Dickinson, London
17th June to 17th July 2026
Featuring seven spectacular portraits, the show includes both new discoveries and superb examples that have never before appeared on the market.
The concept of the Grand Manner in art was promoted in the famed Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, delivered at the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, in which he argued that in portraiture – as in history painting – artists should not merely copy nature, but rather seek to elevate it by alluding to the antique. This, Reynolds explained, ‘gives what is called the grand style to invention, to composition, to expression, and even to colouring and drapery’ (Fourth Discourse, 10 December 1771), which is what this exhibition seeks to show. In the late 18th and early 19th Century Britain enjoyed a period of artistic brilliance, particularly in the field of portraiture, as the Industrial Revolution and trade with overseas territories fostered the creation and elevation of a wealthy middle class, while the Grand Tour inspired aristocratic travellers to collect Old Masters and antiquities to decorate their country estates.
Contemporary painters, both in Britain and abroad, sought to appeal to sophisticated taste by emulating the poses and styles of the masters, while foreign artists such as Pompeo Batoni in Rome competed with British artists to secure prestigious commissions. Classical sources offered a wealth of inspiration, with artists borrowing poses from antique sculptures of gods and heroes to flatter their educated sitters – as well as those who hoped to feign erudition – or incorporating recognisable classical objects and monuments as a nod to a sitter’s Grand Tour experiences.
In his 1784 Portrait of Thomas Giffard, Batoni included the socalled Medici vase, an elaborate marble krater which had already featured in a number of his portraits of English milordi. As the vase was transferred from the Medici Villa to the Uffizi in Florence in 1780, four years prior to Giffard’s visit, he may never even have seen it; his tour was brief and no record of a stay in Florence is known to exist. But that is beside the point, and visitors to Chillingham Hall would have been none the less impressed for the factual inaccuracy.
Reynolds, in his 1777 Portrait of Lady Jean Lindsay, Countess of Eglinton, imbues his sitter with the grace of the muses by painting her with a harp. The setting, an ambiguously classical, open arcade with sweeping crimson curtains, lends the monumental work an additional timeless grandeur.
And the self-taught prodigy Sir Thomas Lawrence, who succeeded Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy, copied and collected old master drawings and plaster casts after the antique; his painting of the family of Lawrence Charles Cockerell (c. 1817) sets the grouping against a turbulent, Romantic landscape framed by theatrical curtains, while the pose of the mother and infant may perhaps reference Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo – at the time in the collection of Sir George Howland Beaumont, whom Lawrence had painted some years earlier, in 1808. The elder son at far left, meanwhile, wears a velvet costume that may allude to so-called Van Dyck dress, which also features in William Beechey’s monumental portrait of the Dashwood children of circa 1789. Beechey, like Lawrence, may be quoting the old masters in pose as well as costume: the pose of the youngest child, sitting on a Saint Bernard dog, recalls that of Europa astride the bull that is Jupiter in disguise, flinging her arms high as he carries her off.
Pompeo BATONI (1708 – 1787) Portrait of Thomas Giffard (1764 – 1823) of Chillington Hall, Staffordshire, 1784 signed and dated lower right POMPEO DE BATONI PINX./ROM.1784 oil on canvas 249 x 180.4 cm. (89 x 71 in.)
This magnificent portrait is one of the masterpieces of Batoni’s late portraiture; indeed, it was the artist’s final full-length, executed less than three years before his death. It was commissioned in Rome during Thomas Giffard’s brief Grand Tour (Autumn 1783 to July 1784), when he was just twenty years old. Described by the great Batoni scholar Anthony Clark as ‘among the most beautiful of all Batoni portraits’,1 this portrayal of a young recusant Catholic ‘Milord’ has few equals in the later part of Batoni’s long and successful career. It has, moreover, passed by unbroken family descent at Chillington Hall for over two hundred and forty years, having been exhibited in public only once in all that time, and has never before been offered for sale. We know frustratingly few details of Thomas Giffard’s sojourn in Rome, but it was during this period that he must have sat to Batoni. Giffard’s late father Thomas Peter Giffard had already sat to the artist some sixteen years earlier in 1766, for a half-length portrait which remains at Chillington,2 and his brother-in-law Robert Courtenay Throckmorton (1750 – 1779) of Coughton Court in Warwickshire, had also sat to Batoni in 1772. At this point Batoni was the most celebrated and brilliant painter of all the international visitors to Rome in the second half of the 18th Century.3 He had become the painter of choice for the visiting British and Irish royalty, nobility and gentry, and was in addition the curator of the papal collections and had been knighted by the Pope. The painter Benjamin West, arriving in Rome in 1760, remarked that ‘… the Italian artists talked of nothing, looked at nothing, but the works of Pompeo Batoni’.4 Giffard stands at the foot of a colonnaded staircase, a distant landscape beyond. Holding his hat and cane in one hand and his gloves in the other, he leans nonchalantly against the staircase pedestal, while at his feet lies a loyal spaniel, a favourite motif. The vase behind him is closely based on the Medici Vase, until recently a famous attraction in the Villa Medici, but moved to the Uffizi Florence in 1780, four years prior to Giffard’s visit. Its inclusion is intended to underline the classical erudition of his sitters. The Giffard full-length has always been regarded as one of the finest of this last phase of Batoni’s career, described by Anthony Clark as ‘magnificent’. By this time he painted it Batoni was seventy-six years old, in imperfect health and relying on studio assistance for secondary areas of his portraiture. Clark, for example, suggested that the architectural surroundings and distant vista in this work were painted with studio assistance, and, as Bowron points out, this may also explain the curious errors in the depiction of the Medici Vase.
Sir William BEECHEY, R.A. (1753 – 1839) The Dashwood children, c. 1789 oil on canvas 182.2 x 182.8 cm. (71 ¾ x 72 in.)
This painting is one of the masterpieces of Sir William Beechey, and it hung in the celebrated dining room at Kirtlington Park. Sir Henry Watkin Dashwood, 3rd Bt., inherited the baronetcy on 10 November 1779. He presumably commissioned this spirited portrait of his children playing with their Saint Bernard around 1789, the year his first payment to Beechey is recorded. At far left, his son Charles sits astride the large dog, hands thrown up in delight. Charles’ sister Anna (later Lady Ely) gently supports him, smiling at her eldest brother Henry, at far right in red. On the ground, embracing the dog, is George, later 4th Bt. due to Henry’s premature death in 1803. The portrait hung firstly at Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire, a Palladian mansion set in grounds designed by Capability Brown, and then at Duns Tew Manor House. Shortly after it was sold by the Dashwood family, the painting was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. Because Beechey’s meticulous account books survive, many of his paintings can be traced to their original commissions. This group portrait first appeared in Beechey’s records from 1789 as ‘Sir H. Dashwood (paid half) £52 s. 10 d. 0’. Later, an entry under ‘Pictures Painted and Moneys Received’ from 14 August 1818 reveals that the remainder of the painting’s price had finally been paid: ‘Of Sir Henry Dashwood (as last half), for his family, painted twenty-five years ago 42 s. 0 d. 0’ (W. Roberts, op. cit.).
Sir William BEECHEY, R.A. (1753 – 1839) Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, future 2 nd Marquess of Buckingham and 1 st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (1776 – 1839), when he was Earl Temple, c. 1802 oil on canvas 76.8 x 63.4 cm. (30 ¼ x 25 in.)
The sitter was the eldest son of George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham, and the grandson of George Grenville, who served as Prime Minister from 1763-65 early in the reign of George III. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1791. As Earl Temple, he was elected MP for Buckinghamshire in 1797 and held a series of positions including Privy Counsellor (1806) and Vice-President of the Board of Trade. In 1813, he left the House of Commons upon succeeding his father in the marquessate. He was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 1820 and further honoured when he was made Earl Temple of Stowe two years later. He served as Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1813-39. In April 1796, when Earl Temple, the sitter married Lady Anne Brydges, daughter and sole heir of the late James Brydges, 3rd Duke of Chandos. Earl Temple added his wife’s family names to his own by royal license dated 15 November 1799, and thus the full family name became unusually quintuple-barreled. A full-length version of this portrait by Beechey is at Stowe House, the historic family seat in Buckinghamshire. Beechey also painted other members of the family, including the 1st Duke’s father, George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham (1753 – 1813), whom this portrait was once thought to represent, and Anna Eliza, Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, with her son, the future 2nd Duke. Interestingly, the youngest of Beechey’s eighteen children, Richard, had Brydges as a middle name, suggesting a close relationship of friendship with the Duke’s family.
Sir Thomas LAWRENCE, P.R.A., F.S.A. (1769 – 1830) Portrait of Sir Charles Cockerell and his family, c. 1817 oil on canvas 237.5 x 168.3 cm (93 ½ x 66 ¼ in.)
This life-sized family group, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence in about 1817, is a prime example of his artistic practice as executed on a grand scale. To have any portrait painted by Lawrence was a great signifier of status, but to commission a family portrait on a monumental scale, in the ‘grand manner’, would have been accepted as a serious statement, not just of wealth and position, but of artistic and cultural intention. The Cockerell portrait is a tour de force of Lawrentian painting; Lawrence was capable of seemingly effortless and dazzling brushwork, put to good use here. The portrait was commissioned by Sir Charles Cockerell, who had made his fortune in Calcutta, before returning to Britain and raising a family. In many ways, this is a very modern painting. The focus of the portrait is firmly on Sir Charles’ wife, Harriet, and her maternal role within the family. It is her gaze that meets the viewer and not that of Sir Charles, who attends to the right of the canvas, looking proudly at his youngest daughter in his wife’s lap. Lawrence always sought to animate his portraits with lively, dynamic poses and compositions, and this portrait is no different. The children are shown behaving as children really do; their son plays with a whip, and the elder daughter looks shyly at the viewer whilst the younger sister squirms on her mother’s knee. Lawrence, along with his predecessors Gainsborough and Reynolds, pioneered this new depicting childhood as a distinct stage in life, in a markedly different approach to portraitists of previous generations who often painted children as adults in miniature.
Sir Thomas LAWRENCE, P.R.A. (1769 – 1830) Portrait of a lady, c. 1801-06 oil on canvas 76 x 64 cm (29 ¾ x 25 ¼ in.) .
This exquisite portrait of an elegant, unknown lady by Sir Thomas Lawrence was painted when the artist was at the height of his powers. It exemplifies his ability to give his portraiture a lyrical dimension, achieved here through the inclusion of an evocative, nocturnal wooded landscape background seen through the velvet curtains. The composition compares closely with those of two portraits from same period: Portrait of Louisa, Lady Wheatley and Portrait of Mrs Jeffrey Prendergast. Both sitters wear the same white dress and gold necklace, and their hands and arms are arranged in the same way as in ours. In our picture the lower edge of the canvas crops the sitter’s hand, which contains a small pentiment wherein it is possible to see two positions for the lady’s left wrist. This suggests our picture might have been painted fractionally before the Wheatley one, which Kenneth Garlick dates to around 1806 (the sitter wed that year), whilst the Prendergast picture was begun in 1801. Although Lawrence never worked as a painter of pure landscapes, he worked them into the majority of his pictures as vignettes, sometimes choosing a recognizable view. He usually included a turbulent sky to add to add a sublime dimension to a painting. Whilst these conventions were relatively commonplace in British landscape of the period, Lawrence’s backgrounds are painted with a vivacity and an individual flair the like of which is perhaps found only in portraits by Gainsborough, who was, unlike Lawrence, a landscapist in his own right. We are grateful to Dr Frédéric Ogée and Dr Brian Allen for independently confirming the attribution to Sir Thomas Lawrence based on first-hand inspection.
Sir Thomas LAWRENCE, P.R.A. (1769 – 1830) Portrait of the Rt. Hon. Sylvester Douglas, Later Baron Glenbervie of Kincardine, c. 1792-93 oil on canvas 129 x 103.5 cm. (50 ¾ x 40 ½ in.)
This sensitive portrait of Sylvester Douglas, politician, diarist, and from 1800, Baron Glenbervie of Kincardine, was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence circa 1792 and exhibited the same year at the Royal Academy. Douglas is shown in a professional capacity as a barrister and King’s Counsel; his most recent case brief lies on the table, loosely bound in its traditional red ribbon. Lawrence portrays him as a man of integrity and intelligence, dedicated to his profession. Douglas served as Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1793 and 1794. From 1778 he reported Lord Mansfield’s judicial decisions in King’s Bench, published in 1783. He was elected FSA in 1781 and FRS 1795. Douglas’s progression was undoubtedly assisted by his marriage in 1789 to Catherine Anne North (1760 – 1817), eldest daughter of Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford and Prime Minister from 1770-82. In January 1800, Douglas was appointed governor to the Cape, and on 30 November the same year he was created Lord Glenbervie of Kincardine in the Irish peerage. For the next fifteen years, he was an active member of both the English and Irish parliaments, which he vividly documented in his diaries. These, together with his journals, published piecemeal in 1910 and 1928, provide a record of his aspirations and disappointments, interlaced with scandalous anecdotes, political gossip, and travel notes. After the death of his wife in 1817 and his son in 1819, Lord Glenbervie turned to literary pursuits, publishing his translation of an excerpt from the Italian poet Fortiguerri’s Ricciardetto in 1822. He died the following year at Cheltenham on 2 May 1823, whereupon his title became extinct.
Sir Joshua REYNOLDS, P.R.A. (1723 – 1792) Lady Jean Lindsay, Countess of Eglinton (1756 – 1778), 1777 oil on canvas 198.1 x 147.3 cm. (78 x 58 in.)
This luminous full-length portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of the beautiful Lady Jean Lindsay, Countess of Eglinton, is considered one of the greatest of the artist’s masterpieces remaining in private hands. Reynolds’ beautiful subject, aged twenty-one, is seated in a classical arcade with a landscape beyond, playing the harp as an allegory of Music. Lady Jean Lindsay was the eldest daughter of George Lindsay-Crawford, 21st Earl of Crawford, 5 th Earl of Lindsay. Her marriage, at sixteen, to Archibald Montgomerie, 11th Earl of Eglinton, joined two of Scotland’s most powerful families. Both the Lindsay and Eglinton families commissioned Reynolds to paint full-length versions of Lady Jean, firstly one for her husband Lord Eglinton (now Koriyama Art Museum, Japan), and then this version for her father, Lord Crawford. Both versions are recorded in his ledgers. Although the two versions are similar, the Lindsay version is noted for its superior and more confident execution. It has, furthermore, avoided the paint deterioration and over restoration often seen in other works by Reynolds. Reynolds recorded a total of eleven appointments with ‘Lady Eglinton’ in his pocketbook, the first taking place at 1 pm on 24 April and the final one at 3 pm on 11 June. During the first three sittings, which took place on 24, 29, and 30 April, Reynolds probably worked on the face, pose, and the general laying in of the composition. Two further sessions took place on 12 and 16 May, while the final six sessions took place in rapid succession on Saturday 31 May, Sunday 1 June, and on 2, 5, 10 and 11 June.
