4. ‘To Self. An Unfinished Sketch’ 1731
Now that he had come to what he called ‘the fagg end of life’, resigning himself to God’s good grace as he approached that to which every man must eventually succumb, Jonathan Richardson allowed that perfectibility might not invariably be the chief business of portraiture. When he stared at his own countenance in the glass, as he did each morning, gathering the Morning Thoughts which he would set down in verse, he appreciated ever more Rembrandt’s devotion to the unvarnished truth.
Twenty years earlier, Richardson had been of a quite different mind. His Essay on the Theory of Painting, the first such to be written by an Englishman, published in 1715, had insisted that the whole work of a portrayer was to ‘raise his ideas above what he sees and form a model of perfection in his own mind which is not to be found in reality’. ‘Common nature’ was ‘no more fit for a picture than plain narration is for a poem’. The ancients understood this well when they composed features of a refined grace unlikely to be encountered on the street or in the agora. How could they do otherwise with gods and heroes? Michelangelo and Raphael, too, were wont to pick and choose from diverse excellencies of face and figure and harmonize them into beauty. Was not that the very point of art? If it descended into mere transcription of what it happened to behold, where was the poetry in it? It was nothing more than common duplication. How might such low reports ennoble the human condition beyond the coarse and the brutal (of which there was no shortage in the world)? The painter ought instead to ‘raise the whole species and give them all imaginable beauty, and grace, dignity and perfection; every several character, whether it be good, or bad, amiable, or detestable, must be stronger, and more perfect’.
But those sententious convictions, expressed in all sincerity, had been set down while he had been face painter to society and then to the great talents of his age: his friend Alexander Pope, whose loftiness of mind and felicity of poetic line would never have been deduced from his physical appearance, stooped and stunted as it was. It was the former, not the latter, which had to be conveyed in any proper likeness. The Essay had been concerned to exalt the standing of painting amongst his countrymen, so that it would no longer be treated as a mere vehicle of minor diversion but seen rightly as what Richardson called a language, a vehicle for the communication of ideas. Seen in that light, it ought not to hang its head before the presumed superiority of poetry and prose. Literary language, after all, was available primarily to those who shared its tongue, while painting was universal. And then there was the instantaneous quality of its communication. Painting ‘pours ideas into our minds; words only drop them, little by little’.
A vision of a great English School of Painting appeared before Jonathan Richardson’s eyes: one that might hold its head high with those of the Italians and French; indeed, supplant them with countrymen who enjoyed the ‘genius of freedom’. The trouble was that its practitioners were for the most part foreigners or else ignorant, even clownish journeymen. To be a true artist meant being, at the same time, historian (master of the knowledge needed to know how Greeks and Romans lived); poet (who could ‘imagine his figures to think, speak, and act as a poet should do in a tragedy’); and, if he were to be a worthy draughtsman, he needed to be something of a mathematician and mechanic as well. Such virtuosi, he acknowledged, were thin on the ground at present, but all the more reason to raise standards high. What was wanted, in addition to Invention, Expression, Composition, Colouring and Handling (the several headings of his instruction) was a feeling for ‘Grace and Greatness’ of the kind stamped through the majestic works of a Raphael. One day there would be an English Raphael to rival the original; he was sure of it.
If George Vertue (edited and waspishly embellished by Horace Walpole) was to be believed, Richardson’s grandiose prescriptions met with chuckling and shaking of heads, at least beyond his immediate circle of friends. ‘Between the laughers and the envious’, his book met with as much ridicule as admiration. It did not help that Richardson himself was given to a formal manner, speaking slowly and loudly, as if every sentence were weighty with significance. A coffee-house conversation might turn into an auditorium for sonorous strictures coming from the plummy mouth of the moon-faced arbiter of painterly dignity. Nor did it escape attention, at any rate to the maliciously minded, that while some of Richardson’s writing was full of ‘fire and judgment, his paintings owed little to either’. There was, in fact, such stern commitment to living life according to the golden mean of temperance and moderation, avoiding both libertinism and excessive austerity, that the effort dragged the paintings down to the zone of the average, where they languished in tolerable mediocrity. Though he was ‘full of … theory, and profound in reflections on his art, he drew nothing well below the head, and was void of imagination’, wrote the uncharitable Vertue; ‘his attitudes, draperies, and backgrounds are insipid and unmeaning; so ill did he apply to his own practice the sagacious Rules and hints he bestowed on others.’
Most of these stinging attacks came after Richardson’s death, although his son Jonathan Junior, dedicated as he was to perpetuating his father’s memory and his literary heritage, would have felt them keenly. But in the hornets’ nest that was the world of London letters, the father would not have been impervious to them either. He might have dismissed them as the cavilling of the spiteful and the jealous. For by the 1720s he had made a great name for himself, above all as a portraitist, and charged much the same tariff as acknowledged masters such as Kneller. He was invited on occasions to paint for the court but grandly declined the opportunity, preferring the aristocrats of letters and the good men of the Church. He had moved from respectable quarters in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to even more handsome ones in Queen Square, where he was to remain the rest of his life. He had a wife, Elizabeth, whom he loved and treasured. Ten of their eleven children had survived the perils of infancy, and most of them gave him satisfaction (though not all).
And yet. When, after Elizabeth’s sudden death, following the ‘mortification of the bowels’ which struck her during a performance of Handel’s Rodelinda, Richardson paused to make a reckoning of griefs and blessings, and of his own virtues and shortcomings, he could not help but wonder if he was, in fact, all that he seemed to the world which had given him a goodly portion of its blessings. Of course, he understood that, measured by all higher values, the approval (or disapproval) of the world was of little importance. What lay within was all that truly counted. ‘Mind all bright if so within,’ he wrote in one of his many notes to himself. So every morning through the 1730s, Richardson rose early and, by light of the dawning day, or else candle and lamp, peered at his own countenance for information on the progress or retreat of his moral condition. Horace Walpole, following Vertue, claimed that no day passed without him putting lead pencil to vellum or a chalk self-portrait on blue or cream paper, and that at Richardson’s death in 1745 there were ‘hundreds’ of them. This was probably an exaggeration, but the many that do survive constitute the most compulsive and relentless self-scrutiny in all of British art.
The series began as visual autobiography. Richardson had written a poem called ‘The Different Stages of My Life’, intended principally for himself and his immediate circle. But when his poetry was published by his son, it attracted some mockery. Those lines he had read, Walpole commented acidly, ‘excite no curiosity for more’. It is true that the verses don’t exactly skip across the page; in fact, they hardly scan at all. But their ungainly amateurishness is itself somehow touching.
As here I sit and cast my eyes around
The history of my past life is found
The dear resemblances of those whose names
Nourish and brighten more the purest flames.
In the Essay, Richardson had written that ‘in Picture, we never die, we never decay, or grow older’, and when he embarked on sketching the cast of characters populating his life he drew them at whichever stage he wished to fix them in his fond recollection. Alexander Pope, who was in advanced middle age by the 1730s, was thus drawn in the prime in which Richardson had first met him. Richardson’s wife, Elizabeth, was sketched in the flower of their marriage; his oldest boy, Jonathan Junior, then approaching middle age, as a seven-year-old cherub and then again at around ten years old, plump-cheeked and fat-lipped. The occasion of drawing another of his sons, Isaac, may have been a recent tragedy. The boy is sketched as a sweet lad, but on the reverse of the vellum sheet Richardson wrote, ‘Went to sea, August 9th, 1718; Cast away 10 Nov 173[illegible]’. ‘The picture of an absent relation, or friend,’ he had written with a characteristic balance of warm emotion and cool reason, ‘helps to keep up those sentiments which frequently languish by absence and may be instrumental to maintain, and sometimes to augment friendship, and paternal, filial, and conjugal love, and duty.’
Richardson himself appears in this first series, also at different times of his life, from the earnest young man to the graver elderly critic; sometimes with a full-bottomed wig; sometimes with shaved head; at others with his soft cap on. What is striking, however, is that despite the changes in costume, the poses – and, for that matter, Richardson’s expressions – are much the same: those of a man with a firm control on his passions; thoughtful, tending to sententious; neither overly familiar nor austerely remote. A middling sort of fellow with a somewhat superior mind.
As the hero of his own story in verse and picture, Richardson did perhaps exaggerate the ‘oppressions’ and ‘sufferings’ which had marked his life, the better to colour it with the sentimental hues the eighteenth-century novel would soon celebrate. ‘My early steps in life, on barren ground/ Inhospitable and severe were found,’ he had written, but actually his father had been a silk-weaver of Bishopsgate successful enough to leave four hundred pounds at his death, not a trifling sum for an artisan or small tradesman. But Jonathan was probably referring to the purgatory he was made to enter when his stepfather apprenticed him to a scrivener (or notary), where he toiled for six years while his restive imagination moaned in its clerical chains. He was liberated by the portrait painter John Riley, whose pupil he became and with whom he lodged. Riley, who died prematurely in 1691, was a skilled and singular artist who painted not only kings and courtiers but, more unprecedentedly, royal servants such as the ‘Necessary-Woman’ Bridget Holmes, whose duties included the emptying of Charles II’s chamber pot and whom Riley depicted discovered by a page behind the kind of grandiose damask curtain usually reserved for princes and nobles, wielding her broom like a musket, ready to repel invaders of the royal privy. Riley, who features in one of Richardson’s most elegant drawings, was obviously an active tutor and master to his pupil, and instrumental in introducing him to his first patrons and perhaps his future wife, who may have been his niece.
Richardson himself would not prove to be quite so kindly to in-house unions. When he spoke of his subsequent life, ‘muddied by domestic afflictions’, he was thinking not just of one daughter who succumbed to madness, nor another who suffered a ‘tedious illness’, but a third, Mary, who had the temerity to elope with Richardson’s pupil-assistant Thomas Hudson without so much as a by-your-leave. The aggrieved father responded by meanly depriving Mary of her marriage portion and, although he included Hudson in his drawing suite, thus presumably reconciled at some point, he never did restore what should have been her due.
Jonathan Junior, on the other hand, was the apple of his father’s eye: so much the very model of virtue, discipline and filial considerateness, never marrying but preferring to care for his father as he aged, especially following a mild stroke, that Horace Walpole spoke of the two of them as ‘lovers of art and of each other’. In a rare and moving double portrait, Richardson drew the two of them together, two peas in a pod, hardly distinguishable by age, both with the same slightly exophthalmic eyes (a feature of portraits of the period), mildly cleft chin and prominent nose, the father’s face just a little drawn compared with the puddingy fullness of the son’s.
Self-portrait, by or after Jonathan Richardson, 1730s
Self-portrait, by Jonathan Richardson, circa 1733
His paragon of a son was the only exception to the last practice Richardson left himself as he slowly retreated from professional portraiture and concentrated instead on one model alone: himself. The late chalk drawings were no longer driven by the need to survey his life as it had unfolded but rather to inspect, with unsparing intentness, the whole condition of his character as it was at that moment. It was, in effect, a pictorial version of the ancient ars moriendi, the preparation made by good Christians for their demise, if at all possible in a state of grace. Richardson’s routine, which had never varied very much, was now as strictly repetitive as his body allowed: still the morning reflections and thoughts set down in verse; still the walks and rides which followed; the meals ever more frugal; the company select and averse to immoderate indulgence. It is easy to understand why Vertue and Walpole thought Richardson in the grip of an obsession, looking at and drawing himself every day, for there is a decided sameness to the series: the three-quarter profile to right or left; the gaze exceptionally severe and searching or, towards the end, just three years before his death in 1745, a little less strained; the cleft chin, sitting comfortably on its stock; and, remarkably, Richardson’s own hair, informally brushed, its silvery hue suggested by the black and white chalk.
Richardson hoped and believed that he would be remembered more as a writer than as a painter. The self-portrait in oils he did of himself shows him with quill and paper rather than brushes and canvas, and before he died he took steps to have his books translated into French, and they did indeed enjoy a certain popularity in France, if one mixed with incredulousness that the English could write at all about art when they showed such inferior evidence they could practise it. In 1719, Richardson had followed the Essay on the Theory of Painting with two further works on how to be an art critic (distinguishing good from bad, originals from copies; a subject he treated more subtly than one might imagine); and A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur, aimed at the instruction of collectors (Richardson himself had a stupendous collection of drawings at his death). If anyone, in any culture, can be assigned the dubious honour of having created a British ‘art world’, a nexus tying together artists, critics, patrons and collectors in a milieu that was not dependent on court and state but which somehow went of its own accord, it was Richardson.
This cultural miracle, the rebirth of what had once shone forth in Greece and Rome and in the Italy of Raphael and Michelangelo, was, Richardson announced, now to take place in England: ‘Whatever degeneracy may have crept in … no nation under heaven so nearly resembles the ancient Greeks, and Romans as we. There is a haughty courage, an elevation of thought, a greatness of taste, a love of liberty, a simplicity, and honesty amongst us, which we inherit from our ancestors, and which belong to us as Englishmen.’ Shakespeare and Richardson’s beloved Milton were but the heralds of this new empire of art; and Richardson himself would not live to see its fruition, though its germination was as yet only in its ripening time. He was confident there would be in England a great revival of art and taste, though only when ‘English painters, conscious of the dignity of their country, and of their profession, resolve to do honour to both by piety, virtue, magnanimity, benevolence, and industry; and a contempt of every thing that is really unworthy of them.’
In other words, when Jonathan Richardson looked down that long Roman nose of his into the mirror for the inscription of all the high virtues of a true artist, he began to discern what the face of British art ought to be. It would, in fact, be someone rather along the lines of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
But Reynolds and Richardson would not have the argument all their own way. William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753, was a direct attack on the equation between classical idealism and high art. Hogarth’s own practice was as inclusive and catholic as Richardson’s strictures were exclusive and refined. The features which Richardson disqualified from proper taste – the knobbly and the irregular; the unseemly and even the deformed, mouths wide open with mirth, madness or pain – were all to be embraced by the artist for whom nature was indeed the only true god. In a still-later generation, eyes would stare out at the beholder, not elegantly and intelligently angled as with Richardson’s own three-quarter-profile heads but locking on to the beholder directly, frontally, unnervingly, eyes which bore through those who contemplated them with the delirious address reserved for religious revelation.