The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  Darnley’s important collection of paintings was housed in his country house at Cobham Hall in Kent and contained a number of works by Titian. As well as his Rape of Europa, Darnley owned Titian’s Portrait of Ariosto (National Gallery, where it is called Portrait of a Man with a Blue Sleeve, possibly a self-portrait), and two further works from the Orléans Collection: Venus admiring herself and a version of Venus and Adonis. They hung alongside Rubens’ Continence of Scipio and Annibale Carracci’s Toilet of Venus, which Darnley had acquired from Lord Berwick for 800 guineas each. Other major works were Annibale Carracci’s Martyrdom of St Stephen, Rubens’ Thomiris, Giorgione’s Milon, Pordenone’s Hercules and Ribera’s Democritus.

  The Bligh family originated in Ireland where they had extensive land holdings. They came to prominence in the eighteenth century when John Bligh was awarded the earldom of Darnley in 1725 and acquired large estates in Kent, based around his seat of Cobham Hall. The house had a distinguished history, playing host to a series of royal visitors including Elizabeth I in 1559 and Charles I and his new bride Henrietta Maria in 1625 (whom he had married instead of the Spanish Infanta – see Chapter 4). Later in the seventeeth century the Duke of Richmond lived here with his beautiful wife Frances Stuart, a great favourite of Charles II and the model for Britannia when the image was chosen to adorn British coins.

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the fourth earl carried out extensive additions and alterations to the existing Elizabethan house, which had been remodelled in the seventeenth century. Like Berwick at Attingham, he chose a fashionable architect, James Wyatt, who designed a Picture Gallery in 1806–9 to replace the Tudor Long Gallery. It consisted of two vestibules with a connecting gallery. The windows in the vestibules and those in the north side of the gallery were blocked out by screen walls to provide wall space for the display of Darnley’s collection of paintings.

  An early nineteenth century guidebook to Kent gives a detailed description of ‘this ancient baronial mansion taken from a late publication’. Surprisingly, the Rape of Europa does not appear to have hung in the picture gallery. The author praised the sculpture in the vestibule and music-room, which he described in some detail, before continuing:

  Thence you proceed to the picture-gallery, 134 feet long, lined with paintings by the first masters. The four chimney-pieces, in common with all the rest in the old parts of the house, are beautifully wrought in white and black marble, bearing the Cobham arms, and date 1587. In an adjoining chamber Queen Elizabeth was lodged, during her visit to William, Lord Cobham, in the first year of her reign, and her arms are still on the ceiling … In the apartments of the south wing are many fine pictures, by Titian, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Salvator Rosa, &c. and a particularly fine and valuable one by Rubens, representing the death of Cyrus.

  There is a tantalizing dearth of accounts of the Rape of Europa by visitors to Cobham Hall in the nineteenth century. One distinguished visitor was the Duchess of Kent in May 1819. Lord Darnley (the fourth earl) described her stay in a letter to his second son who was up at Oxford: ‘Our Royal Visitors [the Duchess of Kent and her doctor] have just set off in a continual pour of rain in the phaeton, after having eaten and drunk and slept well … and with every prospect that HRH will speedily produce a healthy heir to the throne.’ A week later the nation was celebrating the birth of Princess Victoria. She was to become queen aged just 18 in 1837.

  In the 1820s Prince von Pückler-Muskau was a regular visitor, and gave a comprehensive account of his visits to Cobham Hall, but was more interested in the way Humphrey Repton had landscaped the park noting that ‘nothing can exceed the incomparable skill with which the walls of wood within the park are planted in masterly imitation of nature’. Doubtless used to a more formal way of life in his native Germany, the prince was surprised by the manner of eating, the guests appearing for breakfast in ‘neglige’. He was even allowed into his hostess’ boudoir on departure: ‘I took leave of Lady D[arnley] in her own room; a little sanctuary furnished with delightful disorder and profusion:– the walls full of “consoles”, surmounted with mirrors and crowded with choice curiosities: and the floor covered with splendid camellias, in baskets, looking as if they grew there.’

  Even more tantalizing is the house’s association with Charles Dickens. The writer spent a lot of time in the vicinity, staying at the Leathern Bottle in the village, and Cobham features in a number of his works, particularly the immensely popular Pickwick Papers, published in 1836–7, where Pickwick, Winkle and Snodgrass liked to walk in the neighbourhood. Lord Darnley gave Dickens keys to the gates to the park, and the two men obviously got on well. To quote Percy Fitzgerald, in his Memories of Charles Dickens: ‘We then walked over to Cobham, when he [Dickens] told me a good deal about Lord Darnley, whom he said he liked, and showed me the chain drawn across the avenue never removed except for a funeral.’ Dickens made numerous references in his letters to the beauty of the trees in the park, with deer grazing beneath them, and described the house as ‘displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of Elizabeth’s time’, showing his appreciation of one of the best examples of Elizabethan architecture in the country, with additions made in the seventeenth century by John Webb to designs by Inigo Jones.

  However, sadly, Dickens left no description of the interior of the house. The writer was surprisingly knowledgeable about painting. He had been to Italy and written up an account of all he had seen, particularly in Rome, and one can only suppose that he was never invited in by Lord Darnley or he would almost certainly have left some description of the beautiful paintings in the interior. The only direct reference he made to the interior is in a ghost story related by the character of Mary Weller in Pickwick Papers.

  One of the few visitors to Cobham to comment on the collection of paintings was the German art historian Dr Gustav Waagen, Director of the Royal Picture Gallery (later the Kaiser Friedrich Museum) in Berlin. The doctor had already published a series of clear, concise and highly informative catalogues of the Berlin collection, the first major picture gallery where the paintings were hung systematically according to their individual schools. To increase his knowledge, he made frequent study tours abroad which he recorded in meticulous notes, letters, diaries, official reports and sketches. Waagen ranged far afield, visiting the main art centres in Europe: Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Spain and even Russia, as well as his native Germany.

  The small, bespectacled doctor visited England for the first time in May 1835. Already a noted connoisseur, with an acute visual memory, Waagen availed himself of a mass of contacts with the owners of the great collections throughout the country. He had, with typical Germanic thoroughness, drawn up a list of the most notable art collectors in England, ranking them in order, starting with the three main beneficiaries of the Orléans Sale: the Duke of Bridgewater, the Marquis of Stafford and the Earl of Carlisle, with the Earl of Darnley, owner of the Rape of Europa, in fifth place.

  On a peregrination lasting six months the doctor discovered that the English were using their great wealth, gained from their possessions overseas and their participation in the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, to form unrivalled collections of art, exceeding anything on the continent. As he commented: ‘Scarcely was a country overrun by the French when Englishmen skilled in the art were at hand with their guineas.’ The description of Waagen’s journey was published in three volumes by John Murray in Works of Art and Artists in England in 1838. He noted how the British were unique in their desire to live among their possessions, unlike other countries, where art was more usually confined to special cabinets and galleries.

  In eighteenth-century France, nobles such as the Dukes of Orléans, although they owned châteaux all over the country, chose to live entirely in Paris and Versailles, the centre of power which was based on the king. It was therefore natural that the Orléans Collection should have been housed in the family’s main Parisian residence. In Britain, in contrast, the aristocracy divided their
time between their town and country houses. Political power was centred on Parliament, rather than the royal court, and since Parliament sat for less than half the year, this allowed nobles considerable time on their country estates. These land holdings were also a source of much of their wealth, and so they preferred to hang many of their finest works of art in their country houses.

  Waagen needed endless perseverance in his attempts to visit these houses, overcoming the problems of absentee landlords, grudging housekeepers reluctant to admit a foreigner into their domain, and poor viewing conditions. This was a perennial handicap for curious sightseers, especially if they were foreign. Even as distinguished a visitor as the exiled Comte d’Artois, the future Louis XVIII (as the younger brother of Louis XVI he had prudently fled to England during the French Revolution), was treated with scant civility. W. T. Whitley recorded the count’s visit to Blenheim Palace:

  The Cicerone performing this delicate task was the ordinary showman dressed out in the tawdry livery of his office; flippantly sporting his ‘Mounsheers’, his ‘Lewis’s’ and other John Bullisms, and vaunting about the thousands of Mounsheers who were killed, taken prisoners, etc, in every battle. In vain did I take him aside and appraise him that the decencies of hospitality and the quality and intelligence of the visitors rendered fewer explanations necessary. ‘I likes it’, he said, ‘I likes to tell him the truth’, winking his eye at the same instant and smiling excessively.

  Problems such as dealing with obnoxious servants were not enough to put off an indefatigable sightseer like Waagen in his quest to discover the masterpieces hidden in country houses. He returned to England throughout the 1850s, and the summary of his painstaking research, entitled Treasures of Art in Great Britain, was published in 1854 (a supplementary volume was entitled Galleries and Cabinets of Art). Waagen was highly regarded in England and was appointed a juror for the Great Exhibition in 1851, partly at the instigation of Prince Albert, who fully appreciated the good doctor’s devotion to hard work and his high-minded principles.

  It was on his tour that year that Waagen visited Cobham Hall in the company of Charles Eastlake, soon to be Director of the National Gallery, who shared the doctor’s scientific approach to art history. They were probably the two greatest connoisseurs in Europe, both perceptive and immensely scholarly, while Eastlake, in addition, was also a distinguished painter in his own right. Waagen described the Rape of Europa as ‘unquestionably the pearl’ of the Darnley collection, although ‘the great warmth and power of the colouring is somewhat lost in the present neglected state of the picture’. At the end of his tour the earl presented him with a copy of A Day’s Excursion to Cobham, a guidebook written by Felix Summerly, the nom-de-plume of Sir Henry Cole, Director of the fledgling South Kensington Museum (funded with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition and soon to become the Victoria and Albert Museum). Waagen was less than appreciative of this gift, commenting loftily that it ‘was the more acceptable to me in that I find the writer agreeing in most of my conclusions’.

  Waagen had a high opinion of his own talents, but he was not always right. In view of his complimentary description of the Rape of Europa it is fascinating to record his impression of Perseus and Andromeda, the pendant to Europa, which he saw in Hertford House, the home of Sir Richard Wallace (now the Wallace Collection), illegitimate son of the Fourth Marquess of Hertford. The painting was stored in a crate and, when it was produced for the great man’s approval, he pronounced it to be the work of Veronese. Having been downgraded by the great connoisseur, it subsequently languished for years above a bath in Wallace’s dressing room. The Third Marquess of Hertford had acquired the painting in 1815, and it seems probable that the Fourth Marquess, whose extensive collection today forms the basis of the Wallace Collection, bought a reduced copy of the Rape of Europa in 1857 to hang alongside Perseus and Andromeda (the two poesie by Titian had been paired together during the time of Philip II).

  The marquess’s copy of the Rape of Europa had been owned by the neo-classical painter Gavin Hamilton, and by the notable collector William Young Ottley, and was generally considered to be a sketch for the Europa in Darnley’s collection. Hertford’s agent Samuel Mawson described it as ‘much finer than the finished picture’ when it appeared for sale in 1857, and Hertford concurred, writing that ‘the Titian is only a study but I dare say very desirable.’ The marquess, like Philip II before him, seems to have much enjoyed the subjects chosen by Titian, with their highly charged erotic content, since he also bought a late eighteenth-century copy of Danae with Cupid (another of the poesie) in 1856.

  Waagen selected Darnley’s Rape of Europa for the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, in which he played a key role. The city was an ideal choice, representing the new-found wealth that had transformed Britain. A century earlier the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal had begun the process by dramatically lowering the price of coal transported from Worsley into the city. But the true wealth of Manchester relied on the manufacture of cotton, which was mass produced in the city’s water-powered cotton mills. Entrepreneurs such as Richard Arkwright, who owned the first of these mills, made fortunes on the proceeds. The cotton was then taken by railway to Liverpool from where it was distributed in British ships all over the world.

  By the 1850s Manchester was one of the most prosperous cities in Europe. Visitors to the exhibition had the chance to see a magnificent display of art in a setting that summed up the extraordinary success of Victorian Britain, though they had little idea of the poverty and squalid lifestyle of many of the workers whose hard labour had created this urban metropolis. One of those who noticed this exploitation of the working classes was Friedrich Engels, but it was for aesthetic pleasure, rather than the plight of the proletariat, that he urged his friend Karl Marx to visit Manchester: ‘Everyone up here is an art lover just now and the talk is all of the pictures at the exhibition … Among the finest is a magnificent portrait of Ariosto by Titian [belonging to Lord Darnley] … you and your wife ought to come up this summer and see the thing.’

  The exhibition proved to be one of the most extraordinary gatherings of art ever recorded in England, with over 16,000 works of art on display, including 1,173 Old Master paintings and 689 works by contemporary artists, a unique chance for the public to see what collectors had been buying over the previous 50 years. The Prince Consort, in his high-minded way, hoped that the public’s response to seeing these great works of art would both be educational and help to raise the standard of design in manufacture (Manchester being at the heart of the Industrial Revolution).

  Buyers at the Orléans Sale were predominantly a small circle of aristocratic collectors, whose preference of Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters broadly echoed that of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who had formed the collection. At Manchester, traditional Old Masters were still much in evidence, with 27 paintings by Titian including the Rape of Europa, and numerous works of the Eclectic School, as the great Bolognese artists of the seventeenth century were known, but there was an increasing number of viewers prepared to admire other schools of art.

  The exhibition featured a number of Italian Primitives, many of them lent by Prince Albert, who had proved an enthusiastic collector of early Florentine painting. Popular and influential books such as John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Italy, Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art and Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art had persuaded their readers of the merits of Giotto, Fra Angelico and Botticelli, stressing the religious feeling imbuing their works. Now they were able to see the works in the flesh.

  Botticelli, in particular, had been virtually ignored in the early nineteenth century, but now, following the lead given by Eastlake at the National Gallery, he was about to become the most sought after of all Florentine artists of the Quattrocento. One of the most perceptive scholars to view the exhibition was the American Charles Eliot Norton, who was particularly taken with paintings by the Italian Primitives, which related to his life-long lov
e of Dante. Norton was to exert a profound influence on the artistic and literary taste of Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was to purchase the Rape of Europa from Lord Darnley some 40 years later.

  Other schools were also well represented, showing the diverse interests of the leading collectors. French paintings by Watteau and his followers appealed to the Third and Fourth Marquesses of Hertford, the tenth Duke of Hamilton (the dispersal of his collection at the Hamilton Palace Sale was to be greatest sale of the 1880s), and the Rothschilds, who lived in great splendour at Mentmore Towers and Waddesdon Manor (the latter a neo-French Renaissance chateau). Following the Duke of Wellington’s lead (a grateful Spanish government gave him magnificent Spanish paintings for his part in defeating the French in the Peninsular War of 1808–12), a number of collectors had acquired works by Velázquez, Murillo and Goya. Sir Robert Peel, prime minister (1834–5 and 1841–6) and one of the founders of the National Gallery, had formed perhaps the finest collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings in England, which was to be purchased en bloc by the Gallery in 1871.

  But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition was the prominence given to contemporary British art. Turner and Constable had earned a European reputation for the brilliance of their landscape painting, and there were 100 works by Turner on view. In Britain, Victorian genre painting was all the rage and works such as Life at the Seaside, Ramsgate Sands by William Powell Frith had been bought by Queen Victoria (his Derby Day, painted immediately after the exhibition, was so popular that a rail had to be installed at the Royal Academy to hold back the crowds that flocked to admire it). Apart from a few exceptions, however, such as the Third Earl of Egremont, a great patron of Turner, most of the aristocracy tended to ignore native talent. The most original school of painting was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848, whose members, as their name indicated, were looking for a new, purer form of art inspired by preceding those works of the High Renaissance and the Baroque that represented the prevailing taste.