Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

by Stella Tillyard

  It was rare for women to ask painters to make them look older than they were. Usually, as Caroline herself pointed out, painters erred on the side of youth and towards the standards of beauty agreed by the age. When Emily declined to sit for her gallery portrait in 1762 on the grounds that at thirty she looked too old and tired, Caroline replied, ‘as for its being not so young and blooming as it once would have been, that makes very little difference in a picture, except quite old people and children. Painters make their other portraits, I think, look much the same age. You’ll be handsome enough these twenty years to make the best picture in our room if the painter does you justice.’ Emily prevaricated. She was almost continuously pregnant in the 1760s, producing Louisa in 1760, Henry in 1761, Sophia in 1762, Edward in 1763, Robert in 1765, Gerald in 1766 and Augustus in 1767, and could justinably claim exhaustion and incapacity. Eventually Caroline settled for a copy of Ramsay’s 1765 portrait of Emily which tucked her pregnant form under a table and a large, folio volume. ‘Your sweet face is come home and put up in my gallery,’ Caroline wrote in June 1766. Once the picture was hung, Caroline became more hopeful about the painter’s capacity to produce a good likeness (or perhaps the image came to stand for its original and Caroline began to think that Emily was like her picture rather than the other way round). ‘Opinions about pictures are so various I never mind any but my own with regard to portraits. I like it of all things and think it very like.’

  Sarah did not have her own portrait in the gallery and Reynolds’s triple portrait was still unfinished when she came back to Holland House in the winter of 1762, although she had had nine appointments. It was proving very expensive. Painters charged according to the proportion of the sitter they showed, bust, half, three-quarter or full length. The triple portrait had Sarah in half length and Charles and Susan in three-quarter. When the painting was eventually delivered in 1764, Henry Fox received a bill for £120. But the same year this figure was put in the shade by an even more spectacular portrait bought from Reynolds by Charles Bunbury. As the first president of the Royal Academy on its foundation in 1768, Reynolds championed history painting as the highest form to which painters could aspire. History paintings displayed – usually with classical plots and props – heroes who sacrificed themselves for their countries, men and women who gave their children to save friends or cities from destruction and many other personifications of the virtues conventionally believed to be necessary to a good citizen. Critics and painters alike spilled much ink on the value of history painting, but few buyers wanted pictures of minor deities or classical heroes throwing themselves about stony ruins, and painting was dominated by economic rather than moral forces. What patrons like Fox (who bought eight paintings from Reynolds, at least four from Ramsay and three from Hogarth) wanted were portraits of friends they loved and icons of political mentors and heroes.

  With his patrons’ connivance Reynolds gradually merged the subject matter of history painting with the figures of his portraits, coming up with a hybrid known as ‘sublime portraiture’. In sublime portraits modern subjects posed as classical figures in appropriate costume. Sublime portraiture became a way of marrying nudity, theatricality and the unimpeachable virtues of the history painting. ‘Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces’ was one of Reynolds’s first and most flamboyant examples.

  Reynolds painted Sarah throwing a libation into a smoking serpent-ringed urn. Statues of the three graces stand on a carved pillar just beyond her; behind her a handmaiden pours the next offering into a shallow dish. Sarah is wearing a pink gown lined with blue, tied under her bosom with a blue-fringed sash, a garment Reynolds designed especially for the painting. Like the costumes worn at some Holland House theatricals (and this painting is nothing if not theatrical) the gown displays as much as it conceals. The invitation the painting offers to admire Sarah’s body is only partly retracted by the prominently displayed wedding ring on her left hand. Whatever the painting’s ostensible theme – a tribute to friendship, a sacrifice to love, an elaborate compliment to her beauty – its effect is more fleshy than ethereal, redolent of boudoir rather than temple. For this magnificent concoction Bunbury paid £250, an eighth of his annual income and a sum that would have bought a small Salvator Rosa, a clutch of Old Master drawings or a passable Rembrandt. Sarah’s portrait was admired by men and women alike. Louisa wrote to her, ‘my sister Kildare has set me quite distracted about a picture of you that she says is quite delightful, done by Reynolds … and when I see it, if it answers my expectation, I will go to gaol rather than not have it, but I’ll persuade Mr. Conolly to buy it for his gallery – I mean a copy, for I hear Mr. Bunbury intends to have this. In short I am wild about pictures of you and my sister Kildare, I don’t think I shall ever be satisfied without dozens of them.’

  At Reynolds’s large studio on the west side of Leicester Square, he and his sitters were the still centre of an ever-moving crowd of onlookers. The artist frequently held open house. Visitors chatted and milled about, moving between his painting room and his gallery where his latest portraits and collection of paintings were put up on the walls and furniture was scattered about to give the air of a gentleman’s residence rather than a place of business. In tiny back rooms along corridors a small army of assistants worked on backgrounds and drapery, disgruntled and out of sight. In Reynolds’s workroom servants handed books of engravings to prospective customers. Politicians leafed through these volumes searching for poses and props that would lend them an air of statesmanship. Women also looked for the symbolic detritus so necessary to society portraits: books to show that they were critical or absorbed readers, sewing, embroidery, lace, flowers and, increasingly, children. Reynolds’s engraving books offered patrons a chance to create an image of themselves to show the world. Orchestrating this show, chalk in hand, was Reynolds himself, equal parts artist, gentleman and host. Despite Reynolds’s air of worldly propriety, his studio was a place where everyday social conventions were flouted or ignored. Because entry was without invitation to Reynolds’s clients, carefully planned meetings could take place there and be passed off as chance. Women who had lost their reputations might meet estranged friends for hurried conversations. Lovers bumped into one another, assuming stagy poses of indifference and surprise that concealed churning stomachs and beating hearts. Actors, actresses and courtesans came face to face with their audience, each side agog with curiosity.

  Reynolds had to be careful. Notorious courtesans like Kitty Fisher came to sit at an hour early enough to avoid the crowds. But even if she didn’t mingle with more respectable clients her portrait was evidence enough that she had been and its engraving was all over the town. Kitty Fisher was a star and young women like Susan Fox-Strangways, who were fascinated with the theatre and the personal power that actresses and courtesans like Kitty Fisher occasionally attained, copied her eagerly. They aped her extravagant dress and manner – what Caroline disapprovingly called ‘the Kitty Fisher style’ – and, with her portrait as a guide, they could model their own pose on hers when they came to sit themselves. When Susan sat to Ramsay for the Holland House gallery in 1764 she declared her interest in the theatre and its murky underworld by copying the pose in Reynolds’s picture of Kitty completed three years before. Both women sit with their heads turned slightly away from their viewers. Their hands lie loosely across their forearms, allowing their triple lace ruffles to billow across the lower half of the canvas. Ramsay’s addition of a shadowy classical pillar behind Susan does little to dispel the similarities between the two paintings. Such iconography ratified and intensified the kind of social mixing the visits to the painter’s studio allowed. If Susan could copy the dress and pose of a notorious courtesan, who knew what other aspects of low life she might next decide to emulate.

  The public acceptability of courtesans stopped at their images. Actors, who shared the courtesans’ milieu, had already by the 1760s breached the walls of the aristocratic home. Young men from Drury Lane and Covent Garden helped out at
private theatricals, while their elders, led by Garrick, entertained adoring fans at assemblies and dinners. Inside their own houses aristocrats may have felt safe from the sort of social dilution they noticed at the painter’s studio. But amateur theatricals and the studio made one another acceptable because they had a good deal in common. Young men and women like Sarah, Susan and the Fox brothers stood or sat in rich and often revealing costume watched by friends and servants alike. Moreover, seeing Sarah ‘en déshabillé’ acting Jane Shore, as she did at Holland House in 1761 was not so different from going to see Reynolds paint her sacrificing to the Graces three years later. Horace Walpole hit not only on the connection but also the moral. Sarah’s acting called to mind a painting, but it also hinted at the kind of social impropriety that could hover about the painter’s studio. ‘When Lady Sarah was in white with her hair about her ears and on the ground, no Magdalen by Correggio was half so lovely and expressive,’ Walpole wrote in January 1761. His choice of image was prophetic: Sarah looked not only like a cinquecento masterpiece but also like a fallen woman.

  When Sarah came back to Holland House in December 1762, Fox had a sadder description for her. She was the ‘widow’, left in London while her husband went to a house party at Woburn. But she was far from bereft, slipping happily back into Holland House life, its games of cards and political chat, Fox’s bawdy teasing and Caroline’s anxious intensity. In the mornings the sisters read by their own firesides. Books were companions and friends. ‘I think it a very happy thing to have reading,’ Caroline wrote. In the long winter evenings after dinner everyone gossiped over cards. On 4 January 1763 Sarah wrote to Susan Fox-Strangways: ‘Dear Ly Sue – sitting by the quadrille table, where Mrs. Greville, Charles, Mr. Fox and my sister are playing, you must expect to hear about their games.’

  Besides making up the numbers at cards, visitors to Holland House expected conversation on both the political and cultural news of the day. Caroline had strong views about social gatherings; as a hostess she attempted to achieve, as she did in her letters, a careful informality. The atmosphere was studiedly casual, a mixture of the modish and the bawdy; serious talk, dominated by politics, literature and the latest philosophical ideas, mixed together with flattery and scurrility. Many of the Foxes’ friends put themselves forward, in their own social circle and sometimes on a more public stage, as wits and writers. Over the card table Caroline and Mrs Greville might argue about Rousseau’s attitude towards women. Fox praised Sterne’s Tristram Shandy while Caroline admitted that she ‘could make neither head nor tail of it, tho’ I tried because that same thing of the clock caught my fancy at the beginning.’ Fox and his friends traded copies of their occasional verses.

  Of the Foxes’ most intimate companions, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Molly Hervey, George Selwyn and Lady Townshend were originally Henry’s friends. Horace Walpole, Lady Diana Bolingbroke and Mrs Vesey were held in common, while Frances Greville had originally been a friend of Caroline’s mother and aunt. Other Holland House habitués like Lady Albemarle and the Hillsboroughs were part of the extended Richmond family; the Countess of Hillsborough was Emily’s sister-in-law, Lady Albemarle was Caroline’s aunt. Sarah was often at Holland House after her marriage, choosing to go to spend time there rather than wait for visitors to her own house in Spring Gardens. In the 1760s, Charles Fox brought a stream of young Etonians to. his parents’ table. From amongst them, Richard Fitzpatrick and Lord Carlisle quickly became absorbed into the Holland House milieu.

  Henry Fox’s friends had several features in common. They were writers, wits, agnostics and sexual adventurers of various hues. Hanbury Williams, described by Dr Johnson as ‘our lively and elegant though too licentious lyric bard’, was the companion of Fox’s youth and bachelordom: it was in his house that Caroline and Fox were married in 1744. Although nominally a west-country MP, his real interests were women, poetry and drinking. From 1766 onwards, Hanbury Williams was often abroad on diplomatic missions. After an unsuccessful posting to St Petersburg in 1757 he broke down completely and in 1759 he killed himself. Once Hanbury Williams had gone, his cousin George Selwyn took his place as the favoured oddity among the Foxes’ friends. Selwyn began his career of infamy getting himself thrown out of Oxford for blasphemy. He went on to develop more epicene tastes: a sexual obsession with corpses and executions (to which, it was rumoured, he sometimes went dressed as a woman) and an equally strong interest in young men, among them the Earl of March and Charles Fox’s friend the Earl of Carlisle. Rumours abounded that he was a hermaphrodite, born without genitals. Selwyn carried with him a love of life as well as a whiff of the grave. Fox, who enjoyed flirting with his male friends – from Hervey to Selwyn and Walpole – teased him in his letters with sexual innuendo. Caroline and Sarah wrote to Selwyn as an avuncular friend.

  Horace Walpole was often at Holland House, sometimes in Selwyn’s company, always hoovering up political chat and matrimonial gossip, an onlooker rather than a participant, continually reworking the raw material of his leisured life into letters, commentaries and political treatises. Caroline shared his cult of Madame de Sévigné and his Francophilia, but she expressed more respect than fondness for him. Fox, always less discriminating, called him his beloved ‘Hory’.

  Besides these three, a host of other men moved in and out of the family circle at Holland House. Lord Shelburne’s lawyerly mind briefly captivated both Caroline and Fox at the beginning of the 1760s. Richard Rigby, the Duke of Bedford’s secretary was, until 1763, one of Fox’s favourite drinking companions. Clotworthy Upton, a gentle and cosmopolitan friend of Louisa’s from the north of Ireland, became intimate with Caroline in the 1760s. Topham Beauclerk, wit, rake and dope-fiend, was a frequent visitor at the end of the decade after his marriage to Lady Diana Bolingbroke. Charles Fox’s friends Richard Fitzpatrick and the Earl of Carlisle had settled in a few years earlier.

  Fox favoured women who were witty or beautiful. To those, like Lady Townshend or Lady Hervey, who were (or had been) both he offered lubricious flirtations and scatological verses. Caroline had few very close women companions outside her own family, but she liked women who were socially skilful, ‘amiable’ and clever. In her letters to Emily she singled out Lady Diana Bolingbroke, Lady Bateman and Mrs Greville (although, in deference to the epistolary art, she would rarely mention friends that Emily did not know). Lady Bolingbroke was clever, long suffering and a gifted painter, at least two of whose works hung in Holland House. After her marriage to Beauclerk in 1769, she tolerated his constant infidelity and nursed him to his drug-induced death in 1780 with saintly devotion. The Batemans, mother and son, were two intimate friends whom Caroline praised for their good humour and affection rather than their wit or cleverness.

  Mrs Greville was one of the four daughters of the Irish Earl Macartney. After her marriage to Fulke Greville in 1748 she and her husband – gambler and wit enough to satisfy Fox, author enough to interest Caroline – were often at Holland House. Mrs Greville wrote verses which Caroline sometimes tucked into her letters to Emily. ‘Prayer for Indifference’, which Mrs Greville wrote about 1756 was the most celebrated poem written by a woman in the eighteenth century, frequently printed in miscellanies and anthologies. The ‘Prayer’ was an attack on the newly fashionable notion of sensibility, but an attack which, by virtue of its length and intensity, tended to emphasise the emotion it claimed to reject. ‘Take then this treacherous sense of mine/ Which dooms me still to smart;/ Which pleasure can to pain refine/ To pain new pangs impart.’ Mrs Greville was one of a generation of men and women, Caroline and Emily amongst them, for whom sensibility, with its attendant notions of romantic love and eventually propriety and domesticity, was a newly defined emotion. Her poem was constantly read because it recognised both that sensibility was here to stay and that it was bringing about a sea change in the notions women (and to a lesser extent, men) held about themselves.

  For all her uneasy acceptance of sensibility, Mrs Greville was far from conventionally femini
ne. She had matured in the 1740s, a time when, in certain aristocratic households, women traded witticisms and critical opinions with friends of both sexes. Fanny Burney, product of a more careful class and age, was shocked at Mrs Greville’s assertiveness and noticed her habit in company of ‘lounging completely at her ease’, lying on a chaise-longue, ‘with her head alone upright’. Caroline loved her, but when Mrs Greville’s forthright presence clashed with her own anxious oppressed spirits, found her difficult. ‘Mrs. Greville was here a few days with her pretty daughter,’ she wrote at a low point in January 1763. ‘I love Mrs. Greville, but I don’t enjoy her company as I formerly did.’ Their friendship recovered with Caroline’s equanimity. Mrs Greville’s nephew, George Macartney, accompanied Ste Fox to Geneva in 1763 and Caroline briefly harboured hopes that Ste might marry her daughter, the ‘pretty’ Miss Greville. Nothing came of that plan, but the friendship prospered. By 1766 Mrs Greville, along with Sarah and Clotworthy Upton, had her own bedroom at Holland House, ‘to come and go as they like it’. Despite Sarah’s marriage, private theatricals, either at Holland House or in the country, continued. Charles Fox and his friends could be relied on for male parts; Susan Fox-Strangways was often there; Miss Greville and Sarah’s brother-in-law, the caricaturist Henry Bunbury, sometimes lent a hand. By the middle of the decade they had added Dryden’s All For Love (in which Sarah played the doomed Cleopatra) and Fletcher’s marriage comedy Rule a Wife and Have a Wife to their repertoire.