Notes
THE PROPERTY OF THE EARL GRANVILLE
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Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891, this attractive triple portrait shows the second wife and two surviving daughters of one of the great Whig magnates of the Victorian age. Granville George Leveson-Gower, second Earl Granville (1815-1891), was connected with many of the country's leading political families. His paternal grandfather, the first Marquess of Stafford, had been a colleague of the younger Pitt, while his grandfather on his mother's side was the fifth Duke of Devonshire. The Earl owned extensive estates in Staffordshire but never lived on them, regarding them as a source of wealth from manufacture and mining rather than as an arena for agricultural enterprise.
Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Granville entered Parliament in 1837, moving to the Lords, where he headed the Liberal party for many years, on his father's death in 1846. During a long political career serving four prime ministers - Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Lord Aberdeen and Gladstone, he held numerous high offices of state and was associated with some of the most important events and significant issues of the day. As paymaster-general and vice-president of the Board of Trade he worked closely with Prince Albert on the Great Exhibition of 1851. As lord president of the council he was a somewhat reluctant participant in the educational reforms of the 1850s and '60s. But it was the posts of colonial and foreign secretary, which he held for long periods between 1868 and 1886, that proved most taxing. Beset by imperialist crises in India and South Africa, Canada and New Zealand, he also had to cope with the Franco-Prussian War and the ambitions of Bismarck, the aftermath of the great Eastern Question of the 1870s, and the occupation of Egypt that ended so tragically with the death of Gordon at Khartoum in January 1885. With all this, he was a consistent advocate of free trade and parliamentary reform, while in his last years he loyally supported Gladstone over the bitterly divisive matter of Irish home rule. He did not always cover himself with glory. Indeed his kinsman and colleague Lord Hartington conceded that he was 'probably the worst Foreign Minister that Britain has ever had'. But his urbane, cosmopolitan outlook was an undoubted asset to his party, while his London house - in Bruton Street until 1873, thereafter in Carlton House Terrace - gave it a social centre in much the same way that Holland House, Kensington, had done earlier in the century.
Lord Granville's first wife was Marie-Louise Pellina, the only child of Emmerich Josef Wolfgang Heribert, Duke of Dalberg, and the widow of Sir Richard Acton, seventh baronet, of Shropshire. She bore him no children and died in 1860. On 26 September 1865, he remarried, the wedding taking place at St Mary Abbot's Church in Kensington. The second Lady Granville was Castalia Rosalind (1847-1938), youngest daughter of Walter Frederick Campbell of Islay, Scotland, and a full thirty-two years younger than her husband. It is she who appears on the left in the picture, now forty-four and looking remarkably youthful for her age.
This marriage was to be blessed with five children. First came two daughters, Victoria Alberta (1867-1953) and Sophia Castalia Mary (1870-1934); then (no doubt to general relief) a son, Granville George (1872-1939). A third girl, Susan Katherine, arrived in 1876 but died two years later, and she was followed by a second son and last child, William Spencer (1880-1953). Granville George succeeded his father as the third Earl, but since he never married the title went to his younger brother, William Spencer, on his death in 1939.
Victoria and Sophia, who always seems to have been known as Mary, are the two girls in the picture. Victoria is seated beside her mother, holding a fan behind her head and an open book, from which she has perhaps been reading aloud, on her lap. Her younger sister approaches with a spray of dog-roses, though whether by way of pruning or in the interest of flower-arrangement is not clear. Victoria was now twenty-four and would remain a spinster for some time, marrying Harold John Hastings Russell, her junior by a year, on 8 September 1896. A barrister and recorder of Bedford, he was the great-grandson of John, sixth Duke of Bedford, and thus distantly related to Lord John Russell, the sixth Duke's third son, who had loomed so large in his father-in-law's political career. As often happens, Victoria's sister, Sophia, found a husband before her elder sibling. On 16 August 1892 she married Hugh Morrison of Fonthill House, Tisbury, in Wiltshire. For many years he was prominent in local affairs, serving as High Sheriff of the county, a J.P., and Tory member of Parliament for the Salisbury division from 1918. Both sisters produced children, and both outlived their spouses. Harold Russell died in 1926, Hugh Morrison in 1931.
The ladies are seen on the Kent coast, looking out over the English Channel. Lord John Russell had made Earl Granville Lord Warden of the Ports in 1865, thus enabling his family to use Walmer Castle as a country retreat. Servants have brought out a wicker sofa, furnished with cushions, together with a side-table, books and newspapers, a footstool for Lady Granville and even a carpet, but to the left looms a large cannon as a reminder of the Castle's original purpose. The juxtaposition of this potent symbol of aggression, cast in uncompromising bronze, and the display of femininity represented by the three aristocratic women, fashionably dressed and indulged with every luxury, does much to give the picture its piquancy and edge.
The picture raises some fascinating questions about etiquette and timing. It is dated 1891, and was therefore presumably finished not long before the Academy exhibition opened in mid-May. But on 31 March an event occurred which altered his sitters' circumstances dramatically. Earl Granville died at his brother's London house, 14 South Audley Street, it is said from gout and an abscess in the face, possibly a sign of cancer. Less than a week later, on 4 April, he was buried in the family vault at St Michael's Church, Stone, in Staffordshire. Nor did he die as well off as perhaps his womenfolk imagined. No less than £60,000 had to be raised to save his estate from bankruptcy. Despite the fact that he was forming his last administration, Gladstone generously undertook to perform this service for his old friend, and although Lords Rosebery and Hartington (the latter now Duke of Devonshire) contributed, it was eventually Gladstone himself who found the balance.
There is no hint of these dramas in the picture. The ladies show not the slightest signs of mourning, and are apparently blissfully unaware of the financial embarrassment that was soon to engulf them. No doubt, despite being dated 1891, the picture had been substantially completed the previous year. Certainly the leafy hedges and geraniums in flower suggest that it was planned that summer, even if the sitters posed in the studio and were never actually grouped in this alfresco setting. Nonetheless the picture presents an image so much at variance with the facts when the Academy opened that it is surprising it was not withdrawn at the last minute. Somebody, presumably Lady Granville, must have decided to let its exhibition go ahead, even though it was likely to attract comment and gossip.
As for the artist himself, what was his reaction to this crisis? Aged fifty-two in 1891, Charles Edward Perugini (fig. 1) was at the height of his career and the picture was one of his most ambitious. He had lavished his utmost skill on depicting the dresses, particularly Lady Granville's grey silk gown, and had devised an enchanting colour scheme in which pearly, iridescent tones are set off by bold touches of lacquer-like red, distributed across the canvas from the table in the left foreground to the geraniums in the right middle-distance. In the past Perugini's speciality had been idealised genre subjects, but these were beginning to go out of fashion and it is hard to resist a suspicion that with The Ramparts, Walmer Castle he was making a bid for greater recognition as a painter of society portraits. The picture's abscence from the walls of the R.A. would have thwarted this ambition. Indeed, since he had no other exhibits that year, he would have been totally unrepresented.
Perugini had been born in Naples, the son of a singing-master, but before he was eight his Anglophile family had moved to England, where he grew up. By 1853 he was in Rome, and there met the young Frederic Leighton, the future president of the Royal Academy and undisputed head of the late Victorian art establishment. Their friendship was cemented two years later in Paris, where Perugini was studying with Ary Scheffer and Leighton was exhibiting at the Exposition Universelle. Perugini, who always seems to have been short of money, became one of Leighton's many protégés, continuing to receive his financial support well into the late 1870s.
It is possible that Leighton's subsidies were not straightforward gifts but payment for studio assistance. Certainly Perugini's style as an artist was greatly influenced by Leighton's, and he explored a similar range of subject-matter, operating, as it were, on the borders between modern life and an idealism in the classical-cum-Aesthetic taste. His Girl Reading, shown at the R.A. in 1878 (fig. 2), is a perfect example. Like Leighton, moreover, he was loyal first and foremost to the Academy, where he showed almost every year from 1863 to 1915, although he occasionally supported the British Institution, the Society of British Artists and the New Gallery as well.
In 1874 Perugini married Kate Collins, his exact contemporary and the younger daughter of Charles Dickens. They had probably met at one of Leighton's famous parties. Kate was the widow of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Charles Allston Collins, and hence the sister-in-law of another novelist, Wilkie Collins. Her previous marriage had been unconsummated, and for many years she had been in love with the artist Val Prinsep. Once free, however, she threw him over to marry the good-looking Perugini, much to Prinsep's dismay. She herself was a talented artist, although she is probably best known to posterity as the model for the distraught young woman in Millais' popular painting The Black Brunswicker of 1860 (fig. 3). The sittings took place very early in their acquaintance. Later she became a close friend of Millais, himself no stranger to the miseries of a sexless marriage, and sat to him for a more formal likeness in 1880 (see Millais, exh. Tate Britain, 1007-8, cat. no. 119, illustrated). Perugini too was intimate with the great ex-Pre-Raphaelite, whose death in 1896 was a severe blow to them both.
Perugini's portrait of the Granvilles vividly reflects these artistic allegiances. Its high degree of finish and polished surfaces are eminently Leightonesque, while the subject evokes comparison with Millais' Hearts are Trumps (fig. 4), his portrait of the three Armstrong sisters shown at the Royal Academy in 1872. Perugini would have seen this tour de force at the time (he exhibited two pictures himself at the R.A. that year), and when he embarked on his own triple portrait he may well have discussed the problems inherent in such subjects with Millais, who was in the habit of visiting the Peruginis' studios to give advice and offer tips. Even the debt that Hearts are Trumps owes to Reynolds finds a parallel in our picture. Millais had based the composition on that of the master's Ladies Waldegrave (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), which he had seen when visiting its owner, Frances, Lady Waldegrave, at Strawberry Hill. Similarly, if a little more subtly, The Ramparts, Walmer Castle seems to echo Three Ladies adorning a Term of Hymen (fig. 5), Sir Joshua's portrait of the three Montgomery sisters that had been in the National Gallery in London since 1837. The mingling of standing and seated figures in Perugini's design, their conversational interaction, and the part played by flowers (the bouquet in the Countess's lap, the garlands held by Sophia) in linking them together, all suggest that the artist had found inspiration in this monumental work.
There were always so many portraits at the Royal Academy that only a few were noticed by the critics. However, Perugini's picture attracted comments from at least two. The Times was not impressed, comparing it unfavourably with a likeness by Joseph Mordecai of the dramatist Arthur Wing Pinero that hung nearby, but F.G. Stephens, the veteran critic on the Athenaeum, was more positive, even if he could not resist an ironic touch. The picture seemed to him 'pretty and excessively polished, somewhat flat and hard, yet bright, studious, and pure. The ladies are marvellously attired, and beautiful according to the standard of the Book of Beauty'. All in all, Stephens felt it was 'Mr Perugini's best work', not the best he was showing that year since there was only one, but the best he had exhibited to date. In other words, the masterpiece to which the artist had so clearly aspired had been achieved.
We are grateful to Lucinda Hawksley for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
