On 18 October 1883, the marriage was solemnised between Robert Bateman and Caroline Octavia Wilbraham née Howard, at St Marylebone Parish Church. The social cachet of St Marylebone was being enhanced by the daring proposals of its dynamic new rector, Rev. W. Baker, to ‘bring it more in harmony with arrangements and decoration suited to the religious demands of the present day’ (fig. 72). The scheme sought to enrich the interiors with lavish Aesthetic-style embellishments which caused a great stir in the fashionable world: Mrs Gladstone, the prime minister’s wife, laid a commemorative stone to mark the beginning of the work.
As a setting for a wedding ceremony, it is hard to conceive of a greater contrast in scale, style and atmosphere than between St Marylebone and the little church in which Caroline had married for the first time seven years earlier. The contrast was not confined to the building itself. The great church was filled to capacity with aristocratic and honourable Howards, generals, admirals, viscounts and bishops, scarlet uniforms, flashing gems, bustled bottoms and wasp waists, all compressed into a glamorous gaggle, gossiping and gesticulating beneath the soaring pilasters and gilded cornices of the magnificent Neoclassical building.
On Robert’s side, the family was there in force: his father James and his mother, his elder brother John with his wife Jessy, and his younger sister Katherine with her barrister husband Ulick Ralph Burke. The service was conducted by an exceptionally well connected close relation of Caroline’s. Archibald George Campbell was the husband of her elder sister Charlotte. He was also her first cousin, being the son of her uncle and aunt, John Campbell, Baron Cawdor of Castle Martin, and his wife Caroline Isabella, née Howard. As the newly established choir filled the air with descants, Archibald Campbell greeted her at the altar dressed in a golden cope, where Caroline was given away by Lord Wantage, her wealthy cousin Harriet’s husband.
Later, in the vestry, Robert frankly recorded his age as forty-one, whereas Caroline demurely gave hers as ‘full’, presumably to avoid publicly acknowledging her three-year seniority over the bridegroom. Robert gave his profession as ‘Artist’ and his home as St Lawrence, Biddulph – the parish church, which suggests that in all the excitement he mistakenly thought he was being asked for his home parish. Caroline gave her address as 14 Upper Berkeley Street, London. The register was countersigned by James Bateman, Robert’s father; Lord Wantage; Ulick Ralph Burke, Robert’s brother-in-law, and R. G. H. Somerset.
After the wedding the guests made their way to 2 Carlton Gardens, the sumptuous London home of Lord and Lady Wantage who hosted a glittering reception for them. Within a few days Robert and Caroline boarded a boat for Italy, and began what was acknowledged by all who knew them as forty years of blissful happiness. Robert did a series of paintings on this joyful trip, such as Morning in the Green Cloister, Santa Maria Novella, Florence and The Old Market, Milan, but sadly none of these is known to have survived.
According to Amanda Kavanagh,
Robert and Caroline spent the first years of their married life at Benthall Hall, Shropshire, where he painted the imposing portrait of his wife which he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886.
So we decided to start our search for them at that lovely old manor house, which had been acquired by the National Trust but was still home to members of the Benthall family. The administrator forwarded one of the house brochures to us, but warned that it contained very little that would help us. The house had been sold by the Benthall family in the early nineteenth century, and bought back in the mid-twentieth century. Very few records were kept in the intervening years during the tenancies granted by the owner Lord Forester.
The Batemans were primarily remembered for creating a Rose Garden, previously called the Pixie Garden, which has now been fully restored. From the brochure we learned that the tenant before them, George Maw, had published a definitive book on crocuses, The Genus Crocus, in 1886 while at Benthall. This startled us. From Amanda Kavanagh we had understood that the Batemans had arrived in the first year of their marriage, 1883. However, the administrator corrected us, and insisted that they had not moved in until 1890. Kavanagh had proposed that the background to the portrait of Caroline exhibited in 1886 was ‘probably inspired by the view of the Severn from Benthall Edge’. If the Batemans did not move to Benthall Hall until four years after this, it supported our suspicion that the view had, in fact, been inspired by that from Biddulph Old Hall towards Congleton Edge (fig. 73). This gave a fascinating insight into where Robert and Caroline had actually spent the first years of their marriage.
Fig. 73. The view from Biddulph Old Hall towards Congleton Edge.
This discovery was a defining moment in our relationship with Biddulph Old Hall and its involvement with the wonderful love story of Robert Bateman, the mysterious visionary artist, and Caroline Octavia, his complex and beautiful wife. Suddenly we seemed to see them everywhere, watching the setting sun slanting through the glassless windows of the ruins, climbing the tower and gazing over the plain to the Welsh Hills, and walking together past the cascades, waterfalls and still waters of their secret valley. We knew they had been there, laughing, talking and making love, as day by day the huge portrait emerged from the empty canvas in the studio. They did not so much haunt us as simply join us in the house. As they did so we became imbued with the benign intensity of their world.
We returned to the great portrait with a new interest and sought out the article by Richard Dorment published in 2002 in The New York Review of Books, which explained the significance of the clothes Caroline was wearing (see fig. 24). Dorment emphasised the extremely precise, clear execution of every detail of the painting, a pronounced characteristic of all Robert’s later work in oil after he had ceased to show at the Dudley in 1874:
Immediately striking is the almost Pre-Raphaelite obsession with minute details of dress, accessories and landscape, all the more surprising at the height of the Aesthetic Movement in England when a generally freer handling of paint had superseded the tight linear clarity found here.
He went on to note another unusual aspect of the image that is none the less characteristic of Bateman: the deliberate inclusion of visual references to historic styles of painting:
Notable too is the homage Bateman pays to the eighteenth-century grand masters, subtly evoked in his wife’s costume. This lovingly delineated dress of black silk or crepe, trimmed at the sleeves just below the elbow with flowers of lace and worn with a wrap of antique lace, fills almost half the canvas. Whoever designed it wished to suggest the kind of garments worn by women in the paintings of Gainsborough or Reynolds, just as Renaissance artists used drapery to evoke the classical world . . .
His thesis is that an appreciation of a sitter’s clothing is crucial to a proper understanding of the information being communicated, both intentionally and subliminally, to nineteenth-century viewers. In the portrait, that information falls into two distinct categories.
The first is the evocation of the grand portraits of the eighteenth century. In a detailed study of Caroline’s dress, he describes the whole ensemble as ‘sombre but also fashionable’. He notes her padded bustle, describing it as a ‘distant echo both of the mid-Victorian crinoline and of the hooped skirts worn by women in the eighteenth century’. He picks out the short train at the base of her skirt ‘such as English women wore in the 1750s’ and suggests that ‘you find velvet bands, exactly like the one she wears on her right wrist, in portraits by Reynolds and Joseph Wright of Derby’.
The second concerns the clear intention to convey her recent widowhood:
A contemporary would have seen at once that Mrs Bateman is in the second stage of mourning, between the full black that was customary for at least twenty-one months after the death of a close relative or spouse, and the grey or lilac colour permitted towards the end of a bereavement. In half-mourning, a woman was allowed to alleviate the severity of black with lace and pearls. And indeed we know that Caroline Howard, a granddaughter of the fifth Earl of Carlisle, was the widow of the Rev. Charles Wilbraham when Bateman married her in 1883 . . . Although the portrait was exhibited in 1886, the costume and the urn (a traditional symbol of mourning) suggest that Bateman began it much earlier, perhaps during their engagement . . . This is why the bride wears black, but it is also why she discards the traditional widow’s cap, which we know, from many photographs of Queen Victoria taken after the death of Prince Albert, was normally de rigueur for mourning during the whole of the Victorian period.
Dorment adds to the sense that the portrait is a highly orchestrated projection of both the sitter and the artist by suggesting that ‘it is more than likely that Mrs Bateman is wearing a dress designed by her artist husband and made by her dressmaker’ and defines how this would have been perceived in the mid-1880s:
The word contemporaries would have used to describe Mrs Bateman’s ensemble is ‘artistic’. They would have surmised that the circles in which the sitter moved were ‘arty’ but not bohemian.
The information in the article brought home vividly to us the frightening level of public exposure that exhibiting the ten-foot portrait in the Grosvenor Gallery represented for both Robert and Caroline. The subject and the scale of the image must surely have been conceived by them both as a conscious act of self-promotion, designed to project her likeness, his work and themselves as a couple into the epicentre of fashionable artistic life. In the Grosvenor’s West Gallery in 1886, Caroline’s picture had to stand comparison with important works including two Burne-Joneses and two pieces by G. F. Watts. Alma-Tadema was there as was Sir William Blake Richmond (with five pictures), Fantin-Latour, Edward Poynter and John Singer Sargeant. Robert’s friend Walter Crane showed two pictures and Caroline’s cousin, George Howard, showed a small landscape. To make so declamatory a statement among figures of this stature, at the height of the craze for Aestheticism that had brought art appreciation to the heart of upper-class cultural and social life, was to invite ruthless critical appraisal. Little wonder they took pains to ensure that the coded messages about Robert as an artist and Caroline as a subject were understood by their illustrious audience.
We came to realise that the whole structure of the composition, with the upper part of the figure silhouetted against naturally rendered foliage and the portion beyond given over to evocative sky and extended landscape, was directly related to the work of Joshua Reynolds. No doubt the intention was to echo Caroline’s noble lineage and therefore her natural place at the centre of society. However, as we delved deeper into Reynolds’s output, a more personal relationship between Caroline and his work emerged. In 1769 the Howards of Castle Howard had chosen Reynolds to execute a huge full-length portrait of the head of the family, the 5th Earl of Carlisle, set slightly atypically, against grandiose classical architecture but with a characteristic skyscape visible in the background (fig. 74). At almost the same date they had commissioned another large three-quarter-length canvas of the Earl’s wife, Margaret Caroline, posing with fashionable informality in front of naturalistic branches and foliage with a landscape of gently rolling hills in the background (fig. 75). The subjects of these flamboyant canvases were Caroline’s grandfather and grandmother.
The relationship of both images to Caroline’s portrait is marked. The general disposition of the figures within the overall compositions is strikingly similar, and the colouring of the Earl’s clothes, predominantly black with embellishments in pale grey and silver, is echoed in Caroline’s enriched black dress. The trees, foliage and gentle landscape of the Countess’s portrait seem directly related to the background of her granddaughter’s image, and her upswept hair seems uncannily similar, given the century that separates the two pictures. Caroline never knew her grandparents, who had died some fourteen years before her birth in 1839. Her vision of them must have been formed by seeing the Reynolds portraits on childhood visits to her uncle’s palatial home. It would hardly be surprising if these spectacular paintings inspired her as glamorous ideals of the portrait painter’s art, and led to the format of Robert’s picture.
Fig. 74. James Watson after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Margaret Caroline, Countess of Carlisle, 1773, mezzotint, 45 × 35.2 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London.
Fig. 75. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, 1769, oil on canvas, 241 × 149.8 cm, Castle Howard Collection.
The question of why, three years into their marriage, they should have elected to make Caroline’s mourning – and, by inference, her former husband – central to the message of the painting was perplexing. Dorment’s explanation that the painting must have been started during their engagement in about 1882 made sense, but we still had a twinge of unease at their decision to allow her bereavement to dominate society’s view of Caroline so long after the event.
Dorment’s understanding of Victorian mourning allowed him to pinpoint the date of the painting very precisely. This seemed to raise some slightly uncomfortable questions surrounding the timing of the sequence of events from her first husband’s death, through mourning and half-mourning, to her marriage to Robert in 1883. Charles Wilbraham had died in mid-December 1879, so the essential minimum period of twenty-one months would have meant that Caroline remained in deep mourning until October 1881. However, the respectable period of full mourning after the loss of a clerical spouse was longer, two years. If Caroline had observed this convention, and her portrait suggests she was at pains to be seen as a grieving widow, she would not have progressed to the later stage until January 1882. This gave her a total of just nineteen months to complete the second stage of mourning, become engaged and marry Robert on 18 October 1883.
The purpose of these bereavement rituals was to emphasise the sacred solemnity in which marriage was held; their corollary was the period of betrothal, a vital time of patience and self-control in which one demonstrated an appreciation of the irrevocable seriousness of the promises one was about to make. The period between Caroline’s emergence from deep mourning and her marriage seems, for the customs of the time, shockingly short. She must have scarcely completed her period of half-mourning and certainly not her time of wearing grey or mauve for her former husband before she was engaged and remarried. Had there been raised eyebrows at the immodest speed with which the daughter of a senior dignitary of the church had abandoned the memory of her respected clerical spouse and embraced a good-looking younger man?
Their London wedding did not suggest that Robert and Caroline made any attempt to downplay their marriage, but if in some circles it had been perceived as a little improper, it might have limited their acceptability in society. And any question of impropriety concerning the speed of their marriage would almost certainly have extended to speculation about the nature of their courtship. To be acceptable there could be no suggestion that this had taken place before Caroline’s bereavement or while she was in full mourning. The only time, therefore, when they could have become close would have been after January 1882. So her period of half-mourning must have run concurrently with her betrothal for her marriage in October the next year.
Here the portrait itself, perhaps a little too conveniently, suggests a possible narrative. The extended time together needed to complete so ambitious a piece of work must have provided an opportunity, at the first permissible moment, for the attractive widow to find solace with the gifted artist commissioned to record her sad isolation. Did this, unexpectedly, lead to her renewed zest for life and their marriage a few months later? The decision to use the portrait to remind the Grosvenor Gallery audience of Caroline’s status as the widow of an elderly clergyman does suggest they may have had anxieties about the perceived propriety of their own relationship – anxieties they attempted to counter by associating Caroline with the known piety of Rev. Charles Wilbraham.
If, as Richard Dorment logically deduces from Caroline’s clothing, the painting was conceived and begun at the time of the couple’s engagement in 1882, and simply remained unfinished or unexhibited until 1886, it would reflect the plain truth of her situation at that time. If, however, it was begun at any later date during the ensuing four years, it would represent a much more calculated attempt to dress and present her in a way that recalled her former marriage in order to convey the necessary gravitas to counteract any accusations of ‘fastness’ in her subsequent relationship with a handsome younger man.
Whatever the reason, there are signs that it might have proved extremely effective in raising both their status and Robert’s ability to achieve good prices for his work. By 1890 they finally emerged from the haven of their refuge at Biddulph and took the lease on Benthall Hall, where they began the next phase in their journey through life together.
