Dickinson's Summer Exhibition

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 so-called 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.

The exhibition is open Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 5:30pm, or by appointment. We look forward to welcoming you to Dickinson this summer.