The amazing story behind Petworth House’s most recent restoration
From June 10, Petworth House will dedicate a whole room to one painting in its collection, Angelica Kauffman’s Diomed and Cressida (1789), which the National Trust has just had restored.
The story behind the artwork is a remarkable one, that tells us a good deal about the revolutionary age in which it was painted. 1789 was the year the French Revolution broke out, and the US Bill of Rights was signed. The art world was undergoing similarly seismic shifts, with London attempting to rival Paris as a European art capital, and the massproduction of prints democratising the ownership of fine art. Kauffman’s painting lies at the heart of these changes.
Fluent in at least four languages, and an accomplished singer, Kauffman – a founding member of the Royal Academy – was one of the art world’s first international superstars. As a young woman in the 1760s, based in Italy, she made her name painting portraits of young men on their Grand Tour. She moved to London in 1772, where she became one of the capital’s top society portrait artists, on a reputational par with her friend and mentor Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the RA and the dominant figure in British art. A term was coined to describe her popularity: London had become ‘Angelicamad’.
If the society portraits were Kauffman’s bread and butter, her real passion lay in a higher status, if less remunerative, genre of art: ‘history paintings’, featuring scenes from (usually classical) history and literature. Kauffman immersed herself in English culture, and developed a signature voice, often painting scenes from English history and literature, in ‘the Grand Manner’, dominated by female figures. She was a proto-feminist artist, blazing a trail for the female gaze.
In that period a great Shakespeare revival was taking place, spearheaded by another of the era’s cultural superstars, the actor David Garrick (whose portrait Kauffman painted in 1764, in Naples). The artist found scenes from Shakespeare’s plays to be a rich source of inspiration, painting over 20 during her career.
In 1781 Kauffman, having made herself a very rich woman, moved back to Italy. She set up a studio at Via Sistina in Rome, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, which was like no other studio before it. It consisted of 15 rooms, several of which were equipped to welcome visitors who might be considering having a Kauffman portrait done (she could get through three sittings in a day; sitters were invited to recite literature to the artist as she painted). There was a salonstyle gallery, a library, a garden, and stables for customers’ horses, as well as a conventional art studio. The building was staffed by a maid, a cook, and two servants, together with Kauffman’s father and husband, on hand to schmooze potential customers.
Kauffman must have been delighted when she received a lucrative commission from the print dealer John Boydell, through the intermediary of Thomas Jenkins, England’s unofficial ambassador to Rome (probably sometime in 1788). Boydell wanted her to produce two paintings, both depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.
Boydell was an engraver by trade, but, aware that he was not a particularly good one, he had branched into selling other engravers’ prints from a shop in Cheapside in London. In the early days of this venture he had understood that the English were hungry for French prints, but there was little reciprocation across the Channel. He set himself the task of righting that wrong, by paying good money to the country’s top engravers to commission high quality work that he would then sell in Paris. This galvanised the industry, heralding a golden era of English engraving. He managed not only to redress the trade balance, but to completely reverse it: by 1789 the French were spending a total of £250,000 a year on English prints, while the English were spending little over £10,000 on French ones. In recognition of these achievements, Boydell was appointed an alderman of the City of London, representing the engravers (and was elected Lord Mayor in 1790).
Boydell was similarly concerned that the English had a poor reputation when it came to history paintings, a genre which was considered (especially by Joshua Reynolds) to be the highest form of art. He thus devised an ambitious scheme to increase the international prestige of English painting. There were three stages involved: the opening of the Shakespeare Gallery in London, featuring paintings of scenes from the Bard’s plays, produced by artists who were either English or had strong ties to the country; the sale of prints featuring engravings after the paintings; and the publication of a deluxe illustrated edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
Boydell was not a man to cut corners, and in total he invested £350,000 into the project, a vast sum (£450 million in today’s money). He appointed top architect George Dance to design a gallery in Pall Mall, with a Neoclassical stone front, a full-length exhibition hall on the ground floor, and three interconnecting exhibition rooms on the upper floor. The gallery offered 4,000 square feet of wall space for displaying paintings.
To fill this space, he approached the country’s finest painters to contribute works, offering top dollar for those participating (between £120 and £210 per picture, depending on their reputation). Kauffman was included in his plans as she had such strong English connections (she had continued to submit paintings to the Royal Academy after her move to Rome) and had already established a reputation for painting Shakespearean scenes: she was offered £210 apiece for two paintings. It is not clear whether she chose the subjects, or they were dictated to her: one being a scene from Troilus and Cressida, another from Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Interestingly, Boydell offered the engravers more money to reproduce the paintings than he paid the artists to paint them. For example, the London-based Swiss artist Henry Fuseli was paid £210 to paint a scene from The Tempest, while Peter Simon received £315 to engrave it. The Italian Luigi Schiavonetti, also based in London, was hired to make representations of Kauffman’s two paintings.
Best paid of all the artists was Joshua Reynolds, who Boydell needed on board to boost the credibility of the enterprise. He received a downpayment of £500, and was eventually paid £1,500, for his contribution of two paintings, Macbeth and the Witches and The Death of Cardinal Beaufort (from Henry VI), both of which are in the Petworth House collection, and have been restored in the last decade.
The enterprise came in for some flak, notably by the satirical engraver James Gillray who, perhaps upset that he had not been called upon by Boydell to participate, published several vicious cartoons suggesting that Boydell was exploiting Shakespeare’s reputation, in order to make a fast buck. This proved not to be the case: in the first year 600 subscribers pledged 90 guineas each to receive a copy of the deluxe Shakespeare edition (half up front, half on receipt of the publication) and there were various spinoff income streams, but it soon became apparent that the enterprise was unlikely to become a commercial success. It was, however, a popular triumph, with thousands upon thousands of visitors. These were encouraged to buy a catalogue, that contained the script of the relevant scene depicted in the 34 paintings on show (a number which, by 1805, rose to 170). One can imagine visitors stopping in front of Kauffman’s Diomed and Cressida painting, and taking in its visual impact while reading the dialogue between Cressida and Diomed, and between Troilus and Ulysses.
For those not familiar with the play, it is set during the Trojan War. Troilus is a Trojan warrior who plucks up the courage to tell his compatriot Cressida that he is in love with her. She tells him his love is requited, and she will forever be true to him. Days later, however, she is transferred to the Greek camp in exchange for a Trojan prisoner. Troilus sneaks across the lines to try to get her back, only to find her in earnest conversation with the Greek warrior Diomed. To his horror, hiding in the shadows to eavesdrop their conversation, he hears Cressida proclaiming her undying love for the Greek. This is the moment in the play Kauffman has chosen to depict: will the distraught Troilus leap out of the shadows and confront the lovers, and thus expose himself to almost certain capture and imprisonment?
The Shakespeare Gallery was open for 15 years, until 1804. Boydell’s print export business had been hit terribly by affairs in France (first there was the Revolution, then the Napoleonic Wars), and subscriptions to the Shakespeare edition had dropped off significantly. The reputation of the venture had increasingly suffered as the years passed: Boydell had found himself unable to afford the prices demanded by high-level engravers: standards had dropped, delivery was often tardy.
Faced with bankruptcy, in 1804 Boydell came up with an ingenious plan to wind down his project. He successfully applied to Parliament to set up a lottery, to dispose of all his stock, with tickets costing three guineas. Ticket holders were guaranteed a print worth a guinea, and there would be 64 winning tickets for major prizes, the highest being the gallery itself, together with its entire collection of paintings, to one lucky winner.
John Boydell died before the lottery was drawn, on January 28, 1805, leaving his company in the hands of his partner and nephew Josiah Boydell. But he did live long enough to understand that his gamble had paid off, with over 22,000 people purchasing tickets, ensuring bankruptcy would be avoided. The winning ticket was bought by a Scottish gem engraver, William Tassie. Tassie refused an offer from Josiah Boydell of £10,000 for all the paintings, instead opting to put the whole collection up for auction in the Great Hall of Christie’s, held between May 17 and 20. The collection fetched a total of £6,181. Diomed and Cressida was bought by Walter Burrell, for £73, just over a third of the price Angelica Kauffman was paid to paint it.
Walter Burrell was the second son of the wealthy antiquarian and MP Sir William Burrell, who died in 1796. From 1806, Burrell Jr resided in the family estate of West Grinstead Park, in a grand manor house designed by John Nash in a castellated Gothic style. In this elegant pile, Kauffman’s painting would have hung, alongside others in his collection, by Van Dyck and Rembrandt.
Burrell, elected to the House of Commons in 1812, representing Sussex, was the younger brother of Charles Merrik Burrell, the son-in-law of the 3rd Lord of Egremont, owner of Petworth House. The MP bequeathed the painting to Lord Egremont in his will, which is how Diomed and Cressida found its way to Petworth House, after his death in 1831.
For nearly two centuries the painting was hung in Petworth’s North Gallery, increasingly discoloured by several detrimental restorations, and easily passed by without a second glance. Last October, the National Trust employed the Hove-based conservator Sophie Reddington to restore it. Reddington has already restored Macbeth and the Witches and The Death of Cardinal Beaufort for the NT (there’s a fine story surrounding the latter painting, which we will explore in the Autumn issue), and these are now on display again at Petworth.
Reddington tells me that she had rarely seen a painting in such compromised condition, coated in several thick layers of varnish, with evidence of old mould growth on the back of the canvas. She suspects that a predecessor had accidentally scraped off layers of flaking raised paint (not surprising when she reveals that one 19th-century conservator had restored 300 paintings in Petworth in a single year!) There were clumsy retouchings, and mysterious networks of fine drying cracks, suggesting that Kauffman –perhaps in a hurry to fulfil the commission on time – had added an experimental drying agent to the oils used in darker areas of the composition.
Having had the privilege of viewing the painting in Reddington’s studio, shortly before completion of its restoration, and having seen it in its original state at Petworth, I can vouch for the tremendous job she has done, bringing out previously lost details, and revitalising the vibrant colours Kauffman used. The conservation process will be explored in some detail in the exhibition of Kauffman’s painting, Conserving Kauffman, which will run at Petworth House from June 10 until November 24.
After that, one would hope, Diomed and Cressida will hang next to the two Reynolds paintings at Petworth, and another painting in their collection from the Shakespeare Gallery, James Northcote’s The Murder of the Princes in the Tower (from Richard III), as a reminder of John Boydell’s remarkable art adventure. The chances of ever seeing it alongside Kauffman’s other painting commissioned by Boydell, featuring a scene from Two Gentlemen of Verona, are remote. That work is in the collection of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. If you want to explore this theme more deeply, there is a fine Angelica Kauffman exhibition, with 25 works, including the portrait of David Garrick, and a history painting with an English theme, Eleanor Sucking the Venom out of the Wound of her Husband King Edward I, at the Royal Academy’s Sackler Wing until June 30.
Words by Alex Leith