CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 64
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The collection formed by the 4th Earl of Darnley and his Picture Gallery at Cobham Hall, Kent
close to his heart, such as Catholic emancipation
and electoral reform. For the most part, however, he
devoted his life to spending his considerable inherited
wealth on making further improvements at Cobham
and on his art collection. This wealth derived chiefly
from his extensive estates, in County Meath as well as
in Kent, but since these did not yield mineral resources,
he was in no position, unlike many of his fellow
aristocrats, to exploit them for industry. Not all of his
contemporaries warmed to his personality: the sculptor
Richard Westmacott, for example, reported him to be
“very proud, with the high notions of the Old Nobility
… The manner of Lord Darnley is uniform, cold, &
reserved.”19 On the other hand, on a visit to Cobham
in 1827, Prince Pückler-Muskau (admittedly a fellow
aristocrat) wrote that his hosts “are extraordinarily
enlightened and unpretentious and are among the
most pleasant of all people of rank here … He is
totally unselfish and a genuine patriot, the finest label
a cultured man can have.”20 It is also evident from a
number of his surviving letters that Darnley enjoyed a
warm personal relationship with his wife, mother and
children, including his eldest son and heir; and although
also on friendly terms with George IV and his brothers,
he did not share their reputation for moral laxity.21 He
seems to have regarded himself as something of an
expert on artistic matters, and on a visit to Grosvenor
House in June 1829 he did not hesitate to pronounce
the four newly installed tapestry cartoons by Rubens as
“too large and coarse”.22
Even before he came of age in June 1788 Darnley took
a keen interest in his father’s work on the house and
outbuildings at Cobham, and he continued to employ
Wyatt as well as numerous builders and craftsmen.23
In 1793 Wyatt completed the refurbishment of the
magnificent Gilt Hall on the north side of the central
block (figs. 4, 20; marked 43 on the plan), to which
Westmacott’s father (Richard the Elder) had already
contributed a marble fireplace (1778), complete with
flanking caryatids and a relief after Guido Reni’s Aurora
The collection formed by the 4th Earl of Darnley and his Picture Gallery at Cobham Hall, Kent
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from the Casino Rospigliosi in Rome, above which was
placed Anthony van Dyck’s double portrait of Lord John
and Lord Bernard Stuart. This formed part of a suite of
grand spaces that also included an Adamesque entrance
vestibule, a library and a drawing room. Around this
time the young earl undertook a series of extensive
travels, taking in The Hague in 1787, Saint Petersburg,
Warsaw and Berlin in 1788, Rome and Venice in 17891790, and Brussels and Antwerp in 1793.24 In Rome
he celebrated his coming of age by commissioning for
Cobham a marble chimney-piece,25 and by acquiring a
sarcophagus of red Egyptian granite weighing six tons,26
and a number of antique sculptures, including a sevenfoot high statue of the Emperor Hadrian, from the
Villa Peretti Montalto.27 In Rome, too, he made his first,
tentative acquisition of at least one Old Master painting;
and then from 1791, when he married Elizabeth
Brownlow, like his mother an Anglo-Irish heiress, he was
able fully to indulge his passion for pictures.
Thereafter, apart from visits to Ireland to supervise
his estates there, his travels became much less
frequent.28 Elizabeth bore him seven children, and
Cobham became very much a family home, as well
as the destination of the ever-growing number of
paintings Darnley acquired on the London art market.
Presumably likewise assembled through specialist
London dealers was his exceptionally valuable
collection of porcelain, Dresden and Sèvres, as well as
Chinese.29 Soon after the collections were installed in
the new Picture Gallery in the Elizabethan north wing,
in about 1810, his purchases came to a halt – partly, no
doubt, because of the financial difficulties caused by
the agricultural depression after Waterloo, but perhaps
also in part because he now judged the house, and its
decoration, to be complete.30 After his death in 1831,
his son the 5th Earl (1795-1835) died too soon to make
any additions; and although his grandson the 6th Earl
(1827-1896) did add a few paintings in his own, rather
different taste, his long reign was to be characterized
more by sales than by acquisitions.
TASTE AND CHRONOLOGY
Fig. 5 / Peter Paul Rubens, Head
of Cyrus brought to Queen
Tomyris, ca. 1622-1623, oil on
canvas, 205.1 x 361 cm, Boston,
Museum of Fine Arts.
Even a cursory glance at the present Appendix will
reveal that Darnley had a rather particular aesthetic
taste. The list is dominated by the names of Titian,
Rubens, Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa; and his
reputed partiality for the work of Rubens is explicitly
confirmed in a letter of April 1804 from the dealer
William Buchanan to his agent David Stewart.31
Although these painters were also fashionable with
other collectors of the time, Darnley seems to have
made little attempt to balance them with other, equally
fashionable artists and schools. While Tintoretto,
Veronese, Annibale Carracci, Jordaens, Snyders, and
Poussin may all be seen as natural complements to
the most favoured names, other major figures such
as Raphael, Correggio and Parmigianino are poorly
represented, and whole areas are completely absent
from Darnley’s collection. These include the wellestablished favourites among British collectors, Claude
and Dughet; all of Dutch painting; and the entire
eighteenth century. In a burgeoning art market
Darnley bought as originals several works that have
since turned out to be copies,32 but so did most of his
fellow collectors. More remarkable is the number of
undisputed masterpieces he managed to secure.
In terms of subjects, Darnley was evidently not
attracted to genre painting or landscape (including
by Rubens and Rosa), and even paintings with
conventional religious subjects are outnumbered by
those depicting subjects from classical mythology,
and especially from Roman history. In the last
group, a striking number of these were violent, even
gruesome.33 One of the largest paintings, displayed
as the focal point of the Picture Gallery, was Rubens’s
Tomyris (fig. 5), in which the Scythian queen is seen
vindictively supervising the dousing of the decapitated
head of her enemy Cyrus in a basin of blood.
