This magnificent portrait was painted in Rome in 1784 and it must be considered among the masterpieces of Batoni’s late portraiture. It is a picture of particular poignancy, for not only does it have the distinction of being the last full-length portrait that Batoni was to paint of an English sitter, patrons who had provided him with the most important section of his clientele in Rome for over thirty years, it was also to be the very last that he painted in his career, for within three years of its completion he had died.

The sitter, Thomas Giffard, was the eldest son of Thomas Peter Giffard (1735 – 1776) of Chillington Hall in Staffordshire and his second wife Barbara (1737 – 1764), daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton 4th Bt. (1702 – 1791), and his second wife Catherine Collingwood.[i] This portrait was commissioned in Rome during Giffard’s brief Grand Tour in 1784, when he was just twenty years old, and was much the most important and ambitious commission he made during its course. Described by the great Batoni scholar Anthony Clark as ‘among the most beautiful of all Batoni portraits’,[ii] this portrayal of a young recusant Catholic ‘Milord’ posing for posterity beside the symbols of ancient Rome has few equals in the later part of Batoni’s long and successful career. It has, moreover, passed by unbroken family descent 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.

Thomas Giffard (1764 – 1823) and the Grand Tour of 1784:

Thomas Giffard was the scion of one of the oldest Catholic families in England, whose remarkable unbroken pedigree stretches all the way back to the Norman Conquest, and who have held their family seat at Chillington since 1178.[iii] At this period in the mid-to-late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries they formed part of a close-knit circle of leading aristocratic and upper-class Catholic families, such as the Petres, the Stonors, the Jerninghams and especially the Throckmortons, to whom they were closely related by marriage. In the lifetime of Thomas’s father Thomas Peter in particular, the Giffard family had enjoyed a significant increase in both wealth and social status,[iv] and his expansion of Chillington and undertaking of the Grand Tour reflected this. It was common in the pre-Emancipation era for the children of English Catholic families to be educated abroad and Thomas Giffard duly received his schooling at the English College Seminary in Douai in France around 1776. To complete his education, as was appropriate to a wealthy young heir of his rank, and like his father before him, he undertook his Grand Tour in the company of his tutor Father Charles Berington (1748 – 1798), a Catholic priest, and later Bishop and Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. Probably starting in the autumn of 1783, together they visited France, Germany and Italy, travelling south via Spa, Dusseldorf and Munich, which they reached by November,[v] later going on and arriving in Rome by the early spring of 1784. They returned home in the early summer of the same year, arriving in Milan in June, and reaching Lyon by 14 July.

We know frustratingly few details of Giffard’s sojourn in Rome, but he no doubt followed in the footsteps of his father and other Catholic visitors who had recently been to Rome, such as his new brother-in-law Sir John Courtenay Throckmorton (1753 – 1819) and his brother George (1754 – 1826) in 1774-75, and his friend Charles Jerningham (1749 – 1814) in 1777-78. In March of 1784 both Giffard and Berington followed one of the popular courses in antiquities led by the Scottish antiquarian James Byres (1734 – 1817), a staunch Catholic from an Aberdonian Jacobite family who had spent nearly thirty years in Rome as a student of painting and architecture.[vi] As a dealer in antiquities and paintings, and as an antiquarian guide or cicerone to visiting British tourists, Byres had established a high reputation in Rome, second only to his fellow antiquarian Thomas Jenkins (c. 1722 – 1798). The painter Thomas Jones (1742 – 1803) described Jenkins as a man ‘who for years had the guidance of the Taste and Expenditures of our English Cavaliers, and from whose hands all bounties were to flow’.[vii] Accounts of Byres and his exhaustive teaching methods (a tour could last six weeks or more) are plentiful; only a few years before in 1781, for example, Thomas Clarke described him as an ‘intelligent man, tho’ a very disagreeable one’ and wrote sarcastically that ‘if a Man wants to be au fait with every triglyph & modillion in Rome, he is your man’.[viii] On this occasion Byres’s tour lasted five weeks from the 4 March to 7 April. Giffard and his tutor were accompanied by Jonas Langford Brooke (c. 1758 – 1784) of Mere in Cheshire and his companion Dr. John Parkinson (1754 – 1840), together with Brooke’s old friend from Oxford Sir James Graham, Bt. (1761 – 1824) and his tutor the Reverend Thomas Brand (c. 1754 – 1814). In a letter of 26 March 1784, Brand described Giffard and Charles Berington as ‘English Catholics’ and the latter he described as ‘his [Giffard’s] tutor Chaplain Priest & even a Doctor of the Sorbonne … a plain sensible good sort of man.’[ix] On 10 May, perhaps at the invitation of James Byres, they met the Misses Mary and Agnes Berry, the daughters of Robert Berry, at an evening reception at the Villa Madama, and they must have left Rome for Milan not long after.[x] Beyond this, little information survives as to Thomas Giffard’s personal life and activities in Rome, but it was during this period that he must have sat to Batoni, and additionally commissioned a marble bust by the Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson (c. 1737 – 1798), one of the finest neoclassical sculptors in Rome and an important member of the Anglo-Roman community there.[xi]

Pompeo Batoni and the Commission:

Thomas Giffard’s choice of Pompeo Batoni to paint his likeness does not come as a surprise, for his late father Thomas Peter Giffard had already sat to him some sixteen years earlier in 1766, for a half-length portrait which remains at Chillington, and he may well have wished to maintain this family tradition.[xii] His brother-in-law Robert Courtenay Throckmorton (1750 – 1779) of Coughton Court in Warwickshire, had also sat to Batoni in 1772, and the relations between the two families were very close. There can be little doubt that James Byres, who maintained close links with Batoni and his studio, would have encouraged if not instigated such a commission.

It was, without question, by far the most significant of Giffard’s acts of patronage during his stay in Rome. And there can be no doubt at all that the young Grand Tourist was engaging the services of the most celebrated and brilliant painter of all the international visitors to Rome in the second half of the eighteenth century.[xiii] Batoni had established his reputation in the 1730s and 1740s with his superb religious and mythological canvases, but he won his greatest renown for his portraiture, numbering among his Continental patrons alone two Emperors (Francis I and Joseph II), two Popes (Clement XIII and Pius VI), two Grand Dukes (Leopold of Tuscany and Paul of Russia), as well the Dukes of Württemberg and Braunschweig, and he had, of course, become the painter of choice for the visiting British and Irish royalty, nobility and gentry. He was in addition the curator of the papal collections and had been knighted by the Pope. His house was a social and intellectual centre, and he counted both the art historian and archaeologist Johann Winckelmann and the painter Anton Raphael Mengs among his friends. With the departure of the latter to Madrid in 1761 Batoni’s pre-eminence as the most important and famous painter of his day in Rome was assured. 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’.[xiv] The explorer James Bruce, who sat to Batoni in 1762, declared him ‘the best painter in Italy’, while the hostess and poet Anna, Lady Miller stated that ‘[he was] esteemed the best painter in the world’.

Giffard is depicted standing at the foot of a colonnaded staircase, between whose pillars can be glimpsed a distant landscape. 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 motif commonly used by Batoni for many of his portraits of British sitters. The young English ‘milord’ is portrayed wearing a light summer suit of lavender silk, cut long and narrow over a waistcoat of pale yellow,[xv] typical of the plainer style and informality of English male fashion in the 1770s and 1780s.[xvi] Just as the use of plain linen – in contrast to the trimming and surface decoration typical of earlier in the century – emphasised this trend, so unpowdered hair now replaced the formal wig or dressed hairstyles of the earlier period. A comparison with Batoni’s elegant portrait of Giffard’s father, painted in 1765-66, perfectly illustrates this change of fashion.[xvii] As Bowron writes of the present portrait: ‘The costume is a fine example of the elegant simplicity of English male dress in the decade before the French Revolution … when new emphasis was placed in the quality of the tailoring. Batoni responds to this new style in dress with an elongation of form and a simplicity of flowing line…’ [xviii]

The vase beneath which Thomas Giffard leans is closely based upon the Medici Vase, a Greek vase of the 1st Century AD, formerly a famous attraction in the Villa Medici in Rome, and later moved to Florence in 1780 where it was displayed in the Uffizi. Carved with the story of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Medici vase was, together with the Borghese Vase, one of the most famous and revered vases of classical antiquity.[xix] Celebrated antique pieces such as this were regularly used by Batoni in his portraits as memoirs and symbols of ancient Rome and, naturally, to underline the classical erudition of his sitters. It also appears, for example, in another late full-length of 1773 depicting John Chetwynd Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot (1749 – 1793) today in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.[xx] Unlike that depicted in the Talbot portrait, however, the Medici vase in the present portrait is unusually inaccurate in its details, most notably in the changes to the seated figure of Iphigenia and to that of Achilles(?) standing to her left.

The Giffard full-length has always been regarded as one of the finest of this last phase of Batoni’s career. Of its place in his work at this date Ellis Waterhouse wrote that ‘[of the portraits of] … handsome young milordi on the Grand Tour … the handsomest of all, the Thomas Giffard of 1784 … (one of the latest pictures in the exhibition, and of a young man who dressed quite soberly) is the most memorable example’.[xxi] Anthony Clark regarded it as ‘magnificent’ and one of the finest works of Batoni’s entire career:

‘The inspired full-length Thomas Giffard of 1784 is among the most beautiful of all Batoni portraits ... Giffard, whose face in the Batoni resembles that of the Barberini Faun, apparently was only normally handsome and had rather brutal features; in Batoni’s hands he becomes as beautiful as an angel, yet his young male beauty is totally believable and moving’.[xxii]

This was, however, to be Batoni’s last portrait of a British sitter, and indeed was the last full-length of any sitter that he was to paint. After 1780 there had been a marked reduction in the frequency of portraits as well as other works in his oeuvre. Indeed, there are only two other similarly grand late full-lengths with which the present portrait can be compared. These are the portraits of Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville painted in 1778 and today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and that of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 5th Earl of Shaftesbury at St. Giles House, Dorset, painted only two years before in 1782, and the only other full-length of an English sitter painted by Batoni after 1780. The contrast between the portrait of Lord de Dunstanville and the later style employed for the two later portraits, with their calmer tonality and greater simplicity, is readily discernible. The new directness of these likenesses is accentuated by the looser handling of paint and the comparative lack of finish, although their design remains entirely typical. Thomas Giffard’s pose here, with his hat and cane and his elbow resting upon the pedestal at the end of a staircase, upon which sits the Medici Vase, and the spaniel beside him, are all elements which recall Batoni’s earlier portrait of John Chetwynd Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot painted in 1773 and now in the Getty Museum.

Batoni’s diminished production of full-length portraits in his later years was undoubtedly a reflection of his preoccupation with the largest commission of his late career, the production of the seven large altarpieces commissioned by Mary I of Braganza, Queen of Portugal (reg. 1777 – 1816) for the Basilica of the Estrêla in Lisbon, begun in 1780 and the last of which would not be finished before 1786.[xxiii] By this time he painted this portrait Batoni was seventy-six years old, and the unceasing demand of these and other commissions took a mounting toll upon his health and must have required increasing assistance from his assistants. Clark, for example, suggested that the architectural surroundings and distant vista in the present 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.[xxiv] The increasing popularity among his British patrons of Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807), who had returned to Rome in 1781, may also have represented a serious challenge for smaller portrait commissions. Among the group who had attended James Byres’s tour, for example, Sir James Graham and the Reverend Thomas Brand both sat to Kauffman in December 1784.[xxv] When Batoni died in 1787, however, his position as the most famous Italian painter of his day remained unchallenged and his portraits universally acknowledged as ‘among the most memorable artistic accomplishments of the age’.[xxvi]

Giffard’s return to England and improvements at Chillington:

Upon his return to England from his Grand Tour, and having now come of age and into his fortune, Thomas Giffard embarked upon a life of great extravagance. It is difficult to form an accurate picture of him at this time. He is often described merely as a ‘young dandy’, but Wingfield-Stratford also writes of him as ‘A friend of the Prince Regent’ and ‘A man of the highest culture, speaking several languages.’ [xxvii]As a Roman Catholic he was, of course, barred by the penal laws from holding public office, and freed from the burdens and expense of such he was clearly drawn to the world of artistic patronage. He promptly set about finishing the improvements to Chillington begun by his father Thomas Peter in the 1760s.

Thomas’s father had died unexpectedly in 1771 at the young age of forty-one and thus his son had inherited the house at the age of just twelve. His father had already completed the improvement of the park by Capability Brown in the 1760s, replacing the old village of Chillington with a 66-acre stretch of water. His plans for a new house designed by Robert Adam were, however, brought to an end by his premature death. In the late 1780s, therefore, Thomas brought in the young John Soane (1753 – 1837), later one of the most pre-eminent architects of his era, for whom Chillington was his first major country house project. He may have been introduced to Soane through his friend and fellow Catholic Charles Jerningham who had also been in Rome in 1777-78 and again in 1790, and whose brother Sir William Jerningham had recently employed Soane at Costessey in Norfolk in 1784. In 1786 Soane replaced the old Tudor buildings with the new North and East fronts seen today, introducing the great light-filled axis running from the entrance portico through to the canopied saloon. The ranges built by Smith of Warwick in 1724 for Thomas’s grandfather were, however, preserved and incorporated into the new structure. Such improvements naturally came at a considerable cost, and the repercussions were to be felt in more than one way. The expense of the rebuilding had left little funds for decoration, and the interiors of Chillington remained incomplete. The highly eccentric politician and gossip George Selwyn (1719 – 1791) is reported to have described Thomas Giffard as a man ‘of large patrimony which he was rapidly dissipating’.[xxviii] A temporary restoration of his fortunes as well as the completion of Soane’s works at Chillington were enabled by Giffard’s marriage in 1788 to Lady Charlotte Courtenay (1764 – 1844), the daughter of William Courtenay, 2nd Viscount Courtenay (1742 – 1788) of Powderham Castle in Devon.[xxix] A magnificent armorial painted marriage bed attributed to George Brookshaw was commissioned for the occasion, and still remains at Chillington. By her, Thomas had two surviving sons, Thomas William (1789 – 1861) and Walter Peter (1796 – 1877), and a daughter, Louisa (1807 – 1879). Sadly, neither son would follow his father on a Grand Tour. Despite the marriage, by 1790 Giffard’s finances were again in trouble. In later life his ceaseless preoccupation with his debts kept him at a distance from the great Catholic debates raging at the time, in which his Throckmorton relatives and his former tutor Bishop Berington were deeply involved. Although Thomas lived and died a Catholic and Chillington was preserved in the family, as Doyle has observed, his marriage to his protestant wife Charlotte effectively began the slow process whereby the Giffard family ceased to be Catholic and conformed to the Church of England, an event which ‘weakened their ties with Catholicism and brought to an end the family’s influence within the Anglo Catholic community.’[xxx]

[i] Thomas Peter Giffard and Barbara Throckmorton were married in St. George’s, Hanover Square, in London on 13 June 1763, but she died on 17 May the following year, presumably on account of giving birth to their son only nine days previously.

[ii] Clark 1981, p. 116.

[iii] The Giffards are, together with the Dymokes in Lincolnshire, the family whose has owned its estate in England the longest.

[iv] Thomas Peter had married the Hon. Barbara Petre (d. 1762), the daughter of Robert, 8th Baron Petre as his first wife.

[v] P.J. Doyle, The Giffards of Chillington, a catholic landed family 1642 – 1861, Durham Theses, Durham University, 1968. (http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/9887/), p. 184, records a letter, probably written by the Abbé Hook, the traveling companion of Thomas Peter Giffard, dated 10 November 1783 and addressed to Thomas Giffard ‘gentilhomme anglaise, en Allemagne à Munich’

[vi] See B. Ford, ‘James Byres, Principal Antiquarian for the English Visitors to Rome’, Apollo XCIX, June 1974, pp. 446-461.

[vii] Memoirs p. 94, cited by Ford 1974, p. 446.

[viii] Letters of 16 December 1781 and 23 May 1782, cited by Ingamells 1997, pp. 170, 172, n.17.

[ix] Brand Letters Mss, cited by Ingamells 1997, p. 400.

[x] Lady Theresa Lewis, Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, 2 vols. 1866, vol. I, p. 117. Cited by Ingamells 1997 p. 400. Robert Berry (d.1797) a merchant from Fife, whose wife had died when his children were very young, took his daughters – described by a contemporary in Italy as ‘very pretty English girls’ - twice to Italy, between 1783-4 and later in 1790-1.

[xi] The bust is inscribed and dated Christopherus Hewetson Fecit 1784. See T. Hodgkinson, ‘Christopher Hewetson, an Irish Sculptor in Rome’, Walpole Society 34, 1952-54, p. 49, plate XVIII, D, and B. de Breffny, Christopher Hewetson: Biographical Notice and Preliminary Catalogue Raisonné’, Irish Arts Review 3, 1986, no. 3, p. 56, no. 7, reproduced plate XVIIId. Hewetson made several portrait busts of Pope Clement XIV, and numbered several artists among his sitters, including Anton Raphael Mengs and Gavin Hamilton. Thomas’s brother-in-law, Sir John Throckmorton 5th Bt. (1753 – 1819) the husband of his half-sister Maria, is presumed to be the subject of a bust by Hewetson, a commission completed after the sculptor’s death by Christopher Prosperi in 1800.

[xii] Bowron 2016, I, p. 361, cat. no. 298, reproduced.

[xiii] He was also und undoubtedly the most expensive. By 1780 Batoni’s price for a full-length had risen to 200 scudi. This was roughly the equivalent of £50, yet in London Joshua Reynolds was then charging four times as much. In a letter to Lord Arundell in 1774 Father John Thorpe had complained that ‘Pompeo works only for those who pay him most’ and kept raising his prices nonetheless.

[xiv] Cited by K. Christiansen in Notable Acquisitions 1982-3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (P. De Montebello ed.), New York 1983, pp. 39-40.

[xv] Bowron observes that this particular colour combination had been made fashionable by the fencing master and memoirist Henry Angelo (1756-1835) for his attendance at court in 1775.

[xvi] See Aileen Ribeiro, ‘Batoni’s use of costume’, in Pompeo Batoni (1708-87) and his British Patrons, exhibition catalogue, London, Kenwood House, 1982, p. 21.

[xvii] Bowron 2016, I, p. 361, no. 298, reproduced.

[xviii] Bowron 2016, p. 194.

[xix] See, for example, J. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500 – 1900, New Haven and London 1980, p. 316, no. 82, reproduced fig. 167.

[xx] Bowron 2016, pp. 471-2, no. 376, reproduced.

[xxi] Waterhouse

[xxii] Clark 1981, p. 116.

[xxiii] See Bowron 2016, pp. 568-9, catalogue numbers 403, 461, 462, 465, 470 and 479-80.

[xxiv] See Clark 1981, p. 116: ‘… the architectural surroundings and view are a studio assistant’s work over Batoni’s brief indications.’ Bowron and Kerber 2007, p. 189, n.60, suggest that the Giffard portrait ‘appears to have been painted with studio assistance’, as well as that of the Earl of Shaftesbury which they regard as having been ‘completed with considerable workshop assistance’. They consider the Prado portrait of Lord de Dunstanville to be ‘the last portrait of this size to have been painted entirely by the artist himself’.

[xxv] Lady Victoria and Dr. G.C. Williamson, Angelika Kauffmann R.A., Her life and Her Works, New York 1976, p. 144. John Parkinson had earlier visited Batoni’s studio in February or March 1784, but complained of the smell, and declared that ‘it was impossible to remain in it for any time’.

[xxvi] C. Saumarez-Smith, in the introduction to Bowron and Kerber 2007.

[xxvii] Wingfield-Stratford 1956, p. 181. Annotations supplied by T.A.W. Giffard.

[xxviii] Doyle 1968, p. 226 n.2. Cited by Dean 1999, p. 82.

[xxix] The couple were married by special licence at the Courtenay House in Grosvenor Square in London on the 23rd June.

[xxx] Doyle 1968, p. 233.