Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, il Guercino (Cento 1591-1666 Bologna) King David Property from the Spencer Collections The picture collection at Althorp is of exceptional interest for a number of reasons, and represents the cumulative achievement of a family with an unusually consistent record of both patronage and collecting. There are notable strengths in the fields of seventeenth-century portraiture, with the prodigious van Dyck double-portrait and the remarkable group of Lelys, and in the sequence of portraits by Reynolds. As the masterpieces by Rubens and Guercino catalogued below demonstrate, the collection of old master pictures was equally remarkable. Despite relatively recent sales, this will continue to retain a number of pictures of the highest distinction, preserving something of that balance between these and family portraits which was evidently a characteristic of the collection from the time of the first major collector of the family, Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland (1641-1702). He, unlike many of his contemporaries, seems to have concentrated his possessions at Althorp, rather than in a London residence, and Althorp is thus, with Petworth, Wilton and Burghley, one of the handful of great houses in which a major collection formed in the seventeenth century survives, at least in part, in its intended setting. Moreover, because the underlying structure of the house has not been substantially altered, successive stages in the deployment of the picture collection can be followed. The 2nd Earl, who had succeeded his father, Henry Spencer, for whom the earldom was created in 1642, attained his majority in 1662. His interest in pictures would seem to have come from the family of his mother, Lady Dorothy Sidney, daughter of Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester and his wife Dorothy, daughter of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland and sister of Henry, 10th Earl of Northumberland (1602-1668), who was a leading patron of Van Dyck and an outstanding collector. Lady Sunderlands brother Philip, 3rd Earl of Leicester (1619-1698) was one of the most energetic collectors of the age, and as Lord Lisle an active participant at the sale of the collection of King Charles I: Lord Leicesters taste set the pattern, for example, of that of his nephew-by-marriage, the 1st Duke of Devonshire. The 2nd Earl in his youth must thus have known both Northumberland House and Leicester House, the picture collections of both of which not only survived the Civil War, but were actually augmented as a direct result of this. His familiarity with these collections helps to explain the high standards set by Sunderlands own acquisitions. At Althorp the Earls taste can still be sensed not only in the Picture Gallery, but elsewhere in the survivors from his collection of Old Masters. Sunderlands successor, the 3rd Earl, married Lady Anne Churchill, whose parents, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough and his formidable wife, Sarah, were both outstanding collectors of pictures. With such grandparents it is hardly surprising that two of the 3rd Earls sons were interested in the visual arts. Charles, who succeeded his brother as 5th Earl in 1729 and became 3rd Duke of Marlborough on the death of his aunt in 1733, continued to live at Althorp until he inherited Blenheim on the death of his grandmother in 1744. During this period he commissioned what was arguably the finest series of Venetian views by Canaletto. Keenly interested in racing, he also ordered a series of portraits of his horses from John Wootton: these, like the Canalettos, were kept at Langley Park, his house in Buckinghamshire. But the 5th Earls years at Althorp did make one significant contribution to the collection there, for it was he who enlisted Wootton to supply the series of canvasses for the Hall in about 1734. The Dukes younger brother, the Hon. John Spencer, to whom Althorp reverted in 1744, was their grandmothers chosen heir and two documents are eloquent of his attitude to the pictures he inherited. A list of 1742 records the pictures which Spencer scheduled for mortgage. Presumably both for reasons of family piety and because the great portraits were in a house still controlled by his brother, these were excluded. But the list does include many of the more important old masters that were in three of the key rooms at Althorp at the time of Spencers death in 1746: the Eating Room, the Green Room and the Picture Closet. This suggests that many of the other rooms were little changed during Spencers two-year residence, and thus that the hang recorded in his posthumous inventory, compiled by the painter George Knapton--whose ambitious portrait of Spencer and his son is dated 1745--may in large part have preserved the 2nd Earls dispositions. There were 62 portraits in the Gallery, including a number by European masters, and substantial numbers of old masters both on the Great Staircase--where Knapton began his circuit--and in the Great Dining Room. Many of the pictures Spencer inherited from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, including the Hondecoeter with its pendant by Snyders, and the Anguisciola self-portrait, remained in her house at Wimbledon. The Anguisciola had been purchased by the Duchess in 1726 at the sale of the Dukes close friend and associate, William, 1st Earl Cadogan. It has been suggested that the notable collection of old master drawings, largely sold at auction in 1811, was also inherited from the Duchess; but it seems more probable that this was formed by the Hon. John Spencer: an inventory of 1756 compiled by Knapton records his ownership. The collection was particularly strong in works by Italian Seicento masters, and the consistent calibre of the traceable components of this, identified by three variants of his collectors mark, testifies to the discipline with which this was assembled. Spencers eponymous son, subsequently 1st Viscount Spencer (1761) and 1st Earl Spencer (1734-1783), was evidently very interested in the picture collection he inherited. The inventory of 1750 documents a pattern of subtle rearrangements and substitutions, for which the Earls mother or trustees may prove to have been responsible. The 1st Earl will always be associated with Sir Joshua Reynolds, of whom he was a discriminating patron. The outstanding group of portraits by the artist which he commissioned will have necessitated a sequence of adjustments to the picture hang in the house. The finest of the old master pictures which the 1st Earl purchased were bought, however, not for Althorp but for Spencer House, where James Athenian Stuart was employed between 1759 and 1765 to create some of the most modish and intellectually refined neo-classical interiors of their time in Europe. The major Guercino of King David was among the works acquired specifically for Spencer House, and its discrete classicism was perfectly in key with the opulent yet restrained decoration of the house. The canvas and its pendant were acquired by the Earl through the agency of Gavin Hamilton, the Scottish-born painter based in Rome who was himself one of the major champions of academic neo-classicism and clearly had a perfect understanding of his patrons requirements. The 1st Earls marriage to Georgiana Poyntz eventually, through the marriage of her great-niece to her grandson, brought a signal masterpiece to the collection, the whole-length portrait of her brother, William Poyntz, which is perhaps the most arresting picture of its type of the early maturity of Reynolds most significant rival, Gainsborough. Henry Hollands thorough but structurally remarkably tactful remodelling of Althorp in 1787-9 for George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834) would inevitably have led to significant rearrangements within the collection, even if additional portraits had not needed to be accommodated. The 1802 inventory suggests the care with which Lord Spencer redeployed his pictures. Of the old masters many of those deemed valuable enough to mortgage in 1742 were marshalled in the Eating Room and the Drawing Room. The Snyders of the Bust of Circe with animals and flowers, which had been in the former in 1746, was joined very appropriately by the Hondecoeter Farmyard and the Snyders Stag Hunt, framed as a pair, which had in 1746 been at Wimbledon. More old masters were in the Library. The more recent portraits were placed in the family rooms--Lord Spencer had the Batoni of his mother and portraits of his wife, the beautiful Lavinia Bingham, and members of her family, leavened by an Italian Bacchanal, in his Dressing Room--while the majority of the earlier eighteenth-century portraits, as well as some by Lely, were marshalled on the Great Stairs. The major seventeenth-century portraits, as before, were in the Picture Gallery, as was the Knapton of the Hon. John Spencer and his son. Previously a number of miscellaneous old master portraits had been in the room. The arrangement was now almost completely changed. Van Dycks Apostles were brought into the Gallery, but the most significant addition was undoubtedly the remarkable Rubens of the Emperor Charles V, cautiously listed as of the painters school, which was evidently placed as an overdoor--although the possibility that this is the portrait of Count Aromberg given to the artist and listed in the room in 1746 cannot absolutely be excluded. The 1802 list also implies the personal tastes of the 2nd Earls mother, who lived on until 1814. In her Bedroom, with the Reynolds of her daughter, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Huntingdon Collection), a portrait of her mother, Mrs. Poyntz, and the Slaughter of her husband as a child, were fourteen old masters, mostly of religious subjects, while Reads pastels of her son and daughter were in her Dressing Room. The 2nd Earl was a prodigious collector of books. Given the number of pictures both at Althorp and Spencer House, buying more was a lesser priority. Despite the formidable number of portraits he had inherited, the earl, as his probable acquisition of Rubenss Portrait of a commander indicates, was ready to acquire more. Lord and Lady Spencers connection with Quintin Crauford, a discriminating collector who was at the heart of the British community in Paris, led to the acquisition of a group of distinguished French portraits at his posthumous sale of 1820. Among these the remarkable canvas of Claude de Lorraine, duc de Chevreuse by the younger Pourbus was by far the most spectacular. Three years earlier the fine Philippe de Champaigne identified as Robert Arnauld dAndilly is said to have been bought at Christies in the sale of the duc dAlberg, who had lost most of his German inheritance as a result of his adherence to Napoleon. The 2nd Earls outstanding individual purchase was made in the Netherlands: the Rembrandt of the artists son, Titus, which was to be sold in 1915 and is now in the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena. The Spencers fourth son, Frederick, 4th Earl Spencer, added a few other French portraits to the collection. From the perspective of the picture collection at Althorp it is unfortunate that the 4th Earl was a man of his times. In 1847 he sold a masterpiece that evidently was too explicit for contemporary taste, Bronzinos Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, now in the National Gallery, privately through Christies: among the pictures mortgaged in 1742, this had evidently been admired by the 2nd Earl, who presented a copy of it to Admiral Duncan after his great victory at Camperdown in 1797. Neither of the 4th Earls sons, John Poyntz or Charles Robert, respectively 5th and 6th Earls Spencer, was particularly interested in pictures. The latter married Margaret, daughter of Edward Baring, 1st Lord Revelstoke, whose family has an unmatched record as picture collectors between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. It is thus not surprising that their son, Albert Edward John, 7th Earl Spencer (1892-1975) had a deep and scholarly interest in the remarkable collections he inherited. With the 8th Earl of Ilchester, whom he followed as President of the Walpole Society, and the 28th Earl of Crawford, he was one of the outstanding patrician connoisseurs of his generation. Heavy death duties when he inherited in 1922 necessitated the sale of a handful of pictures, most notably Holbeins King Henry VIII, now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which in Sir Francis Watsons words was a cause of deep distress to him. But Lord Spencer worthily maintained what is by any standard a consistently distinguished sequence of portraits and added no fewer than seventeen earlier family portraits from the Chichester collection at Stanmer in 1967. Lord Spencer also made possible the preparation of the late Kenneth Garlicks A Catalogue of Pictures at Althorp, published by the Walpole Society in 1976. After the death of the 7th Earl in 1975, three portraits by van Dyck were surrendered in lieu of Capital Transfer Tax, passing to the National Gallery, to the Tate, and to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Subsequent sales took a heavy toll on the holding of old master pictures which had since the 2nd Earl of Sunderlands time been a significant presence at Althorp, matching the portrait sequence for which the collection is rightly celebrated. But despite losses the collection still has a remarkable range and depth, as the present picture hang brings out so well.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:55:02 +0000
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