Unless a collector was as rich as William Beckford, whose family had made a fortune from sugar plantations in Jamaica, or the Duke of Bridgewater, it was extremely unlikely that he would be able to acquire a genuine Raphael. Most collectors had to content themselves with works by seventeenth-century Bolognese masters such as Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Domenichino, all strongly influenced by the master. Alternatively, paintings by the two leading French artists of the classical school, Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorraine, both working in Rome in the seventeenth century, were much sought after. Poussin’s austere compositions were deeply influenced by the art of antiquity while Claude’s Arcadian landscapes were filled with classical ruins. Two Claudes from the Altieri Collection caused a sensation when they were brought back to England by Admiral Nelson, and were purchased by William Beckford for the staggering price of £6,825 in 1799. He was to resell them less than a decade later for 10,000 guineas (they now hang in Anglesey Abbey).
These classical artists were highly regarded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, first President of the Royal Academy, and his championship of the art of Michelangelo, Raphael and Carracci, chief representatives of what he regarded as the ‘three great schools of the world [the Roman, Florentine and Bolognese]’, formed the central thesis of his influential Discourses on Art, delivered in the 1770s. In his own painting, however, Reynolds strove to emulate Titian’s technique; his portraits were strongly influenced by Van Dyck, who took so many of his ideas from Titian, and he owned 29 works attributed to the Venetian artist, including a copy of the Rape of Europa, now in the Wallace Collection.
Reynolds, like other late eighteenth-century British artists, had copied a number of works by Titian when visiting Italy on the Grand Tour (his works in the Spanish royal collection were virtually unknown). It is interesting to note those contemporary British artists’ view of Titian. Many of them made copies of his work, choosing those that dated from the middle stages of the painter’s career, particularly the 1530s and 1540s, when his style was most receptive to the Roman and Florentine idea of disegno, as championed by Reynolds (and indeed Vasari back in the sixteenth century) rather than the much freer, late style characteristic of the Rape of Europa. The words these artists most commonly used to describe these works by Titian were balance and harmony.
The Irish painter James Barry dismissed Titian’s late St Sebastian in the Palazzo Barbarigo in Venice: ‘to me [it] appears nothing more than a most disorderly mass of colours, jumbled together by the jumbling and slobbering of a pencil’. For William Hazlitt, however, it was precisely this subtle use of colour that gave these late works their unique quality, which he characterized as gusto (the Italian for taste). The colours in the Bridgewater poesie were:
dazzling with their force but blended, softened, woven together into a woof … and then a third object, a piece of drapery, an uplifted arm, a bow and arrows, a straggling weed, is introduced to make an intermediate tone, or carry the harmony. Every colour is melted, impasted into every other.
With so much disagreement, it is not surprising that it was not until several years after its arrival in England that the Rape of Europa finally found a buyer. The Fifth Earl of Carlisle, a major stake-holder in the Bridgewater consortium, and a notable collector in his own right on the Grand Tour, expressed an interest in acquiring the painting, but withdrew from the sale, and it was not until 1804 that it was acquired for 700 guineas by the Second Baron Berwick, a fraction of the valuation of £5,250 for Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto paid by the Duke of Bridgewater. Berwick’s interest may have been stimulated by reports brought back by tourists who had flocked to Paris following the Treaty of Amiens in 1802–3 between Britain and France. Visitors were astonished by the quality of works on display in the Louvre Museum, created by its director Vincent Denon as a temple to the arts, and featuring a number of Titians looted by the victorious French from Italy.
Berwick had inherited a fortune from his father, who was ennobled by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger for his help in restructuring the immensely profitable East India Company, a source of seemingly limitless wealth in the fast-expanding British Empire. The baron proceeded to employ the architect George Steuart to remodel Attingham Park in 1782 in the neo-classical style. Steuart produced a formal design for the house with two sets of apartments for Berwick and his wife, an idea often used for royal palaces, where the king and the queen would live separately. At Attingham the two apartments were united in an Entrance Hall with a top-lit staircase, providing a grand effect.
Berwick died in 1789 and the baronetcy and his estate were inherited by his 18-year-old son Thomas Noel Hill, who had just gone up to Jesus College, Cambridge. Three years later, on leaving university, the Second Baron Berwick pursued his artistic studies by going on the Grand Tour to Germany, Switzerland and Italy, taking as his travelling companion the knowledgeable Edward Daniel Clarke, later to become a brilliant scientist, professor of mineralogy at Cambridge and one of the founding members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. As soon as the two men reached Rome in November 1792, Berwick began to commission works of art, relying on his friend for advice. He ‘is employing Angelica Kauffmann [a popular female artist later to work extensively in England] in painting,’ wrote Clarke, ‘and I am now selecting passages from the poets for her to paint for his house at Attingham, he has left me to follow my own taste in painting and sculpture.’
Clarke made Berwick aware of the perils of the art market, drawing his friend’s attention to the unscrupulous dealers and salesmen who profited from the naivety of rich English Grand Tourists: ‘The greatest of these Romans carry cheating to such a degree of ingenuity that it becomes a science; but in baking legs, arms, and noses, they really surpass belief.’
Clarke took full credit for the purchases Berwick made, commenting: ‘I have ordered for him two superb copies of the Venus de Medicis and the Belvedere Apollo [famous Roman statues in the Uffizi Gallery and the Vatican], as large as the originals; they will cost near £1,000.’ Berwick and Clarke continued their Grand Tour to Naples where they were to spend over a year. Grand Tourists often used their time abroad, far from parental discipline, to sow their wild oats, and the baron combined his efforts to buy works of art, acquiring a set of fine views by Jacob Philipp Hackert, with an attempt to seduce Lady Plymouth. The success of his Grand Tour led Berwick to revisit Italy in 1797, where he purchased ‘some very fine statues’ in Rome. In recognition of his knowledge of the arts, Berwick was made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1801.
Many of Berwick’s early purchases had been works of sculpture, but his acquisition of the Rape of Europa showed his intention to make a serious collection of Old Master paintings. The subject was a serious one, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the voluptuous princess lying astride the bull must also have appealed to the racier side of his lordship’s character. Berwick was soon to become infatuated with the 17-year-old Sophia Dubouchet, one of four sisters, all of whom were courtesans. At first Sophia showed little interest in his advances, describing Berwick as a ‘very nasty, poking, old, dry man’. But this did not prevent her from following the baron to Brighton in 1811, rendered fashionable by the Prince Regent, where she was described as parading ‘the remains of her rather shaky virtue’. On returning to London shortly afterwards she was soon comfortably installed by Berwick in a house in Montague Square and, within a year, had become his wife.
Swiftly adapting to her new, respectable lifestyle, Sophia retired to Attingham Park, Berwick’s splendid house in Shropshire, where she followed her husband’s instructions and refused to see her sisters. Her behaviour may account for the unflattering account of the Berwicks by Sophia’s sister Harriete, who was to become the leading courtesan of the Regency period, practising her trade under the name Harriete Wilson and numbering among her clients the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor and four future prime ministers. Harriete described Berwick in her Memoirs as ‘a nervous, selfish, odd man, and afraid to drive his
own horses’. But she saved up her real venom for Sophia, who had set her sights at a cobbler at the tender age of 13, before throwing ‘herself into the arms of the most disgusting profligate in England aged fourteen, with her eyes open, knowing what he was; then offers herself for sale at a price to Colonel Berkeley, and when his terms were refused with scorn and contempt, she throws herself into the arms of age and ugliness [Lord Berwick] for a yearly stipend, and at length, by good luck, without one atom of virtue, becomes a wife.’
Harriete used the same racy style in her Memoirs to describe her famous clients, or ‘protectors’ as she preferred to call them. She determined to publish her Memoirs despite efforts by one of her more notable clients to prevent this. Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo and the most famous soldier in Europe, was used to giving orders. When Harriete refused his request, the Iron Duke is said to have uttered his famous comment: ‘Publish, and be damned.’ Harriete duly went ahead, ignoring the duke’s objections, and her Memoirs appeared in a broadsheet in 1825. Each week crowds would gather outside her publisher John Stockdale’s shop, which had become a salon for the political classes (Stockdale’s was frequented by Tories, while Whigs preferred Debrett’s). Londoners would pretend to express their strong disapproval while on tenterhooks to find out the graphically described sexual peccadilloes of the rich and the famous in the current issue. The enduring popularity of the Memoirs has ensured that they remain in print to this day.
Since going on the Grand Tour Lord Berwick had determined to make his country seat one of the most splendid in England, a worthy place to house his magnificent collection of works of art. As well as the Rape of Europa (referred to as Jupiter and Europa in Bryan’s sale catalogue), he acquired other masterpieces from the Orléans Sale: St John in the Wilderness and the Vision of Ezekiel by Raphael, purchased for 1,500 and 800 guineas respectively, and Annibale Carracci’s Toilet of Venus and Rubens’ Continence of Scipio for 800 guineas each. Berwick’s taste was eclectic, and his purchases included Van Dyck’s Balbi Children (National Gallery) and works by Poussin, Claude, Cuyp and other masters of the Dutch School. The most expensive of these, showing the growing interest in the Spanish School, was Murillo’s Virgin and Child, was bought for £2,500, more even than Raphael’s St John at 1,500 guineas, and over three times the price paid for the Rape of Europa.
To house his collection, Berwick employed John Nash, the most fashionable architect of the day, to remodel Attingham. Berwick had already employed Humphrey Repton, the leading landscape gardener, on his park, to provide a worthy setting for the house, and it seems probable that Repton, who was in partnership with Nash, introduced patron and architect. Although Nash described himself as a ‘thick, squat, dwarf figure, with a round head, snub nose and little eyes’, he had great charm. In the words of Repton: ‘He had the power to fascinate, beyond any man in England.’ Like Berwick, he aspired to a place in the elite of Regency society, working for the Prince Regent at Brighton Pavilion and Buckingham Palace. In 1805 Berwick gave Nash the commission to build a grander staircase off the Entrance Hall. The most original feature was a top-lit Picture Gallery to display Berwick’s collection of Old Master paintings. The architect was not afraid to use new technology, and the roof of the Gallery had curved cast iron ribs supporting continuous glazing, a highly original feature.
Nash’s use of cast iron demonstrates the willingness of architects and their aristocratic patrons to make use of new technology. The cast iron came from nearby Ironbridge Gorge, one of the key pioneering points of the Industrial Revolution. This was where the iron-founder Abraham Darby had successfully set up a coke-fired blast furnace in the village of Coalbrookdale in the early 1700s, using coal from the mines in the sides of the valley. The iron ore that Darby produced by a process of smelting was of very high quality and was used to produce cast iron cooking pots, kettles and domestic articles. By the late eighteenth century, the technology was considerably more sophisticated and Coalbrookdale was producing structural ironwork. Following Abraham Darby III’s construction of Iron Bridge, the first cast iron bridge in the world, in 1780, the Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford, soon to become the greatest engineer and road-builder of the day, began the Longdon aqueduct, which carried the Shrewsbury Canal over the River Tern on cast-iron columns.
However, despite Nash’s originality in the use of cast iron, the material was very expensive, costing Berwick £13,000. In addition, Nash tended to be slap-dash in his architectural projects and his workmanship was often shoddy. The small panes of glass in the roof were soon leaking and Berwick found himself paying for their repair and to the scagliola (imitation stone) columns which had been damaged by the water. This rather ruined the magnificent effect of the interior, with its walls in the Chinese style, porphyry scagliola columns and marbleized door-cases, and a white marble fireplace in the Egyptian style. Lady Berwick, now happily ensconced at Attingham, was keen that her quarters should be designed in the latest style. In 1812 her husband commissioned the fashionable firm of Gillows of Lancashire to fit out a suite of rooms on the first floor.
Keeping Berwick and his wife in the lifestyle to which they were accustomed came at a hefty price. As early as 1810 the baron wrote to his brother William Hill, later Third Lord Berwick and himself a passionate collector, lamenting: ‘I can not afford to retain a seat [country house] in Salop … blame me for not living more prudently, and not having the resolution to abstain from Building and Picture buying’. There is a certain irony in this letter, as William was also deeply in debt due to all the works of art he had been purchasing. A year later Richard Williams, a rich lawyer based in London’s Lincoln’s Inn, was offering Berwick £1,000 for his Rubens, or £3,000 for the Rubens and his Raphael. The majority of Berwick’s collection was sold in the 1820s but it appears that the Rape of Europa was sold before 1816, when J. Watton’s A Stranger in Shrewsbury gave a very complete account of Attingham, but omitted any mention of Titian. Having described the position of the house, and the ‘lofty and spacious hall’, the author continued with a detailed description of the paintings in the Picture Gallery:
The picture gallery is a spacious room 78 feet and 6 inches long, by 25 feet 6 inches wide, and 24 feet high. It contains many chef d’oeuvres of the old masters, particularly some valuable ones by Raffaello – Parmigianino – Paolo Veronese – Annibale Carracci – Rubens – Vandyck – Poussin – Kuyp – the Ostade’s – Murillo – Salvator Rosa – Berchem. The walls of this elegant room are of a deep lake colour; the ceiling supported by porphyry columns of the Corinthian order, the capitals and bases of which are beautifully gilded. Underneath the cornice of this extensive room is a gold fringe of great depth. The floor is inlaid with rich Mosaic work, and the grand staircase is finished in a corresponding style of magnificence.
Watton continues with a detailed description of the rest of the interior, showing why Berwick’s costly passion for collecting and his determination to decorate Attingham in the best possible taste led him into acute financial trouble:
The suite of drawing rooms is superbly furnished with immense plate glasses and burnished gold furniture, and the ceilings are richly gilt. The boudoir is a beautiful small circular room, the panels of which are decorated by the pencil of one of our first artists. The library is in the west wing, and is a very extensive and lofty room, the cornice is supported by rich Corinthian pilasters; and besides a very valuable collection of books, it contains several rare specimens of art from the antique. Among those most worthy of notice will be found a font from Hadrian’s Villa; on the basso relievo on its exterior the story of Narcissus is beautifully told. A rich candelabra from the antique, of exquisite workmanship, near ten feet high – a fine colossal statue of Apollo Belvedere [a notable purchase on Berwick’s Grand Tour] – a beautiful small Esculapius – with a splendid collection of Etruscan vases from Herculaneum, busts, chimeras, & c. The rooms on the first floor correspond in the grandeur and magnificence of their furniture with those on the g
round floor.
By this date it appears that John Bligh, Fifth Earl of Darnley, was already the owner of the Rape of Europa, for which he paid considerably less than Berwick had paid for it just a few years earlier, when it was exhibited at the British Institution (most of the main beneficiaries of the Orléans Sale were directors of the Institution). The Institution had been set up in 1805 with the aim of encouraging native talent, with the idea that it should show both living artists and great works from the past, with the latter, it was hoped, providing inspiration for the former. The idea proved a great success and artists flocked to display their paintings. Some contemporary artists felt that too many works by ‘Dead Artists’ were hung in the exhibitions, and this may account for the ironic comment made about the Rape of Europa by one critic: ‘When a lady is permitted to exhibit herself in this pickle, it would be indecent to insist on her putting on clean linen.’
The British Institution was a private society but its success was instrumental in the founding of the National Gallery in 1824. One of the initial subscribers had been the Russian émigré, banker and collector John Julius Angerstein (most of the money he spent on his art collection was made from his slave estates in Grenada), and it was the acquisition of his 38 paintings for £57,000 that formed the core of the National Gallery. Angerstein believed that early sixteenth-century Italian painting marked the apogee of taste, and his collection included three works by Titian: the Concert, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Ganymede. His paintings were installed at his London house at 100 Pall Mall, where they were hung frame to frame, from floor to ceiling. Two years later the gallery managed to buy Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, the finest of his early mythological works painted for the Duke of Ferrara. The paintings continued to be exhibited at these premises until the new building in Trafalgar Square was opened to the public in 1838. In the following year the new gallery attracted 768,244 visitors.
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