CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 69
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The collection formed by the 4th Earl of Darnley and his Picture Gallery at Cobham Hall, Kent
The collection formed by the 4th Earl of Darnley and his Picture Gallery at Cobham Hall, Kent
In 1791 he bought from Reynolds a version of Van Dyck’s
portrait of Inigo Jones – probably again primarily for
reasons of family piety, since the architect of the central
block at Cobham was traditionally (but mistakenly)
attributed to Jones. But Darnley’s patronage of the elderly
Reynolds was not limited to portraiture: in the same year,
and perhaps on the same occasion, he bought from him
a version of his Calling of Samuel, perhaps in conscious
emulation of the version of 1776 that he would already
have known in the nearby Tudor mansion of Knole.40
The only Old Master Darnley is definitely known to
have bought in Rome in 1789 was an unconventional
choice for a young man on his first visit to the Eternal
City: a version of Salvator Rosa’s Temptation of Saint
Anthony, a surrealistic vision of the saint being threatened
by peculiarly repulsive monsters. Although Rosa was to
remain a favourite, perhaps Darnley quickly regretted his
choice of subject, because by 1794 he had offloaded the
painting to the London dealer Benjamin Vandergucht.41
But his appetite for Old Masters had been whetted,
and in about 1791 he bought a group of paintings from
another neighbour in Kent, Thomas Moore Slade
(1749-1831) of Rochester.42 Slade was a dealer as much
as a collector, and as a result of an unsuccessful business
Fig. 8 / Salvator Rosa,
Pythagoras and the Fishermen,
1662, oil on canvas, 132 x 188
cm, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Fig. 9 / Titian, Man with a Blue
Sleeve (“Ariosto”), ca. 1510,
oil on canvas, 81.2 x 66.3 cm,
London, National Gallery.
It should be emphasized that these generalizations
about Darnley’s taste are based on the list of paintings
he decided to keep, and that they do not take account
of the many that passed through his hands, especially
during the first ten years of his career as a collector,
when his taste in Old Masters seems to have been
more catholic. It may also be admitted that while
the distinction between paintings he is likely to have
inherited (mostly family portraits) and those he
purchased is usually clear, this is not always the case.
An anonymous Jacob and Esau, for example, tentatively
attributed by Waagen to Caravaggio, is already
recorded at Cobham in a Stuart inventory of 1672;37
and an old, half-sized copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration
may similarly already have been in the house in the
seventeenth century. In such cases he presumably
retained these works as much for reasons of piety
towards his ancestors, as because they were consistent
with his own aesthetic taste.
On the whole, the earliest years of Darnley’s majority were
also those of his closest involvement with contemporary
painters. Just as he inherited the architect Wyatt from
his father, so too he continued to employ Reynolds and
Gainsborough to paint family portraits,38 progressing
only later to John Hoppner, Thomas Phillips and William
Fowler.39 It must have been partly a sense of loyalty to his
father and ancestors that in 1788 Darnley bought – from
Gainsborough’s widow – his copy of Van Dyck’s Lord John
and Lord Bernard Stuart (Saint Louis Art Museum), which
the painter had made in 1785, presumably at the family’s
house in Berkeley Square.
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venture, he was forced to sell a large part of his stock,
including the fifty-six paintings he had bought in 1776
from the enormous collection formed by Bartolomeo
Vitturi in Venice, immediately after the owner’s death.
According to his fellow-dealer William Buchanan,
Slade sold to Darnley nine ex-Vitturi pictures, including
five attributed to Titian. But of these nine, only four
(including two of the Titians, the Salvator Mundi and the
Self-Portrait with Francesco Zuccato) were later retained and
appear in the present Appendix,43 and Darnley seems
to have quickly recognized the others (none of which
are now identifiable) as second rate and to have got rid
of them. Evidently to his longer-term satisfaction was
another purchase from Slade, Rosa’s Pythagoras and the
Fishermen (fig. 8), which, according to Buchanan, had
recently been sent from Rome by Gavin Hamilton
for sale by Desenfans in London. Buchanan adds that
Slade also offered Darnley Claude’s Embarkation of Saint
Ursula (London, National Gallery), but that the offer
was declined.
Slade was also the organizer of the sale in London
in April 1793 of the recently imported Flemish and
Dutch pictures from the Orléans collection. Darnley
bought only one painting at the sale, but it was a very
large and important one – Rubens’s Tomyris – for which
he paid the correspondingly very large sum of 1200
guineas.44 In December of the same year, as he wrote
to his wife during a trip to the southern Netherlands,
he bought five obviously much smaller paintings (two
more by Rubens, a Claude, a Snyders, and a Van de
Velde landscape) for just £500.45 In his letter Darnley
was somewhat defensive, perhaps because the countess
may have considered that his outlay on pictures that
year had already been extravagant; but he assured her
that this latest purchase was a bargain, and anyway, if
necessary he would easily be able to sell the paintings
on at no loss. Probably around this time he also bought
two works of outstanding quality, recently imported
from Paris by the dealer Le Brun: Titian’s Man with a Blue
Sleeve (fig. 9), and Rubens’s oil-sketch for one of the scenes
from the cycle of the Life of Henri IV (fig. 10).46 In 1795
Darnley bought another painting from the Reynolds
collection, this time from the artist’s posthumous sale,
Titian’s Saint Margaret and the Dragon. Although this
had reputedly once belonged to the royal collection,
Darnley secured it for only 50 guineas.47
