The Yellow Boy - Lord George Seymour-Conway

The present work is a portrait of Lord George Seymour-Conway (21st July 1763- 10th March 1848), seventh son and youngest child of Francis Seymour Conway, Earl and afterwards 1st Marquess of Hertford (1718- 1794) and his wife Isabella (neé Fitzroy) (1726-1782) by the President of the Royal Academy and the master portraitist , Sir Joshua Reynolds. The present work was painted in 1770 with appointments for sittings marked in Reynolds’s pocketbook throughout the year with the work being finished on 18th August. Lord George Seymour-Conway, known as Lord George Seymour, was elected to Parliament as one of two representatives for Orford in 1784 and held the seat until 1790. He later represented Totnes between 1796 and 1801. He married Isabella Hamilton, daughter of the Rev. and Hon. George Hamilton on 20th July 1795 and died in 1848, aged 84; he was buried in St. Andrews Church in Hove, Sussex.

Following his return from Italy in the 1750s Reynolds assembled a core of patrons amongst the Whig dynastic families in Britain such as the Spencer, Cavendish, Russell, and Wentworth families. In 1757 Reynolds painted Horace Walpole (1717-1797), son of the great Whig politician Robert Walpole (1676-1745), who was widely regarded as the first de facto Prime Minister of Great Britain. Reynolds painted three copies of his portrait The Hon. Horace Walpole M.P. (1757, The Marquess of Hertford, Ragley Hall) to send a copy to publisher James McArdell so that a mezzotint could be engraved and printed for private distribution by Walpole. Walpole presented one of Reynolds copies to his first cousin Francis Seymour-Conway, Earl of Hertford. It was this portrait that brought Reynolds to the attention of the Earl of Hertford and seems to have been the trigger for a series of portrait commissions.

Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford was to become an important patron for Reynolds. He was a courtier and Tory politician who was extremely close to George III, becoming Lord of Bedchamber in 1757 and a member of the Privy Council in 1763. He served as ambassador to France and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and was Lord Chamberlain from 1766 to 1782 and from April to December 1783. For Reynolds, the Earl of Hertford’s Royal connections would have been incredibly attractive to Reynolds who had hopes of Royal patronage.

Reynolds first portrait was a painting of the Earl of Hertford’s eldest son Francis Seymour-Conway, later the 2nd Marquess Hertford, painted circa 1763. The Earl of Hertford then commissioned a portrait of his brother Henry Seymour-Conway. Reynolds’s next works were two ‘beautiful examples of portraits in Van Dyck dress’ (Christopher Martin Vogtherr, Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, 2015, p.20), the first a portrait of the Earl’s second son Henry Seymour-Conway (1746-1830) painted in 1766 and the present work painted a few years later. In 1775 Reynolds painted an untraced portrait of the Earl’s eldest daughter Anne, and between 1781 and 1784 he painted Lady Elizabeth Seymour Conway (Wallace Collection, London) and Frances, Countess of Lincoln (Wallace Collection, London), a pair of portraits of Hertford’s younger daughters. Unusually these works were conceived as a pair and remain together in the Wallace Collection. In 1785 the Earl of Hertford commissioned a portrait of himself (1785, The Marquess of Hertford, Ragley Hall). Reynolds seems to have viewed this commission as an important one as he showed the work at the 1785 Royal Academy exhibition.

The 1st Marquess’s family commissions formed the foundation of a large collection of Reynolds’s work acquired by the Marquesses of Hertford until the death of the 4th Marquess Hertford in 1870. Most of the family’s art collection was then inherited by the 4th Marquess’s illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace and now forms part of the Wallace Collection in London. The family portraits of the Seymour-Conways, except for the two portraits of Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford’s daughters Elizabeth and Frances, were included in the entailed property that reverted to the 5th Marquess at Ragley Hall.

In the present work Reynolds has depicted Lord George in the costume of the 17th century, or the Van Dyck style. Reynolds accurately recreates the bobbin lace collar, gloves and asymmetrically draped cloak seen in many works by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The vibrant yellow silk of the slashed doublet is reminiscent of Van Dyck’s portrait of young Prince Charles in his painting The Three Eldest Children of Charles I (1635/36, Royal Collection, Windsor). There are also similarities to Van Dyck’s portrait George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Lord Francis Villiers (1635, Royal Collection, Windsor). Both works could have served as direct inspiration for the present work as Van Dyck’s portrait of the Villiers brothers work had been engraved in 1752 by James McArdell and Robert Strange included the engraving of The Three Eldest Children of Charles I in his Descriptive which would have been readily available to Reynolds as source material. Additionally, both paintings appear in the background of fellow Royal Academician Johann Joseph Zoffany’s (1733-1810) painting George, Prince of Wales, and Frederick, later Duke of York, at Buckingham House (1765, Royal Collection, Windsor), painted only a few years before the present work. Thomas Jeffrey’s A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Ancient and Modern, particularly after the Designs of Holbein, Vandyck, Hollar and others, 1757 and 1772, was also another likely source material.

The Van Dyck style was very popular for portraits painted in the 18th century. Many writers from the latter part of the eighteenth century saw Van Dyck as one of the founders of English portrait painting. Van Dyck’s work spanned the gap between the work of Old Masters such as Titian and Rubens and the modern work of Reynolds and his contemporaries. Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1667-1745), an artist by whom Reynolds set much store, extolled the virtues of Van Dyck’s work. Richardson had served as tutor to Thomas Hudson who in turn was tutor to Reynolds as well as Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) and Richard Cosway (1742-1821). Susan Sloman describes Van Dyck’s dress as ‘a form of fancy dress, often designed for use at masquerade balls, and popularly worn for portraits’ (Susan Sloman, Van Dyck and Britain, 2009, p. 206). Aileen Ribero notes that ‘there are a number of references in the 1760s and 1770s to boys and young men adopting the Van Dyck dress as a kind of informal costume; the long, naturally arranged hair worn by boys in the period was not dissimilar to the hairstyles worn by Van Dyck’s male sitters in the 1620s and 1630s. It was also an artistic convention for sitters to be painted in this costume, and it is impossible to be sure if this is a real suit or a studio prop’ (Aileen Ribeiro, ‘Hussars in Masquerade’, Apollo, CVI, February 1977, pp.111-16).

There were various reasons for a patron to commission in a Van Dyck dress; for some patrons commissioning a family portrait, the use of Van Dyck dress emphasised a sense of dynastic prestige. In 1757, the artist John Astley (1724-1787) painted The Family of Marcus Beresford, Earl of Tyrone which emulated works such as Van Dyck’s The Pembroke Family Group and similar family portraits of great aristocratic families of Charles I’s court. As the first Earl of Tyrone, it is likely Beresford wanted to establish a visual reference to the family portraits of great aristocratic families such as the Earls of Pembroke.

For some patrons, new commissions in the Van Dyck style were chosen to complement existing works by Van Dyck in their own collections. Several of Joshua Reynolds portraits in the Van Dyck style referenced Van Dyck works in the sitter’s family collections. Circa 1766, The Marquess of Rockingham commissioned Reynolds to paint Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke (c.1766, Fitzwilliam Collection, Cambridge); the work was never completed, but the composition of the portrait refers to a portrait Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, with Sir Philip Mainwaring (c.1637-40, The Trustees of the Rt Hon. Olive Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels settlement) which was in Rockingham’s possession. Reynolds portrait of George John, Lord Althorp (1774, Althorp), in which the sitter was painted in a grey Van Dyck costume, was intended to hang alongside the Spencer family’s portrait of George, Lord Digby, later 2nd Earl of Bristol, with William Lord Russell, later 5th Earl of Bedford (c.1635, Althorp) by Van Dyck at Althorp.

The use of Van Dyck dress not only served to elevate the standing of the sitter but also the artist. Sloman states ‘Reynolds work regularly invited comparison with Van Dyck. His knighthood, which resulted from his appointment as first president of the Royal Academy in 1769, placed him in a position of social privilege and further encouraged the view that he was Van Dyck’s natural successor’ (Susan Sloman, Van Dyck & Britain, 2009, p. 215). In the increasing artistic criticism of the 1770s and 1780s Van Dyck was often used as a marker against which contemporary works of art were judged.

The use of Van Dyck dress was particularly popular with patrons and artists in the 1760s and 1770s, but it remained in use in the following decades. In his seventh Discourse, delivered in December 1776, Reynolds commented critically on how common the trend had been ‘a few years ago’. Reynolds also stated that in using Van Dyck dress ‘very ordinary pictures acquired something of the air and effect of the works of Van Dyck, and appeared at first sight to be better picture than they really were’. These comments may have been directed at his rival Thomas Gainsborough whose portrait The Blue Boy (Jonathan Buttall) (c.1770, The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California) had received particularly positive reviews from contemporaries such as Mary Moser and Francis Hayman. Michael Rosenthal speculates that perhaps Reynolds, ‘alerted to Gainsborough’s plans to re-exhibit in 1777, was getting in a pre-emptive strike by implicitly belittling a portrait generally regarded as exceptional’ (Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough, 1999, p. 86).

Despite Reynolds’s criticism of the use of the Van Dyck style, he continued to employ the use of Van Dyck costume throughout the decade. His work George Huddesford and John Bampfylde (c. 1778, Tate, London) depicts both sitters in Van Dyck dress and recalls the Renaissance friendship portrait and several double portraits by Van Dyck such as Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, with Sir Philip Mainwaring. This was a particularly personal work as George Huddesford (1749-1809) had attended the Royal Academy Schools and been a pupil of Reynolds. John Bampfylde (1754-c. 1796) was a poet and amateur musician who was enamoured with Reynolds’s niece Mary Palmer (1750-1820), who was living with Reynolds in Leicester Square at the time. Bampfylde dedicated his work Sixteen Sonnets to her. The use of the Van Dyck style in more personal works demonstrates the value the style held for Reynolds and its importance in consolidating his position as a leading artist in England at the time. As Susan Sloman comments, ‘throughout their rivalry in the 1770s and 1780s both Reynolds and Gainsborough played on their indebtedness to van Dyck, knowing that their artistic quotations would be appreciated by the most discerning of their clients and by an increasingly well-educated exhibition-going public.’ (Susan Sloman, Van Dyck & Britain, 2009, p. 228).

The present work sits within a genre of portraits by Reynolds of the children of members of English society in historical dress. As well as portraits such as Master Thomas Lister (The Brown Boy) (1752-1764, Bradford City Art Galleries), Charles, Earl of Dalkeith (The Pink Boy) (1777, Bowhill House) and George John, Lord Althorp, Reynolds also painted portraits in historical costume from other eras. Perhaps the most well-known work is his painting of Master Crewe as Henry VIII (c. 1775, Private collection). Tudor costume, like Van Dyck dress, was a popular costume at society masquerades. Horace Walpole remarked of a masquerade in 1770 that he was surrounded by ‘a crowd of Henry the Eighths, Wolseleys, Vandycks, and Harlequins, (Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. vol. 23, New Haven and London, 1937-1983, p. 193).

The present work is an excellent example of Reynolds skill in capturing the likeness of children and is described by Vogtherr as ‘a particularly insightful exploration of the personality of a young boy’ (Christopher Martin Vogtherr, Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, 2015, p.20). Reynolds’s paintings of children often focussed on capturing the nature of a child, focussing on their childish high spirits and their pursuits. Horace Walpole commented on Reynolds depiction of John Crewe stating ‘Is there not humour and satire in Sir Joshua’s reducing Holbein’s swaggering and colossal haughtiness of Henry 8th. to the boyish jollity of master Crewe?’ (Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 5 vols., London, 1782, p. ix, n.). However, portraits of children posed a difficulty for Reynolds for their nature: their humour, curiosity, and directness, was at odds with the dignified attitude of the Grand or Historical style Reynolds had been developing through the preceding decades.

Reynolds was, in the 1760s and 1770s experimenting with an ‘Historical Style’ of portraiture in which sitters, primarily women, were painted within an antique, pastoral setting and in costume influenced by classical sculpture avoiding specific reference to modern fashions. In his Discourse V given in 1772, Reynolds stated ‘When a portrait is painted in the Historical Style, as it is neither an exact minute representation of an individual, nor completely ideal, every circumstance ought to correspond to this mixture. The simplicity of the antique air and attitude, however, much to be admired, is ridiculous when joined to a figure in modern dress’ (Sir Joshua Reynolds Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark, London, 1975, p.88). This style is most clearly seen in his full-length portraits such as Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll (1759, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) in which the sitter is placed in a landscape, leaning upon a block of classical sculpture dressed in a classical style of costume.

Reynolds’s portraits of children never attempted to emulate the classical grace he sought to recreate in his portraits of adults. However, the reference to Old Masters and preceding artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck introduced a sense of timeless grandeur Reynolds felt required in great paintings. Reynolds’s portrait of Master John Crewe as Henry VIII depicts John Crewe in a simple forward-facing pose, the companion piece, Miss Frances Crewe (1775, Private collection) also shows the sitter in the same forward-facing, direct pose; there is no contrived attitude that would be unnatural in a child. The same simple pose is used again in Reynolds’s portrait Lady Caroline Scott as ‘Winter’ (1777, The Collection of the Duke of Buccleuch). Master John Crewe as Henry VIII demonstrates Reynolds careful consideration of the character of the sitter, as Desmond Shawe-Taylor comments, John Crewe ‘is engaged in a splendid dressing-up game taking place in Reynolds studio: we see his ordinary coat discarded on the stool behind, he laughs in triumph at his new disguise, while a puppy, incredulous at the transformation, sniffs to make sure’ (Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians: Eighteenth Century Portraiture and Society, 1990, London, p. 216). Reynolds’s biographer Northcote describes how Reynolds ‘used to romp and play’ with the children sitting for his portraits, and how he would ‘talk to them in their own way; and whilst all the was going on, he actually snatched those exquisite touches of expression which make his portraits of children so captivating’ (Ernest Fletcher, Conversations with James Northcote R.A. with James Ward on Art and Artists, London, 1901, p.78).

By the 1770s Reynolds had become well known for his mastery in capturing the innocence and simplicity in his child portraiture, becoming popular amongst ‘Great families who rejoiced to see their broods depicted with ineffable poignancy, innocence and natural grace were regaled with a fresh variation on the them’ (John Chu, ‘Joshua Reynolds and Fancy Painting in the 1770s’, Martin Postle et al. Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, 2005, London, p.94). Perhaps Reynolds’s most successful family portrait was The Marlborough Family (c. 1777-1778, Blenheim Palace). This work captures a range of human characteristics, managing to balance the idea of family prestige and the sentimental. Reynolds manages this by splitting the composition into three connected groups. On the left the Duke is shown seated with his hand resting on his eldest son, George, Marquess of Blandford. Both are depicted as dignified connoisseurs; the Marquess holds a morocco case containing the Duke’s collection of gems. In the centre Caroline, Duchess of Marlborough stands in an elegant attitude similar to that of the female sitters in Reynolds full-length portraits of the Historical style. On the right stand the Duke and Duchess’s five younger children. These children are depicted as playful, excited, and frightened; the animation of this group is further exaggerated by the inclusion of the family’s dogs who play at their feet.

Reynolds’s reputation for creating popular paintings of children was furthered by his series of ‘fancy pictures’; genre works of individual children such as The Strawberry Girl (c.1773, The Wallace Collection, London) often published as engravings. These fancy paintings were not commissioned works but were painted with collectors in mind. They were designed to sit alongside Old Master paintings on the walls of collectors such as the Duke of Dorset and referenced paintings of children by Rembrandt (1606-1669), Bartolomé Murillo (1617-1682), and Antonio da Correggio (1489-1534). These paintings allowed Reynolds to experiment with techniques and themes that would not have been suitable for portrait commissions.

Reynolds was at the forefront of a revolution in the way portrait painting was viewed in the 18th century. In the first half of the 18th artists such as Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) and Peter Lely (1618-1680) were valued most highly. Reynolds himself claimed that in his youth ‘a man who placed Van Dyck above Kneller would have been scoffed at’ there are even tales of peri wigs being added to van Dyck portraits to make them more contemporary. The work of Reynolds and his contemporaries such as Thomas Gainsborough brought portraiture into a new age. Horace Walpole stated that it was Reynolds himself who ‘ransomed portrait painting from insipidity’ (James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Vol. II, 1819, p.305). Reynolds had set about casting ‘the privileged members of society into impressive roles, more varied and more convincing than any which they could have proposed for themselves’ (Nicholas Penny et al., Reynolds, 1986, p.17). Reynolds’s portraits elevated the status and public image of actors, military and naval heroes and celebrities raising them to similar heights in the public eye as members of the royal family and aristocracy.

The art market in London was thriving in London, Britain was becoming a centre for European print making and the demand for fine mezzotints and line engravings of portraits was especially high. Additionally, British society was increasingly interested in celebrities and celebrity gossip. Portraits of the famous and infamous of the day created an expanding market in engravings of portraits which were reproduced for all tastes from the crudest woodcuts included on broadsheets to the finest mezzotints produced for a collector’s market. The present work was itself reproduced in a very fine mezzotint by Edward Fisher in 1771 (1771, National Portrait Gallery, London). Edward Fisher was often used by Reynolds for the reproduction of his works and who held him in high regard even though Reynolds described him as ‘“injudiciously exact”, for finishing too highly what this painter considered to the unimportant parts of the plate’ (Chaloner Smith, British Mezzotinto Portraits…, vol. 2, 1883, p. 486). The print market was essential for the dispersal of an artist’s work and to the creation of their reputation and popularity. Tim Clayton states that no ‘contemporary painter’s work was as well represented by prints, nor arguably by such good quality examples, as Reynolds’ (Tim Clayton, ‘Figure of Fame: Reynolds and the Printed Image’, Martin Postle et al. Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, 2005, London, p.49).

The present work was painted in the years following Reynolds knighthood and appointment as the first president of the Royal Academy. He was working at the height of the British art world and accomplishing his ambition to be among the very best. Reynolds’s ambitions had brought him far; he was born in Plympton, Devon on the 16th July 1723, the third son and seventh child of Rev. Samuel Reynolds. The family had no artistic connections but his father, who worked as master of the Free Grammar School at Plympton, encouraged his drawing and painting from a young age. Reynolds’s father had originally intended for his son to be apprenticed to an apothecary, however, Reynolds had greater ambitions.

In 1740 Reynolds was apprenticed to Devon born portrait painter Thomas Hudson. Reynolds travelled to London to refine his painting technique drawing from plaster casts and live models. Following Jean-Baptiste Van Loo’s return to France in 1742, Hudson became regarded as the greatest portrait painter in Britain. A disagreement abruptly terminated Reynolds apprenticeship with Hudson in 1743, the quarrel was soon forgotten but Reynolds did not resume his apprenticeship and instead started out as an independent portrait artist dividing his time between Plymouth Dock and London. During the 1740s Reynolds’s patrons were mostly local gentry and naval officers, though his network of patrons gradually expanded. One such patron was Captain John Hamilton who sat for Reynolds on three occasions. Hamilton introduced Reynolds to Richard Eliot and his family who were to become important patrons and collectors of Reynolds’s work. In 1746 the Eliot’s commissioned The Eliot Family (1746, The Eliot Family), a family portrait inspired by Van Dyck’s portrait of the Pembroke Family. As with much of his portraiture, this work captures the characters of Reynolds sitters, and he demonstrates the playfulness of his child sitters that was to become so popular in his later career.

In 1747 Reynolds took a studio in St Martin’s Lane in London and was listed as one of the ‘Painters of our own nation now living, many of whom have distinguished themselves by their performances, and who are justly deemed eminent masters’. In 1749 Reynolds was offered passage to Rome aboard the Hon. Augustus Keppel’s ship. While abroad in Italy Reynolds studied the Old Masters and made sketches of his fellow Grand Tourists, art dealers and painters. He left Rome for Naples, Assisi, Perugia, Arezzo, and Florence in 1752 and briefly visited Paris on his to London in October 1752. Works such as his portrait Augustus, 1st Viscount Keppel (1752-3, National Maritime Museum, London) demonstrate the influence his studies abroad had on his work. The heroic stance of the naval officer was based upon the classical sculptures he had seen, and the colour palette of this work show the influence of Renaissance artists such as Tintoretto. By the mid-1750s Reynolds’s portrait practice was flourishing and Reynolds was finding patrons amongst the elite of London society. His paintings were routinely engraved by the best copper engravers in London amplifying the dispersal and popularity of his work.

In 1760 Reynolds relocated to Leicester Square and took part in the first annual exhibition of the Society of Artists. Reynolds exhibited five paintings and would continue to show works throughout the decade. In 1768 the society formed the Royal Academy and Reynolds accepted the Presidency. Reynolds was knighted by George III on 21st April 1769.

Reynolds exhibited over one hundred paintings during the 1770s, he produced mostly portraits, but he painted some history paintings such as Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon (1770-3, Knole, National Trust Collections). By the late 1770s Reynolds had firmly established himself as one of the greatest portrait painters in England alongside figures such as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), George Romney (1734-1802), and Allan Ramsay (1713-1784).

In 1780 the Royal Academy held its first exhibition at the newly completed Somerset House and in 1784 Reynolds was sworn in as Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King following the death of Allan Ramsay. Reynolds had threatened to resign his Presidency of the Royal Academy had he not been appointed to the post; he had been insulted by the length of time it took to appoint him and was outraged to discover his stipend was less than the King’s rat catcher. Between 1784 and 1790 Reynolds exhibited ninety-six works boosting both the Academy’s profile and his own. In 1789, due to failing eyesight he was forced to give up his practice; he had suffered a stroke in 1782 and though he had recovered his health he had been in decline ever since. Reynolds died 23rd February 1792 and was buried with great pomp in St Paul’s Cathedral on 3rd March 1792.

Reynolds’s personal ambition had elevated him from humble beginnings in Devon as the painter of local gentry to the centre of British society. He used his considerable skill to promote the status and celebrity of his many sitters and which in turn increased his own social standing. Reynolds had deliberately set out to rival the work of artists such as Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck and had elevated British portraiture to new heights.