The Sir George Scharf Sketchbooks 7. Introduction to SSB 48
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The Sir George Scharf Sketchbooks 7. Introduction to SSB 48 (27 September–9 October 1857) By Philip Cottrell, University College Dublin NB. All page references are to SSB 48 and catalogue numbers refer to items from the Art Treasures Exhibition’s Gallery of Ancient Masters unless otherwise specified. By the start of SSB 48, Scharf was over half way through an intensive on-the spot six-week review of the Art Treasures Exhibition which lasted from Friday 4 September-Monday 12 October 1857. Apart from a brief return to London (Tuesday 8-Wednesday 9 September), and an excursion to Trentham Hall, Staffordshire (Tuesday 29 September-Friday 2 October), Scharf was in the Art Treasures Palace daily, sketching and inspecting hundreds of items in situ. This included the one day, other than Sundays, on which the exhibition was closed to the public as part of a ‘National Day of Humiliation’ on Wednesday 7 October, commemorative of the Indian Mutiny. This fell toward the end of the compilation of SSB 48, which covers roughly a fortnight, from Sunday 27 September to 9 October 1857. As with SSB 47, Scharf continued a recto/ verso system of pagination with the verso of each page often left blank, although this system falters on occasion. Scharf continued to lodge in Manchester at Scott’s Temperance Hotel, as confirmed by a note in his diary for Friday 2 October.1 Not counting numerous sketches of medals and portrait miniatures, around sixty paintings are represented in SSB 48, a third of which were from the British Portrait Gallery. 7.i. Studies of portrait miniatures Until now, Scharf’s studies of items in situ at the Art Treasures Palace had largely concentrated on paintings from his own area of jurisdiction, the Gallery of Ancient Masters. Mindful, however, of his appointment as Secretary to the newly-formed National Portrait Gallery, by late September he had increasingly focused on works from the British Portrait Gallery (see also the introduction to SSB 47). His professional activities now involved the accumulation of material which would assist him in identifying sitters in British portraits - not only those which already beginning to form the nucleus of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, but also those which would recommend themselves for future acquisition. As a 1 Smaller 1857 Letts’s Diary - NPG7/3/1/13. 1 result, at the start of his compilation of SSB 48, between Sunday 27-Monday 28 September, Scharf began a careful examination of a section of the Art Treasures Palace devoted to the display of British portrait miniatures. Of huge importance here was a major loan of works contributed by the eccentric William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland (1800-1879). Scharf’s careful studies after select items loaned from the Duke’s collection at Welbeck Abbey dominate the early pages of SSB 48 (pp. 2 recto-5 recto & 7 verso-8 recto, and see also relevant notes compiled on 5 October at pp. 57 recto & 62 recto-64 recto). These also incorporate drawings of miniatures also lent by Walter Francis Montagu-Douglas- Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch (1806-1884), Colonel Meyrick and Edward James Herbert, 3rd Earl of Powis (1818-1891). Fig. 7.i. George Scharf, Sketch of Isaac Oliver’s ‘Portrait of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury’ in situ at the Art Treasures Exhibition, 27 September 1857. Page 5 recto of Scharf Sketchbook 47. Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London. With regard to works selected from the Ancient Masters and British Portrait Galleries featured in SSB 47, it has already been noted that Scharf clearly enjoyed sketching works of art at extremely close quarters. He was often drawn to diminutive items exhibited low in the hang, some on copper, and seems to have derived pleasure from scrutinising the minutiae of finely worked surfaces (see the introduction to SSB 47). This may be expressive of particularly Victorian tastes which cherished carefully observed and finessed effects, but such an approach naturally appealed to Scharf’s ordered, and at times, obsessive predilection for meticulous note-taking and record-keeping. It also suited his own temperament as an artist/ illustrator; he was a skilful technician whose intricate and fastidious filigree style was composed of fussily compressed flourishes of the pencil – the 2 “curlicues” memorably noted by Mitchie and Warhol.2 His goveraphic style is seldom given full expression in the Art Treasures sketchbooks, as most of their drawings were intended as quick ricordi; but a flavour of his developed style is occasionally apparent in patient studies of some of the miniatures in SSB 48, particularly so with his study of Isaac Oliver’s Portrait of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury from Powis Castle on page 5 recto; Miniatures, cat. 20 – see also fig. 7.i) Scharf did not, however, ignore important larger works from the British Portrait Gallery, and continued the practice he had established in SSB 47 of making impressive larger full or three-quarter-page studies of portraits of the Stuart period. Good examples of these include two sketches completed on Monday 28 September after works from the Warwick collection: Huysmans’s Portrait of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, then thought to be by Kneller (p. 9 recto; sold at Sotheby’s in 2014; BPG, cat. 227a) and Rubens’s Portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel (BPG, cat. 107; p. 13 recto) now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Throughout the first of the two weeks covered by SSB 48, Scharf also returned to the Gallery of Ancient Masters intermittently, and among the works sketched here is a study of a Claude Lorrain Wooded River Landscape (cat. 836) completed on 28 September on page 11, and lent by Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster (1795-1869). Scharf’s sketch connects it to one sold at Christie’s in April 2015. 7.ii. Sketches of paintings from the Dutch school and a visit to Trentham, Staffordshire At this point in the compilation of SSB 48, however, it was particularly works by artists of the Dutch school which interested Scharf. Page 7 recto has Scharf’s best study of an item that he returned to several times, Simon Kick’s, The Robbery (cat. 715), exhibited as by Bartholomew van der Helst, and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. It was lent by Henry Thomas Hope (1808-1862), to whose works Scharf paid especial attention throughout SSB 48. On the next day, Tuesday 29 September, Scharf sketched an Isaac van Ostade Village Scene (p. 16 recto; cat. 1016) lent by Richard Sanderson (who died that same month) which has so far resisted identification. Scharf made studies of similar items from this part of the hang on the following two pages, 17 recto and 18 recto. A mystery surrounds another seventeenth-century Dutch work sketched on this day on page 19 recto: Jan Steen’s The 2 Michie and Warhol, 2015, p. ix. 3 Dancing Couple in the National Gallery of Art, Washington which was another painting lent from the Hope collection. It cannot be readily identified with any item included in the published exhibition catalogue of the Ancient Masters section. Scharf’s accompanying note suggests that it was cat. 936, but this refers to a separate work by Steen from Hope’s collection, the Easy Come, Easy Go now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. But as the Washington picture was clearly sketched in Manchester, it possibly appeared hors catalogue, as seems to have been the case with at least one other item from the Gallery of Ancient Masters, Lorenzo Veneziano’s Madonna of Humility with Sts Mark and John in the National Gallery, London.3 A sketch on page 20 recto is also notable as it is of an item from the watercolours section of the exhibition - a Turner composition lent by H. Woodd which seems to be identifiable with a Temple of Poseidon at Sunium now at Tate Britain. Scharf broke off from his survey for an excursion to Trentham Hall, Staffordshire, the residence of George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 2nd Duke of Sutherland (1786-1861), which lasted from the afternoon/ evening of Tuesday 29 September to the morning of Friday 2 October. The context for this visit is supplied by an entry in Scharf’s aunt’s diary for 28 September: “Received a note from George saying he was going by invitation from Lord Overstone to pay a visit to the Duke of Sutherland”.4 Although the latter had only lent to the Modern Masters section of the Art Treasures Exhibition, he was obviously on good terms with Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone (1796-1883) - the Manchester banker who later became Chair of the exhibition’s General Committee on the death of the first incumbent, Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, the previous February. Overstone was both an important lender to the Art Treasures Exhibition (see below) and a supporter and patron of Scharf’s. This trip to Staffordshire, a welcome break from the confines of the Art Treasures Palace, is reflected in a lengthy run of sketches of Trentham and its environs on pages 20 recto-32 recto. Particularly fine are drawings of the house (designed by Charles Barry, but now mostly demolished) seen from its formal gardens on 1 October (pp. 28 recto & 31 recto; see also fig. 7.ii) and the sketches completed on the same day of the replica of Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa which still stands in the grounds (pp. 29 recto & 3 See Pergam, 2011, pp. 276 & 306, and for Hope pp. 215 & 231 n.67.