baron of the Exchequer and as a legal associate of Clerk’s. Meanwhile Ramsay’s portraits of public figures, such as the Duke of Argyll and Sir John Barnard - the popular Member for the City of London and a former Lord Mayor, - were attracting the attention of the leading engravers, notably the younger Faber, and the dissemination of prints of such portraits must have considerably enlarged the painter’s reputation. In the Lord Hardwicke (Plate 48) and the 2nd Duke of Argyll (Plate 57) Ramsay did justice to his patrons’ political eminence by giving their portraits something of the air of the ‘grand manner’. They remain among the most dashing of his full-lengths, both in design and colour. The latter picture would have served for long, through Faber’s engraving, as an exemplum in the use of the classically inspired cross-legged pose which became widely fashionable in the eighteenth century, and which Aikman had already employed in a full-length of the painter-architect William Kent,65 the companion of the artist’s Italian years. This pose has its ultimate origin in ancient sculpture, being found especially in three works that seem to have particularly appealed to the eighteenth-century taste for grazia of deportment - the Faun with Pipes now in the Louvre but then in the Villa Borghese in Rome; the Satyr ascribed to Praxiteles at the Capitol; and the Mercury in the Uffizi Palace in Florence. (Ramsay made a sketch of the Borghese Faun during his second visit to Italy.) The cross-legged pose is seen earlier in the eighteenth century in two major works of sculpture executed for Westminster Abbey - first of all in the statue by Giovanni Battista Guelfi for the monument to James Craggs set up in the Abbey in 1727; and secondly in Peter Scheemaker’s famous statue of Shakespeare for the monument to the poet designed in 1740 by William Kent and installed in Poets’ Corner in the following year. But in composing the portrait of Argyll Ramsay must also have had Van Dyck in mind, as is 57

John Campbell, 2nd

suggested by the general character of the design and the eloquence of the colour-scheme,

Duke of Argyll, 1740

as well as his inclusion, at the Duke’s feet, of a plumed helmet such as appears in Van

(Collection of the Duke of

Dyck’s last portrayal of Charles II as Prince of Wales.66 Unquestionably, the 2nd Duke of

Argyll, Inveraray Castle)

Argyll and other full-lengths painted by Ramsay in 1739 and 1740 display a Continental

ALLAN RAMSAY

72

stylishness that was beyond the powers of almost all his English rivals, Knapton and Highmore alone excepted. Within a year of his arrival in London from Italy Ramsay’s prosperity was such that in the year 1739 he was in a position to marry,1’7 despite the lact that Anne Bayne, in consequence of her father’s sudden death two years earlier, brought him a dowry of only £500.68 His young wife came from a cultured family: her father, Alexander Bayne of Logie, had been Professor of Municipal Law at Edinburgh, and had possessed, besides, a talent for musical composition and painting, while her mother was a granddaughter of the dis¬ tinguished Scottish architect Sir William Bruce, whose memorials are Prestonheld House, Holy rood Palace and Hopetoun House. Anne Bayne’s vivacious features, large blue eyes and golden hair are known to us from Ramsay’s two portraits of her (Plates 22, 58),J lor the second of which she probably posed shortly before her death in childbed in the fourth year of her marriage. Alexander Bayne had died during Ramsay’s absence in Italy, but he must have become well known to the painter at the time of his courtship of his daughter in Edinburgh. He had practised law in Edinburgh before entering Lincoln’s Inn, where he had formed a useful connexion with the Earl of Wemyss, who engaged him as his agent for the manage¬ ment of his Nuneham estates. It is hard to resist a verbatim quotation of Boswell’s engaging account of this kindly and somewhat eccentric man. Boswell had his information from Lord Karnes, as he tells us in his Journal in Edinburgh of 1778, but was apparently unaware of Bayne’s connexion with Ramsay: Lord Karnes told me this evening that a Mr. Bayne of Logie, known by the name of Logie Bayne, was the first regular Professour of Scots Law here. He was at first an Advocate at this bar, but did not succeed. He then went to London and resided some years, thinking to try the english bar. But that could not do either. But such was the effect of a grave countenance and a slow, formal manner, a neatness of expression and the english Accent, that the Advocates sent a deputation to ask him to accept of being Professour, which he did most readily. Stirling of Keir was once invited to dine with him. One o’clock was then the hour. When he went in to Mr Bayne’s study, Mr Bayne took no notice of him at first, but kept his eye intent looking through a telescope to the clock of the Tron Church. Then suddenly rising, said, ‘You’re welcome, Sir. It is precisely One o’clock.’ He was a sort of musical composer, but of no taste in Musick, for he was quite inattentive to the finest pieces at the Concert till his own performances were played, and then he fell to the harpsichord and was all alive. He was a kind of mechanick too, and tried to boil snuff in place of toasting it. I found Lord Karnes held Bayne very cheap. Yet... I have heard that he wrote a paper in the Spectator. Lord Stormont, however, came to a more favourable opinion, and addressed to Bayne a poem lauding in high-flown terms a treatise which he had written on music. Still more flattering is the memorial tablet which his wife placed beside his grave at Alnwick Church: A man of Elegant Taste and Polite Style, who had the Art of tempering the Severities of his harder Studies with the Soothing Gaieties of Gentlemanly Amusements, sometimes with Mechanical Operations, sometimes with Painting, but chiefly with Music, wherein he greatly Excelled; conspicuous in these Ingenious Talents, joined with a perpetual Justness, Decency of Manners; He Shone, the Light of his Family and Relations, the healer of Divisions, the Relief of the distressed, the Darling of his companions. In March 1740 Ramsay’s wife gave birth to a son, who was given the name Allan.70 In conveying the news to Cunyngham on 10 March/1 Ramsay could not resist an allusion to 58

Anne Bayne, first wife of

the success his hard work had brought him: ‘You tell me you make money fast by never

the painter, c. 1743 (Private

being at home, I do the same thing but ’tis by never being abroad. You hope that in otia

Collection)

tuta requires,11 I that I shall ride above; at cetera paene gemellf.'1’ It was in this confident letter

74

ALLAN RAMSAY

that he now proudly announced his triumph over his strongest rivals, Vanloo, Soldi and Rusca: ‘I have put all your Vanlois and Soldis, and Roscos, to flight and now play the first fiddle my Self’. Ramsay was here claiming no less than the right to be considered the leading portrait painter in London: the connoisseurs known to Alexander Gordon would doubtless have concurred, as did Vertue eventually (but not for another eleven years). Waterhouse has drawn attention to the fact that Ramsay mentions none of his English competitors,74 whom he would not have regarded as presenting the same challenge. The chief of these was the stolid, uninspired Thomas Hudson, whose best years still lay ahead. He and Ramsay were to share the favour of London society lor another decade. Ramsay’s letter to Cunyngham contained some news of Paderni, who had found a new patron in Dr Mead, having been commissioned by him to make a number of copies of ancient paintings. These may have included the replica of the Aldobrandini Wedding in the Vatican which Mead is known to have possessed — a composition rich in graceful render¬ ings of the human figure, some of which were soon to be adapted to the ‘attitudes’ in English portraiture.

Meanwhile Annie Ramsay’s place in the painter’s household at

Covent Garden had been taken by her sister Cecilia, who seems to have performed the duties of helpmeet and companion to Ramsay’s young wife. That July, in thanking Cunyngham for looking after the delicate Annie in Pembrokeshire, the poet Ramsay was able to report that his son and family in London were ‘all well and prospering’. Indeed, as he had observed to Cunyngham earlier in the year, the painter was in such a ‘fair and thriving way’ that he seemed ‘to have nothing against him as long as God [granted] him life and health’. What saddened the poet was that he had to rely mostly on letters from his daughters for news, such was the painter’s ‘Laziness to write’ — what the younger Ramsay himself called his ‘inkophobia’. By December, however, the painter had at last com¬ municated with his father, and had given him news of the health of all the household and not least of the youngest Allan. But the poet’s happiness in the good fortune of his family was to be shortlived, for within little more than two years he and his son were both to find themselves widowers, and the child Allan had also died. In the meantime the painter was consoling Cunyngham on the death of his father, in consequence of which the baronetcy of Prestonfield had now passed to the doctor’s elder brother William. Ramsay’s condolences had nothing in them of the easy consolations of contemporary piety. He knew his friend, and couched his sentiments in the precise terms that he must have been sure Cunyngham would appreciate as a physician accustomed to mortality, gently reminding him of the philosophic attitude to death which accepted its universal dominion, and even introducing a lighter note of humane wit: I heartily condole with you on the Death of the venerable old Gentleman, tho those things being the common and inevitable lot of Mankind cannot bring any Surprise to a philosopher like you. It is what we must all come to; and after you have by your skill preserved the insides of one half of England, and I by mine the out, perhaps the best side of the two, Ire tamen restat quo Numa devenit et Ancus. Pulvis et umbra sumus.75 Where Hippocrates, and Apelles, St Luke, Ratclifle [,nV] and Sr Godfrey76 have gone before us, with a numerous suite of Patients and pictures that have come to an untimely end.77 As to Ramsay’s list of famous physicians and painters, the inclusion of Sir Godfrey Kneller in this exalted company is not a matter for surprise, but reflects a reputation which accorded the German painter a place in the annals of portraiture in England second only to that of Van Dyck. Ramsay added to his letter an intimation of his desire for Annie’s return to London, both on account of the approaching bad weather and because his wife was ‘beginning to be sick again

and had need of ‘a help mate’ — Cecilia having probably gone back to

Edinburgh. He also felt obliged to seek his friend’s help over an extraordinary matter concerning the Aberdeen painter William Mosman (his fellow student at the Edinburgh

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON: 1738-1751

59

75

Posthumous Portrait of the

painter’s son Allan, 1740 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Academy of St Luke). On his return from Italy Mosrnan had set up practice as a portrait painter in the Scottish capital; but Ramsay had meanwhile received word from Paderni in Rome that Mosrnan had failed to repay the loan of a sum of money amounting to 70 crowns. As Cunyngham was at this time in Scotland, having gone up to Prestonfield on his father’s death, he was in a position to have a word with Mosrnan, who had failed to answer the letters that Paderni had written to him. Ramsay advised Cunyngham that George Turnbull was another of Paderni’s debtors (to the extent of £15) - and, Ramsay surmised, Turnbull would ‘never be in a capacity to pay him’. Presumably the circum¬ stances in which this debt was incurred (a very substantial one, amounting by conversion to present valuation'to nearly £1,000) related to Paderni’s illustrations to Turnbull’s Treatise on Ancient Painting. Meanwhile Mosman’s laxity had given Ramsay second thoughts about an idea he had had in mind to commission him to paint his mother-in-law’s portrait for his own house: as he confided to Cunyngham, he would now ‘wait the upshot of Camillo’s 70 crowns’. The triumphs that Ramsay now achieved in his profession were accompanied by domestic joys that did not last, being soon clouded by the death of his young wife and ultimately by the death of all the children of the marriage. In the spring of 1740 his wife gave birth to a second son, Bayne.78 But in May of the same year his first child, Allan, died at the age of fourteen months.78 Bayne himself was to live for only eight years;80 and a daughter, Anne, who was born in 174381 - and whom Ramsay used to call his ‘much accomplished child’, — survived only into her eleventh year.88 And it was in giving birth to Anne that his wife died in February 1743.88 A few weeks afterwards, the poet’s ‘gude auld wife’ died in Edinburgh.84 In later life Ramsay told Lady Bute a touching story about his grief over the death in infancy of a favourite child, who must have been Allan. Sitting in tears beside the death-bed, he had felt, he said, a sudden desire to take the child’s likeness. He thereupon fetched his materials and began to paint, and so long as he continued to do

ALLAN RAMSAY

76

so ‘felt no more concern than if the subject had been an indifferent one’. His grief had left him. As soon as he laid down his brushes it returned.85 On Ramsay’s own death, the picture, painted on an unstretched piece of canvas, was found among his effects (Plate 59).86 Of all Ramsay’s major patrons during the 1740s, none was more important to his advancement in his profession than the former Lord Ilay, who in 1743 had succeeded his elder brother as 3rd Duke of Argyll. One of the most powerful of Whig statesmen in Great Britain and a strong supporter of Walpole, the 3rd Duke virtually directed Scottish affairs, and it was by no whimsical jest that he earned the appellation of‘the King of Scotland’. In 1744 he sat to Ramsay for the first of a series of portraits commissioned during a period of a decade and a half, and including the masterly seated full-length at Glasgow, painted in 1749 (Plate 70). Altogether the Argylls’ patronage of Ramsay extended for nearly two decades - from 1739 (when the full-length of the 2nd Duke was begun) to 1758 (ending shortly before the 3rd Duke’s death). Furthermore the 3rd Earl of Bute, who became the greatest of all Ramsay’s patrons and brought him to the notice of the future King George III, was the Duke’s nephew - a relationship whose significance has only recently been appreciated by modern writers. Members of Parliament who sat to Ramsay in the early

1740s included Viscount

Hillsborough, Robert Craigie (the distinguished Lord Advocate), Pennystone Powney, Sir James Grant of Grant, his son Sir Ludovic Grant, and Sir John Baird of Newbyth. The last two names underline the importance of family connexions to the ‘business’ of an eighteenth-century portrait painter. This is not a matter that has been much explored by historians of art: but it is plain from contemporary letters that sitters often conveyed to their relations or friends their opinion of their portraits, favourable or otherwise; and it was only natural, besides, that once a portrait had been hung up in a private house, the likeness and other features of the picture would become talking-points for family and guests alike. In this manner an artist who had pleased would be recommended by one relation or friend to another. In the case of the instances just cited, Sir John Baird’s wife, Janet Dalrymple, was the sister of Sir James Dalrymple of Hailes, who had sat to Ramsay in 1739 (Plate 42); and Sir Ludovic Grant’s second wife, Lady Margaret Ogilvy, was the daughter of another of Ramsay’s sitters in that year, the Earl of Findlater and Seafield. That is to say, we have two parallel and typical examples of patronage descending from one family to another, evidently by virtue of a marriage. Similarly, we find close friends or political associates commissioning portraits within a short period of one another. This pattern of patronage, which is relevant to the history of eighteenth-century portraiture as a whole, shows itself consistently in Ramsay’s career. It is not known how frequently in these years Ramsay managed to free himself from his busy practice in London in order to spend some time in his native Edinburgh. But he was certainly there for a short while during the fateful year of the Forty-five. The visit was probably necessitated by an offer he had made, earlier in the same year, to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary - a recent foundation - of the gift (as has been mentioned) of a full-length portrait of the 2nd Earl of Hopetoun, a benefactor to the hospital. The picture was to be an adaptation, at full length, of a three-quarter-length portrait which Ramsay had already painted for Hopetoun House; but, as it was not apparently delivered for another three years, his work on it was probably delayed by the uncertain situation created by the Young Pretender’s occupation of Edinburgh on 16 September - which Ramsay was in time to witness, having left London that summer. (Horace Walpole’s puzzling assertion that, having originally been a Jacobite, Ramsay had gone north to join the rebel army, but had arrived too late87 (which he had not), looks like a mistaken inference from Vertue’s account of this Scottish visit,88 which mentions the Jacobite incursion, and may also represent a confusion with the poet Ramsay’s more certainly known inclinations towards the Stuart cause.)

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON: 1738-1751

60

77

Margaret Johnstone, Lady

Ogilvy, 1 745 (Collection of Sir Francis Ogilvy)

The ‘Guse-pye’ now ceased to be a safe Horatian retreat; and the elder Ramsay had wisely gone to stay with friends in the country: not only was the house exposed to the artillery of the loyal Castle garrison, but on the afternoon of 8 October a contingent of Highlanders led by Cameron of Lochiel marched up to it with the object of using it as a stronghold from which to direct fire on the sentinels of the lower guard. A few shots were exchanged, several of the rebels were killed, and Lochiel was wounded. When the Castle cannon began firing on the town there was general alarm; but on the retreat of Lochiel’s men the guns fell silent, to the immense relief of the citizenry.8‘* It was no place for an artist’s studio. Yet during his stay in Edinburgh, where he remained until late October, Ramsay painted several portraits, showing (like other portraitists of the period) complete impartiality towards his patrons’ political allegiance: while on the one hand Robert Dundas of Arniston, whose wife now sat for a bust-length portrait, held a high Govern¬ ment appointment as Solicitor-General for Scotland, Lord Ogilvy, who commissioned similar portraits of himself and his wife (a Jacobite heroine), had joined the Prince in Edinburgh. The portrait of Lady Ogilvy (Plate 60) remained unfinished, the execution of the costume being carried forward only to the stage of the umber underpainting, as though the sittings had been interrupted, and finally abandoned, on account of the military situation. To the year 1745 belongs one of the few surviving examples of Ramsay’s occasional ventures into light verse. Entitled ‘A Convenient Place to Desert to’ and comprising three six-line stanzas, this piece was addressed to Cunyngham, probably in the expectation of being with him at Prestonfield: as has been mentioned earlier, Cunyngham had apparently absented himself for a while from his medical practice in Wales so that he could be with

ALLAN RAMSAY

78

his widowed mother in these uncertain times. Although it has little merit in itself, the poem throws some light upon the painter’s conception of the good life. His subject is the conventional longing, familiar to readers ol Horace, for a quiet retreat from the pomp and luxury of the world, a theme to which many poets of the period, from Pope to the elder Ramsay himself, had given more distinguished expression. Renouncing the dignity of‘lofty Rooms’ and the temptation ‘to loll in splendid Equipage’, the would-be poet confesses his unassuming wish for a modest house exempt from the window-tax laid upon large man¬ sions, where his board would be temperate and his cellar innocent of‘poysonous Draughts’ that ‘kill the night and damn the day’: Yet craves not lofty Rooms my heart Where fire and froid and a desert Await the pampering train; Nor would I waste my youthfull age To loll in splendid Equipage The envy of the vain. Be mine a House tho’ clean but small To pay no Window Tax at all And temperate my Board; No poysonous Draughts that bends convey To kill the night and damn the day Its cellar should afford. But there I’d pass the careless hour, Now gay, now serious, never sour, And Enjoy with sense and Rest, Far from the Insipid vulgar crew, A Book or such a friend as you, Most stoically blest. Ramsay’s intimation in these verses of his preferred taste for a moderate diet, together with his expressed abhorrence of strong drink, is wholly consonant with Allan Cunningham's information that Ramsay was 'fond of delicate eating’ and drank nothing stronger than tea, even the smell of claret being offensive to him. Ramsay was to return to Edinburgh, on a much longer visit, in 1747. This was a year of considerable importance in his career, for from the period immediately preceding his departure from London that summer there stand two major portraits which occupv a distinguished place in the history of British art - the full-lengths of Dr Mead (Plate 61), painted for the Foundling Hospital,90 and The Chief of MacLeod at Dunvegan Castle (Plate 63). Hogarth’s gesture in presenting to the Foundling Hospital his portrait of its founder, Thomas Coram, had set an example to his fellow artists;91 and at a meeting of the Court of Governors held on 31

December 1746 it was announced that fifteen artists, including

Ramsay, had agreed ‘to present Performances in their different Professions for Ornament¬ ing this Hospital’.92 Among the other painters named were such prominent bgures as Francis Hayman, Joseph Highmore, Thomas Hudson, Samuel Scott and Richard Wilson. At the same meeting all the artists in question were thereupon elected ‘Governors and Guardians’ of the hospital - an honour already conferred upon Hogarth and the sculptor John Michael Rysbrack. These events were to make a considerable impact on the state of the arts in England: not only was there soon brought together, in an institution visited by 61

Dr Richard Mead, 1747

a large section of the public, a collection of representative works by contemporary British

(The Thomas Coram

artists, but the discussions of the Artist Governors at their annual dinners at the Foundling

Foundation for Children,

(held to commemorate the landing in England of King William III) played a signihcant

London)

part, under Hayman’s leadership, in the establishment in 1760 of the Society of Artists,

ALLAN RAMSAY

80

with its unprecedented provision of yearly exhibitions; an impulse leading ultimately to the institution of the Royal Academy of Arts eight years later. Of all the notabilities directly connected with the Charity, none, save only George Frederick Handel, had attained to greater distinction than Richard Mead. Besides being a Governor of the hospital, Dr Mead held the office of medical consultant. The portrait of him was to form a pair with Hogarth’s Coram, and the two pictures are known to have been hung together in the Secretary’s office on 16 December 1747. Ramsay would have been in no doubt about the importance of his task, and in any case must have been conscious that his work would have to stand comparison both with Hogarth’s masterpiece and with two full-lengths painted for the Foundling Hospital by Hudson in the previous year - the portraits of Theodore Jacobsen, the architect of its new premises in Lamb’s Conduit Fields, and Justice John Milner, its vice-president. In the Milner Hudson had excelled himself in a remarkable psychological study, and his expressive rendering of his sitter’s melancholy features makes it all the more regrettable that so little is known about the man himself; but for all that it is the Jacobsen (Plate 62) that tells us more about Hudson’s artistic preoccupations at this moment, and helps to throw light upon his professional relationship to Ramsay. Indeed Hudson here gives the impression of making a deliberate attempt to emulate Ramsay’s elegance, and Jacobsen’s cross-legged pose recalls that of the 2nd Duke of Argyll of 1740 (Plate 57), which Hudson could have consulted in Faber’s engraving. Fhe antique origin of this well-known attitude would inevitably have been in his thoughts; and he further displayed his classicizing intention by giving prominence in his composition to a relief all’ antica and some broken fragments of a Corinthian column: Hudson had not enjoyed, as Ramsay had, the benefit of an Italian training, and it is as though he felt a need to demonstrate the depth of his own far from negligible acquaintance with the antique, largely second-hand though it was, and so to present a challenge to his cultured rival. What he lacked in reputation on account of his insular education he attempted, a few years later, to make good by a hurried visit to Italy in the company of Roubiliac; but, as Vertue observed afterwards, that venture had been ‘very quick and their stay very little - only enough to say that they have seen Rome’.

It is against this

background of rivalry that we may judge Ramsay’s response. What he produced was something entirely new - a bold composition of contrasting blacks and reds and a strikingly realistic presentation of a man of imposing presence whose imperious gesture testified to his standing in the world; a work of such authority and stylishness that it could be seen to be the product of a mind of exceptional and elevated sophistication. Four years after its presentation Vertue singled out the portrait of Mead (Plate 61) as having ‘the admiration of most people’,93 as though it was attracting special attention; but a bare record of this kind only hints at the impression which the Mead must have made upon the most discerning among those who first saw it. The reactions, however, of two such visitors to the Foundling Hospital, soon after the picture had gone on display, have come down to us in a curious work, published anonymously in 1839, which contains recollections of celebrated medical men of former times, including Dr Mead.94 One of the two was Aaron Hill, the poet and dramatist; the other was the author of the book, a young, unidentified friend of Hill’s who apparently knew both Mead and Ramsay. The visit must have taken place within the period 1747-49, since Hill died in January 1750. As they stood in front of Ramsay’s portrait Aaron Hill offered the opinion that it was not like, and that in any case no one could paint nowadays, ‘except Mr Reynolds’ - and even he was ‘not fit to hold a candle to Vandyke’; an interesting judgment if accurately reported, as Reynolds at this time had still to establish his reputation in London and had not yet begun, or at least completed, his studies in Italy. Hill’s young companion, on the other hand, was far from being in agreement with him, and concluded that the poet was ‘ignorant’ about such matters. Recollecting the portrait afterwards, he observed: ‘I thought

THE FIRST STYLE AND SUCCESS IN LONDON: 1738-1751

81

62

Thomas Hudson:

Theodore Jacobsen, 1746 (The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, London) 63

Norman, 22nd Chief of

MacLeod, c. 1747 (Collection of MacLeod of MacLeod, Dunvegan Castle, Skye)

it so strong a resemblance, that I fancied it was alive, and wondered how such a work could be done’; and again: ‘It is so like - ah, what a wonderful art! - that I could have spoken to it’. The Dr Mead is certainly one of Ramsay’s most powerful exercises in realism; but it has entered the history of British painting more specifically as his major statement in the language of Late Baroque: with this portrait, as Waterhouse observed, the European ‘grand style’ had been introduced into British portraiture, and the precepts that Reynolds was to bring back from Italy had been anticipated by many years.95 The subject and the circumstances alike called for a tour de force, and the Baroque masters had shown the expressive possibilities inherent in a style which combined intense realism with eloquence of design and ‘attitude’. The same air of the ‘grand manner’ characterizes the full-length of Norman, 22nd Chief of MacLeod at Dunvegan (Plate 63), a picture likely to have been painted in London in the same year, although possibly begun in 1746. In a bold design, Ramsay represented the MacLeod as striding by the seashore in checked trews and plaid, imitative of tartan, with the Isle of Skye and his clan chieftain’s home of Dunvegan Castle in the distance. Some two decades earlier, Ramsay’s former master in London, the estimable Hans Hysing, had portrayed one of his youthful sitters (almost certainly Thomas Osborne, Earl of Derby) in colourful tartan trews,96 and as a young man the 3rd Earl of Bute had posed in tartan trews and plaid for a full-length ascribed to Aikman:9/ but the MacLeod is a work of a far more exalted order of artistic invention. To begin with, there is an entirely novel element in the startling effect created by the graceful silhouetting of the MacLeod’s figure against the serene background of landscape and sky, enhancing the decorative quality produced by

ALLAN RAMSAY

82

64

Joshua Reynolds:

Commodore Augustus Keppel, c. 1753 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) 65

Joseph Vanhaecken:

The Chief of MacLeod, copy after Ramsay, c. 1747 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

the diced red and black of his Highland costume.

More significantly, the dramatic

movement given to the pose brings the later work of Reynolds still more powerfully to mind. There can indeed be no real doubt that Reynolds’s great full-length of Commodore Augustus Keppel,98 probably painted in 1753 (Plate 64), was partly inspired by Ramsay’s composition. Reynolds could not have seen the MacLeod in 1747, when he was absent from London, but he might conceivably have known it in an unfinished state if it was already on Ramsay’s easel in the previous year. However, at least six years separate the execution of the two pictures, and on the assumption that the MacLeod was sent to Dunvegan shortly after its completion, instead of remaining temporarily in the sitter’s London residence, another explanation of Reynolds’s apparent knowledge of the composition may be pro¬ posed. By the time the Keppel was painted, Ramsay and Hudson - Reynolds’s master - had for some years been acting as the executors of Joseph Vanhaecken; and among the drawings belonging to Vanhaecken’s estate there was a large and detailed copy by him in chalks (Plate 65) of Ramsay’s portrait of MacLeod.(> As Allan Cunningham tells us, Ramsay became a great favourite at Court; and we are informed that when painting the King he was sometimes invited to take his easel and canvas to the palace dining-room, so that his Majesty might criticize his work as he ate, ‘and have the pleasure of his conversation’. The artist would then speak ‘freely and without disguise’ about European affairs, in which he was well versed. ‘When,’ says Cunningham, ‘the King had finished his usual allowance of boiled mutton and turnips, he would rise and say, ‘Now, Ramsay, sit down in my place and take your dinner!’5' Queen Charlotte, likewise, is reported to have delighted in Ramsay’s company, not least on account of his ability to converse with her in her native German - a rare accomplishment at the Court. In this context it is of considerable interest that in January 1762, when he must have been engaged upon the State full-length of the Queen, he made arrangements for a number of German books to be sent to him from Hamburg, in particular requesting examples of‘the poetical, critical or comical works of Lessing’, of Rabener (‘who writes in the manner of our Swift’) and of Gellert, Gessner and Hagedorn.58 What he sought to obtain were not ‘any large works in Law, Divinity, Physick, Natural History, or other severe studies’, but rather ‘matters of entertainment or Belles Lettres’; and, if possible, they should be in large print.59 It may be plausibly surmised that Ramsay’s purpose was to acquire a number of books in the German language which he could offer to the young Queen - a mere child of seventeen years - for her delectation. That this was his intention

LORD BUTE’S PATRONAGE AND FIRST COURT1 APPOINTMENT

145

167

Thomas Gainsborough: Queen Charlotte

(Collection of Her Majesty The Queen)

is compatible with the known fact that, many years afterwards, in 1775, he presented to the King a book of exceptional rarity (now in the British Library) which he had in his possession, a modern Greek translation of Boccaccio’s Le Teseide delle nozze di Emilia, published in Venice in 1529. The circumstances attending this gift are recounted in a passage in Ramsay’s unpublished essay on English Versification (where he introduces the work by its English title Theseus and the Marriage of Emilia): T have never been able to hear of any but two copies of it; one belonging to Mr Elans Stanley, and another belonging to me, as mentioned by Dr Warton in his History of English Poetry, Vol. I, page 3 5 2.60 Upon hearing that the King had purchased at a great price a copy of the Teseide of Boccaccio, I thought it a pity that this rare book should remain in my small and obscure collection; and therefore, did myself the honour of presenting it to his Majesty June 15, 1775’.l Queen Charlotte’s own library has since been dispersed, and the suggestion proposed above that Ramsay made her the object of a similar act of generosity cannot be verified: but it would not have been out of character. What does seem clear is that Ramsay was drawn to the Queen from the beginning; and certainly she inspired some of his finest works. The first of his portraits of her, the Coronation full-length, has hitherto been wrongly identified with a picture in Buckingham Palace (Plate 191),62 which in actuality is a later variant painted for the King’s mother, Princess Augusta. Consequently the merits of the original portrait have remained unappreciated and unknown ever since George III apparently gave it away (on inheriting the Buckingham Palace picture from his mother) to one of his German relations. This sympathetic portrait, recently traced to Cassel,63 is now revealed as an unrecognized masterpiece in Ramsay’s finest vein (Plate 142). Horace Walpole considered it

‘much flattered’,64 and no doubt Ramsay did to some extent

underplay that obtrusive plainness which had so upset the King when, on the eve of his wedding, he was first vouchsafed a sight of his bride, and which crowned an uncommon diminutiveness of stature: but in this respect, it may be suggested, the picture compares favourably with the much later full-length by Gainsborough,6’ a masterpiece of poetic transformation but one that departs so far from truthfulness as to present us with a woman

146

Queen Charlotte with a

fan, c. 1 763(?) (Collection of the Earl of Seafield)

of commanding presence and imperious beauty, such as her courtiers may well have found difficulty in recognizing (Plate 145); and because Ramsay portrayed her as the pensive and sensitive girl that she was, the characterization rings true. One story about the painting of the picture has been related. While the Queen herself did not come to the artist’s studio for the sittings, it was arranged that in order to ease his task in the completion of the portrait the crown jewels and other regalia were delivered to his house, and a preliminary chalk study of the Queen’s crown has been preserved. Ramsay, it is said, became so anxious about the responsibility thus imposed upon him that he requested the provision of a guard, with the consequence that in deference to his concern sentinels were posted day and night in front of and behind his house in Soho Square. In the profile portrait of the Queen (Plate 146), Ramsay again produced a work of exceptional quality. Here, in a side view of the royal features, what they lacked in beauty

LORI) BUTE’S PATRONAGE AND EIRST COURT APPOINTMENT

169

*

147

Studies for the

portrait of Queen Charlotte with a fan (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) 148

Studies for the

portrait of Queen Charlotte with a fan (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

seems of little account beside the simple dignity and charm of her portrayal, which is counterbalanced by an emphatic, secondary point of interest, of great beauty in itself, represented by her graceful manner of lightly holding a closed fan in her hand. This elegant motif, for which four separate studies in chalks exist (Plates 147, 148), may be said to epitomize Ramsay’s quest of the ‘graceful in Nature’; and the impression that it made upon his contemporaries is reflected alike in Gainsborough’s repetition of it in his own fulllength of the Queen, painted some two decades later (Plate 145), and in the admiring comments of one of Reynolds’s most faithful disciples, James Northcote, who was moved by Ramsay’s conception to make favourable comparisons with both Reynolds himself and even Van Dyck. Northcote’s encomium upon the picture reminds us once more of the value placed by eighteenth-century taste upon grace of attitude and appropriateness of gesture, and it is only in the context of an appreciation of contemporary conventions of deportment that his response to the portrait can be fully understood and his judgment evaluated. Northcote recollected the portrait during a conversation with William Hazlitt: I have seen a picture of his of the Queen, soon after she was married - a profile, and a fan in her hand: Lord! how she held that fan! It was weak in execution and ordinary in features - all I can say of it is, that it was the farthest possible removed from anything like vulgarity. A professor might despise it; but in the mental part, I have never seen any thing of Vandyke’s equal to it. I could have looked at it forever ... I don’t know where it is now; but I saw in it enough to convince me that Sir Joshua was right in what he said of Ramsay’s great superiority. His own picture of the King, which is at the Academy, is a finer composition and shows great boldness and mastery of hand; but I should find it difficult to produce any thing of Sir Joshua’s that conveys an idea of more grace and delicacy than the one I have mentioned.(,/ Northcote’s allusion to Reynolds’s opinion of Ramsay’s ‘great superiority’ refers back to an earlier moment in the conversation with Hazlitt, when he had quoted Reynolds as saying that Ramsay was ‘the most sensible of all the painters of his time’; by which choice of epithet Reynolds presumably meant to denote, according to common eighteenth-century usage, Ramsay’s possession of a sensitivity, or sensibility, exceeding that of other por¬ trait painters of his generation. Meanwhile the contrast drawn by Northcote between Reynolds’s ‘great boldness and mastery of hand’ and Ramsay’s ‘grace and delicacy’ - a

170

ALLAN RAMSAY

distinction virtually identical to that made by Horace Walpole - reminds us that the appreciation of Ramsay’s special virtues was capable of surviving the triumph of the ‘Grand Style’. Even so, Northcote’s view of Ramsay’s supposed weakness of execution, together with his comment elsewhere in the conversation that Ramsay’s hand was not equal to his conceptions, his manner being ‘dry and timid’, serves only to illustrate the change in aesthetic taste which Reynolds had himself been largely instrumental in bringing about, and which might conveniently be dated from the first Royal Academy exhibition of 1769. Ramsay’s Court appointment was meanwhile drawing upon him the obloquy of Bute’s vociferous enemies. Not only was Bute’s influence over the King distrusted and resented, but his hopes for a new national unity under enlightened

Hanoverian rule aroused

suspicions of a sort of disguised Jacobitism. To these there was added the scurrilous charge of an improper relationship with the King’s mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta of Wales; an allegation which was accepted eagerly by lampoonists and caricaturists alike, and which, taken up by the mob, led to the burning of petticoats and jackboots outside Bute’s town residence. But there can be no doubt that the ultimate cause of Bute’s unpopularity was the mere fact that he was a Scot, and not only a Scot but a Stuart. The Union of 1707, after all, had not miraculously swept away the prejudice nursed by Englishmen in general against their northern neighbours; nor was the hostility much diminished before the end of the century. Samuel Johnson’s absurd contempt for the Scots is legendary, and, being harmless, became merely laughable by his immortalization by a Scottish pen. But it is Johnson - himself indebted to Bute for his pension - who offers us the most succinct, and one of the fairest, of contemporary assessments of that proud nobleman’s guiding principles in office: ‘Lord Bute, though a very honourable man, a man who meant well, a man who had his blood full of prerogative, was a theoretical statesman, a book minister, and thought the country could be governed by the influence of the Crown alone’. What is so largely obscured by the severe judgments pronounced by others is Bute’s undoubted ability, to a balanced appreciation of which we may turn to the reflections of a French politician, Louis Dutens: Lord Bute, Dutens observed, ‘was a man of dignified, elegant manners, and of a handsome person; he was endowed with great talents, and a comprehensive mind; his knowledge was extensive; and he possessed a spirit of magnanimity that despised difficulties, and proved how admirably he was fitted to share in the greatest enterprises’. Elsewhere Dutens ascribes the animosity directed at Lord Bute, at least initially, to the jealousy aroused by his appointment as First Lord of the Chamber to the young Prince of Wales.*’8 When in May 1762, a year and a half after the Prince’s accession, Bute succeeded Newcastle as Prime Minister - being the first Scotsman to hold the premiership - the feeling against ‘the Thane’, as he was dubbed, gathered new strength, and he became the victim of a ceaseless stream of abuse, whether from the speeches of his political opponents or from newspapers and broadsheets: sometimes he even met with open assault in the street. No less alarmingly, the antagonism which he had aroused was soon extended to Scotsmen in general, for the large number of Scots who had lately been raised to positions of high office had not gone unremarked, and was capable of being ascribed, however maliciously, to Bute’s clannishness. Among the fusillades directed against Bute and his countrymen one of the most typical was a collection of satirical prints entitled The British Antidote to Caledonian Poison, which appeared shortly after Bute’s conclusion of the un¬ popular, but very defensible, peace with France of April 1763 (ending the Seven Years’ War). In allusion to the benefits enjoyed by the populace that were ascribed to a war economy, this publication deplored the consequences of the treaty, whereby ‘peace and poverty and Scotchmen reign’, advising all seekers after the latest fashions to be sure to decorate their conversation with appropriate quotations from the poems of the elder Ramsay.

LORD BUTE’S PATRONAGE AND FIRST COURT APPOINTMENT

171

In this last adhortation we may probably discern a covert hit at the poet’s son. Detecting a slight to Reynolds and thereby to Englishmen in general, Bute’s enemies were certainly explaining the favour that was being shown to Ramsay by the fact of his Scottish birth. Ryland’s line-engraving of 1761 of the full-length of George III as Prince of Wales (which preceded by many years the engraving of the State portrait) must have brought Ramsay’s elevation very much into the public consciousness; and it was in allusion to this splendid portrait (Plate 133) - which should have furnished ample proof of the justness of Ramsay’s appointment as painter to the King - that the author of a pamphlet of 1763 entitled Le Montagnard Parvenu, or the New Highland Adventurer in England, having denounced Lord Bute as ‘the self-styled Maecenas of the polite arts’, went on to inquire: Had not every English subject reason to stare at finding their beloved young king’s picture painted by Ramsay, and not by the Apelles-hand of Reynolds? The reason is obvious: the former is a Scot, the latter an Englishman. Ramsay, for all we know, may be as honest and worthy a man as any in society; but it cannot, we hope, amount to any misprision of treason to say that Reynolds is a more masterly painter, and, were Alexander alive, would be chosen by him in preference to the other.()esides that primary excellence, the picture is notable for its balanced design and rich - but restrained — colour scheme. It now hangs, worthily, beside one of Hunter’s Chardins in the gallery that houses his collection of paintings.

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

173

197

Francois Hubert Drouais:

Elizabeth Gunning, afterwards Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll (Collection of the Duke of Argyll)

In other works of this period the affinities with contemporary painting in France can be still more striking. The lovely half-length of Martha, Countess of Elgin,29 a ravishing con¬ coction of cinnabar-pink, silvery greys, muted grey-greens and resonant blacks (Plate 172), is virtually indistinguishable in design from two portraits by La Tour and Drouais - La Tour’s Madame Masse30 and Drouais’s Elizabeth Gunning (afterwards Duchess of Argyll) (Plate 173).31 The latter portrait, being of an English sitter, could conceivably have been known to Ramsay, especially on account of her marriage into the Argyll family. Likewise, the Holland House Lady Kildare (Plate 168), besides reflecting in its general style Ramsay’s appreciation of the art of Nattier, contains a passage that suggests comparisons with a particular work by that master, the half-length of the Countess of Warwick (Plates 174, 175) now in the Frick Collection in New York. In the two pictures the sitter’s hands are seen in perspective, clasped together in a very similar manner. The inference is that in the Lady Kildare Ramsay was applying to his own composition the lessons of Nattier’s innovatory exploration of natural gesture, derived as it was from close observation of a large variety of attitudes, rather than those belonging merely to the accepted conventions of portraiture. But the picture could never be mistaken for the work of any one but Ramsay: whatever he assimilated from the work of his French contemporaries he made his own, infusing its essence into the substance of his personal style and sensibility. Here, as was so often the case, the charm of a feminine subject inspired him to create a work of tender, almost fragile beauty. Lady Holland saw the portrait in Ramsay’s painting-room shortly after its completion, and she was charmed by it. ‘I saw your sweet face at Ramsay’s the other day,’ she wrote to her sister; ”tis a heavenly picture indeed’.33 The portrait of Lady Kildare was painted shortly after Ramsay’s return from Paris in the

172 Martha, Countess of Elgin, c. 1764(?)

late summer of 1765, in the course of his journey back to England from a visit to Geneva as

(Collection of the Earl of

the guest of his friends the Stanhopes. Geneva at this time was considered to be itself a

Elgin and Kincardine)

198

174

ALLAN RAMSAY

Jean-Marc Nattier:

The Countess of Warwick (Frick Collection, New York) 175

Study of hands for

the portrait of Lady Kildare, Plate 168 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

second Paris, and Lord and Lady Stanhope had taken up residence there in order to secure the best education for their only surviving son, the brilliant Charles, Lord Mahon (Plate 176),33 the future scientist and politician. Of all Ramsay’s eminent patrons in England, it was to the Stanhopes that he formed the deepest attachment. Almost certainly he would have owed his introduction to them to the fact that Lord Stanhope had married one of the sisters of his old patron the Earl of Haddington, the Honourable Grisel Hamilton (Plate 178), with whose family Ramsay had been acquainted since his early twenties. Lord Stanhope had been a Fellow of the Royal Society from the age of twenty-one; he had long been acknowledged as one of the leading mathematicians of his day; and his precocious gifts had been inherited by his son. He had first sat to Ramsay in 1749 (Plate 74), commissioning in the same year the delightful portrait at Chevening of his short-lived elder child Philip, Lord Mahon (represented as seated in a meadow with a toy drum) (Plate 75), and had renewed his patronage in 1762, when he had commissioned a second portrait of his son, the Chardinesque picture which has already been discussed (Plate 169). In the following year, after the boy’s death, Ramsay painted a charming half-length of his younger brother Charles, who had now succeeded to the Mahon title, representing him with a bilboquet bat in his hand (Plate 176); and a year later Lord Stanhope and his wife posed for two of Ramsay’s most sensitive half-lengths (Plates 177, 178). As we have seen, it was Lord Stanhope who had proposed the painter’s election to membership of the Society of Arts. Ramsay’s friendly relations with the family continued into his last years, and he was always a welcome guest at the Stanhopes’ great country mansion of Chevening, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where Lady Stanhope (Plate 178) pre¬ sided over a household ‘ordered’, it is said, ‘with exact regularity and discipline’. Her firm control of the domestic economy at Chevening would appear to have been all the more necessary in that her husband, whose dreamy expression is so well captured in Ramsay’s 176

Charles, Viscount

portrait of 1764 (Plate 177), was known for being of so shy and retiring a nature that it

Mahon, 1 764 (The Board

precluded his capacity to assert any sort of authority, whether in public life or within his

of Trustees of the

family.34 Otherwise Lady Stanhope was known for her charitable works among the poor of

Chevening Estate)

her neighbourhood - works inspired by a deep piety. It was also typical of her that she

;

ALLAN RAMSAY

200

177

Philip, 2nd Earl

Stanhope, 1764 (The Board of Trustees of the Chevening Estate)

attracted, in a scurrilous age, the admiration of many, and the complaints of others, by her reputation for extreme discretion, a characteristic much resented by the scandal-loving Lady Mary Coke, who remarked of it: ‘This may be very prudent, but ’tis very disagree¬ able when one is curious’.35 Unhappily this sweet-tempered woman was now entering upon a long nightmare of suffering, lasting for many years and becoming increasingly difficult to bear. What was at first assumed to be a rheumatic condition was correctly diagnosed only much later, though not very helpfully in the light of the medical resources of the time, as being a fractured thigh caused by a fall; and as the years passed Lady Stanhope’s agony was to persist unabated. Ramsay’s visit to Geneva in 1765 may possibly have been prompted by news of her distress. He was accompanied on this occasion by his wife, and they took with them their little daughter Amelia, then in her eleventh year. They arrived in the second week of September, and remained the Stanhopes’ guests for ten days. They found Lady Stanhope in great pain. She was being treated by Dr Theodore Tronchin, one of the most eminent physicians of his day and a friend of Voltaire, who considered him to be equal in wisdom to Aesculapius and in beauty to Apollo - manifestly a good subject for the portrait which Ramsay found time to paint for his host.36 Tronchin had formed a theory about the cause of the decline of the Roman Empire which would have amused Ramsay if it was touched upon during the sittings. Being an enthusiast for the medical and spiritual benefits of cold baths, he had drawn his conclusions from the reputed neglect of them by the degenerate successors to the imperial dignities of Augustus: ‘As long as the Romans,’ he averred, ‘after their exercise on the Campus Martius threw themselves into the Tiber, they were masters

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

201

178

Grisel, Countess

Stanhope, 1764 (The Board of Trustees of the Chevening Estate)

of the world; the hot baths of Agrippa and Nero turned them into slaves’. Ramsay wanted the Stanhopes to have the portrait of Tronchin as a gift, but Lord Stanhope would hear nothing of it. ‘You will never suffer us,’ Margaret Ramsay complained later to Lady Stanhope, ‘to do anything we have a mind for and ought to do’.3/ While in Geneva, Ramsay took the opportunity of paying a visit to Voltaire at Ferney. Afterwards he reputation of his

pioneering Salons — the first

methodical essays

in the criticism of

had expected, and that he lived in noble style: Ramsay only regretted that Voltaire’s table was ‘disgraced by sycophants’ who were ‘continually offering him the grossest flattery which he received with pleasure’;38 a by no means uncommon reaction on the part of visitors to Ferney, who would be struck by the number of portraits and busts of Voltaire that filled his house. On 23 September 1765 the Ramsays left Geneva for a longer visit to Paris, lasting until 15 October. Ramsay was at once introduced by Louis-Michel Vanloo to Diderot, whose fame as one of the founders of the Encyclopedie had for some years been augmented by the reputation of his

pioneering Salons - the first methodical essays

in

the criticism of

contemporary art. Diderot and Ramsay were first of all fellow guests at a dinner given by the Vanloos, and met again at the house of another of the great Encyclopedistes, the Baron d’Holbach.31 Diderot was himself unfamiliar with Ramsay’s work as a painter, and in any case had heard nothing good of it: ‘They say that he paints badly,’ he wrote to Mile Volland; ‘but he reasons very well’.40 Diderot had long known Ramsay’s name from his acquaintance with Voltaire’s Calas, where (as has been mentioned) the painter is referred to as a philosophe, and it would doubtless have been in that light that Ramsay would have wished to present himself in the exalted literary circle to which he had been admitted in

ALLAN RAMSAY

202

179

Maria Walpole,

Countess Waldegrave, c. 1758-59 (Collection of the Earl and Countess Waldegrave)

Paris. Indeed, at d’Holbach’s house the conversation had turned upon a famous con¬ temporary work of jurisprudence, Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punish¬ ments), to which, many years later, Ramsay was to revert in a long communication to Diderot.41 It was consisitent with the empiricism which he had imbibed from Hume that Ramsay should have rejected a legal philosophy that seemed to him to rest upon an idealistic theory of human nature. Such a speculative work as Beccaria’s treatise, he insisted, belonged merely to ‘the category of Utopias, of “Republics” in the manner of Plato and other ideal systems,’ which, while demonstrating their authors’ humanity and goodness of heart, have never had, and never would have, any practical influence: on the contrary, the questions at issue could not be treated in the abstract; for ‘laws are never formulated a priori upon any general principle pertaining to human nature: invariably they arise from the particular needs and circumstances of a society’. Unfortunately the greater part of Ramsay’s correspondence with Diderot is now lost: but we know that on one occasion he sent him a present of the Odes of Gray and ‘un exemplaire des Lemons de Sheridan’, together with an engraved portrait of that remarkable pioneer of scientific method in scholarship, Richard Bentley. These gifts came by the hand of Edmund Burke, who, early in 1773, was making a visit to Paris. During his stay in Paris in 1765 Ramsay renewed his friendship with Hume — He bon David’, as he was aptly named in Parisian society, - but few details of their meetings are 180

Horace Walpole’s

Nieces: The Honourable Laura Keppel and Charlotte,

known. Hume is also found occasionally at this time in the company of an English visitor who had occasion to be especially grateful for the Ramsays’ presence: Horace Walpole had

Lady Huntingtower, 1765

arrived in Paris a little before the Ramsays, only to be confined to his lodgings by a severe

(Private Collection,

attack of gout, accompanied apparently by loss of weight; and it was in order to comfort

U.S.A.)

him in his misery that Ramsay and his wife paid him frequent visits.42 When, on being

204

ALLAN RAMSAY

sufficiently recovered to resume the social round, he accepted an invitation to one of the literary conversazioni presided over by his beloved Mme du Deffand, he found the Ramsays among his fellow guests, with the young Amelia present. On another occasion he dined with the Ramsays at Hume’s apartments at the Hotel de Beaupreon (in the rue de l’Universite) — the dinner taking place in a room where Mme du Chatelet had swallowed poison on being forsaken by her lover.43 On making his farewells to Horace Walpole before setting out for England, Ramsay received from him a number of letters for delivery to Lady Hervey, Faure and others, as well as a purple box with a painted cameo which Walpole had acquired for himself in Paris. If Ramsay had been able to remain longer in Paris, Walpole might well have sat to him for a portrait he had promised his friend Henry Seymour Conway. He was certainly unwilling for it to be painted by a French artist, for in his opinion, as he advised Conway, the French painters were ‘bitter bad, and as much inferior to Reynolds and Ramsay as Hudson to Van Dyck’.44 Walpole had long since given practical expression to his high opinion of Ramsay’s art by sitting to him, quill-pen in hand, for a thoughtful half-length (Plate 132);4° and Ramsay had also painted a poetic portrait of his favourite niece, Maria Walpole (Plate 179), on her marriage in 1759 to the 2nd Earl Waldegrave.40 But by the date of Ramsay’s visit to Paris Walpole had received even more impressive confirmation of his judgment, having lately commissioned a double-portrait of his two other nieces, Faura Keppel and Charlotte, Lady Huntingtower (Plate 180), for this proved to be one of the artist’s absolute masterpieces.4' A letter from Ramsay to Walpole written at an early stage in the execution of this picture shows that the choice of the dresses they were to be represented as wearing was left entirely to the young ladies themselves, who were no doubt, conscious of the desirability of avoiding similar or clashing colours. Laura Keppel — seated on the left side of the composition - chose a gown of light blue and white; Lady Huntingtower (standing on the right) one of pink, covered by a black shawl: out of these materials Ramsay created one of his most enchanting arrangements of delicate colour, which is matched by the beauty of the drawing. The picture develops a type of composition that he had arrived at about a quarter of a century earlier in painting the double-portrait of Sir Edward and Lady Turner (Plate 47),48 wherein one sitter is seated in profile and the other stands at a three-quarter angle, the couple being shown in intimate rapport with one another. Laura Keppel looks up from her needlework to address her sister, who has just left off reading a book (held closed in one hand) in order to engage in the conversation - and indeed the painting is conceived very much as a conversation-piece. Yet despite its informality of sentiment this is one of Ramsay’s most classically controlled compositions, and, in a manner that may bring to mind some Greek frieze, the action, such as it is, has been frozen into stillness. Perfection of design lends a harmonious unity to the whole, without in any way detracting from the unaffected naturalness of the portraiture. It could scarcely have been more appropriate that Walpole’s desire to possess a picture of his beautiful nieces should have prompted him to entrust the task to the artist whom he considered to have been ‘formed’ to paint women, and whose style he characterized as being ‘all delicacy’. The following year, 1766, brought to Ramsay’s painting-room the most controversial of the philosophes. Early in that year Jean-Jacques Rousseau, agitated by the persecution, both real and imaginary, which he was suffering, whether in Switzerland or in France, on account of his radical ideas, had been taken under the protection of Hume; and on the expiry of his duties at the Paris Embassy Hume now escorted him to London. There was no sign then of the oncoming storm which Rousseau’s disturbed state of mind would soon stir up, at Hume’s expense, and which would involve the portrait for which he now sat to Ramsay (Plate 181). Hume did all that was in his power for Rousseau, showing him every 181

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

mark of friendship, introducing him to London society and exerting his influence in order

1766 (National Gallery of

to obtain for him a pension from the King. After short periods of residence in London and

Scotland, Edinburgh)

at Chiswick, Rousseau then received an offer of hospitality from a wealthy and bookish

206

ALLAN RAMSAY

landowner, Richard Davenport, of Calverley and Wootton. Davenport had conceived so profound an admiration for Rousseau’s unconventional views on education that he was

bringing up two orphaned grandchildren in the principles of Emile.49 Through

Hume, Davenport now offered Rousseau the use of his fine residence of Wootton in Staffordshire. It was arranged that Davenport would call upon Rousseau on 1 March at Ramsay’s house in Soho Square, where Rousseau was sitting for his portrait. On his acceptance of Davenport’s invitation, Rousseau took up residence at Wootton on 26 March - by which time the portrait had been finished, - and he was to remain there for a little over a year. Whether it was Ramsay or Hume who first proposed that Rousseau should sit for his portrait - and on the evidence it was their mutual wish, - before its completion Ramsay told Hume that he intended him to have it as a present. The picture of Rousseau, a halflength, is now justly celebrated as one of the masterpieces of British portraiture, and it was adjudged at the time to be a great success, not least by Rousseau himself, who reported to a correspondent, ‘A good painter here has painted me in oils for Mr Hume’, adding that Ramsay had ‘made such a success’ of it that there was talk of its being engraved.3" On his own part Hume considered that Ramsay had ‘succeeded to admiration’ and had made him ‘a most valuable portrait’.31 And such was Rousseau’s fame that the King asked specially to see the picture. Rousseau posed for the portrait in his exotic Armenian costume — a long purple robe, lined with brown fur, and a black fur cap. No less arresting is the intensity of his portrayal: the focus upon Rousseau’s dark, glowing eyes and sensitive features is enhanced by the contrasting shade into which his upper frame and visible hand are thrown - a subtle tenebrism characteristic of other late works by Ramsay (including the companion-portrait of Hume), and deriving directly from Rembrandt. When recollecting the sittings in later years Rousseau remarked that he was ‘posed in a dark spot’, an arrangement that would have been necessary in order to obtain the particular effect of lighting exhibited in the painting, and which conformed to Rembrandt’s own practice. Among the portrait painters of his time Ramsay was of course far from being alone in showing an interest in the art of Rembrandt. Hudson indeed claimed to be an expert connoisseur of Rembrandt’s graphic works, and had also based one of his por¬ traits on an etching by Thomas Worlidge of a picture reputed to be a self-portrait by Rembrandt. (As the original was in the possession of the 3rd Duke of Argyll, it would almost certainly have been one of the works ascribed to Rembrandt in British collections that were known to Ramsay.) The instances of Rembrandtesque echoes in British por¬ traiture in the second half of the eighteenth century are too numerous to mention here, and one need only point to their presence in the work of such artists as Reynolds, Frye and Hone, to name but three. Nor is the Rousseau the only important example by Ramsay. Another is the exceptionally sensitive half-length at Ickworth of the French ambassador to the Court of St James, the Due de Nivernais.52 The portrait of Hume (Plate 184), painted as a companion-piece to the Rousseau, even seems to reflect a still more considered understanding of Rembrandt’s art, reaching more deeply into the master’s mysterious power of commenting, as it seems, upon the very nature of humanity. Yet there could scarcely be a stronger contrast than that between Rembrandt’s titanic genius and Ramsay s delicate sensibility, nor indeed between the expressive and un¬ analysable complexity of Rembrandt’s handling of his pigments and the polished refine¬ ment of Ramsay’s polite surfaces. Clearly what Ramsay learned at Rembrandt’s feet was confined to the employment of particular effects of lighting and tone in the service of an intensified interpretation of character. But in a more general sense the role of light assumes from this time a special importance in his portraiture as a whole, often tending to dissolve precision of form, as definition gives place to an evocativeness akin to the qualities found in the later work of Gainsborough. It may not, besides, be inconsequential that Ramsay now ceased to adhere, at any rate consistently, to what had been for nearly thirty years a

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

207

182

David Martin:

Rousseau, engraving after Ramsay’s portrait, 1767 183

Eighteenth-century

copy of Ramsay’s portrait of Rousseau (Private Collection)

fundamental part of his technique, the use of a vivid red underpainting at the first sitting. The Rousseau, modelled throughout in browns and greys, is in fact the first known example of his departure from that procedure, and it is understandable that he should have discarded it in his concentration on achieving an unusual effect of Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro. Unhappily this great portrait became one of the causes of offence to Rousseau which gave rise to his notorious quarrel with Hume, when in the same year he unaccountably turned on his benefactor and accused him of plotting his destruction., ! Hume, argued the deranged self-tormentor, had at first shown him instances of his friendship that had touched him to the heart; but, he declared, ‘that of causing my portrait to be painted . . . was not of the number’. That, he considered, carried with it ‘too much the affectation of popularity’, and there was ‘an air of ostentation’ about it which greatly displeased him. Th is was but one of many complaints against Hume, some of them more serious, but all of them indicative of mental illness involving delusions of persecution. They formed the substance of a long letter to Hume, who patiently endeavoured to answer them, hav¬ ing first shown the letter to Ramsay.j4 But as Rousseau was repeating his accusations to others, so that the quarrel became the common talk of London, Hume eventually, although

reluctantly, decided

for his own

protection

to publish the correspondence,

together with notes clarifying the obscurer points.'” Nevertheless Rousseau returned to France in the summer of the following year as convinced as ever of Hume’s villainy. Long afterwards, he was still brooding over the portrait, and as late as the year 1770 was accusing Hume of diabolical motives in arranging the sittings.

Looking now

(in all

probability) at the engraving which David Martin had made of the picture (Plate 182), he was struck by the conviction that the portrait had been designed, at Hume’s instigation, to demonstrate to the whole of Europe that he was ugly. Ramsay, he protested in the pathological Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, had given him the features of a Cyclops - ‘un Cyclope affreux’: on the other hand, when he had painted Hume, he had made him out to be a handsome man; but it was he, Jean-Jacques, who was handsome, and Hume who was a veritable Cyclops. Some of the numerous replicas of the portrait, it may be added, so distort Rousseau’s features as to have justified his complaints, if they were prompted by his knowledge of one of these parodies (Plate 183).

ALLAN RAMSAY

208

A version of the portrait was commissioned from Ramsay by Richard Davenport, shortly after Rousseau had left Wootton. This was delivered to Wootton in the summer of 1767. Writing to Davenport on 16 June, soon after its despatch, Ramsay revealed in a humorous manner something of his own feelings about his strange sitter: I

hope by this time you have given shelter under your roof to my Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, who, if he should prove less witty, will be at the same time less ungrateful, less mischievous and less chargeable than his predecessor. I am afraid, however, that both of them are attended with more expense than their company is worth, as you will see by the note which, in obedience to your commands, I have enclosed.jb It was a neat enough way of calling a patron’s attention to a twenty-guinea bill. Davenport was prompt in paying, and in thanking him Ramsay was able to pass on to him some fresh news of Rousseau which he had just received from Lady Holland: Rousseau had at length returned to France, and Lady Holland, his sometime admirer, had narrowly missed encountering him at Calais, where, Ramsay said, ‘he had entertained the simple inhabi¬ tants with the hairbreadth Jscapes his liberty and life had made in England’. Ramsay had no information as to Rousseau’s present whereabouts; ‘but,’ he assured Davenport, ‘so much importance will not continue long anywhere without being discovered’.J/ Notwithstanding this gentle mockery, and despite his consciousness of the hurt done to his friend Hume by an indulged protege and guest, Ramsay does not appear to have been uncharitably disposed towards Rousseau, and may well have concluded that his mental abnormality rendered him not totally answerable for his actions, and a few months after the departure of his troublesome sitter from England he made him a particularly con¬ siderate gesture. Knowing of Rousseau’s liking for prints of high quality, he sent him a parcel of some twenty examples by British engravers, and absolutely declined his request to name a price:58 one of these was a portrait of the King - almost certainly Ryland’s line engraving of the Coronation portrait, which had been published early in 1767. How far Ramsay approved of Rousseau’s ideas is another question. He certainly had no symapthy for Rousseau’s philosophy of the Noble Savage: as he once observed to Diderot, ‘Those who indulge in intellectual pursuits find little charm in the bare neccesities of life. Reduced to bare necessity, one must bid farewell to poetry, painting and all the agreeable branches of philosophy, and embrace instead Rousseau’s Nature - Nature on all fours’.59 At the same time, Ramsay cannot have been less conscious than any of his contemporaries of the significance of Rousseau’s new emphasis upon the value of the emotions, as a corrective, so to speak, to the tendency towards insensitivity to which the exaltation of human reason was liable; and it is undeniable that the profoundly sensitive qualities of Ramsay’s ‘second style’ reflect in great measure the place accorded in the second half on the century, partly under Rousseau’s influence, to the cultivation of‘sentiment’. As Ramsay was later to insist in conversation with Fuseli, a work of art required more than attention to mere rules, however rationally determined, if it was ‘to touch the feelings’.60 The portrait of Hume to which Rousseau objected so strongly is also at half length, although differing from it fundamentally in its direct, frontal presentation of the sitter (Plate 184). Painted as a companion-piece to the ‘Cyclops’ picture, it must have been completed shortly after Rousseau’s departure to Wootton. The two portraits were to hang together in the parlour of Hume’s house in the New Town on his return to Edinburgh. As though not to be outdone by Rousseau’s purple costume, Hume posed in the scarlet ‘uniform’ which he had worn, some years earlier, as Secretary to the Military Mission at Vienna and Turin (unless, if it no longer fitted the ageing sitter’s now ample frame, it 184

David Hume,

was merely draped over a lay-figure in the painter’s studio). When Joseph Moser, the

(Scottish National

artist-author, in paying tribute to Ramsay’s art, praised a portrait by him of a philosopher

Portrait Gallery,

whom,

Edinburgh)

marking of it that it ‘seemed to think’, and quoting Ramsay as having said that it was

he

recollected,

apparently

owing

to

some

confusion,

as

being

Franklin,

re¬

210

ALLAN RAMSAY

only in his sitter’s capacity as a philosopher that he had wished to represent him,1'1 he could conceivably have been drawing upon a faulty recollection of the Hume. That Ramsay did in fact see his characterization of Hume in precisely that light might indeed be read into an anecdote told by Cunningham about George Ill’s request to be shown the painting as well as the Rousseau (conceivably with Hume, its owner, present along with Ramsay). Being greatly struck, on inspecting it, by the splendour of the sitter’s attire of scarlet cloth and gold braid, the King remarked to Ramsay that, while he thought the portrait very like, he considered the dress ‘rather too fine’; to which Ramsay wittily replied, I wished posterity should see that one philosopher during your Majesty’s reign had a good coat upon his back’; a rejoinder that offers us, incidentally, one of a small number of such glimpses into the easy relationship that existed between the King and his favourite painter. Today this second portrait by Ramsay of his friend Hume is recognized as one of his greatest achievements. There is a quality of the monumental in the sitter’s simple dignity of attitude, and it is as though that very simplicity of presentation had been contrived in order to remove any distraction from the expression of interior thought. The Rembrandtesque lighting focuses attention - as in the Rousseau - upon the sitter’s countenance, but with a difference, in that the mood is less passionate than reflective. We may feel that only a painter who knew Hume both as a man and as a thinker could have created so memorable an image of a philosopher of the Enlightenment. Never, moreover, did Ramsay approach so closely to Rembrandt in subtle characterization. In October of the same year, 1766, Ramsay paid a short visit to Edinburgh, remaining there about a month. His visit was almost certainly connected with the development of his properties on the Castle-hill. Some years earlier he had acquired further land to the north¬ east of the ‘Guse-pye’, with the object of building a pair of houses ‘in the English fashion fit to accommodate two small families of distinction’ (as he put it in his petition to the Town Council). Although he had intended to proceed with this project as early as 1761, difficulties over the site, involving the need to pull down the old founding-house in which the city’s bells had once been cast, led to long delays; and it had not been until July 1765 that Ramsay was granted the Warrant of the Dean of Guild entitling him to build the two houses, which were to have a common wall.1’'"’ As one might have expected, his choice of architect fell, at least initially, upon Robert Adam, whose tasteful designs have been preserved.'” In the end, however, Ramsay changed his mind, and erected a terrace of three houses of different design, each comprising four storeys and an attic: the terrace was completed by 1768, and now forms the eastern part of the courtyard contained within the present late Victorian complex known as Ramsay Garden. The Disposition of the Town Council enabling Ramsay to purchase the land occupied by the founding-house (or bell-house) is dated 27 July 1763. The date is suggestive, for a few months earlier Sir Alexander Lindsay had died and his son David had inherited Evelick: it may have been already in Ramsay’s mind to provide for his mother-in-law, in her widowhood, a suitable town residence; and shortly after the completion of the terrace both Lady Lindsay (Plate 187) and her unmarried daughter Catherine are found to be living in one of the new houses. One has the impression, besides, that the Lindsays were not, financially, in the easiest circumstances, which would account for the fact that about this time Ramsay purchased from Sir David Lindsay the lands of Beltrodie and Nether Durdie, on the Evelick estate. What is certain is that Lady Lindsay’s reconciliation with her elder daughter and son-in-law followed quickly upon Sir Alexander’s death: Margaret Ramsay now devoted herself to looking after her mother; on occasion Lady Lindsay stayed with the Ramsays at 67 Harley Street, and when in Edinburgh even helped with the business side of the painter’s practice in Scotland.64 Her death in Lebruary 1774 left Margaret Ramsay ‘unable to think of anything else’ and incapable, in her grief, of writing to any of her friends for several weeks.65 The bold enterprise of expanding his properties on the Castlehill, it may be added, witnesses to Ramsay’s confidence as a man of business

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

211

who enjoyed very considerable means. According to trustworthy information known to Allan Cunningham, he had amassed a fortune of not less than £40,000 before his first Court appointment;66 Sir Alexander Dick, who must have been acquainted with the facts, once told Boswell that by then he was already wealthy;67 and many years earlier Robert Adam had remarked on how rich he was.68 Although during his visit of 1766 Ramsay remained in Scotland for only about a month, as a freeholder in the shire of Kinross he was involved during that period in two disputes over a question pertaining to electoral rights - the somewhat arcane question of the Scottish law of Old Extent.66 Although insignificant in themselves, these disputes possess a certain biographical interest, inasmuch as his conduct reflected his extreme caution in respect of all legal matters. The first case concerned Sir Michael Malcolm ofLochore, who lodged a claim to be enrolled as an elector, at the Michaelmas meeting of the freeholders, upon the qualification of his estate of The Binns, in Kinross-shire. Two freeholders only were present at the meeting - Ramsay, who was praeses (or chairman), and Robert Rankine of Colden. Ramsay argued that the claim was inadmissible, on the grounds that the freehold qualification had been determined by the statute of 1681 to be a forty-shilling land of Old Extent, whereas Malcolm had presented to the freeholders two retour documents, both prior to the 1681 statute, showing that the lands were divided into two equal parts, each retoured at twenty shillings. Ramsay felt doubtful whether such a conjoining of two twenty-shilling lands could be equated with the single retour of a forty-shilling land required by the law. Rankine, on the other hand, dismissed this objection and voted for the candidate’s admission; whereupon Ramsay, as praeses, turned down the application by the exercise of his casting vote. In consequence, Malcolm sent a petition of complaint to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, as was open to him to do under the law. Ramsay had meanwhile returned to London, where a warrant was served upon him requiring him to present his answers to the Court within thirty days. In complying with the order Ramsay explained that being no lawyer, and having never had any experience of these matters, he had endeavoured to inform himself of the best advice he could get, whether any example of this kind had occurred, and, as he could hear of none, he thought the safest course was to adhere to the strict letter of the law, which limits a freehold qualification of this kind to be a forty-shilling land of old extent, proved by a retour prior to the 1681 [statute] . . . If he has mistaken the law in this particular, he is sorry for it, and your Lordships will set matters to right; but he is not yet convinced that the judgment was wrong. The Court,

however,

took a different view, and

having quashed

Ramsay’s decision

admitted Sir Michael Malcolm as an elector. The second case pertained to a submission from Robert Colvill of Ochiltree. Here Rankine agreed, quite properly, with an objection that had been raised to the effect that, as Colvill no longer possessed the lands according to which he had been enrolled, he should be struck off the list of electors; but Ramsay disallowed the objection on the technical grounds that the paper officially presenting that objection bore nobody’s signa¬ ture, and insisted that in consequence of this omission no such anonymous document could be accepted. In the event, the Court of Session once again revoked Ramsay’s ruling, ordering Colvill’s name to be removed from the electoral roll. If the dry records of these long-forgotten disputes possess any interest for the student of Ramsay’s life, it will be only on account of the light they seem to shed upon a prominent component of his character - a certain punctiliousness, born of extreme caution, which was reflected no less in his handling of his financial affairs. He might be said to have closely conformed to the popular notion of Scottish canniness, although it is doubtful whether his prudence exceeded that of contemporaries - such as Reynolds among painters - whose reputations have not suffered in consequence. What is clear is that he was a man who was

ALLAN RAMSAY

212

always careful of his purse and attentive to every detail pertaining to his personal finances. This trait is further exemplified by his course of action when his bankers, James and Thomas Coutts, ended their partnership and Thomas assumed sole management of the firm. The dissolution of the famous partnership occurred on 24 June 1775; upon which the majority of the customers were content to sign orders directing their accounts to be transferred to the care of Thomas Coutts: Ramsay, on the other hand, took the exceptional precaution of calling in at the bank on the date in question and signing the ledger. Although Ramsay was shortly to succeed Shackleton as Principal Painter in Ordinary, by then two major rivals, Francis Cotes and Johan Zoffany, had come to the attention of the King and Queen, in Zoffany’s case on the recommendation of Bute himself: in fact Zoffany soon came to share the position of pre-eminence at the Court which had once been Ramsay’s alone, while in the year of Ramsay’s appointment as Principal Painter Cotes had achieved a triumph with a superb crayon portrait at half length of the Queen with the infant Princess Royal in her arms,70 and this he had adapted in the same year 1767 to a full-length composition in oils.'1 A reflection of Cotes’s rivalry with Ramsay is to be seen in an observation made by Reynolds’s pupil and biographer James Northcote, who gave it as his opinion that in this period ‘Cotes and Ramsay shared, in some degree, with Reynolds the fashion of the day’. Moreover, in the following year the foundation of the Royal Academy under Reynolds’s presidency was to herald a new era in British painting in which Ramsay found no place. Yet, paradoxically, however great the threat to his pre-eminence as painter to the Court, at no time did Ramsay’s literary reputation stand higher. The most widely known of all his publications, the Essay on the Constitution of England, had appeared in 176572 and had been reissued in a new edition in the following year, with numerous corrections and additions.73 A year later a German edition was published in Frankfurt and Leipzig, with the author's name, unprecedentedly, on the title-page.74 It was also about this time that he began writing occasionally on current political issues. At first his attention was con¬ centrated on the developing crisis in North America; and his profound concern over Britain’s threatened loss of her transatlantic territories prompted a substantial pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government. Occasioned by the late Disputes between Great Britain and her American Colonies: this was written in 1766, although it did not appear in print for another three years.75 The Essay on the Constitution of England represents, essentially, a defence of the hard-won liberties enjoyed by the British people under the Hanoverian monarchy, and argues for the preservation of the current state of affairs against any attempt to improve it. Above all, Ramsay had been inspired to write the essay by his indignation at the tendency of con¬ temporary politicians to credit Magna Carta with the establishment, in all its final per¬ fection, of the English Constitution, and so, by overlooking the political achievements of more recent times, ‘to depreciate the liberty we now enjoy under the best of Kings, at the head of a free Parliament’.

Such a misconception was entertained, for instance,

bv

Edmund Burke and, most notably, by Lord Chatham, who once described Magna Carta as ‘the Bible of the English Constitution’. In the course of tracing the history of what has always remained an unwritten constitution, and in considering its effective modification, during long centuries, by shifts in power and assent, Ramsay first draws attention to the many articles of Magna Carta devoted to regulating the system of feudal servitude then established by law, and to the fact that the celebrated charter did nothing to deprive the monarch, or his appointed and subservient judges, ol the administration of justice, it being only after the Glorious Revolution that magistrates were made independent of the Crown. Nor, he goes on, would any advocate of popular government discover in the provisions of Magna Carta the least support for his own cause in the powers given alike to the bishops of the Church and to some twenty-five barons: moreover the very first clause acknowl¬ edged the subjection of the Church of England to the Roman pontiff, ‘Popery being thus

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

213

seen stalking in front of this famous charter, and arbitrary power in its rear’. As in the Dialogue on Taste, Ramsay sees the whole question of civil liberty primarily in terms of a long-drawn-out struggle against the Church; and a great part of the work is devoted to an account of the corruption of Christianity by the ambition for power of its spiritual overseers. Their arrogance had been matched only by their ‘loquacious sophistry’, until ‘the plain, pure and useful doctrines of Christ were drowned in an ocean of meta¬ physical quibbles’. There had followed the persecution of all those who did not accept dogmas decided upon at councils of the Church merely by a majority of votes. The Emperor Julian — whom history remembers especially for his efforts to extend toleration by encouraging the revival of ancient cults - is extolled by Ramsay under the designation of ‘great wit, scholar and philosopher’; but even he, Ramsay laments, had failed to prevent Christians from persecuting one another, ‘in spite of all his clement and father-like injunctions'. Ramsay goes on to deplore the increase of ecclesiastical power and wealth during the Middle Ages, under the authority of the bishop of Rome, accompanied as these developments had been by the introduction of notoriously superstitious rites, often borrowed from heathendom, and conducted in a language incomprehensible to the com¬ mon people. There followed the cult of the saints and the diffusion of stories of their miraculous deeds to which credit was ordained: all this had resulted in the intellectual submission of the populace and in the suppression of free inquiry. Thus, in one guise, was the religion of the magistrate re-established, much as it had been under Julius Caesar: the pontifical title had merely taken the place of the imperatorial; and ‘the chief magistrate of Rome’ was still ‘the commander of all Europe’, whose kings, kept in due obedience by the religious Orders, were no more than his lieutenants. But ‘a magistrate . . . , with the Bible in one hand, and the sword in the other, acknowledging his duty to convince, and, at the same time, urging his right to strike, is, of all animals in the creation, the most absurd’; and from this contradiction there had been kindled those flames which, for some two centuries before the Reformation, had laid waste Germany, France and England. In England, Ramsay argues, the cause of liberty owed much to the fact that William III came from a country which had recovered its national independence by its strenuous exertions against ecclesiastical tyranny; ‘and we are altogether obliged to his being a Dutchman, and not to his being a philosopher, for that toleration and religious quiet, which we now enjoy’. Ramsay was enabled

to support his analysis of Magna Carta by including in an

Appendix, with critical notes, the full text of the charter’s ‘Original Articles’, transcribed from a unique manuscript then in the possession of a granddaughter of Bishop Burnet, Miss Mary Mitchell. Furthermore his publication of the Articles, together with his detailed comments on them, must have greatly enhanced the value of his essay in the eyes of interested readers: he had brought to the notice of the public the precise nature of a historic transaction which had assumed a mythic significance. Having come to know of the existence of this precious document, Ramsay had called on Miss Mitchell in order to inspect it, and on perceiving its importance had intimated to her his opinion that the manuscript ought to be placed in the British Museum (a very recent foundation then located at Montagu House), and that the King should see to the matter. A few days later, he had called again and had urged her to allow him, for safety’s sake, to look after the document for her: consequently, on her consent, it had been placed under lock and key in the Ramsays’ parlour. For reasons unknown, Ramsay’s approach to the King failed of its object. Eventually, in May 1769, the manuscript was purchased, through the painter’s agency, by Lord Stanhope, and presented by him to the Museum.7b It is clear that it was by the Essay on the Constitution of England that Ramsay became best known as a writer. No doubt, in addition, it helped to give authority to his subsequent interventions in print in the various political disputes of the day that engaged his interest. In lighter vein, the fame of the essay is reflected in a witty allusion to it in some verses which appeared in the Edinburgh press in 1767, and which are believed to have been

ALLAN RAMSAY

214

written by James Boswell. They were occasioned by an order made by the Edinburgh Provost and magistrates that the celebrated equestrian statue of Charles II in Parliament Square — a monument erected in 1685 and now acknowledged to be the finest example in Britain of lead statuary - was to be painted white. To this benighted example of civic iconoclasm our poet retorted: Well done, my lord! with noble taste You’ve made Charles gay as five-and-twenty; We may be scarce of gold and corn, But sure there’s lead and oil in plenty; Yet for a public work like this You might have had some famous artist: Though I had made each mark a pound I would have had the very smartest. Why not bring Allan Ramsay down From sketching coronet and cushion? For he can paint a living king, And knows — the English Constitution. The milk-white steed is well enough, But why thus daub the man all over, And to the swarthy Stuart give The cream complexion of Hanover?'' Early in the year 1767 John Shackleton fell dangerously ill, and according to the custom of the time there was some speculation about who, in the event of his death, would succeed to his office. For Ramsay the outcome lay far closer to his own interests than the situation relating to Hogarth a few years earlier; and it is easy to infer by what prompting David Hume was now persuaded to write to his friend Francis Seymour Conway, Earl of Hertford, who had succeeded the Duke of Portland as Ford Chamberlain, in order to press Ramsay’s claims. There would have been every reason to expect a sympathetic response: during Hume’s years as his secretary at the Paris embassy, Hertford had formed a warm attachment to him; he was also the friend of Ramsay’s admirer Horace Walpole. Hertford, however, had been given to understand that Shackleton was expected to recover, and replied to Hume to that effect on 22 January, adding: ‘If he dies in my time of office, I will take care to be perfectly informed of His Majesty’s wishes and Mr. Ramsay’s pretensions before I act upon it’.78 What Ramsay particularly feared was that on Shackleton’s death another painter might be appointed as his own partner in office. As he confided that March to an unidentified correspondent - probably Lord Bute (or possibly some one who had his ear), - all he asked was to be put ‘on the same footing with Mr Jervais,79 Mr Kent80 and Mr Shakleton [ffc] under the late King’; and it was only right that ‘the whole functions and emoluments of the Office’ should, ‘naturally and without further obstruc¬ tion’, devolve upon himself.81 Lord Hertford’s sanguine expectations proved to be deceptive, and Shackleton died on 17 March (1767).87 His death brought renewed solicitations on behalf of Reynolds, but these came to nothing. Not only did Ramsay have prior claims which could scarcely be gainsaid, but the King, caring little as he did for Reynolds as a painter, had since ascending the throne persistently declined to sit to him.8 ’ With incontestable justice, in the same month of March the appointment of Ramsay as Principal Painter in Ordinary to His Majesty was announced.84 He now received the Principal Painter’s salary of £200 per annum.

In the 1780s, long after he had ceased to paint, this was reduced to £50, but he

was always privileged to receive ‘compensation’ to the extent of £150 per annum, so that in effect his fixed emoluments remained the same.86 There is appropriateness in the fact that, a month after Ramsay’s appointment, Ryland’s newly executed engraving of the Corona-

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

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tion portrait of the King (Plate 143) was exhibited at the Society of Artists - a reminder, if any such prool were needed, of Ramsay’s title to his new dignity. Once again the hand of Lord Bute can be detected in Ramsay’s advancement, notwithstanding the distance he now kept from the King; and even before Shackleton had breathed his last, Ramsay had taken up his pen to convey his deep sense of obligation, apparently in the knowledge that Bute had intervened in his support: My Lord, My heart is so full of gratitude for the generous part you take in my protection that I am altogether unable to express it. I hope my conduct will be better able to speak what I feel and to assure you of my being with the greatest respect My Lord Your Lordship’s most obliged and most faithful servant, Allan Ramsay.87 Meanwhile, orders for copies of the Coronation portraits were still pouring into the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Their production continued until Ramsay’s death in 1784 that is to say, for more than a decade after his retirement from painting, - having long since been entrusted entirely to studio assistants, although for some years, out of a strict sense of duty, Ramsay had made it his rule to paint the heads and pul the finishing touches to these replicas himself.88 The demand for them was immense. Ambassadors and Governors of overseas provinces were entitled to receive them gratis; and as their pos¬ session became a mark of loyal patriotism, members of the leading families, provincial mayors and other dignitaries throughout the country, together with government depart¬ ments and in some cases such institutions as colleges and banking houses, discovered an equal need for their acquisition. Those pictures that were shipped abroad kept pace with the ineluctable expansion of the British Empire; and only in some of the American states did revolutionary fervour eventually reverse the meaning of patriotism and encourage the discreet removal of the now offensive images of their Britannic Majesties from the walls of public buildings, or prompt, it would seem, their outright destruction. Inevitably, the sheer volume of the requests for the State full-lengths that passed through the office of the Lord Chamberlain made it necessary for Ramsay to employ a substantial body of assistants; but in the first stages of what became a veritable picture-factory the principal role in the execution of the copies fell to his Scottish pupil David Martin, and in the later period of the 1770s and early 1780s to Philip Reinagle, as, successively, chief assistants in the studio. The early copies of Ramsay’s royal portraits were painted in his studio in Soho Square; but eventually what became a well-organized manufactory required more ample accom¬ modation, and from 1764, when he acquired the house at 67 Harley Street, although at first retaining his residence in Soho Square for himself and his family, this continuous industry was conducted in a ‘long gallery’, as Cunningham describes it, constructed from a set of coachmen’s rooms and haylofts. George Michael Moser, the Swiss enameller and gold-chaser, who is perhaps best remembered for his major role in the establishment of the Royal Academy, recalled the scene in the earlier days in Soho Square, and marvelled at the vast demand for the likeness of the Sovereign: I have seen his show-room crowded with portraits of his Majesty in every stage of their operation. The ardour with which these beloved objects were sought for by distant corporations and transmarine colonies was astonishing; the painter with all the assist¬ ance he could procure could by no means satisfy the diurnal demands that were made in Soho Square upon his talents and industry, which was probably the reason why some of these pictures were not so highly finished as they ought to have been." 1 Moser hastened to add to his criticism of some of these replicas his appreciation of Ramsay as a man whom he ‘had reason to esteem’ and whom he considered ‘an excellent scholar

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and an excellent painter’ (the priority given to his scholarship probably reflecting merely the persona presented by Ramsay after his retirement). Yet the criticism itself is curious, for lack of finish can be justly ascribed only to a very few of the very late copies, some of which may have come to Moser’s mind. What Moser does not tell us is precisely how this stream of copies was produced. In his letter to the Duke of Portland, Ramsay explained that they were all made from the ‘original’ Coronation portrait painted for St James’s Palace. But we surely cannot under¬ stand this in a literal sense. Over a period of some twenty years, more than a hundred copies of the Coronation full-length of the King left Ramsay’s house (these usually being paired with a pendant of the Queen), and even if we lacked Moser’s confirmation of the obvious fact that they all must have been executed in Ramsay’s studio, and that Ramsay’s assistants cannot have been constantly interrupting the daily routine of the Palace by their labours, it would be equally absurd to suppose that the original was on permanent loan to Soho Square or Harley Street for the convenience of the copyists. The only plausible conclusion is that a ‘master copy’ existed in the studio from which all the subsequent versions were made, and which, being presumably from Ramsay’s own hand, or largely so, and being an exact replica of the original, might be said to justify the succinct account of the matter given by him to the Duke of Portland. Shortly after Ramsay’s death, a rather less objective commentary than Moser’s on this royal picture-factory, and one contrasting with it in its satirical intention, was offered to the public by Peter Pindar (the pseudonym of John Wolcot) in his Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for mdcclxxxv. I’ve heard that ramsay, when he died, Left just nine rooms well stufTd with Queens and Kings; From whence all nations might have been supply’d, That long’d for valuable things. Viceroys, ambassadors, and plenipo’s, Bought them to join their raree-shows In foreign parts, And shew the progress of the British arts. Whether they purchas’d by the pound or yard, I cannot tell, because I never heard; But this I know, his shop was like a fair, And dealt most largely in this royal ware. See what it is to gain a Monarch’s smile! And hast thou missed it, Reynolds, all this while! How stupid! prythee, seek the Courtier’s School, And learn to manufacture oil of fool.90 The shaft directed in the last few lines at the neglect suffered by Reynolds at the hands of the royal family (his knighthood excepted) may well have been sharpened by the fact that Wolcot, like Reynolds, was a Devon man; but we find here no allusion to any continued English resentment over the appointment of a Scot as the King’s principal portrait painter, nor any sign of a recollection on Peter Pindar’s part of what had once been a cause of bitter contention: what these verses underline is the author’s awareness of the fact that while, on the one hand, Sir Joshua Reynolds was now universally famous as a painter of supreme genius, the greatest that England had ever produced, Ramsay on the other hand, in consequence of the accident which enforced his retirement, had long since been for¬ gotten as an artist, or at least was remembered only by the ever-present and lucrative products of his studio. Moreover it was easy to believe that Ramsay had sold his soul for a State sinecure.91 Already we detect an intimation of the decline that Ramsay’s artistic reputation suffered, not merely by the persona of author, scholar and political pamphleteer

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

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which he showed to the world in his last years, but by his becoming principally associated in the public mind with the manufacture of endless copies of the likeness of a no longer popular monarch. Yet the supply of such copies was his duty as painter to the King; and even today the same misunderstanding persists, even to the extent of a serious mis¬ representation of the period immediately preceding his enforced retirement, giving rise to the erroneous assumption that for as many as seven years before then he painted nothing, or almost nothing, apart from the replicas of the royal portraits, the execution of which was entrusted chiefly, at first, to his assistants, and soon in their entirety. The first of Ramsay’s assistants, David Martin, had entered Ramsay’s studio as a mere boy in 1752 and remained in his service until at least the late 1760s. By the financial year 1766-67 he was receiving from Ramsay fees in excess of £300;99 in July 1768 we find him, for instance, being employed by Lord Findlater to make copies of certain portraits by Ramsay.9j As we have seen, Martin had joined Ramsay in Rome in 1755, and if there is any substance in Cunningham’s report that he was told to bring his drawings with him, for the purpose of refuting a hint offered by the President of the Accademia di San Luca that England could not produce anything comparable with the work of his own students, the incident may well reflect Ramsay’s pride in his pupil’s talent. Martin’s gift for drawing had shown itself early, and brought him the distinction of being appointed principal draughtsman and designer in the studio. As Ramsay’s assistant, he became a proficient imitator of his master’s style and technique of painting; but on setting up his own practice in Edinburgh, where in 1775 he was made the Prince of Wales’s Painter to Scotland, he tended to prefer bolder effects closer to the more powerful manner of Reynolds, while developing in his late work a certain coarseness of handling. Nevertheless, as the leading Edinburgh portrait painter for some two decades, he did much to preserve in the Scottish School the ‘natural’ tradition established by Ramsay, apparently playing some part also in the very early training of Raeburn. What he owed to his master’s principles of design is well illustrated by his acknowledged masterpiece, the portrait of Benjamin Franklin in the White House in Washington,94 which shows a clear debt to a type of composition devel¬ oped by Ramsay in such portraits as the Robert Wood (Plate 108) and more particularly the William Hunter (Plate 170). Reinagle, the son of a Hungarian musician resident in Edinburgh, had been articled with Ramsay in 1763, at the age of fourteen, serving an apprenticeship of seven years. He remained with him for the rest of Ramsay’s life - a period of above two decades.9 ’ By 1770 he was receiving about £60 per annum for various items of work. Altogether, he is reputed to have executed as many as ninety pairs of the Coronation portraits of the King and Queen, a large number of which were painted after Ramsay’s retirement in 1773 and during his long periods of absence in Italy from 1775 to 1777 and from 1782 to 1784. For some years Reinagle’s fees for each copy - paid to him by Ramsay - was only ten guineas out of the total of £42 which Ramsay charged (even when he was abroad) for a copy at full length. Later on, however, in consequence of representations made by Reinagle to Ramsay, the income was divided equally, so that for every pair of royal portraits Ramsay and Reinagle each received £42. After this drudgery Reinagle is said to have laid down his brush with a thankful heart, and to have been unable to contemplate portraiture again ‘without a sort of horror’: his subsequent rise to eminence as an animal-painter seems a fitting enough sequel to his long enslavement to their Majesties’ persons. Another of Ramsay’s pupils, Alexander Nasmyth, described him as ‘an agreeable companion’ and as Ramsay’s intimate friend: a close relationship is also implied by his having bestowed on his son, the landscape and panorama painter, the names Ramsay Richard, in that order.96 By the year 1767 a German, George Roth, had entered Ramsay’s service. Among other assistants, Cunningham mentions ‘Vandyke, a Dutchman, allied more in name than talent with him of the days of Charles the First’; Miss Black, ‘a lady of less talent than good taste’; ‘Eikhart, a German, well acquainted with draperies’; and ‘one Vesperies, a

218

ALLAN RAMSAY

foreigner’, who was ‘occasionally employed to paint fruits and flowers’.'' It would, how¬ ever, be a vain task to attempt to identify in any of the known replicas of the royal portraits, or in other pictures by Ramsay, the handiwork of these humble specialists. Much the same is true of Peter Toms, who although not a member of Ramsay’s studio is documented as having worked for him in some sense in 1754,1)8 and may have continued to do so occasionally in the 1760s if that is the interpretation to be given to a remark dropped by Lord Bath at the time of his sittings to Reynolds. Lord Bath had discovered to his surprise that even so eminent a master as Reynolds employed an assistant to help him with draperies and accessories, Reynolds having just despatched his Lordship’s portrait to him for this purpose; and, as he informed Mrs Montagu, ‘The same Person (but who he is, I know not) works for Ramsay, Reynolds & another, called Hudson." The assistant in question can most plausibly be identified with Toms, who was certainly being much employed by Reynolds, as well as by Cotes, in this period.1"0 Occasionally, although very rarely, we find in Ramsay’s work passages that remind us of a drapery-style common to certain portraits by Reynolds and Cotes, and which might be attributable to Toms: but on that assumption his services to Ramsay can be assumed to have been minimal; nor is there any evidence or tradition that he was ever employed on the painting of the royal portraits. The last and most celebrated of Ramsay’s pupils, Alexander Nasmyth, went on, like David Martin and Philip Reinagle, to attain distinction in his own right, although prin¬ cipally in landscape.101 Nasmyth devoted himself chiefly to the congenial task of revealing to his countrymen the unique beauties of the Scottish scenery — by virtue of which he has been rightfully called ‘the father of Scottish landscape painting’. His work is mainly to be seen in collections north of the Border: if it were better known in England his name would have a very high place in histories of British landscape painting alongside those of the most distinguished artists of his time. Nasmyth’s four-year apprenticeship, commencing in 1774, postdated Ramsay’s enforced retirement from painting, and much of it occupied the period of his master’s absence in Italy from 1775 to 1777. Nevertheless his training under Ramsay has a historical significance in relation to Scottish painting comparable with Martin’s, for when Nasmyth returned to his native Edinburgh he upheld those standards of sound draughtsmanship which he had learned to value in London, and which, being fundamental to the tasteful refinement of his style as a landscape painter, must owe far more to Ramsay’s example than has been suspected. So far as his unaffected naturalism is con¬ cerned, one may surmise that Ramsay would have drawn his attention to the merits of the honest Lambert (elevated in the Dialogue on Taste to the very company of Hogarth and La Tour). Nasmyth was born in 1758, the son of a distinguished master-builder in Edinburgh, and, like Ramsay, was educated at the High School. He was afterwards apprenticed to an Edinburgh coach-builder, under whom he was put to the decoration of the panels of carriages. Meanwhile he was attending classes at the Trustees’ Academy, an institution of recent foundation which was then under the direction of the Italian-trained history-painter Alexander Runciman. His son James Nasmyth, the engineer and inventor, remarks in his Autobiography that Ramsay was ‘exceedingly kind to his young pupil’, and that he estaBlished with him a lifelong friendship.102 Nasmyth is said to have taken particular ad¬ vantage in London of Ramsay’s collection of drawings by the Old Masters. On returning to Edinburgh in 1778 Nasmyth set up as a painter of cabinet-size portraits and conversation-pieces, before proceeding to Italy, where he copied works by Claude. By 1785 he had settled permanently in Edinburgh, now devoting himself chiefly to landscape, although continuing to paint occasional portraits, the most famous being his two masterly portrayals of Robert Burns, a personal friend:103 but such was the range of his gifts that he earned distinction also as illustrator, stage-designer, architect, landscape-gardener and engineer. Special interest attaches to a cabinet-size replica by Nasmyth (Plate 185), now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, of Ramsay’s early Self-portrait (Plate 27) - inscribed on

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

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185 Alexander Nasmyth Copy of Ramsay’s early Self-Portrait (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh) the back of the old canvas 26 April 1781.104 The inscription almost certainly records the date of the picture’s acquisition by the 11th Earl of Buchan, who required a likeness of Ramsay for inclusion in his eccentric scheme for a ‘Caledonian Temple of Fame’, 03 to be built on his estate at Dryburgh Abbey. Buchan had inaugurated this whimsical project in the previous November, at about the time that, with much the same patriotic fervour, he had founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. The ‘Temple of Fame’ was to be ‘dedicated to the portraits and contemplation of illustrations of illustrious Scots’ from every walk of life. A long list of those who would be portrayed is preserved in Buchan’s Commonplace Book — where we find, for instance, the names of the architect Sir William Bruce, the poet James Thomson, the anatomist Alexander Monro primus, and David Hume. The last two, Buchan hoped, would be represented by their portraits by Ramsay.

ALLAN RAMSAY

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186

Mezzotint engraving

by A. Wivell of Ramsay’s Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1820

Elsewhere Buchan notes the names of five artists accorded places among ‘Scots eminent in different fields’: Jamesone, Aikman, Ramsay, Gavin Hamilton and John Runciman.106 Buchan ventured the hope that on the completion of the Temple, outside whose portals statues of such philosophers of antiquity as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca would point up a comparison between the ancient kingdom of Scotland and imperial Rome, other aspiring Scotsmen would be inspired to emulate the example of the great men whom it honoured and so merit a place within: ‘May my countrymen strive,’ he urged, ‘to enter in at the strait gate of this venerable apartment. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are on the outside of this building. None can enter that are not truly Scots’. Ramsay had been among the first to be approached by Buchan for permission to have copies made of their portraits; but, while thanking Buchan for the honour he had done him, he had declined his request, on the grounds that no suitable likeness of himself was in his possession: the only such picture, he explained, was one he had begun ‘about twenty years ago’, but which, having never been finished, was in no condition to be copied.10' Ramsay was here referring to the Self-portrait at the Easel (Plate 1) which he had painted during his second visit to Italy. Notwithstanding his reservations about its unfinished state, it was to be competently engraved in mezzotint by Wivell in 1820 (Plate 186) as the only published likeness of the artist. The much earlier Self-portrait copied by Nasmyth (now in the National Portrait Gallery in London) was conceivably in Scotland, perhaps in the possession of the Bayne family; but Ramsay may have simply excluded it from

187

Amelia Murray, Lady

Lindsay (The Board of Trustees of the Chevening Estate)

consideration, as representing him in his youth. There is no certainty that Nasmyth had not already made the copy before leaving London. At all events, the fact that Buchan refused to be put off by Ramsay’s negative answer to his request, and contrived another means of representing him in his ‘Temple of Fame’, tells us something about the esteem in which the painter was still held in Scotland long after his retirement from practice. Towards the end of the year 1767 (the year of his appointment as Principal Painter in Ordinary) Ramsay paid a short visit to Edinburgh, evidently arriving in Scotland in October. There he took up residence at the ‘Guse-pye’, devoting much of his time to the supervision of necessary work on the house now occupied by Lady Lindsay, for which a new roadway was also in hand.108 His wife had remained in London to nurse the children during their recovery from measles. She was now expecting her last child: this was John, the future general, born in London on 17 May of the following year, 1768. The reconcilia¬ tion with Lady Lindsay seems now to have been complete, and she did not decline to sit to

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her son-in-law for what must be accounted one of Ins most sympathetic portraits (Plate 187). Although he did not yet know it, Ramsay was now at a watershed in his life. So far as official recognition was concerned, his elevation to the position of Principal Painter in Ordinary, following not long after his election to the Vice-Presidency of the Incorporated Society of Artists — an institution enjoying the patronage of the King, and widely known as the Royal Incorporated Society, - had placed him at the very head of his profession. But within another year and a half all was changed. Willi

the foundation of the Royal

Academy in December 1768 under the presidency of Reynolds, a new chapter had opened in the history of the arts in Britain, and the pages in that history which Ramsay had long adorned had been finally turned. The knighthood bestowed upon Reynolds in the follow¬ ing year not only acknowledged his own supremacy among the artists of his own time, but signalled the emergence of a distinctive British School of European reputation, with the Royal Academy, rather than the Incorporated Society or the St Martin’s Lane Academy as its guiding body. Although Ramsay was a frequent guest at the Academy’s public functions, the chief of these being the splendid annual dinners inaugurated by Reynolds, he neither sought membership nor sent anything to its prestigious exhibitions; and in this aloofness, which in the latter respect had already characterized his relationship to the Incorporated Society, we may see the origins of his gradual eclipse, hastened a few years later by his enforced retirement — and leading ultimately to an almost total obscuration of his distinguished place in the history of eighteenth-century British painting. It may be that he was not wholly in favour of public exhibitions, and considered that the proper place for a portrait was the house or institution for which it was destined; and he may likewise have felt, with his customary fastidiousness, that to have his work hung cheek by jowl with that of artists of discordant character would detract from the delicacy of his own taste and fail to do justice to the discreet unassertiveness of his style. But a more cogent explanation for his attitude almost certainly lies in his consciousness of his privileged position at the Court, which from

1767 had been given the seal of a unique status: the office of Principal

Painter to His Majesty was still associated in memory and reputation with such eminent predecessors as Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir James Thornhill, behind whom there trailed the incomparable glory of Van Dyck; and, as Sir James Caw proposed many years ago, Ramsay would probably have considered that ‘to become a mere academician would belittle the distinguished and unique position he already held’.109 This judgment can be amplified by the further consideration that, in addition to being Painter to the Court, Ramsay held the office of Vice-President of the Incorporated Society - which had been granted a royal charter some years before the Academy came into existence. The Incorporated Society already had its own history of achievement, whereas the fortunes of the Royal Academy still lay in the future, and the Academy’s superiority as a national institution, although virtually predictable, remained unproven. The Incorporated Society,

indeed, was sufficiently proud of its own standing as an

independent body to take the decision, announced on 6 June 1769, to expel from its membership all those artists, headed by Reynolds, who had joined the new Academy. Nor was it as if the King himself had at once withdrawn his favour from the older institution: in fact, two weeks after the opening of the first of the Royal Academy’s annual exhibit¬ ions, he visited the rival exhibition held by the Incorporated Society in Spring Gardens, as The Public Advertiser announced on 12 May (1769). He was accompanied by the Queen and her brothers, the two Princes of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Their Majesties were reported on this occasion to have expressed ‘their satisfaction at the great Number of ingenious Performances exhibited there, and the Advancement of the Arts in general in these Kingdoms’. It is possible, nevertheless, that Ramsay’s aloofness from the Royal Academy led to a falling-off of the commissions he received from the year 1769, when attention was increasingly focused upon the Academy exhibitions. His case was not quite comparable

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with that of Hogarth, who had painted scarcely anything in the last five years of his life (suffering as he was from poor health); but Ramsay may conceivably have chosen, in his late fifties, to reduce radically the number of commissions that he accepted, whether from a consciousness of failing energies or from a sense that he had achieved all that his powers were capable of, and that the terms of his ideal of portraiture could be carried no further. A hint of contemporary sensitivity to Ramsay’s personal position after the foundation of the Academy, whether reflecting feelings within his own circle or merely the etiquette of the Court, is conveyed by a newspaper report of the knighthood bestowed upon Reynolds on 21 April 1769 - five days before the opening of the Academy’s exhibition. According to the Public Advertiser of 24 April, Ramsay had first been offered the same honour but had felt obliged to decline it, declaring that 'by the Country he came from he had already Enemies enough, and by this title should get more’; whereupon, we are told, ‘the King sent for Mr Reynolds, and knighted him’.11" If this report is to be believed, the inference that can be drawn from it is that once the occasion of the Academy’s inaugural exhibition had persuaded the King of the appropriateness of a knighthood for its first President, form required the offer of an identical accolade to His Majesty’s Principal Painter. Two days later, however, the same newspaper denied the truth of the story, stating categorically that it was 'entirely without Foundation’.111 Yet it seems very possible that there lay behind the report some actual circumstance, for Ramsay’s alleged objection rings entirely true, recalling his bitter remark to Lord Bute, some six years previously, about 'the ill-founded clamour of the seditious concerning Scotch preferments’. We may take account in parti¬ cular of the sort of situation that could have arisen from prior intelligence of the King’s intention regarding Reynolds and speculations as to whether the same honour would be conferred upon his official painter. It is not difficult to suppose that representations to the King on behalf of Reynolds would have been matched by consequent representations on behalf of Ramsay. If Ramsay was himself privy to what was being said on that score, it would not have been out of character for him to decide to scotch any assumptions in his favour, giving his reason in the very terms stated in the newspaper. He might even perhaps have answered in the same manner an inquiry at a high level as to what his response would be to the offer of a knighthood. In any case, in respect of the subsequent denial of the report, it would have been desirable to remove any impression that Reynolds’s knight¬ hood had been conferred upon him only in consequence of Ramsay’s own refusal of the same mark of distinction. Certainly the hatred of Bute and the ill-feeling against the Scots had by no means abated. In this same year a disorderly rabble mounted a demonstration outside Bute’s house in South Audley Street; the former Prime Minister was being regularly accused of promoting unpopular policies in which he had no part whatsoever; and allegations of his undiminished influence at Court - less easy to refute - continued to be published in the press, together with the usual animadversions upon the elevation of some Scotsman or other to a coveted place or honour. Two years after her husband’s appointment as Principal Painter, Margaret Ramsay informed Lady Stanhope in Geneva that Bute was still being ‘blamed for everything’.112 About the same time, when John Stewart, a protege of the Marquess of Rockingham, stood for election to the Secretaryship of the Society of Arts, mustering many fellow Scots among his supporters, of whom Ramsay seems to have been one, the Gazetteer published a savage and sarcastic attack upon his nationality and on his supporters north of the Border."5 Margaret Ramsay had special cause to be con¬ cerned: early in 1769 her brother Sir John Lindsay - a distinguished naval officer who had been knighted for gallantry - was on the point of sailing for India as commander-inchief of the eastern fleet; and, as she reported to Lady Stanhope, his appointment to his new command had given rise to ‘a great cry against the Scotchs’:"4 once more Lord Bute was being accused of favouring a fellow countryman. This further outbreak of hostility towards Bute and his compatriots is of particular interest because it occurred only some

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four months after Ramsay’s reported refusal of a knighthood on the very grounds of his vulnerability to anti-Scottish prejudice. No prominent Scot was more sensitive to the general feeling against his compatriots than Ramsay’s friend David Hume, who once observed that while he had fully expected his literary works to earn him the enmity of every Christian, Whig and Tory, he had found it hard to accommodate himself to the concerted hostility, on entirely different grounds, of the English, the Welsh and the Irish. On leaving his post at the Paris embassy Hume had remained in London for some three years, as Under-Secretary of State of the Northern Department, prior to returning thankfully to Edinburgh. His present affluence, he now felt, merited more ample accommodation than he had been accustomed to in his house in James Court, in Edinburgh’s ancient Lawnmarket, and his first plan had been to rent one of Ramsay’s new properties on the Castle-hill. In the end, however, he decided to move to a capacious house at one corner of St Andrew Square, in the New Town, where he was to live until his death in 1776. His change of mind about Ramsay’s house was due to advice from an old friend, the poetess Alison Cockburn (remembered especially as the author of the moving lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest’): Mrs Cockburn drew his attention to the house’s inconvenient situation on the exposed north side of the Castle rock, averring with a vehemence as excessive, perhaps, as her imagery was metaphysically dubious, ‘I would as soon be the Soul of an unburryed Sinner wandering about the river Styx as live in these houses’.115 Nevertheless, whatever the disadvantages of the site, for which the magnificent prospect over the countryside to the north, beyond the houses of the New Town, must have afforded considerable compensation, Ramsay took immense trouble over the upkeep of the properties and their gardens, and every detail of their interior decoration received his close attention.110 It would have been these responsibilities, at least in part, that drew him back regularly on short visits to Edinburgh — where we find him, for example, during the winter of 1770—71 and in the following autumn. A like conscientiousness had led him, many years earlier, to enclose the grounds of the ‘Guse-pye’ and to improve the entrance to its garden, in order, as he said in his letter outlining his plans to the city authorities, to make the property more agreeable to visitors to the Castle-hill, ‘and particularly the Gentlemen and Ladies of the first rank who from the nature of the petitioner’s business resort to his house’;117 that is to say, all those people of quality who came to his painting-room to sit for their portraits, and who were continuing to do so during his visits to Edinburgh from the later 1760s onwards. It was then, in all probability, that he painted such late examples of his facility for feminine portraiture as the Anne Broun, Lady Dalrymple (Plate 188),118 the Anna Bruce of Arno t (Plate 189)119 and the Jean Morison of Haddof20 The year 1769 saw the appearance in print of his Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government, defending the right of Great Britain to tax her American colonies. Otherwise he published little in these years: the most substantial of his printed writings at this time were two pamphlets on Indian affairs, in which he had a personal interest as a major holder of East-India stock - an important source of his growing wealth. In addition, between December

1769 and April

1771

he contributed six letters, under the pseudonym of

‘Marcellus’, to the Public Advertiser, all of which were immediately reprinted in the London Chronicle}-1 But these ephemera hardly justified Horace Walpole’s later statement that, in the course of his advocacy of government policy, Ramsay ‘left off painting, and was a constant scribbler for the Court in the newspapers’, with its implication that his retirement from painting, instead of being due to the grievous accident he suffered to his right arm in 1773, was prompted by a wilful decision to exchange his brush for the pen of a political 188

Anne Broun, Lady

Dalrymple, 1766-67

hack; nor can it be held that Walpole was very well informed about the occasional pieces which Ramsay sent to the London journals, since he misattributed to him certain

(Collection of Lady

pseudonymous letters not of his authorship.122 Walpole had little sympathy for Ramsay’s

Antonia Dalrymple,

political views, particularly those concerning the American crisis, and his own copy of the

Newhailes)

Origin and Nature of Government is annotated in extenso with adverse comments.123 By the

226

ALLAN RAMSAY

1770s he and Ramsay had evidently drifted apart, and there can be no certainty that Walpole ever appreciated the true nature of the artist’s calamitous injury — which Ramsay himself, as in the parallel case of his illness in Rome, seems to have been stoically determined to downplay. Nevertheless, in the light of such circumstances, one can com¬ prehend Walpole’s dismay that a painter whom he deeply admired, and whom he was accustomed to speak of in the same breath with Reynolds, had suddenly abandoned his art. After his accident Ramsay was to concentrate his energies, understandably, upon his literary and scholarly interests. His political writings were plainly inspired by a profound patriotism, and there can be no question but that he saw his pen as a means of effectively serving what he believed to be the interests of his country. In his Essay on the English Constitution he had already revealed his pride in

Britain’s rise to imperial greatness,

comparable as it was in his estimation - and in that of many of his contemporaries, whether in England or abroad — with the glory of ancient Rome; a comparison found, for instance, in the famous Essay on Painting published in London in 1764 by Count Algarotti, himself a Fellow both of the Royal Society and of the Society of Arts. The primacy that Ramsay gave to the American situation was occasioned entirely by his concern that that greatness was being imperilled. At the same time the range of his more purely literary interests is reflected in his learned inquiries into such disparate matters of scholarly concern as the principles of English prosody and the question of the site of Horace’s Sabine farm, which he saw as having an important bearing upon a true understanding of the poet’s passages of description. On the other hand his contributions, in the last year of his life, to a volume of light verse, entitled The Arno Miscellany, possess no more than some slight biographical interest, reminding us also of his fitful aspiration to poetical honours.1'4 This venture itself aroused the contempt of Horace Walpole, who was astonished that Ramsay had seen fit to come out, in apparent dotage, as such a ‘bad poet’.1'1 How seriously Ramsay himself took his quite ordinary talent for versification is unclear; but during his visit to Edinburgh in the winter of 1770—71 he was sufficiently interested in the opinion of the young Henry Mackenzie (shortly to become famous as the author of The Man of Feeling) to give him a copy of some satirical verses which he had recently composed, in order to get his verdict on their merits. These, in turn, Mackenzie passed on to his cultured kinswoman Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock for her scrutiny, pronouncing at the same time his own judgment that while the idea expressed in them was ‘good enough’, and although the versification was ‘polish’d into a laudable smoothness’, the poem was ‘what any one might have written’. Mackenzie refers to Ramsay on this occasion as ‘a man whom everybody allows to be a Painter, and who is himself desirous of being thought an Author of some consequence’.121’ Although in these years Ramsay published very little and could never, besides, have achieved recognition as a poet, - there can be no doubt that in a wider sense his literary ambitions were by no means diminished. Since the time of his first Court appointment he had developed a passionate interest in politics, and it was more often than not his views on affairs of State that prompted him to take up his pen. In all his publications on international affairs Ramsay shows himself to be a firm supporter of government policy, save where, in his view, it had failed in its duty towards British interests in North America. The two pamphlets on the Indian question are no exception. The matter at issue in this case pertained to the very predictable controversy that had been aroused concerning the undetermined rights of the East-India Company to acquire territory and to declare war without the consent of the British Government. Being a substantial investor in East-India stock who had thereby greatly increased his wealth, 189

Anna Bruce of Arnot,

c. 1766—68(?) (National

Ramsay may certainly be described as an interested party; besides which, the dispute in question had become a national issue inviting the participation of those most concerned.

Gallery of Scotland,

While the Ministry, in its increasing anxiety over the autonomous powers assumed by the

Edinburgh)

Company, insisted that on all matters relating to peace or war the commanders of the

ALLAN RAMSAY

228

190

Lady Charlotte Burgoyne,

c. 1772(?) (Privately owned: from the Collection of George Pollard Armitage)

assigned British forces on land and sea must have a voice with the ‘supervisors’ appointed by the East-India Company, many of the Company’s Directors were strongly opposed to such a restriction. The conflict had come to a head in the summer of 1769, when the Directors appealed to the proprietors for their support. Ramsay had thereupon addressed a letter to the Directors defending the Government’s position: this appeared in print three years later,127 and he followed it, in the same year 1772, with a further pamphlet in two parts — the first taking the form of a letter to Lord North (then Prime Minister), and the second comprising the text of a speech which, as one of the proprietors, he had delivered in East India House on 12 November of that year, at a meeting of the General Court of the Company.128 Meanwhile the whole issue - one closely affecting the national interest - had come up for debate in the House of Commons. In the previous April John Burgoyne, as Member of Parliament for Preston, had delivered the decisive speech w'hich led to the setting up of a government committee of inquiry. Burgoyne’s wise proposals, advocating adequate ministerial control over the East-India Company, were to form the basis of subsequent legislation, and they were debated in the Lower House on 17 November, almost certainly with Ramsay present in the Strangers’ Gallery as an interested onlooker.1211 It may be noted that Burgoyne’s speech, delivered on 13 April, followed only some three weeks after Ramsay’s letter to Lord North outlining similar views and bearing the date 20 March 1772. As we have seen, Burgoyne had known Ramsay in Rome, where he had sat to him in 1756 (Plate 112). The fact that he now commissioned from him a portrait of his wife, Lady Charlotte (Plate 190), suggests that their common interest in the same national

191

,

Queen Charlotte in Coronation Robes (revised) C. 1767 (Collection of Her Majesty The Queen)

ALLAN RAMSAY

230

issue, at precisely the same time and from a shared viewpoint, may have drawn them again together. The three-quarter-length of Lady Charlotte Burgoyne - one of the loveliest that Ramsay ever painted — can in fact be plausibly dated to about the same year on stylistic grounds alone, and must in any case have not long preceded the artist's retirement in 1773. This commission highlights a fundamental misunderstanding that has arisen concerning Ramsay’s work during the final years of his portrait practice.

It has been generally

assumed, quite erroneously, not only that the production of copies of the State portraits constituted the sole official function required of him from the time of his appointment as Principal Painter in Ordinary, but that he did not thereafter undertake other commissions unconnected with his Court duties.130 In actual fact he continued, in the first place, to receive royal patronage to the end. In the period stretching from about the time of his elevation as Principal Painter in

1767 to his retirement early in

1773, Ramsay was

commissioned by the royal family to paint at least six new portraits, three at full length and the others at three-quarter length, besides producing versions of the Buckingham Palace group-portrait and other works of a like nature. To a date close to his second Court appointment must be assigned the revised Coronation full-length of Queen Charlotte painted for Princess Augusta, which represents the Queen at a more mature age and as conforming to the new French fashion of the late 1760s and 1770s for high-piled, powdered hair (Plate 191). This is by far the most poetic of Ramsay’s four known portrayals of the Queen,131 and a silvery, flickering light suffuses her features and jewelled dress, to become lost in the softly contrasting shadows of the pillared hall in which she stands. In its lyricism of shimmering light and blended tonalities the picture reflects a development in Ramsay’s late style prompting comparisons with Gainsborough. The possibility that in the 1760s Ramsay was taking note of Gainsborough’s work in his Bath period has sometimes been proposed:132 but if this was so, a measure of reciprocity may have been involved, for the two painters had a good deal in common, and there is much to be said for the recent suggestion that Ramsay’s late manner was now working its spell upon his younger English contemporary. A full-length, of similar date, of the Queen’s third son, Prince William, afterwards Duke of Clarence (Plate 192), who was to ascend the throne at an advanced age as William IV, deserves equal attention.134 The young prince is represented in ‘coats’, the long dress worn in this period by boys of tender years, and stands in a carpeted interior beating a toy drum. The picture is one of the most charming of eighteenth-century depictions of chil¬ dren; it now hangs at Windsor Castle, and is hardly put out of countenance by having been placed in the company of Van Dyck. The inclusion of a table bearing a gilt vase, two teacups and a cream-jug reminds us of Ramsay’s continuing interest in contemporary French portraiture, where domestic accessories of a similar kind are often to be found, whether in the work of La Tour, Nattier, Aved or Drouais. Such realism of detail may also reflect Ramsay’s awareness of the competition offered at Court by Zoffany, whose penchant for minute particularization had begun to impress its Teutonic virtues upon the aesthetic tastes of the Hanoverian monarch and his German consort. Notwithstanding what has been thought to the contrary, there is no question of any falling-off in these years of Ramsay’s employment at the Court. But his patronage by the King and Queen was now largely shared with Zoffany; and it was from both Ramsay and Zoffany that Queen Charlotte commissioned in the late 1760s a small group of pictures of members of her family. The two by Ramsay were a three-quarter-length of her younger brother Prince George Augustus (painted during his visit to England between November 192

Prince William,

afterwards Duke of Clarence (later King William IV), c. 1767-68 (Collection of Her Majesty The Queen)

1768 and August 1769)135 and a posthumous portrait, at three-quarter length, of her mother,

Princess

Elizabeth

Albertina,

Duchess

of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

(probably of

slightly later date) (Plate 193).136 In view of Ramsay’s commitments in 1769, which can be shown to have been parti-

193

Princess Elizabeth

cularly heavy, the latter picture may well not have been completed until at least the

Albertina of Mecklenburg-

following year — which would bring us already into the 1770s. The Princess had died in the

Strelitz, c. 1769—70 (Collection of Her

year of her daughter’s marriage and Coronation; and while using for the likeness a head-

Majesty The Queen)

and-shoulders portrait of her (by the German painter Daniel Wage), Ramsay adopted the same procedure that he had employed in the Galileo (Plate 122), creating a design of his

Study for the

own for the figure, which he seems to have based on the chalk study (Plate 194)13/ he had

portrait of Mary Martin,

made for a three-quarter-length of Mary Martin (the widow of Admiral William Martin)

194

1761 (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

(Plate 195), painted in 1761,138 and so ensuring that the princess’s costume conformed to the fashion of her day. The flavour of the Princess Elizabeth Albertina - a work notably rich in colour — is again very French, and the motif of the closed fan which the princess is represented as holding upright in her hands appears to derive ultimately from La Tour’s full-length portrait of Queen Marie Leczinska.1But the absolute masterpiece among these late royal portraits is the Brunswick Princess Augusta (Plate 196), a three-quarterlength with a garden setting.1411 It bears the date 1769 (the last year, it appears, in which Ramsay signed and dated his pictures). This lovely portrait even surpasses the second fulllength of the Queen in its tender lyricism, and once more the poetry is essentially a poetry of light - here silvery and softly diffused. For what must be the last known work commissioned from him by the King, the fulllength at Marienburg of George Ill’s second son Prince Frederick, Duke of York141 (Plate 198), which is probably datable in the early 1770s, Ramsay prepared two small oilsketches in colour - unique in his ceuvre, - showing alternative designs, presumably as trial pieces142 (Plates 199, 200). The portrait was destined for Hanover, the royal sitter being

195

Mary Martin, 1761

represented, at about the age of six or seven, in his capacity as Prince and Bishop of

(City Museum and Art

Osnaburg - titular honours bestowed upon him in infancy. Like the three-quarter-length

Gallery, Birmingham)

of the Queen’s mother, but to a greater degree, the portrait exhibits an intensity of realism

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

235

197

Portrait study of Queen

Charlotte, early 1770s

(National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

and detail which seems to mark a new and hitherto unsuspected development in Ramsay’s style, suggesting more strongly than the Prince William an attempt to rival Zoffany on his own ground. More deeply, however, this carefully composed work evokes recollections of Van Dyck’s portrayals of royal children. Not only did Ramsay here revert to the crosslegged pose which Van Dyck had given to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles II) in the second of his two groups of The Three Eldest Children of Charles 7,143 but the directness of the portraiture has much in common with Van Dyck’s own, both in the latter picture and in the group of the King’s five children.141 Finally with regard to the Royal commissions, there has come down to us a chalk study for a female portrait, at bust length, recognizably of Queen Charlotte (Plate 197),141 for which the character of the hair-style must in itself indicate a dating in the early 1770s. It seems very possible that this drawing was made in preparation for a portrait which was never carried out, conceivably in consequence of the accident that ended Ramsay’s career as a painter. Apart from the royal commissions, a number of other undated portraits, mostly not exceeding the scale of the half-length, can be assigned to the late 1760s, in addition to such dated pictures as the Mrs Dundas of Arniston,XM’ painted in 1768, and the pair of Lock Rollinson14/ and his sister Martha Tracy Travell,148 both of 1769. The bust-length portrait at Newhailes of Anne Broun (Lady DalrympleJ149 (Plate 188) was evidently begun in 1766 and completed in 1767 (presumably in Edinburgh), and a comparable or slightly later date must accordingly be given to the similarly composed Anna Bruce of Arnot (Plate 189). Within the period 1767-69 can be placed the bust-length portrait at Glasgow of Ramsay’s brother-in-law Sir John Lindsay150 and the half-length of fean Morison of Haddo,151 The

196

Princess Augusta,

Princess Dowager oj 11 ales,

1769 (Collection of Prince Ernst August of Hannover

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

237

199

Oil sketch for the

portrait of Prince Frederick (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) 200

Oil sketch for the

portrait of Prince Frederick (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

lovely half-lengths of Anne Howard (Plate 201) and The Honourable Anne Gray (Plate 202), both in private collections, represent variations on a type of open-air portrait which Ramsay had first developed many years earlier, but which now becomes the vehicle for a meditative lyricism of a quality not found elsewhere in British painting of the eighteenth century. A still later date must be given to the three-quarter-length of Lady Charlotte Burgoynel3~ (Plate 190), for which the year 1772 seems probable. Some further portraits suggest on various grounds a similarly late dating, either in the late 1760s or early 1770s. It is possible that the unfinished half-length at New Haven of a girl in a pink dress (Plate 203) also belongs to this period, if the striking resemblance of the young sitter to Ramsay’s daughter Amelia (Plates 208, 209) is more than coincidental. On grounds of style this enchanting picture could easily be assigned to a date nearer 1760, although the dark brown background would be exceptional before the year 1766, the date of the half-length of Hume. Conceivably, then, we have here the one known painting by Ramsay of his elder daughter at the age of about sixteen. While in these years there was a definite falling-off in Ramsay’s productivity, suggestive of a desire on his part to limit quite strictly the number of commissions he accepted, there has been much misapprehension concerning this period of his life, and no evidence exists for any kind of supposition that prior to his accident he had the least intention of retiring from his practice: indeed according to Allan Cunning¬ ham’s account of the accident, he was engaged at the time on a royal portrait. Until quite recently the date of the accident was not certainly known; and Cunningham, who provides a vivid narrative of the circumstances in which it occurred, wrongly places it after Ramsay’s third visit to Italy from 1775 to 1777: moreover, in one particular, he confused that visit with the painter’s fourth and last visit of 1782-84, stating that on both occasions, rather than only on the latter, Ramsay was accompanied by his son. On the grounds of the marked shakiness of Ramsay’s handwriting after 1777, the present writer, failing to allow for a progressive worsening of the painter’s condition, formerly concurred

198

Prince Frederick,

Duke of York, early 1770s (Collection of Prince

with Cunningham in a late dating.153 But it can now be established, from a letter written

Ernst August of

by Margaret Ramsay which had not previously been examined, that Ramsay suffered the

Hannover)

ALLAN RAMSAY

238

201

Anne Howard,

c. 1768-69(?) (Private Collection)

accident shortly before 20 March 1773.1:54 As Cunningham tells us, what led to it was Ramsay’s concern for the safety of his family and household. On reading a newspaper report of a fire which had consumed all the lower rooms of a private house, causing the loss of several lives, Ramsay was ‘so touched by the calamity’ that he immediately rose from his chair and summoned his family, pupils and servants, bidding them follow him to the loft. Then, pushing a ladder through a loft-door opening on to the roof, he climbed up while they all watched, and explained to them, ‘Now I am safe, I can escape along the roofs of the adjoining houses’. But ‘as he turned to come down again he missed the step, fell, and dislocated his right arm in so severe a way that it never fully recovered’.135 As it chanced, the painter’s injury virtually coincided with the marriage in Scotland, on 15 March 1773, of Margaret Ramsay’s younger sister Catherine to Alexander Murray of Murrayfield, a rising barrister who was to be appointed Solicitor-General for Scotland two years later and eventually to succeed the great Karnes as a Lord of Session; and it was in the course of sending her congratulations five days later that Margaret Ramsay com¬ municated to her sister some news of the accident and of her husband’s subsequent progress. ‘He is much better,’ she went on to say, ‘and I hope will soon get well, but cannot use his right arm much. I have great reason to be thankfull it is no worse, for it was a dreadfull fall, by a ladder slipping from under him’.1Her optimism was not to be fully justified, for (as Cunningham emphasizes) Ramsay never completely recovered from the effects of his fall, and three years later he was still seeking from the warm springs of Ischia the cure which, before his departure for Italy - made largely for the sake of his health, the waters of Buxton had failed to provide.157

FINAL DECADE AS A PAINTER

239

202

The Honourable Anne

Gray, c. 1770(?) (Private Collection)

The accident marked the end of a career of exceptional distinction, in which Ramsay had occupied a leading position among the artists of his time. It was composed essentially of two phases, during the first of which he had been the principal founder, together with Hogarth,

Highmore and Hudson, of a truly national school of portraiture, faithfully

reflecting the modes, manners and ideals of the beau-monde in the reign of George II, and during the second had created a new, natural style of portraiture combining intense characterization with unaffected grace — a style that in its capacity to escape from the limitations of a particular period and culture secures for his art its permanent place among the finest achievements in the history of British painting.

CHAPTER NINE

Last Years: 1773-1784 Despite the serious effects oi his fall, which left him with enduring pain, Ramsay was soon afterwards undertaking two strenuous journeys in the service of family and friends — the first, during the summer of 1773, to Edinburgh, where Lady Lindsay had fallen ill, never to recover,1 and the second, that autumn, to Geneva, as an escort to Lady Stanhope’s sister, the Honourable Rachel Hamilton (Plate 204). Lady Stanhope’s condition had deteriorated to such an extent that she could now scarcely move without crying out in agony, and her sister was anxious to be with her in her sufferings. Ramsay’s offer to conduct Rachel Hamilton across Lrance calls to mind Boswell’s description of him as the sort of person who would get up in the middle of the night and ride ten miles through heavy rain to serve a friend.' Ramsay had returned to London from Scotland in September, and preparations at once went ahead for the journey to Geneva. This, however, was to be a year of accidents, for his wife was prevented from accompanying him by two injuries to a leg affecting her ability to walk. In consequence, the painter’s sister Janet (Plate 6) was summoned from Edinburgh to act as chaperone, while Margaret Ramsay remained behind in the devoted and selfless care of Amelia. The party set off from London on 10 October, in a pair of chaises, and at once ran into very rough weather. Ramsay declared afterwards that the crossing from Dover to Calais was the worst he had ever known. Navigation in the harbour at Dover had been rendered dangerous by sandbanks thrown up by the storms, so that the ship was prevented from coming alongside the pier; and the boat carrying the passengers out to it was tossed so violently about on the heavy seas that Ramsay was sick and his sister, as Rachel Hamilton reported afterwards, seemed ‘like to die’.1 Once on board the waiting vessel, Ramsay was constrained to lie down on the tilting deck and to hold on to a pump in order to avoid being thrown about. When, on their arrival at Calais, the boat conveying them ashore ran hard into the pier, there were cries of alarm from the women and children on board; Janet, meanwhile, had been rendered so incapable by sea-sickness that the sailors had seen fit to toss her into the boat that carried the baggage, to her great alarm at being so summarily separated from the others. Not that they themselves all escaped such indignities: ‘I could not help laughing afterwards,’ Miss Hamilton told her brother George, on at once sitting down in the hostelry at which they put up at Calais to write to him about her adventure, ‘at the ridiculous figure we all made when they took us out of the boat: a man took me and slung me upon his back like a sack without saying a word to me - all the rest the same’. Throughout the crossing she had observed Ramsay’s efforts to conceal his own sufferings: ‘I could not but wonder all the time,’ she reflected when recalling the experience on a later occasion, ‘how he could be so good as come with me’. Well might Amelia Ramsay’s bosom friend Prances Boscawen - the Admiral’s daughter and now the wife of a young naval captain (afterwards an admiral), the Honourable John Leveson Gower - allude to Ramsay’s journey as ‘an act of heroic friendship’.1 By the time that they were ready to continue their travels the storms had completely cleared; but it was not only the return of summery weather that lightened the tedium of

203

A Young Lady (Amelia

the two-day journey to Paris; for Ramsay, besides acting, as Miss Hamilton put it, as ‘a

Ramsay ?) (Yale Center for

most careful and attentive conductor’ who knew ‘exactly what he should give and do upon

British Art, New Haven)

ALLAN RAMSAY

242

204

The Honourable Rachel

Hamilton, 1749 (Collection of the Earl of Haddington, Mellerstain)

every occasion’, had resolved to amuse the travellers by bursting into song and engaging the postilion in nonsensical conversation. They reached Paris on 14 October, and were to remain there for about a week. ’ Dr Tronchin was now in residence in the French capital, having been appointed physician to the Duke of Orleans, and Lady Stanhope had recently made the journey from Geneva to consult him. Rachel Hamilton was accordingly anxious to obtain his opinion of her sister’s condition: although he was not at home when she called, Ramsay was able to see him shortly afterwards, only to be given what proved to be a far too optimistic assessment. This must have made it easier for Ramsay’s party to enjoy Tronchin’s hospitality to them at his fine apartments in the Palais Royal, where he entertained them to a splendid dinner: but when, on 24 October, they arrived in Geneva, they found Lady Stanhope still racked by pain and, although able to walk with the aid of crutches, quite unable to sit down. Ramsay wasted no time in seeking to renew his acquaintanceship with Voltaire, going out to Ferney on the day after his arrival in Geneva, and taking with him the young Lord Chesterfield (the 5th Earl), who on inheriting a fortune from his celebrated godfather was making his Grand Tour. As the Stanhopes’ guest, Ramsay now had the opportunity of getting to know the young Charles, Viscount Mahon, whose portrait as a boy he had painted ten years earlier (Plate 176); and there commenced from this time a friendship which seems not to have been affected by Mahon’s radically different political views, among the chief of these being his opposition to the American war. On her own part Rachel Hamilton considered her brilliant nephew an awkward youth, one ‘not formed in his person’ and ‘very shambling’ in his deportment. Ramsay himself went further, noting that Lord Mahon was ‘somewhat deficient in matters of dress and modes of behaviour

LAST YEARS: 1773-1784

243

205

Michael Foye: Bust of

Allan Ramsay (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh)

requisite in mixed companies . . ., which, however trifling they may seem to scholars, are very essential in life’. In other respects, however, he received a very favourable impression of him. ‘He is an excellent young man,’ he wrote to Lady Stanhope’s brother George Baillie, ‘has a friendly, generous and public spirit, a good understanding very well cul¬ tivated, with regard to many branches of business, and [is] master of all the exercises which belong to a gentleman and an officer’.8 With winter approaching and the roads worsening, it was soon desirable for Ramsay and his sister to set out for home. They left Geneva on 31 October, and on reaching Paris a few days later Ramsay called again at the Palais Royal to see Dr Tronchin. Once more Ramsay chose to linger awhile in the French capital, and it was not until 20 November that he and Janet arrived back in London, after a fair passage of the Channel. Apart from the first crossing, he informed George Baillie, the entire expedition - occupying six weeks had been so free of accidents and bad weather that he had not himself ‘suffered any martyrdom’ on account of his endeavour to be of service to his friends. Nevertheless the journey to Geneva may well have aggravated his infirmity; and by May

1774 he was complaining of ‘rheumatic pains’.7 This is the first we hear of a

condition which can be assumed to have been directly related to his fall in the previous year, as seems to be confirmed by the progressive deterioration of his handwriting. He was eventually persuaded, against prolonged resistance on his part, to try the remedial virtues of the hot springs of Buxton, in Derbyshire (still a famous health resort).8 Much faith was placed in the eighteenth century in the benefits to be derived from ‘taking the waters’, benefits that more often than not were illusory. Buxton indeed proved to be no answer to what we are told was a shattered constitution, and Ramsay’s health continued to decline.

244

ALLAN RAMSAY

Italy, on the other hand, had the reputation of offering a cure for various ills, and it was in the hope of finding such a remedy that in the summer of 1775 Ramsay and his wife, together with their elder daughter Amelia, who had been born in Rome, set out again for the Eternal City - John and the younger daughter, Charlotte, being entrusted to the care of their aunt Catherine in London. They began their journey in August, and stopped for a few days in Paris, where they were received by Horace Walpole9 and entertained by his amoureuse Mme du Deffand, who in her blind old age still presided imperiously over her literary salons. It was Ramsay’s rule, on his various visits to Italy, to complete all he had to do or see in Paris before the beginning of September:1,1 accordingly on this occasion he resumed his journey towards the end of August, evidently taking the same route that he had chosen in 1736 and 1754; and, once arrived in Italy, he preferred, as before, to spend the greater part of his time in Rome. There he sat to the Irish sculptor Michael Foye for a portrait bust which shows us a serious, somewhat troubled face, with a strong hint of melancholy about the sunken but firmly set mouth (Plate 205).11 Appropriately, he wears a toga. Ramsay’s thoughts indeed now returned to those scholarly interests, of an antiquarian nature, which had attracted him especially to the problem of Horace’s Sabine villa. During his second Italian visit he had often occupied himself in the copying of Latin and Greek inscriptions on ancient monuments, a hobby evidently pursued to no particular end save the scholarly satisfaction to be derived from the acquisition of knowledge, but one that it had once amused him, as we have seen, to put to use in teasing his friend Hume. At the time of this third visit to Italy, Henry Fuseli — then nearing the end of his long years of study in Rome — was struck by Ramsay’s fondness for ‘tracing on dubious vestiges the haunts of ancient genius and learning’.12 The two artists would have had a great deal in common, for among all contemporary painters of the British School Fuseli most closely approached Ramsay in scholarship and general learning. Yet it is on other grounds, pertaining to Ramsay’s view of the function of painting, that a further anecdote about their association in Italy, related by Joseph Farington, possesses particular interest. Fuseli went with him on a visit to Turin, to inspect the work of a learned but uninspired painter, ‘who could draw well, and could reason upon the principles of art and compose pictures agreeably to rules commonly considered essential to be attended to’, but whose works ‘produced little impression on an intelligent Spectator’. ‘I see,’ Ramsay observed to Fuseli as they came away, ‘that common sense will not make a painter. This man can shew you why he does this and that, and attends to prescribed rules; but more is wanted to touch the feelings’.13 The remark fittingly expresses what must have been Ramsay’s approach to his own art, especially in his later years, and recalls a similar comment contained in his essay on English Versification. Conceivably, he had already detected a tendency towards an excessive reliance upon ‘prescribed rules’ in the published Discourses of Reynolds, if not also in Reynolds’s applica¬ tion of his theories to his own practice as a painter. Certainly, neither the poetical qualities of Ramsay’s characteristic portraits of women, nor his capacity to move us by penetrating to the individual personality, would have been possible of attainment if as a painter he had not consciously set out ‘to touch the feelings’. As Ramsay was still suffering discomfort from the effects of his accident, it was in quest of some alleviation of his pain that during the months of July and August 1776 he took a holiday with his family on the Isle of Ischia, opposite Naples, a resort renowned for the curative properties of its baths. Sharing the same hope, Frances Feveson Gower wrote optimistically to Amelia that August: ‘I hope Mr Ramsay will find all the benefit bathing can give, return to this country well in health, and the party stored with an endless fund of entertainment’.14 A temporary improvement seems to have followed, and to have inspired 206

Self-portrait, 1776

a return to drawing. Several portrait-studies in chalks, executed during this visit to Ischia,

(National Portrait Gallery,

have come down to us, including the Self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery in

London)

Fondon,1’ a drawing possessing all the authority of his best work as a draughtsman (Plate

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206): although less severe than Foye’s own interpretation of his physiognomy, it reveals a

208

hint of sadness and resignation, if not yet the world-weariness of his very last years. Its

(Huntington Library and

very mastery suggests that, as his injury appears likely to have been chiefly to his upper

Art Gallery, San Marino)

arm and shoulder, by resting his elbow on a table or desk he would have had sufficient use

209

Amelia Ramsay, 1776

Amelia Ramsay, 1776

of his lower arm to draw with some freedom, although not to manage with comfort the

(National Gallery of

more strenuous activity of painting. And while a portrait-study of Margaret Ramsay was

Scotland, Edinburgh)

abandoned as a failure,1'3 a second attempt, catching her in the act of glancing downwards with lowered head, produced one of the loveliest of all his portrayals of her (Plate 207).17 The serene and pensive mood of this tender drawing contrasts with the animation ex¬ pressed in one of two studies of the vivacious Amelia (Plates 208, 209)18 (‘as quick as Ariel’, Horace Walpole had described her in her childhood). All these studies, together with another of‘a country girl’, exhibit a love of drawing for its own sake; and as ends in themselves they were carefully preserved along with the large body of working drawings made in preparation for Ramsay’s commissioned portraits. Whether or not Ramsay envisaged the possibility of being able to resume his brush, his return to Italy not only provided a distraction from his physical sufferings but acted as a stimulus to the exercise of his scholarly inclinations; and it was now that he resumed his investigation into the problem of the site of Horace’s Sabine villa, the country retreat which the poet had received as a gift from his patron Maecenas. The writing of his Enquiry into the Situation and Circumstances of Horace’s Sabine Villa, with his wife assisting as an amanuensis, soon became his chief occupation; it was to see completion during his fourth and final visit to Italy of 1782-84. The publication of the treatise was prevented by

207

Margaret Ramsay,

Ramsay’s death in August 1784; but the site which he identified in the Licenza valley

1776 (National Gallery of

corresponds to that accepted today by the Italian Government, which undertakes the

Scotland, Edinburgh)

ALLAN RAMSAY

248

210

Panoramic View of the

Licenza Valley (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, 284)

upkeep of a ruined villa brought to light by more modern excavations. The scope of Ramsay’s treatise extended beyond the limits of purely archaeological inquiry, for, as he explained, once the true situation of Horace’s villa was known, ‘new lights [would] be from thence reflected upon his poetry, which has long been the delight of men of the best under¬ standing’.19 Indeed, the challenge offered by this learned quest held out the promise of a valuable reward, since if it could be demonstrated that related passages of rural descrip¬ tion in Horace’s poems were not merely instances of ideal ‘landscape-painting’, but, on the contrary, held up a mirror to real scenes, then the poet’s essential naturalism was proven. Ramsay’s intention reflects the same insistence upon Nature as the mistress of all the arts that we find in the essay on Ridicule and the Dialogue on Taste. In order to establish his case Ramsay supported his argument with a mass of quotations from Horace’s poems. He intended in addition to illustrate the essay with engraved views of the Licenza region, including a detailed panorama of the area; and to this end he engaged the services of his young countryman Jacob More, who was at that time studying in Rome: Ramsay’s choice of artist was a discerning one, for More had a good eye for the particular character of a scene. He was shortly to earn a reputation as one of the most eminent landscape painters of his day, a modern Claude.20 In the summer of 1777 Ramsay found himself ideally placed for the pursuance of his investigations on the spot, when Count Orsini made available to him a suite of rooms in his palace at Licenza. He took up residence there, with his wife and daughter, in June of that year, and was shortly afterwards joined by More, whose task was to translate Ramsay’s rough sketches into finished watercolours for the use of an engraver. Several drawings by Ramsay and More relating to the project have survived, among them a squared-up drawing by Ramsay showing a panoramic view of the Licenza valley as seen from one of the windows of the palace, and carefully lettered to indicate the exact position of each landmark (Plate 210). More produced three watercolours of the same view, the last of the series being on a scale large enough to accommodate the amount of detail that an

LAST YEARS:

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249

211

Allan Ramsay

(drawing) and Jacob More (wash): View of Rocca Giovane (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, MS. 730 37R)

engraver would require. Altogether seven such drawings by him are known (Plates 212, 213), all relating to four of the illustrations chosen for the treatise: of these, two are inscribed on the back in Ramsay’s hand with topographical notes of an explanatory character; and on occasion More added wash to a drawing by Ramsay (Plate 211). The engravings, however, were never executed: Ramsay apparently reached the eventual con¬ clusion that the views he had envisaged were of too general a nature; at all events he sub¬ sequently conceived the idea of illustrating the Enquiry with more intimate scenes, including depictions of the towns of Licenza and Rocca Giovane and of the presumed site of the famous villa itself. These illustrations, he decided, would be fittingly associated with a detailed map. But he was not to proceed with this revised scheme until his final visit to Italy in 1782. The Ramsays returned to Rome on 28 June 1777. As Ramsay later recalled, they did so with ‘much regret’, since not only had their visit to Licenza been stimulating in itself, but they had found great pleasure in getting to know the simple country folk who made their arduous living from

the land:

Ramsay had come to consider them as belonging in

themselves to the ‘antiquities’ of the region; for, he observed, apart from their religion, they seemed ‘to be of the same stamp with those who, according to the poets and historians, inhabited the country in the days of Numa Pompilius; with the same laborious manner of living, the same contented poverty, and the same innocence’.-1 During his two years in Italy Ramsay had become increasingly concerned about the worsening situation in America; so much so that prior to his departure from Italy, he rushed out a reprinting of his previously published letters on the crisis, under the title Letters on the Present Disturbances in Great Britain and her American Provinces.u His arrival in London that October virtually coincided with the news of his friend Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga. In all his writings on the American crisis, Ramsay defends the constitutional right of Great Britain to tax her colonies: in his view the Americans had confused the issue by

212

Jacob More: View from Licenza, looking towards Mons Lucretilis, with ‘Horace’s Villa’ in the distance

(above the prominent house), watercolour (Private Collection) 213

Jacob More: Horace's Villa, watercolour, 1778 (Private Collection, Scotland)

LAST YEARS: 1773-1784

251

regarding themselves as Englishmen and claiming the same rights as those possessed by their British cousins, whereas similarity of language or descent did not confer such privileges upon a people who should properly be treated as aliens; nor was their allegiance to the Crown complete and unambiguous. Erom this time Ramsay exhibits a mounting impatience with the Government in its handling of the American situation. In January 1778 he published two letters in the Public Advertiser, the first deploring the actions of the newly established American Congress, and the second (signed ‘Investigator’) attributing the failure of British arms in North America to the infection of national polity by ‘a parcel of pusillanimous vermin’ who ‘cheat the principles of the Nation, and keep their places’. His concern over the outcome of the American war is further exemplified by a pamphlet entitled A Succinct Review of the American Contest, Addressed to Those Whom It May Concern, which appeared in February of the same year under the pseudonym of‘Zero’, supposedly a hall-pay officer in the navy.-’ Ramsay’s views were considered by His Majesty’s Opposition to be sufficiently important to require an answer; and in January 1778, for instance, both Ramsay and the unpopular Earl of Sandwich were severely criticized for their advocacy of a more determined prosecution of hostilities against the Colonists.24 Ramsay’s practice, common at the time, of publishing his essays and occasional writings anonymously has led to the association of his name with the products of other pens — notably a work of some length entitled An Historical Essay on the English Constitution, published in London in 1771, which has been ascribed to him owing to a confusion with his own treatise on the same subject.25 Strong but less decisive doubts have recently been cast upon his authorship of another work issued anonymously - the Plan of Re-Union between Great Britain and Her Colonies, published by John Murray in 1778,26 the year of Ramsay’s most intensive literary engagement in American affairs. This is no epistolary excursion or pamphlet, but a sizeable volume of over 200 pages. It was based, as the author informs his readers, upon ‘a manuscript on the improvement of the sugar-colonies’ which he had had in hand for some ten years (perhaps implying its commencement at about the time that Ramsay’s productivity as a painter begins to show a marked decline). The work in question was ‘extracted and fitted for a temporary publication, in hopes of its contributing something to elucidate the rights of Britain, deserted and betrayed as she is, by too many of her ungrateful sons’. The objections raised to Ramsay’s authorship rest principally upon the fact that no copy of it is included in the three volumes now in the National Library of Scotland comprising the works envisaged by him as forming the contents of the intended three-volume collection of his previously published writings (The Investigator, volumes i-iii).2/ However, it should be borne in mind that the painter’s scheme for this project — to be entitled Ramsay’s Works - omitted The Investigator nos. cccxi and cccxn, as well as his unpublished treatises on English prosody and on the site of Horace’s Sabine villa, both of which he clearly regarded as important contributions to their subjects. As the date of Ramsay’s plan for the projected three volumes of his Works is unknown, the force of the argument against his authorship of the Plan of Re-Union may be said to be correspondingly diminished. It has been argued further that Ramsay’s reputation for ‘Scottish parsimony’ is inconsistent with an advertisement in The London Chronicle for 22-24 January 1778 to the effect that the profits from the sale of the Plan of Re-Union were ‘to be applied for the benefit of the soldiers wounded in America’.28 While it is true that Ramsay was regarded by at least one acquaintance - the notoriously profligate James Boswell - as being very close with his money, and was known generally for his amassment of great wealth (a ‘money-getter’ such an enemy as Robert Strange, himself struggling at the time, saw fit to call him), the total evidence regarding his character suggests a person of outstanding generosity, as well as benevolence, whether towards friends or relations: a man of such notably humane sympathies should need no defence in our times. Ramsay must have been only too acutely aware of what service in the British forces overseas entailed: in this year 1778 his future son-in-law Archibald Campbell had returned from four years’ exceptionally

252

ALLAN RAMSAY

distinguished service in North America, and had begun his courtship of Amelia shortly afterwards; furthermore Ramsay was in close touch with his first wife’s brother, Captain William Bayne, who commanded a ship of the line under Sir Samuel Hood, earning a reputation for conspicuous bravery. Bayne was eventually, in April 1782, to be fatally wounded in action during the long-drawn-out engagement off Dominica: his gallantry and that of two other naval officers who fell in the battle are commemorated in the grand monument by Nollekens in Westminster Abbey. There were reasons close enough to Ramsay’s heart for a patriot’s acknowledgment of the indebtedness of private citizens to those who risked their lives for their country. Moreover, in addition to its compatibility of style, the views expressed in the Plan of ReUnion are nowhere inconsistent with those found in the various publications on American

affairs that are indisputably by Ramsay, although they go beyond them in suggesting extreme measures for bringing the war to an end. The strategy proposed involved the withdrawal of all the British troops to New York; after which a proclamation would be issued offering a free pardon to any of the rebel provinces that agreed to renounce their allegiance to Congress; but, were this offer to be refused, ten thousand troops would be embarked in transports and landed at any convenient point where little resistance was expected; their task would be to burn and destroy the private houses, magazines and plantations within their reach; only the lives of those who did not resist by force of arms would be spared. Such outright advocacy of something approaching what we have come to know as ‘total war’ is not perhaps a mode of warfare that the present age has earned the moral right to condemn; nor is it easy to believe that some one of Ramsay’s humanity could have been the author of so ruthless a plan: it may nevertheless be borne in mind that Ramsay’s last prose work was to be an essay On the Right of Conquest, which constitutes, essentially, a defence of the thesis that in international affairs, given appropriate circum¬ stances, might is right. More significantly, however, humane considerations are far from being absent from the Plan of Re-Union: while excusing the proposed strategy on the grounds that the ends, if not the means, were intrinsically good, the author insists that otherwise there could be no justification; for ‘every degree of pain, even the smallest, given to individuals, without having in view any useful or humane end, is an act of cruelty, which no just or wise man will ever recommend or countenance’. Nor should it be forgotten that it was humanitarian feeling that determined the author’s intention to reserve all profits from the sale of the book for the relief of the British wounded. In fact, notwithstanding the doubts that have been raised, Ramsay’s authorship of the volume is given every support by two passages in the diary of John Baker, a well-known barrister with whom Ramsay had been acquainted for many years. Baker records that on 27 January 1778 Ramsay called upon him about one o’clock at his house in Duke Street and stayed for three-quarters of an hour, informing him that ‘his book was come out today at Murray’s, entitled A Plan for a Re-Union of Great Britain and the Colonies (or something like it), as a preface to a larger work he is to publish’. During the course of the conversation Ramsay added that he had left copies with ‘most of the Ministers’.29 On 13 February Baker recorded that on that day he ‘was reading Mr Ramsay’s book’,’0 so that there can be little doubt that the volume which he held in his hands was a presentation copy from its author. Perhaps most strikingly of all, what Ramsay had told him some two weeks earlier, to the effect that the book was intended as the preface to a larger work, corresponds precisely to the statement in the Plan of Re-Union that the text had been ‘extracted’ from a manuscript (necessarily of very much greater length) which its author had been preparing for as many as ten years. Finally, it seems unlikely than Murray, the publisher of the Plan of Re-Union, would have brought out, at about the same time, two works with the same or a similar title, as we should be obliged to suppose if we accepted the further suggestion that Ramsay could have written some hitherto untraced pamphlet which has been confused with the known volume (though Baker refers to Ramsay’s

LAST YEARS: 1773-1784

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‘book’). 1 he only other candidate who has been proposed as the author of the work is Sir William Pulteney, but the grounds for this ascription have not been established. \\ hile the verdict ot history has not been favourable, on the whole, to the policies which Ramsay supported, and which in respect of the American situation conformed largely to those of Lord North, his views on political and international affairs were shared by many others who enjoyed the protection of the Court and who likewise wrote from sincere conviction, among them Samuel Johnson himself; and what is indisputable is that Ramsay wrote as a patriot deeply concerned for the welfare of his country. Nor would his attitude to the American war have been seen by most of his contemporaries and friends in any other light. There was even a certain timeliness in the publication of the Plan of Re-Union, for a mere three weeks after its appearance the nation observed a Fast Day, held on 17 February 1778, in response to a royal proclamation enjoining prayers for the American loyalists and corresponding intercessions for the rebels’ repentance for their disloyalty to the Crown. As it happened, the Fast Day became one of the topics discussed at a social engagement at Mrs Boscawen’s on 7 March of that year, at which Ramsay was present, together with Johnson’s friend Hester Thrale. Ramsay on this occasion reverted to a point he had made in his Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government, to the effect that the difficulty in providing appropriate answers to the American controversy lay in the fact that the question changed from one day to the next;31 and he now suggested to the company that no clergyman was qualified to preach on the Fast Day who did not do so extempore: politics, he remarked, turned and veered about to such a degree that he would defy any minister of the Church to prepare his sermon adequately even if he composed it a mere three days before.32 Yet in considering Ramsay’s political writings it is impossible not to regret that his passionate desire to make his own contributions to the controversies which he saw as most deeply affecting the national interest diverted him from the application of his literary gifts to subjects of more enduring value, such as the biography of his father which Boswell, with some discernment, strongly urged him to write, perhaps recognizing the waste of a considerable talent. All the same, long before his third visit to Italy Ramsay had achieved a substantial reputation as an elegant essayist on literary, historical and aesthetic subjects, as well as on contemporary issues, whether or not of a political nature. It was with this reputation, spread over a broad canvas, and with equal recognition within the intellectual circles in which he moved as a man of exceptional learning and erudition, but no longer as one of the leading painters of his time, that he had returned from Italy in the autumn of 1777; and it was in this light that he was now admiringly received into the circle of Johnson and Boswell. It seems very probable that it was through Boswell, who was already acquainted with Ramsay, that the painter was introduced to Johnson. Before giving up his lawyer’s practice in Edinburgh in 1778 and moving to London, Boswell had come to know both Ramsay’s sister Janet, whom he found an entertaining companion,33 and his old friend Sir Alexander Dick;34 furthermore he had lately been considering the idea of renting one of Ramsay’s properties on the Castle-hill: his wife had been ‘charmed’ with the house, and its spacious¬ ness appealed to Boswell for professional reasons, since, as he put it, ‘I could have there a good consulting-room quite to myself’;35 but, on his going south, the plan was abandoned. The first recorded occasion on which Ramsay and Johnson were together, although it was probably not the first in actuality, was on 9 April 1778, when they attended a dinner given by Reynolds.36 The other company consisted of Boswell, the poet Richard Owen Cambridge, Edward Gibbon, Jonathan Shipley (Bishop of St Asaph’s), Bennet Langton and his wife, and Reynolds’s sister Frances. The conversation seems to have been led by Ramsay, who proceeded to discourse at length to this cultured gathering upon the question of Horace’s Sabine villa. On adding that he had put his observations down in writing, Boswell eagerly responded: ‘Pray put them in the press and let them come out again . A

254

ALLAN RAMSAY

general discussion of Horace’s poetry and character ensued, before the conversation turned to other topics, among them the comparative merits of London and Paris, in the course of which Johnson pronounced heavily against Ramsay’s view that literature was ‘in its spring in France’, but that in England it was ‘rather passee\37 After dinner, the party was joined in the drawing-room by further company, including David Garrick, Dr Charles Burney (the musician and musicologist) and the gifted young poetess Hannah More (a favourite of Johnson’s), whose play Percy, graced by a prologue and epilogue from the pen of Garrick, had just completed a triumphant run at Covent Garden. A few days later we find Boswell calling upon the Ramsays at 67 Harley Street and enjoying a ‘very good talk’, in the presence of the painter’s wife and his daughter Amelia. Boswell was disappointed, however, to learn that, apart from writing a few notes, Ramsay had not proceeded with the life of his father which, prior to leaving for Italy three years earlier, he had promised to write. Already Boswell had considered undertaking the task himself, but had been discouraged by Sir John Pringle (as he recorded in his London Journal for 1776), on the grounds that Ramsay as a poet perpetuated broad Scotch, ‘spoken only by the vulgar’. Now, on being informed by the painter that the proposed work was still ‘only in his head’, Boswell implored him to think about it further. There were few warmer admirers of The Gentle Shepherd than Boswell: his regret at being unable to persuade Johnson of the merits of this most charming of pastoral poems is well enough known. But all that Ramsay ever produced was the brief manuscript to which reference has already been made. On the same occasion they also discussed Johnson: Ramsay paid conventional tribute to Johnson’s learning by describing him as ‘a very polite man’: what he thought of Johnson as a person is not recorded; but as he placed great value upon correct manners and deportment, he must have found Johnson unusually wanting in the social graces; nor in all probability would he have been greatly drawn to a mind that was as open to the persuasions of religious bigotry as it was closed to the appreciation of the visual arts; and he must have been painfully aware of Johnson’s hostility towards his friend Hume — who had died, serenely accepting his inevitable ‘dissolution’, during the painter’s recent visit to Italy. Ramsay returned Reynolds’s hospitality on 29 April 1778.39 The other guests were Johnson, Boswell, William Robertson, Lord Binning and Mrs Boscawen. Johnson was late in arriving, and the others began to express their opinion of him. Ramsay repeated, more or less, what he had already said to Boswell — that ‘he had always found him a very polite man’, and that ‘he treated him with great respect, which he did very sincerely’; to which Boswell, in whose eyes such moderate praise must have seemed totally inadequate, responded in a burst of idolatrous emotion, ‘I worship him!’ This was too much for Robertson, a man conspicuous for his moderation and common sense, and he gave it as his opinion that they were all spoiling Johnson; then, mindful of his cloth, he reminded the company that it was wrong to worship any man. When Boswell began vehemently defending his hero, Robertson ventured to interpose a comment on Johnson’s credulity, especially in matters pertaining to the Church of England. Boswell would have none of this, and continued his praises with an encomium upon Johnson’s powers of reasoning and his skill in ‘drawing characters’, which, he averred, no doubt with an eye to eliciting the support of Reynolds and Ramsay, was ‘as rare as good portrait-painting’; an analogy which, however, failed of its presumed object, for Reynolds now rose to the challenge with less than unqualified assent, observing, ‘He is undoubtedly admirable in this; but, in order to mark the characters which he draws, he overcharges them, and gives people more than they really have, whether of good or bad’. Boswell must have been gratified to note that, as soon as Johnson came in, all those who had been so freely discussing him became ‘as quiet as a school upon the entrance of the headmaster’. Johnson was delighted with the Ramsays’ hospitality: ‘We very soon sat down,’ Boswell recalled, ‘to a table covered with such a variety of good things, as contributed not a little to

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dispose him to be pleased’. The implied liberality of their host scarcely matches the modern notion oi Ramsay s parsimony. But although his entertainments seem to have been lavish, and included dances and concerts,40 the house in Harley Street was not distinguished by any great beauty, let alone magnificence, in its furnishings. Anna Porter, a close friend of Amelia Ramsay whose father, Sir James Porter, had in the course of a distinguished career as a diplomat served as Minister Plenipotentiary at Brussels, descriInd it in he 1 diary as an agreeable home, but not an elegant one; and everything, she said, was always upside-down {derange): her visits there were attractive to her rather on account of the opportunity they afforded her of ‘meeting very clever people there’, together with her enjoyment of the vivacity and information that marked Ramsay’s conversation; as she confided to her journal, I gamed much in that society’. Elsewhere she portrays Ramsay as ‘a man of a most lively, classical, original conversation’, adding that his wife ‘follows his will implicitly - their daughter most amiable, I love her affectionately’. As host on 29 April, Ramsay gave a lead to the conversation by introducing the subject of Pope’s poetry, which, he maintained, was now less admired than it had been in the poet’s lifetime; a proposition at once contradicted by Johnson. The choice of topic is of some interest, not only because Ramsay was known for his extensive familiarity with the ancient and modern poets (and in his Dialogue on Taste had paid tribute to Pope as one of the leaders of a new, natural school of poetry), but also because at this time he was engaged in a close study of English prosody. This resulted in a lengthy treatise entitled An Enquiry Into the Principles of English Versification; with Some analogical remarks upon the versification of the Antientsf The essay was never published. The manuscript is largely in

Ramsay s own hand, but a section of it is in his wife’s, and other parts are in a third hand: possibly it was not completed until after his wife’s death in 1782. This estimable work had as one of its principal objects the refutation of the view lately expressed by Lord Monboddo, in his Origin and Progress of Language (published in several volumes over a long period), that the English language shared with all other modern tongues a deficiency in certain qualities ‘necessary to the formation of legitimate verse’. Announcing on the first page his dissent from Monboddo’s characteristically unorthodox conclusions, Ramsay outlines the general purpose of his own Enquiry: To vindicate the honour of modern times, and of my own country, I take up the pen against so respectable a Writer; and shall endeavour to shew that all the requisites for poetry exist in the English language; so that, if our Poets do not make verses according to the principles of the Ancient Greeks, it is their own fault only; and I will conclude by shewing that what to an English ear appears excellent or faulty in our poets, proceed [s] from an observance or non-observance of those rules by which the ancients were govern’d. These rules, he proceeds to argue, have necessarily to be modified by consideration of the differences between the English language and the ancient tongues. For instance, spondees are uncommon in English but are a basic element in classical prosody. To take another example, the classical hexameter, a major form in the most serious poetry of the ancients, is rendered inappropriate to the genius of English verse, except in relation to comical subjects, by the light effect produced by the unstressed syllable at the end of the line: but if, Ramsay suggests, this short syllable were to be transferred to the beginning of the line, it might be possible to ‘produce a species of hexameter dactylic verse, full of harmony’; and this might be successfully employed on subjects of dignity. ‘But,’ he warns, ‘I am confident that every English attempt to imitate, with exactness, those ancient hexameters, will turn out unnatural and ridiculous’. Ramsay’s examination, and defence, of the principles of English prosody is argued by means of a detailed analysis revealing a wide knowledge of our poetic tradition, such as constituted, according to Allan Cunningham, one of the cultured attributes for which he was most esteemed as a guest at the entertainments of the Royal Academy. On one

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occasion he read out at least a part or a draft of the treatise to Hannah More, having arranged a small gathering in his house for the occasion. Her response had been far from favourable. ‘It is very scientific and ingenious,’ she commented afterwards, ‘but I do not allow him his positions, and very pertly told him so’. Her principal objection was due to her impression that Ramsay had seemed ‘to set written rules above the “nicely judging ear’”, and this she would ‘never allow’. Especially did she disagree with his denial of the excellence of Pope’s ear for harmony of sound, and this she would ‘never allow neither’.4" With regard to the latter point, in actuality the only criticism of Pope in the Enquiry is a very minor one, concerning the poet’s rhyming of be with me in a couplet where the word be should be unstressed, as against its usage as a long vowel when that verb is ‘expressive of abstract existence’, for example in Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’. Moreover, while Ramsay does insist in his essay on the virtues of metrical correctness, as all sound critics and all our finest poets have always done, he is careful to add the qualification that ‘in every elegant art there is a point beyond which rules cannot carry us’, and that ‘here the deficiency must be supplied by Taste, which will always advantageously distinguish those artists who happen to be blest with it; and, perhaps, nothing tends to debase any Art, and to render it inelegant, than an attempt to subject any particular Grace in it to a particular rule’.4’ He might, we may think, have been writing about his own work as a painter. In actual fact the historical interest of the treatise lies largely in the advanced character of its conclusions, supporting as it does the case for metrical variety, in opposi¬ tion to the current insistence upon mechanical rigidity of metre;44 and in this respect Ramsay can be said to have foreshadowed in some degree, at least theoretically, the freer usages of Coleridge and the Romantics. The conversation at 67 Harley Street on 29 April continued with a discussion of the Iliad. Ramsay offered a sceptical view of Homer’s authorship, giving it as his opinion that the poem was ‘a collection of pieces which had been written before his time’ — a thesis that was already in the air and which was to be fully developed in Friedrich Wolf’s Prolegomena of 1795.4j Ramsay remarked that he would like to see a translation of the Iliad ‘in poetical prose, like the Book of Ruth or Job’; whereupon Robertson suggested that Johnson might try his hand at a part of it. ‘Sir,’ Johnson replied, ‘you would not read it without the pleasure of verse’. Later, the name of Robert Adam came up in the conversation, and Ramsay and Robertson agreed that he was remarkable for ‘a constant firmness of mind’ which enabled him to remain cheerful and good-humoured amid a multitude of domestic and professional anxieties. There followed from this a discussion of man’s capacity to master a nervous disposition, which Johnson considered, against the profounder doubts of Boswell, to be entirely under the control of the will; an assertion which Johnson, an abstainer in his later years, then applied to the perils of wine-drinking, declaring that one had to choose between abstemiousness and study on the one hand and claret and ignorance on the other: on this point at any rate Ramsay would have been in full agreement. On the following day Boswell called upon Johnson. He found him in his bedroom, and they began talking about the previous afternoon’s dinner-party. ‘Well, Sir,’ Boswell reports Johnson as saying, ‘Ramsay gave us a splendid dinner, and Ramsay is a fine fellow’.46 Johnson followed this remark with his well-known tribute to Ramsay as a conversationalist, prefacing it with an expression of his personal affection for him: ‘I love Ramsay. You will not find a man in whose conversation there is more instruction, more information, and more elegance, than in Ramsay’s’. ‘What I admire in Ramsay,’ said Boswell, ‘is his continuing to be so young’. Johnson agreed: ‘Why, yes, Sir,’ he replied, ‘it is to be admired’, adding, in recollection of his own years, that he prided himself on the absence of ‘the old man’ in his own conversation: he had, he felt sure, no more of it at sixty-eight than he had had at eight-and-twenty. The ‘benevolence’ which Boswell considered to be one of Ramsay’s principal traits was

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a \ntue that the painter himsell admired in Johnson, as he had an opportunity of showing in the same year. No one could have set a nobler example than Johnson of caring humanity, as visitors to his lodgings in Bolt Court could not fail to observe from the number ol distressed and destitute victims of ill fortune who found sanctuary under his lool. That summer he had become worried about the poor health of a struggling young painter in whom he had taken a benign interest. This was Mauritius Lowe, a natural son ol Lord Southwell. Unhappily Lowe’s lack of any pronounced artistic gifts gave him little chance ol success in London s competitive scene. Some indication of the poverty of his talent is supplied by Northcote’s damning comment, a few years later, on a vast picture by him of The Deluge which had been rejected by the Royal Academy. The painting illustrated the text in Genesis vi: 4 relating the supposed existence of giants at the time of the Flood, a proposition open in itself to the ridicule of sceptical minds. Northcote at any rate considered Lowe s painting ’execrable beyond belief’; but the kindly and pious Johnson sought to cheer the dispirited artist with the uplifting assurance: ‘Sir, your picture is noble and probable .4/ To return to the earlier occasion of his concern for Lowe, Johnson was anxious to secure for his young protege the best possible medical advice, and he bethought himself of William Hunter, now Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy. Knowing of Ramsay s intimacy with Hunter, he now sought Ins aid in begging the great surgeon’s assistance. In consequence Ramsay sat down at Bolt Court to write a pleading letter to Hunter, couched in all the formalities of language customary even among friends of long standing: Dear Sir, Dr Johnson, with his usual humanity, interests himself for a young artist who lies ill of some distemper which requires the advice of a skilful anatomist, and has induced me to conspire with him in desiring that you would be so good as to call upon the young man when you happen to go to that part of the town where he lodges, which is at No. 3, Hedge lane, Haymarket, - his name is Lowe. - Being well acquainted with your benevolent disposition, I will make no apology for this request, and am, Dear Sir, With the greatest esteem, Your most obliged and humble servant, Allan Ramsay.48 This letter has a further significance, unconnected with its contents, inasmuch as the handwriting is somewhat shaky. The same deterioration characterizes Ramsay’s signatures in these years on the ledgers of his bank account at Coutts’; and the fact that a great part of the manuscripts of his treatise on Horace’s villa and his essay on English prosody is in his wife’s hand is no doubt due to his difficulty in making a fair copy. The youthful impression that Ramsay made upon Boswell, while confirming to some extent, at any rate in a general sense, Edward Edwards’s information that he returned from Italy ‘in good health and spirits’,49 would seem to have been attributable more to the liveliness of his mind - which Boswell was soon to contrast with his ‘very decrepit body’ — than to any material remission of physical symptoms. On the contrary, the tremor of his right hand was but one of the signs of a progressive decline in his health. Already Anna Porter, a regular visitor to the Ramsays’ house, found that they were now ‘frequently at home from his increasing infirmities’.30 We find in Boswell’s Johnson one further account of a dinner-party at 67 Harley Street, held on 8 April 1779,51 although this was not the last occasion of which we have records of either Johnson’s or Boswell’s presence at entertainments in Ramsay’s house. Besides Johnson and Boswell, the other guests included the young Lord Graham, afterwards 3rd Duke of Montrose, who was eventually to beocme Lord Justice-General of Scotland. (His mother had sat to Ramsay forty years earlier.) One of various topics discussed concerned the value of money as an incentive to work. Johnson expressed the view that no man could

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employ himself in making money without ‘vigorous parts, though concentrated to a point'. Ramsay had every reason to concur, and far greater reason to speak with authority on the subject: ‘Yes,’ he said, paraphrasing an old proverb, ‘like a strong horse in a mill; he pulls better’. Afterwards the conversation turned upon the question of liberty, evidently resulting in general agreement upon the necessity of considerable restraints on personal liberty for the general good: as Ramsay put it, ‘The result is, that order is better than confusion’; to which Johnson replied with an air of finality, ‘The result is, that order cannot be had but by subordination’. Ramsay’s party had been given in return for a dinner with Johnson four days earlier. On 10 April Boswell called on Ramsay, and was pleased to find him ‘very lively’. Their conversation was devoted to ‘Art and Nature’, a subject dear to Ramsay’s heart but seldom touched on either by Boswell or Johnson himself; and our regret must be that on this occasion Boswell recorded nothing of what was said, apart from the information that their discussion embraced the question whether ‘good-nature were art’, and that they ‘agreed it was the thing’: our regret must be all the greater because it was on account of the

stimulating character of the conversation that Boswell returned home to dine ‘in highest glee’.J~ Whatever Ramsay’s circumstances as a famous painter in enforced retirement, and however intense his devotion to literary and scholarly pursuits, it is difficult to think that his conversation did not frequently dwell upon questions relating to the visual arts or that, in particular, a man who was so accustomed to speaking his mind never expressed an opinion upon the views enunciated annually by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Academy Discourses. In his Life of Johnson Boswell was inevitably selective in recording the dis¬ cussions to which he was a party; and presumably we must allow for the omission of topics in which his own interests were not deeply engaged, or about which he was not very well informed. Both Boswell and Anna Porter say much about the liveliness of Ramsay’s con¬ versation, but their accounts of it are on the whole disappointing; and when Miss Porter remarks at one point on its sometimes ‘eccentric’ nature our tantalization must be all the greater. On many other occasions we have cause to regret that Boswell, for one, refrained from his customary attention to detail. Outside the pages of his great Life, whether in his journals or his correspondence, he provides scattered notices of his social engagements with Ramsay and of Johnson’s continued intimacy with the painter. What is very clear from these is the particular pleasure that Boswell found in Ramsay’s company. For example, writing to Johnson from South Audley Street on 26 April 1779, he laments an attack of the gout which compelled him to absent himself from a dinner that afternoon at 67 Harley Street: ‘I am in great pain from an inflamed foot, and obliged to keep my bed, so am prevented from having the pleasure to dine at Mr. Ramsay’s to-day, which is very hard; and my spirits are sadly sunk. Will you be so friendly as to come and sit an hour with me in the evening?’5’ On the whole, however, such fragments of autobiography are not very informative. When we learn that on 30 April 1780 Johnson, Reynolds and Lord Monboddo were together at Ramsay’s house,54 we are left to speculate on the circum¬ stances that brought Johnson face to face with so notorious a detractor as Monboddo; for, besides being known for his strong and sometimes eccentric opinions, Monboddo appears to have been unnaturally jealous of Johnson’s standing in the world of letters: he even attempted to convince Boswell that Johnson was no fit subject for a biographer. It is possible, then, that as Ramsay had been acquainted with Monboddo for many years, ever since the days of the Select Society in Edinburgh, and had continued to be in touch with him, Boswell chose him as a likely mediator. A striking feature of such social events recorded by Boswell is the frequency with which Ramsay and Reynolds were together, whether at Ramsay’s house or elsewhere. Thus on 18 May of the same year Reynolds, Mrs Boscawen and Boswell were guests at an ‘Evening Conversation Party’ at 67 Harley Street.55 Boswell records finally, in relation to Ramsay,

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his own attendance at a tea and coffee party given on 20 April 1781 by Mrs Garrick, the actoi s widow, at which Ramsay and Reynolds were present, along with Johnson, Dr Burney, Mrs Boscawen and Mrs Carter — a particularly distinguished company, such as Ramsay continued to find pleasure in during the years immediately preceding his wife’s death early in the following year. In apparent recollection of the entertainment at Mrs Gairick s, Boswell confided to his journal that evening: ‘I spent one of the happiest days that I can remember to have enjoyed in the whole course of my life’.56 In the summer of 1779 Ramsay s elder daughter Amelia married Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell, the son of James Campbell of Inverneil, Commissioner of the Western Isles of Scotland, and the member of a numerous and farflung family. Campbell had lately returned from four years’ exceptionally distinguished service in America, culminating in his command of the troops designated Or the recovery of Georgia. This object he had achieved in a campaign of only three months, earning himself national fame and the grateful esteem of the King. A man of handsome presence who reminded Boswell of General Paoli, he was now forty years of age and sixteen years older than his bride. They were married on 8 July at St Marylebone Church. 7 A little while earlier, Ramsay had apprised the King and Queen of the forthcoming marriage, and, making the union a subject for the exercise of his wit, he had added ‘that the Conqueror of Georgia had made a conquest also of his Daughter, which gave him as much pleasure as the former’. It is Campbell himself who tells this story - and it had a gratifying conclusion: ‘Their Majesties smiled,’ he recollected, ‘and were graciously pleased to say handsome things upon the occasion’.38 Something of the nature and something of the limits of Ramsay’s standing in high society are reflected in an account that Campbell gave to one of his brothers of the advantages to their family that might be expected from the union: You must not be surprised to hear that I am likely to form a valuable connexion for our family. A lady of Harley Street, the daughter of the famous Allan Ramsay, connected and in high regard with Lord and Lady Mansfield and Neice [sic] to Lord Stormont, Sir John and Sir David Lindsay Gent? of high repute and distinguished interest at present. They have all received me warmly and in the Course of a fourthnight I am in hopes to be in possession of one of the Most Amiable, well disposed Ladies of this Metropolis, easy and free from Pride and in short all I could desire or wish.59 In imparting the news to another brother, Campbell made it clearer that the family connexions that he deemed so advantageous lay with the social position of the Lindsays, not with that attained by Ramsay himself, although he was careful to accord Ramsay (a landowner and man of property, as well as Court painter) the title of Esquire: The Daughter of Allan Ramsay Esq, of whom you have heard so much, as a Painter to the King, would perhaps be of little consequence to me in Point of Connexion, had she not been also the Neice \_sic\ of Sir John Lindsay Knight of the Bath; Sir David Lindsay Lieut. Gen. in the Army; and Grandneice to Lord Mansfield . . . Exclusive of the importance of such a connexion in England, it affords me serious weight and con¬ sequence in Scotland, and in the end may prove so to all our family on either side of the world.60 He added that Amelia had ‘no pride in her own consequence’, and that, although her father was giving her a dowry of four thousand pounds (a very large sum at that lime about £250,000 in present money), she was ‘a treasure in herself and he ‘would have married her without a shilling were it necessary she should have none’. Regarding his future father-in-law, he drew a picture of Ramsay that was more admiring than reverential: ‘The old Cadger,’ he said, ‘is Rich and Highly respected; a most Sensible, Pleasing, Clever Old man’. As for his ambitious hopes for the future, he had not long to wait for their realization. Live months after his marriage, Campbell was appointed Deputy

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Governor of Jamaica, with the rank of Brigadier-General, succeeding as Governor in 1782. Knighted within another three years, he was to end a distinguished diplomatic career as Governor of Madras, where his wife became celebrated for her work for the improvement of hospitals and schools, of which the most notable instance was her foundation in 1787 of an Asylum for Orphan Girls.1’1 There can be no doubt that Amelia’s marriage - by all accounts an extremely happy one - added to Ramsay’s feelings of loneliness in his last years, especially after the death of his wife just under three years later. Indeed it deprived him of the company of both his daughters, for when eventually, in the summer ol 1780, Amelia joined her husband in Jamaica, her sister Charlotte (then aged twenty-one) insisted on going out with her. These circumstances, moreover, brought in their train immediate anxieties of their own. Now that France and Spain were in alliance with the American colonists, the passage to Jamaica (which normally took about nine weeks) had become all the more perilous on account of the risk of attack by the enemy fleets, and Ramsay had at first advised Amelia not to attempt the voyage until safety was assured,62 being strongly supported in this by Campbell’s elderly mother. Only after several months had passed did Amelia and Charlotte receive their consent to it. Even so, they were fortunate to reach their destina¬ tion, for their convoy came under fire from a joint French and Spanish fleet and their ship was the only one to get through.63 It was to be on learning, in the summer of 1784, of his daughters’ imminent return from Jamaica that Ramsay, by then a widower, hastened home from his last visit to Italy, only to die on reaching the shores of England. Ramsay’s most recent ventures into print had had as their subject the rapidly changing situation in America. But he was now impelled to resume his pen by the darkening skies of political crisis at home. A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq64 came out in the spring of 1 780, and a pamphlet entitled Observations upon the Riot Act63 in the summer of the following year. The first of these was prompted by the popular agitation of the previous winter against governmental extravagance, corruption in high places and the abuse of patronage — a national movement of protest on the part of the propertied middle class which spread rapidly from the meetings of the Yorkshire Association (virtually an extra-parliamentary ‘opposition’) to other counties (and most notably to the Middlesex of Fox and Wilkes). All this had resulted in a series of petitions demanding radical reforms and bearing the names of tens of thousands of signatories.1)6 It seemed to some that a revolt of the people was imminent, especially as the proposed reforms called for a reduction in the influence of the King, who was widely believed to be ultimately responsible for the filling of inessential posts with idle placemen. It was this movement that now united the Opposition Whigs, providing them with a potent weapon against the Government; and it was calculated, further, that without the exercise of royal patronage the Rockinghamites, who were supported by Fox, might enjoy a majority in the Commons. On 11 February 1780 Edmund Burke rose in a crowded House to deliver his great speech on economic reform; twelve days later he presented a ‘Bill for the Better Regulation of his Majesty’s Civil Establish¬ ments, for the Limitation of Pensions, and the Suppression of sundry useless, expensive and inconvenient Places’. Ramsay’s Letter, dated 13 March 1780, takes the form of a reply to Burke’s speech, and questions the basis of the new Bill. So far from agreeing with Burke that the system of dispensing salaries and pensions then in operation increased the power of the Crown, Ramsay argues that that system - ‘which has been gradually forming upon what are now called Revolution Principles’, and which ‘has been stiled by its friends The Whig System; and by its enemies, The System of Corruption'' - is in fact ‘the popular or democratic system, and the most popular and democratic that was ever seen in any empire so rich and extended as ours. It is a system originating from the people, and which has been carried to the utmost limits of popularity that are consistent with civil order and government’. There was now, he continues, ‘no original power in the Crown’, since all the power that the Crown appeared to exercise was merely delegated by a majority in the House of Commons, and

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Parliament had the exclusive ptivilege of allocating the nation’s money lor every purpose, whether civil or military. Ramsay goes on to criticize Burke s speech for its lack of any ‘leading political principle’ and foi its inconsistency, on the one hand Burke seemed to want to extend the scope of popular government, and on the other took an example from despotism by recommending, foi imitation by the King of Great Britain, what was popularly understood to be the frugal management of the household of King Frederick the Great. Ramsay takes up the last point with a light touch, but not the less scathingly: the King of Prussia’s cook, he points out, was known to be under contract to furnish dinner to his majesty and three other persons for twenty shillings a day and to receive live shillings a-head for such guests as may be occasionally invited beyond that number . In ridiculing the notion of such an example Ramsay was doubtless recollecting his own personal knowledge of George Ill’s frugality, extending as it did to His Majesty’s invitations to him, according to the well-known anecdote, to partake ol what was left of his favourite dinner of boiled mutton and turnips; for he goes on, in an ironical reductio ad absurdum: Now, Sir, I will venture to assert, upon the credit of those who have often stood behind our Sovereign, when at his meals, that he is neither a glutton nor an epicure; and that he may be fed as cheaply as the King of Prussia, whenever you and your friends will put him in a similar situation. But this frugality is impracticable while a Member of Parliament insists upon having the honour of turning his spit; and would immediately go over to the Minority, in case his Majesty should at any time find fault with his pocketing as much kitchen-fee in one day as would maintain the King of Prussia and his French beaux esprits for a month. Just as in his Essay on the Constitution of England he had argued against the desirability or necessity of constitutional reform, so now Ramsay expressed his conviction that the democratic ideal was already sufficiently well protected by the parliamentary system. Like many of his contemporaries, he especially feared the consequences of popular agitation: the threat posed was that of art actual confrontation between the King and ‘the people’; and this threat appeared all the more real because the movement for reform had begun outside the House of Commons, and had continued to draw its strength from extra-parliamentary councils. Ramsay’s alarm over the activities of the out-and-out rabble-rousers is vividly reflected in the sentiments he expressed on the situation at one of his literary parties at 67 Harley Street (on 1 February 1780), as overhead by Anna Porter: All things [Ramsay declared] tend to a Civil War. The petitions are only formed to inflame people, for how are plain country gentlemen brought to sign them? - A petition is offered them with this question: ‘Are you for unmerited pensions?’ ‘No,’ says the honest man. ‘Then sign this petition against them’. And another is asked: ‘Are you for supporting abusers of the Constitution?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then sign the petition’. Thus worthy men, from mistaken worthy motives, give hands to incendiaries.67 Ramsay was far from

being alone in fearing the outbreak of civil war. Among his

acquaintances even Horace Walpole, who had become passionately hostile to George III, while at first welcoming the proposed reforms, now began to be alarmed by the readiness of the local committees ‘to affect Parliamentary airs’ and to go on to meddle with the Constitution itself; while William Adam, the politician son of the architect John Adam, warned the House against a recurrence of that ‘wild spirit of reformation’ which had ‘got loose’ when resistance had been made to the tyranny of Charles I. The collapse of the petitioning movement by the early summer of the year 1780 must have assuaged Ramsay’s fears; but their reasonableness would have been confirmed, at least in part, by the outrages of mob-violence which erupted in London that June, and which are known

to history as the Gordon Riots.

Religious bigotry in the form of

Protestant resentment at the recent extension of tolerance to Roman Catholics (albeit still cautiously limited) had now replaced political extremism, and once again issued in a

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petition to Parliament. The petitioners, numbering tens of thousands and led by the fanatical Lord George Gordon, were now inflamed not by concern over the corrupt practices of a Court, but by fear of a despotic foreign allegiance. Lord George Gordon, a young man in his late twenties, had in the previous December been elected president of the Protestant Association, a body formed for the purpose of obtaining the repeal of the act of 1778 removing certain of the Catholic disabilities in force since the reign of William III. When, on 2 June 1780, the huge mob that had assembled in St George’s Fields, and w'hich then accompanied Gordon to the Houses of Parliament for the presentation of the petition, ran amok through the streets and proceeded to sack and set fire to the houses of Catholics and magistrates, and generally to indulge in wanton acts of violence and incendiarism, civil order broke down entirely, to be restored only by the military after a week of anarchy. The ordeal of the residents was all the more terrifying because crosses had been marked with white chalk on the doors of known Catholics and those sympathetic to the cause of Catholic emancipation (however circumscribed).

Lord Mansfield,

Margaret Ramsay’s

uncle, whose support of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill of 1778 had not been forgotten, became a prominent victim: on 7 June Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square was ransacked and burnt to the ground, with the loss of all his books, papers and pictures; and he himself narrowly avoided the violence of the mob by escaping with his wife by a back door. Owing to the family relationship, Mrs Boscawen, for one, feared that the Ramsays might also be in danger: ensconced in the safety of her house at Richmond, she could observe from her garret windows the conflagration in the city, together with the large exodus from London which had made her part of the country Tull of refugees’. ‘Lord and Lady Mansfield,’ she wrote to Mrs Delany, ‘are seldom out of my head. I sent a servant to Mrs Ramsay, and had the satisfaction to hear that they were at least unhurt’.65 Ramsay’s daughter Amelia (who was still living with her parents) had herself witnessed a good deal of what she called ‘a most dreadfull scene of riot and confusion’. This had lasted for some days, and she had been aware of the destruction of various Roman Catholic chapels, prisons and private houses. After martial law had been proclaimed and the mobs dis¬ persed, it was a relief to her to see mounted troops and foot-soldiers in the streets — ‘after the terrors we have been in’.59 It was the vulnerability of the citizenry to the consequences of mob rule, as demon¬ strated by the events of that alarming June, that prompted Ramsay, early in the following month, to write his pamphlet on the Riot Act. His concern was to propose a number of amendments to the Act of 1715, and to demonstrate how little legal security there was for life and property against violence. Although the pamphlet is dated 10 July 1780 it did not appear in print until the beginning of the following year. Shortly afterwards, evidently with the aim of lending greater topicality to his pamphlet, and of drawing attention to his proposals, Ramsay sent to the Public Advertiser a long epistle, purportedly written by a Frenchman living in London to a friend in Bordeaux, in which the supposed author of the letter reported that a distinguished lawyer had conveyed to him his doubts whether Ramsay’s suggested amendments to the Act would ever become law. This extraordinary ‘puff’ designed by Ramsay for his own pamphlet appeared in the Public Advertiser for March 1781. But greater interest attaches to Ramsay’s response to the congratulations on his pamphlet which he had received from Lord Monboddo, the Edinburgh kwyerphilosopher and sometime member of the Select Society. The lawyer alluded to in the letter printed in the Public Advertiser may indeed have been none other than Monboddo himself.

Interestingly, in thanking Monboddo for his compliments on the pamphlet,

Ramsay disclosed in what manner he regarded his own political writings, indicating at the same time the value that he placed upon independent inquiry: Though my writings should not produce any change in our Statute Book, I shall not think my time or pains in composing them altogether thrown away; for I have long been

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in the habit of considering every discovery of Truth not only an addition to the common stock of human knowledge, but as an addition to the common stock of human happi¬ ness, and that even those who are not able to see its beneficial consequences will, sooner or later, feel them.70 In these years Ramsay’s health continued to decline, and he went out much less frequently, spending the greater part of his time in reading and in conversation with his friends. His wife had also become very frail, and it was her own health that proved to be the more precarious. Her delicate appearance in later life is captured in a drawing by her husband touching in its tenderness of feeling (Plate 214). Her death on 4 March 178271 may well have been expected for some months. The circumstances, if Hester Thrale is to be believed, were extraordinary. It cannot be said that Mrs Thrale always proved herself to be the most reliable of witnesses; nor did she apparently know the Ramsays at all well: she was unable, lor instance, to recall the name of Margaret Ramsay’s family, and she thought that Ramsay himself was the grandson of the poet - although, as she put it, ‘no Gentle Shepherd as it appears, but a man of strong sense, and hard manners, and very cultivated understanding, but without sensibility, or the affectation on’t’. Nevertheless her account of his wife’s death is circumstantial enough to acquire a certain strange plausibility: Both [Ramsay and his wife] had very ill health many years before they died - they slept in one room, however, and separate beds - the maid who attended them in a closet close by. When Mrs. Ramsay felt herself expiring, she called the girl, and said: ‘Farewell, my dear, and God bless you’. Seeing her move tow’rds her master for the purpose of calling him, ‘Do not wake Mr. Ramsay, child,’ exclaim’d the lady: ‘if he should be disturbed now, he would get no sleep all night. Give my duty to him, and tell him that I said so. — Adieu’. She then breathed her last. Her husband sent his black-edged cards round with thanks for obliging enquiries that very day fortnight and received us all at his literary parties as usual, I remember.'2 Mrs Thrale was living in Harley Street at this time and was no doubt in a position to be told a story of so intimate a character, even if it came to her only through servants’ gossip. As it happened, just under four weeks after Margaret Ramsay’s death Mrs Thrale invited the painter to a rout, at which Boswell and Johnson were also present. Ramsay was not one to show his grief to the world; and on this occasion Boswell was moved to discover in the contrast between the painter’s physical infirmities and the continued strength of his mental faculties an example illustrating the Platonic concept of the soul’s independence of the body: as he noted afterwards in his journal, ‘Mr Ramsay, the painter, was of the party, and by a very lively mind in a very decrepit body gave a convincing proof that the Mind or Soul or Spirit is distinct from material substance'.12 In the ‘Advertisement’ with which he prefaced his treatise on Horace’s villa Ramsay declared that the journey to Italy which he made with his son later that year was undertaken ‘to alleviate his bodily infirmities, by change of climate, and to dissipate the melancholy occasioned by the loss of one valuable part of his family, and the dispersion of others’.74 It seems that he was so broken down by his bereavement that he was unable to find words to express his sorrow. Apparently incapable of writing anything himself, he requested Dr Johnson and the poet William Hayley (the friend of Romney) to compose epitaphs on his wife, as is implied by a letter of Hayley’s of 2 April 1782, relating that he and Johnson had been asked by ‘a deeply afflicted husband and father’ to write epitaphs on ‘Mrs R’.75 A letter of consolation which Ramsay wrote to his daughter Charlotte about a month after her mother’s death has escaped the disappearance of other correspondence of this time, and may here be quoted in full: My dear Child, I wrote last night to your sister, and now recollect that in that letter your name was

ALLAN RAMSAY

264

not mentioned. But this was only a neglect of my pen; for you was equally in my thoughts, and what is contained in the letter was equally meant to be addressed to you. That you may, therefore, have no imaginary cause of uneasiness added to what is but too real, 1 write these few supplemental lines; desiring you, at the same time, to consider your sister, who is so much more advanced that you in knowledge and experience, as your Mother, and to attend strictly to whatever she shall advise. I desire, likewise, that you will w'rite to me, whenever you have an opportunity, letting me know in what I can be usefull to you, who am ever My dearest Child Your most affectionate father Allan Ramsay.76 Towards the end of the summer following his wife’s death Ramsay received an invita¬ tion from the Stanhope family to make his home with them for a while at Chevening, and to bring with him his son John, who was now, at the age of fourteen, being educated at Westminster School. But this invitation he felt unable to accept, notwithstanding his regret at depriving

himself of the company which he declared he preferred to any other. His own

infirmities, he explained, would impose too great a burden upon his host and hostess.'7 Morevover he had come to the conclusion that his life might be prolonged, or rendered less painful, by his spending the winter in a warm place, such as Marseilles or Pisa, because his ‘weakened circulation’ was no longer capable of withstanding ‘the cold and damp of another of our winters’. He would be accompanied by his son, who would himself benefit from being ‘at a distance from the air of Westminster’. This latter reflection may con¬ ceivably have been prompted by more than considerations regarding the English climate, for it is possible that Ramsay was also taking into account the recent decline of West¬ minster School, and the bullying that was rife, under a lethargic headmaster, one Samuel Smith, a man unfitted by his mild nature and easy-going ways to deal adequately with the misery inflicted

upon sensitive boys by their bigger oppressors:78 even after Smith’s

retirement, his legacy remained, and Boswell, for instance, was at first nervous about the wisdom of sending his son

back to the school after an illness.

But the educational

advantages to be gained by a boy of John Ramsay’s age from foreign travel were a primary consideration, and the one doubt in Ramsay’s mind concerned his own powers of endur¬ ance upon the road: The only difficulty 1 find in this project [he remarked], which in other respects would be of certain benefit to my son’s education and my health, is, that I am ill fitted for the fatigues of travelling; but this I shall endeavour to guard against by travelling as much as possible by water. I have got a foreign servant who has been a traveller and very well recommended, who will likewise serve me as a nurse; and I am getting everything ready for setting out - which I hope will be in about eight days. Before his departure he asked Lord Stanhope and Viscount Mahon to witness the execu¬ tion of a will disposing in his son’s favour all his lands, heritages and other property,76 but bequeathing to each of his two sisters a modest annuity, in addition to his customary provision for them, dating back some four decades. Ramsay left London with his son on 4 September 1782.8(1 In the meantime Rome had been decided upon as their ultimate destination rather than Marseilles or Pisa. As we know from a diary which John Ramsay kept during his stay in Italy, but which now lacks the first and last few pages, they arrived in Rome by 1 1 December. This conscientiously written journal offers us much information about the manner in which Ramsay occupied his time in Italy, and about the company he enjoyed: it lacks, however, the detail and insight that a more mature diarist might have furnished.

214 Margaret Ramsay, c. 1780(?) (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

It is hardly surprising that Ramsay should have decided to return once more to his beloved Rome: not only had Rome always been his preferred choice among the cities of Italy, but it offered the greatest advantages for his son’s education. John Ramsay’s studies,

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