71 – 75: Paint
So many Old Marlburians have been involved in the visual arts. Of course, William Morris is the most celebrated figure in this respect. His work involved many aspects of art and design, but it must be admitted that although he was such an influential man, he was not a great painter on canvas. His remarkable achievements lay in the design of patterned papers, fabric, furniture and stained glass, as well as writing poetry and promoting the cause of conservation and important political and social visions. Perhaps the most famous twentieth century painter to have spent time at the College was Christopher Wood (BH 1915-6), a key figure in the history of modern British painting, who with Ben Nicholson discovered and were inspired by the primitive painter Alfred Wallis at St Ives. Derek Hill (LI 1930-3) was a very different sort of artist. His landscapes and portraits were very popular, and he appears in innumerable biographies and memoirs as a busy houseguest, traveller and teacher of other painters, including His Majesty, King Charles III. His work and own collection can be seen at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire and Glebe House in County Donegal.
Many Old Marlburians have been of considerable importance in the understanding of fine art. Clive Bell (C1 1895-9) of Bloomsbury fame influenced generations with his ideas about ‘significant form’. Philip Pouncey (B3 1923-28) and Ellis Waterhouse (C3 1919-23) were scholars of great importance, and Dean Walter Hussey (C1 1922-27), who commissioned so much fine work at St Matthew’s Northampton and Chichester Cathedral, is regarded as the Anglican church’s outstanding patron of the arts in the twentieth century. The most well-known Old Marlburian connected with the study of painting is the difficult figure of Anthony Blunt (C3 1921-6), the traitor who was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and the Director responsible for building the reputation of the Courtauld Institute and who established the teaching of Art History in this country. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge now possesses what was once Blunt’s most prized possession, Nicholas Poussin’s Eliezer and Rebecca. Blunt’s academic reputation was made in part through his study of Poussin. This work at the Fitzwilliam used to hang in his flat at the top of the Courtauld, when it was housed at 20 Portman Square, reached by Robert Adam’s great double staircase. According to Michael Levy, this remarkable piece of architecture, ‘cool and restrained for all its elegance, symbolised an environment ideal for (Blunt’s) personality. He may not exactly have sashayed down it to a chorus of murmured admiration from student and staff, but something of that possibility was in the atmosphere.’ Blunt’s career ended in disgrace, but his scholarly achievements were considerable. His ashes were scattered at Martinsell Hill, a few miles from the College.
The Art School has a large collection of works which accumulated over the years and there are some fine portraits of the Masters since the school began. These are currently being restored in the light of some of them being found to be in a poor condition. There is plenty of restoration work to do elsewhere, notably the portraits of the first prefects (Object 16) and the Hubert von Herkomer portrait of the Fellow of New College Oxford and member of Council, Alfred Robinson (B1 1855-60). Herkomer was a leading portrait painter who was admired by Van Gogh.
Many works could have been included in this section but there is space for only five. The first is a portrait of an extraordinary woman who helped to shape Marlborough’s grounds in the eighteenth century. The second is a key work from the same century by one of England’s greatest artists and the third is an important depiction of the College’s early days. A single painting from the Chapel’s remarkable series of paintings will provide a focus, and just one portrait of the Masters will be covered, an unconventional work painted by a superb artist.
71. The portrait of Lady Hertford
A portrait which is supposed to be of Frances Seymour, Lady Hertford (1699 – 1754), hangs in the Adderley. During the time she lived in the mansion house, now the home of C1, she created a remarkable garden and became the patron of several important writers, notably Isaac Watts, Laurence Eusden, William Dyer, William Shenstone and Stephen Duck. Above all she supported James Thomson, one of the most celebrated writers of the day, who dedicated his 1728 poem Spring to her (see objects 13 and 14). Lady Hertford was the wife of Algernon Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who became Duke of Somerset in 1748. In her literary interests she was influenced by her great aunt Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, and the poet Elizabeth Singer, with whom she was acquainted at Longleat, her childhood home. It is thought Francis moved to Marlborough with her husband in 1718 to live in the house built by her father-in-law, Charles Seymour, the 6th Duke of Somerset.
The portrait was purchased by the College from the widow of the colourful Lionel ‘Wiggy’ Gough (CR 1940 – 59), whose first husband, Robert Atkinson, had acquired the painting. He felt it bore a strong resemblance to another portrait of Lady Hertford by the celebrated Scottish painter Allan Ramsey (1713-84). The complicated story of the relationship between the portraits was described by Amy Hunter in the 1963 Report of the Marlborough College Natural History Society, but in 1969 Alistair Smart, Ramsay expert and Head of Fine Art at Nottingham University, wrote that it may well be the case that this is not a representation of Lady Hertford, and he felt the work was by the successful London portraitist Thomas Hudson (1701-79).
For years, this fine painting faced the great Gainsborough at the other end of the Adderley. In a way doubts about who painted it and indeed who it may represent do not matter. It is good there is something in the College to remember this remarkable woman by other than the inscribed stone in the grotto at the foot of the Mound (Object 13).
In 1739 Francis and Algernon moved to Richings (renamed Percy lodge by them) near Iver in Buckinghamshire, where work began on a garden which had already been established and which also had rich literary association. The house has long since disappeared and the site, now much changed and developed, is just a few hundred feet from the roar of the M4 and the M25. Approaching London by car, anybody with Marlborough associations should contemplate the queuing traffic at the northern interchange of these two motorways and remember that the place was once a rural idyll which Francis felt came ‘nearer to my idea of a scene in Arcadia than any place I ever saw.’ This talented woman supported the establishment of the Foundling Hospital in 1730, and when she died, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.
72. Mr and Mrs Byam and their daughter Selina (c1764) by Thomas Gainsborough
This great work, measuring 2.5 x 2.3 meters, was the largest portrait Gainsborough ever painted. It was loaned to the College in 1942 and then donated by the descendants of Henry Hony (B1 1897-1902) in 1955, but ultimately the considerable problems presented by security, insurance and conservation meant that the painting had to be sold in 1999, and it now can be seen at the Holburne Museum in Bath. With the proceeds of the sale at Christie’s, the College built the Henry Hony Centre for the performing arts, and a copy of the portrait was made by Barrington Bramley to hang in the Adderley.
Painted around 1764, the work is remarkable for the way in which the young girl Selina, added in 1766, addresses the viewer directly, while the slightly imperious Mrs Byam (whose fine clothes were upgraded at this time) fails to focus on the landscape which her husband’s outstretched arm points to. The dark woodland behind them contrasts with the dramatic sky and distant view to the left. This work marks a transitional stage in Gainsborough’s work, as landscape begins to form an important part of his portraits, underlining the wealth and prestige of the figures presented. George Byam made his fortune from sugar plantations, and so there is an uncomfortable background to this work.
The painting provided the subtext for a cartoon by Raymond Briggs which depicts a flabbergasted art connoisseur being informed by a 1970s punk that his school owned a work by Gainsborough.
73. A painting of the College in the mid 1840s
In the late 1990s Peter Finer, the fine art dealer specialising in antique arms and armour (and father of four Marlburians), spotted that a painting of the College in its early days was going to be auctioned and he raised the alarm. Funds were found and this important piece of history was acquired. The picture is naïve in manner, but it is a fascinating depiction of the school in its early days. There is no sign of the construction of A or B House or the first chapel, so it must have been painted between 1843 and 1846. Pupils are shown engaged in various dynamic activities and groups of beaks are scattered around Court. The artist was a little fanciful in his depiction of the uniform which these early Marlburians wore. A wide range of clothing existed, and even in the 1870s the Master, the formidable George Granville Bradley, battled with sartorial diversity.
74. The Revelation of John by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope
Between 1874 and 1876 a remarkable series of paintings was commissioned for Marlborough’s Chapel by the Master, Frederic William Farrar. These twelve works which depict the ministry of angels on earth were undertaken by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, who painted them in Florence in a style and palette which was unfamiliar in Victorian England. At the time they were controversial, and for so long much Victorian painting has been looked down on, but their art historical quotations, their compositional inventiveness, their colour and the scale of the commission make them worthy of attention. Simon McKeown has written about their extraordinary story in Marlborough College Chapel. Art and Vision, which can be found in the publications section of the College’s website.
It is hard to single out any one of these paintings for special attention because they are all so remarkable, but perhaps the most unusual if not finest is the depiction of St John the Divine kneeling before the vision of the New Jerusalem, described in Revelation 21, 1 – 27. The influence of Andrea Mantegna is clear in this strange work, which in some respects anticipates the unworldly aspects of the European Symbolist movement. Marlburians were baffled by some of Stanhope’s work and Wilfred Blunt (C3 1915-20) wrote that this painting, with its celestial city ‘hovering laputa-like in the empyrean’, was nicknamed either ‘pie in the sky’ or ‘the forced landing’.
Together with the splendid architecture and furnishings of George Frederick Bodley’s building, these paintings help to make the Chapel’s interior one of the finest creations of nineteenth century ecclesiastical art. The works are also important because they were commissioned in an age when artistic education in schools like Marlborough was not a priority, indeed it hardly existed. Farrar was a remarkable aesthete, educationalist and a celebrated writer and preacher whose talents resulted in him being appointed Archdeacon of Westminster and Dean of Canterbury.
75. The portrait of F.M. Heywood (1952) by Ruskin Spear
The portraits of the Masters of Marlborough vary in quality, but the collection contains some fine works. Perhaps the most interesting is the representation of Francis Melville Heywood, who became Master of Marlborough just before the outbreak of the Second War. Much younger than many members of Common Room, his reforms were not universally popular, but he steered the school through a very difficult period, making the community more humane and helping it to enjoy great academic and sporting success. He left Marlborough in 1952 to become Head of Lord Treloar School for the physically handicapped, a conscious decision to work for the less privileged.
Heywood was an unpretentious man and the portrait painted by Ruskin Spear is an unconventional portrait by a remarkable artist, whose style and subtle limited tertiary palette owed something to Walter Sickert, who in turn had learnt so much from Degas. Heywood is revealed in an unusual downward light which conceals as much as it reveals, and he is in a relaxed pose with his hands in pockets, wearing what appears to be a tweed jacket. The picture is a far cry from so many academic portraits of the day, which often inclined to pomposity or banality.
A restoration of this important painting was undertaken recently because damage had been caused by a careless contractor. The beauty of Spear’s bravura brushwork has been made clearer, and there is much to savour in this work by an artist who painted so many famous people, but who also found beauty in rainy days, dingy pubs and the traffic of Hammersmith.