Strangely Perhaps in a Protestant Country, and at a Factory

DECORATIVE OR DEVOTIONAL: Joseph Willems‟ Chelsea Pietà and porcelain sculptures employing Counter-reformation imagery in eighteenth-century England

Matthew James Martin

BA (Hons), MA, PhD, PGradCert (Art Conservation Studies)

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Melbourne College of Divinity

2010 2

Declaration

I declare that the word length of this thesis is 43,869 words, inclusive of footnotes, but excluding bibliography, tables, appendices and illustrations.

Statement of Originality

I hereby certify that this thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other institution and affirm that to the best of my knowledge, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis.

Signed: ______Date: ______

PART ONE

TEXT

ABSTRACT

A small number of porcelain sculptures on religious subjects are known from eighteenth-century England. These have long puzzled commentators. Why were sculptures employing Counter-reformation imagery being produced in Protestant England? This thesis attempts to answer this question through a detailed examination of the contexts of production and consumption of the Pietà figure group modelled by the Fleming Joseph Willems and manufactured by the Chelsea porcelain factory. Long assumed to have been a Huguenot enterprise, it is shown that the Chelsea factory included artists and craftsmen of various confessional allegiances amongst its personnel. Although the Reformation had seen occasional bursts of iconoclasm in England, by the eighteenth-century English Protestant elites had developed strategies to allow them to engage with Counter-reformation art in the interests of the accrual of cultural prestige. Some images, however, continued to present difficulties, especially when they assumed sculptural form, and as a subject, the Pietà must be numbered amongst this latter group. A close iconographic analysis of Willems‟ Pietà reveals the compositional and symbolic complexity of this work and suggests that this porcelain sculpture was intended to serve as a Catholic devotional image. Despite caricatures of their descent into provincial isolation, many of England‟s Catholic gentry families were fully engaged in the cultural life of eighteenth-century England and many were active as collectors and patrons of art and luxury commodities. It is argued that patronage for these porcelain devotional sculptures is to be sought amongst members of England‟s recusant elite.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The generosity of many people has made the completion of this project possible. My greatest debt of gratitude is to my supervisor Dr Claire Renkin. Her boundless enthusiasm, erudite conversation and her unerring eye for detail have aided me in making this text something far better than it might have been. My colleague Sophie Matthiesson, Curator of International Painting and Sculpture here at the National Gallery of Victoria, has been unfailingly generous in her willingness to listen to lengthy discourses on Recusant art, in her always acute observations, and in her reassurances that what I might have to say is worthwhile. Carol Cains, Curator of Asian art, has provided cups of tea and encouragement. I wish to thank Rachel Delphia, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh for very generously providing me with access to information in curatorial files concerning the Pittsburgh Tournai Pietà. I would also like to thank The Right Honourable Thomas Hugh Clifford, 14th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, for his prompt and gracious response to my enquiries concerning the provenance of the Melbourne Pietà.

Finally, my thanks go to Don for his support and tolerance, and for noticing the flowers.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1759-65, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (D2-1989).

2. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1756-58, soft-paste porcelain, V&A Museum (C.49-1985).

3. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Madonna and Child, 1755-56, soft- paste porcelain, David Roche Collection, South Australia.

4. Derby Porcelain, Crucifixion, c.1760-65, soft-paste porcelain, V&A Museum (414: 170-1885).

5. Derby Porcelain, St Francis (Monk with skull), c.1750, soft-paste porcelain, British Museum (1929,0611.2).

6. St James Factory, Mater Dolorosa, c.1752-54, soft-paste porcelain, British Museum (1940,1001.1).

7. Derby Porcelain, Madonna and Child and Prudent Mother, c.1790,soft-paste porcelain, British Museum (1936, 0715.39, 40).

8. Balthasar Permoser (corpus), Benjamin Thomae (Mary and John), Meissen Porcelain, Crucifixion group, c.1719, Böttger porcelain, wood, Porzellansammlung (P.E. 3879), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

9. Johann Kirchner, Meissen Porcelain, Maria Immaculata, c.1732, hard-paste porcelain, Porzellansammlung (P.E. 406), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

10. Johann Kändler, Meissen Porcelain, Altar Garniture, c.1737-40, hard-paste porcelain, Geitsliche Schatzkammer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

11. Johann Kändler, Meissen Porcelain, Maria Immaculata, c.1738-40, hard-paste porcelain, Umĕleckoprůmyslové museum, Prague (16.771).

12. Johann Kändler, Meissen Porcelain, Calvary Group, c.1737-47, hard-paste porcelain, wood,leather, Private Collection.

13. Franz Anton Bustelli, Neudeck Porcelain, Crucifixion group, c.1761, hard-paste porcelain; Jacob and Wolfgang Gerstens Workshop, Hausaltar, c. 1760, wood, metal, Private Collection.

14. Massimillio Soldani Benzi, Doccia Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c.1744, porcelain, wood, Private Collection.

15. Johann Zoffany, Sir Lawrence Dundas, c.1769, oil on canvas, Collection of the Marquess of Zetland.

16. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Fisherman, 1753-57, soft-paste porcelain, Private Collection; Agasias of Ephesus, Borghese Gladiator, c.100 BCE, marble, Musée du Louvre (Inv. MR 224).

17. Nicolas Coustou, Pietà , 1712-28, marble, Notre Dame de Paris. (Author‟s photo)

18. Nicolas Coustou, Pietà , detail. (Author‟s photo)

19. François Girardon, The Entombment, c.1728, gilded bronze, Notre Dame de Paris. (Author‟s photo)

20. Jacques François Blondel, after Ferdinand Delamonce, Elevation du fond du choeur de N.D. de Paris et de son autel principal, published by Jean Mariette, Paris 1727, engraving, British Museum (M,37.31).

21. Antoine Hérisset, Altar of Notre Dame, Paris, c. 1765, engraving, published in J.A. Piganiol de La Force, Description historique de la ville de Paris et de ses 12 environs, Vol.1 , Paris, 1765. General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

22. St James factory, The Holy Family, c.1750, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (1996.197).

23. Workshop of Raphael, Giulio Romano (attributed to), The Small Holy Family, c.1519, oil on panel, Musée du Louvre (inv.605).

24. François de Poilly the elder, La Sainte Vierge, 1648-81, engraving, reworked by Charles Simonneau and published in the Recueil Crozat, 1729-40, British Museum (1855,0609.96).

25. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1756-58, soft-paste porcelain, sold Christies London, lot 90, 11 February 1991.

26. Anthony van Dyck, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c.1629, oil on canvas, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen.

27. Paulus Pontius, after Van Dyck, Pietà, 1630, engraving, British Museum (R,2.34).

28. Paolo Veronese, Pietà, c.1576-82, oil on canvas, The State Hermitage, St Petersburg.

29. Agostino Caracci, after Veronese, Pietà , c.1582, engraving, British Museum (U,2.29).

30. Anthony Van Dyck, Pietà, 1628-32, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado.

31. Anthony Van Dyck, Pietà, 1618, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

32. Cornelis Galle I, after Rubens, The Lamentation with one angel, 1600-50, engraving, British Museum (1891,0414.660).

33. Hendrick Goltzius, Pietà, 1596, engraving, British Museum (1868,0822.609).

34. Anthony Van Dyck, Lamentation, 1635, oil on canvas, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerpen (Inv.404).

35. Peter Paul Rubens, Pietà with St Francis, 1617-20, oil on canvas, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels (Inv.164).

36. Paulus Pontius, after Peter Paul Rubens, Pietà with St Francis, 1628, engraving, British Museum (1891,0414.656).

37. Peter Paul Rubens, Descent from the cross, 1617, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille.

38. Annibale Carracci, Pietà, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

39. Pietro del Pò, after Annibale Carracci, Pietà, c.1650-63, etching, published by Noël Coypel, Paris. British Museum (U,1.131).

40. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1759-65, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (D2-1989).

41. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1759-65, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (D2-1989).

42. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1759-65, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (D2-1989).

43. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Roman Charity, c.1763, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (D21.a-b-1984). 14

44. Peter Paul Rubens, Roman Charity, current whereabouts unknown.

45. William Panneels, Roman Charity, c.1631, engraving, British Museum (S.5352).

46. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Roman Charity, c.1763, soft-paste porcelain, National Gallery of Victoria (D21.a-b-1984).

47. Detail of Mantle. Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1756-58, soft-paste porcelain, V&A Museum, (C.49-1985).

48. Detail. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, 1756-58, soft-paste porcelain, sold Christies London, lot 90, 11 February 1991. 49. Detail, Jacques François Blondel, after Ferdinand Delamonce, Elevation du fond du choeur de N.D. de Paris et de son autel principal, published by Jean Mariette, Paris 1727, British Museum (M,37.31).

50. Hendrik Goltzius, The Entombment, 1596, engraving, Private Collection.

51. John Goldar , after Daniel Dodd, Entombment, 1788, engraving, British Museum (M 1939,1104.2).

52. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Madonna and Child, c.1761, soft- paste porcelain, British Museum, (1948,1203.57).

53. David Le Marchand, Virgin and Child, c.1696, ivory, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo. (Acc.No.69.1023).

54. David Le Marchand, Corpus Christi, after 1700, ivory, V&A Museum (A.42- 1983).

55. Detail of pedestal, Melbourne Pietà group. (Author‟s photo)

56. Detail of base, Victoria and Albert Pietà group. (Author‟s photo)

57. Detail of base, Melbourne Pietà group. (Author‟s photo)

58. Detail of base, Melbourne Pietà group. (Author‟s photo)

59. Tournai Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c.1765, soft-paste porcelain, gilt-bronze, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (63.17.3).

60. Tournai Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c.1765, soft-paste porcelain, gilt-bronze, Loan Exhibition of Tournai and Chelsea Porcelain, Belgian Institute London, 1953.

61. Tournai Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c.1765, soft-paste porcelain, sold Christies, Kasteel van Rumbeke sale, 20-23 May, 1997, Lot 3107.

62. Tournai Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c.1765, soft-paste porcelain, Musée Royale de Mariemont.

63. Capheaton Hall, Northumberland. (Author‟s photo)

64. Broughton Hall, North Yorkshire. (Author‟s photo)

65. Stonyhurst Hall, Lancashire. (Author‟s photo)

66. Francesco Trevisani, Sir Edward, 6th Baronet Gascoigne, oil on canvas, c.1727, Lotherton Hall, West Yorkshire.

67. Buckland House, Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). (Author‟s photo)

68. The Mass Cabinet, Little Drawing Room, Coughton Court. (Author‟s photo)

69. Nicolas de Largillière, Anne, daughter of Sir Francis Throckmorton, 1729, oil on canvas, Coughton Court, Warwickshire.

70. Nicolas de Largillière, Elizabeth Throckmorton, Canoness of the Order of the Dames Augustines Anglaises, 1729, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington (1964.20.1).

71. Nicolas de Largillière, Sr Frances Wollascott, 1729, oil on Canvas, Art Gallery of South Australia.

72. Nicolas de Largillière, Sir Robert Throckmorton, 4th Bt., 1729, oil on canvas, Coughton Court, Warwickshire.

73. Pompeo Batoni, Robert Throckmorton, 1772, oil on canvas, Counghton Court, Warwickshire.

74. Peter Lely, Thomas Clifford, 1st Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, c.1672, oil on canvas, Government Art Collection, United Kingdom.

75. Thomas Corbett, Pair of William III sconces with the arms of the Lords Clifford of Chudleigh, c.1701, silver, Sold Christies London, 19 November 2002, Lot 142.

76. Ugbrooke House, Chudleigh, Devon. (Author‟s photo)

77. Part of an eighteenth-century Chinese export porcelain service with the arms of Clifford of Chudleigh, c.1740, hard-paste porcelain, Private Collection.

78. Joseph Willems, Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Madonna and Child, Various collections.

CONTENTS

Part One

Abstract 7

Acknowledgments 9

List of illustrations 11

Contents 19

Introduction 21

Chapter One – Nicholas Sprimont and the Chelsea Porcelain Factory 39

Chapter Two – Counter-reformation Imagery in Eighteenth-Century England 59

Chapter Three – The Willems Pietà Groups as Devotional Images 87

Chapter Four – The Audience for the Chelsea Pietà 125

Conclusion 149

Bibliography 153

Part Two

Illustrations 1

INTRODUCTION

The European ceramics collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia includes one of the great masterpieces of eighteenth- century English porcelain art: a Pietà modelled by Joseph Willems, dated c.1761 and produced by the Chelsea porcelain factory (Fig.1).1 The work is inspired by the marble group of Nicolas Coustou in the choir of Notre Dame in Paris. Well known to scholars of eighteenth-century English porcelain, this model, only three examples of which are known,2 is one of only two models on religious subjects produced by Chelsea – the other is a group of the Madonna and Child; both were modelled by Willems and first produced during the Red Anchor period (1753-57) of the factory‟s production (Fig.2 & 3).

These figures have long puzzled commentators: “Strangely perhaps in a Protestant country, and at a factory presumably managed by a Protestant Frenchman, a number of figures and groups on a religious theme were nevertheless made at Chelsea.”3 So Elizabeth Adams introduces her brief consideration of this group of models. That Adams finds it a matter of some surprise that religious subjects should have been treated of by the Chelsea modellers reflects, it may be argued, a sense of uncertainty about the significance of religious images and their associations with Roman Catholic piety – an uncertainty as much contemporary as eighteenth century – in the context of Protestant England.4 In this wariness, Adams is not alone. Arthur Lane comments that “it is perhaps more surprising that Chelsea, with its Huguenot associations, should have produced in the seated Madonna and Child (1755 and 1756 catalogues) one of the most successful religious groups

1 Accession number: D2-1989. 2 A red anchor example in the V&A (C.49-1985), the gold anchor example in the NGV, and another gold anchor example sold on the London market in 1991 (Christies, London 11 February 1991, Lot 90). A further biscuit version of the model was produced c.1766 at the Tournai factory. 3 Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: The British Museum Press, 2001), 133. 4 The term „Catholic‟ is used in place of the fuller „Roman Catholic” hereafter. 21 in European porcelain”.5 Hilary Young also comments on these models, providing the most sophisticated response by construing this material as evidence for “a complex response to Counter-reformation iconography” in the factory‟s production.6 Young makes an important observation when he identifies the „religious‟ subjects spoken of by both Adams and Lane as, more specifically, Counter-reformation imagery. The religious character of the subject matter is not problematic in itself; religious art never entirely ceased to be created and appreciated in post-Reformation England. It is the explicitly Catholic associations of the imagery which is the challenging point for these writers.

A number of issues would appear to stand behind these statements: assumptions about the uniformly negative reception of Counter-reformation imagery in eighteenth-century England; assumptions about the Protestant identities of the artists and craftsmen responsible for the production of these figures; and puzzlement concerning the possible function of these objects.

These statements also point to a much larger issue, namely the nature of the relationship between art and religion in the eighteenth century. It is of note that religious art in eighteenth-century Europe is a field which until very recently has been largely neglected by art historians. The eighteenth century has generally been characterised as the century of the Enlightenment, and as such, the birthplace of rational, secular Modernity. The enormous quantity of religious art that was produced in Europe during this period does not figure,

5 Arthur Lane, English Porcelain Figures of the Eighteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 69. The Gold anchor version is mentioned in the 1761 catalogue (Lane 1961, 72). 6 Hilary Young, English Porcelain 1745-95. Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption. Victoria and Albert Museum Studies in the History of Art and Design (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 37. Whilst the focus here is specifically upon the Chelsea Factory and the situation in mid-eighteenth century England, similar concerns about the confessional identities of artists and consumers appear in the work of commentators writing about other porcelain factories of the period. So for example, in their book on Meissen porcelain figures, the authors Yvonne and Len Adams, speaking of the great porcelain modeller Johann Joachim Kändler and his work for the Catholic Saxon court in Dresden, state: “It is amazing that Kaendler, the son of a Protestant pastor, was able to produce figures more aligned with the Catholic faith than his own, although he did convert to Catholicism later in life. Whether this was a political move or through conviction is not known.” (Len and Yvonne Adams, Meissen Portrait Figures (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1987), 58).

22 by and large, in the narratives of eighteenth-century art history. But the recent work of cultural historians suggests that we risk dangerously misconstruing the period‟s visual culture if we assume its religious art to be the etiolated remnants of a dying tradition in an age of secular rationalism. As Nigel Aston has recently argued in his important study Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe, the eighteenth century has come to be seen by many historians as “the truly Christian Century” in Europe, one in which religious belief formed a fundamental component of public culture.7

In eighteenth-century England, both art and religion mattered. Religious observance amongst social elites remained the norm. The eighteenth century was the great age of the English country house chapel and English aristocrats, like their continental counterparts, generally employed at least one chaplain who was an important member of the household.8 Religion remained fundamental to definitions of national self-identity. Religious beliefs and prejudices – especially, but not exclusively anti-Catholicism – were vigorously discussed in public forums and informed politics in a powerful fashion. 9

Art could not lay claim to the same degree of significance, but it still mattered a good deal more than we might imagine today. Art was inextricably entwined with discussions about education, taste and morality.10 In an age when radical social and economic transformations were taking place, art occupied a central role as a marker of cultural and social superiority. As Ian Pears states in his study of the rise of painting collections in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, “possession of taste not only indicated education and hence virtue but also implied and signified the fitness of its possessors to

7 Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 10. 8 William Gibson, A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain 1530–1840 (London, 1997), esp. Ch.3. 9 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2000; B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. Theological Debate from Locke to Burke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 10 See Ian Pears, The Discovery of Painting: the Growth of Interest in the Arts in England 1680–1768. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 23 rule”.11 And art in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England necessarily included religious art, a sub-category of the genre that stood at the pinnacle of the art-critical hierarchies of the period: history painting.

The Chelsea Pietà embodies the intersection between these two realms – art and religion – in eighteenth century England. The Pietà assumes the form of a fashionable luxury porcelain group, a desirable object whose ownership would certainly have contributed to the stock of cultural capital demonstrating one‟s superior standing in society. Yet its Counter-reformation subject matter requires explanation in the context of the perceived lack of interest in Catholic imagery on the part of Protestant collectors.

It is necessary for us here to define Counter-reformation imagery. What characterised those images, products of the Catholic Counter-reformation, which proved so offensive, to greater or lesser degree, to Protestant English sensibilities? The role of images in Christian worship came under fierce attack during the Reformation and iconoclastic tendencies, which had, since antiquity, always existed in the Church, came powerfully to the fore.12 Many of the Reformers contended that the use of images in Christian worship was idolatrous and a manifestation of the pagan superstition with which, it was argued, the Catholic Church had become corrupted. The responses of the Reformers varied from place to place, but in the most extreme cases, all images were stripped from homes and places of worship and destroyed. The senior authorities of the Catholic Church reacted to these attacks by reaffirming the ancient role of images in Christian worship promulgated at the second Nicene Council in 787.13 The decree of the 25th session of the Council of Trent held in December of 1563 defended the role of images in

11 Pears 1988, 36. 12 On the nature of European devotional images see in general: Erwin Panofsky, “ „Imago Pietatis‟: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des „Schmerzensmanns‟ und der „Maria Mediatrix‟,” Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1927), 264ff; Joanna Ziegler, Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, c.1300-c.1600 (Brussels and Rome: Brepols, 1992), 25ff; Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum in Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann 1981), 69ff, 301-2;. 13 G. Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images from Calvin to Baronius (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 70-78. 24

Catholic worship and devotion against the accusations of idolatry levelled by the Reformers and carefully clarified the appropriate use of images.14 A literature subsequently appeared which developed the basic prescriptions of the Tridentine decree, outlining in particular the acceptable forms which Catholic images were to take. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti‟s Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582), the most comprehensive and influential attempt to explain the rulings of the Council of Trent concerning sacred art, argued against the perceived excesses of Mannerist art and advocated an art that was naturalistic, clear, direct and moving.15

It is a misconception that the Reformation did away with all religious imagery. Luther himself was not hostile to images, remarking that they were “indifferent things” of themselves and only problematic if misused.16 It was the Swiss Reformer John Calvin who advocated a more radical Reformed position on images, arguing that man-made symbols – like the statues, images and paintings found in Catholic Churches – could not assist communication between the human and the divine realm because material props drew attention away from the immaterial, spiritual realm. For Calvin, images were not only redundant for devotional purposes, but they actually led people away from God.17

In England, although the Elizabethan Injunction of 1559 saw religious imagery removed from the Churches of the realm, religious images remained, as Tara Hamling has recently demonstrated, a relatively common occurrence in the decoration of domestic spaces on into the second half of the seventeenth

14 J. Waterworth (ed. and trans.) The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent, (London: Dolman, 1848), 233-36. 15 Stefano della Torre (ed.) Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alla imagini sacre et profane (Bologna, 1582). Monumenta Studia Instrumenta Liturgica, 25. Città Del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002; C. Hecht, Katholische Bildertheologie im Zeitalter von Gegenreformation und Barock: Studien zu Traktaten von Johannes Molanus, Gabriele Paleotti und anderen Autoren. Berlin, 1997. 16 On Luther and religious art see Carl Christensen, Art and Reformation in Germany (Athens, OH.: Ohio University Press, 1980), 42-65. 17 On Calvin‟s attitudes to idolatry see Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 25 century.18 It was the type of religious image that was at issue for most English Protestants, and the context of its display. An important result of the Tridentine decree on images was that religious art in Catholic states began to emphasise those subjects that upheld dogmas disputed by the Reformers, and new subjects came into being for the same purpose. Amongst these innovations we find images of the Virgin glorified, especially as the Immaculate Conception; the honouring of modern saints such as Carlo Borromeo and others; and themes such as the last communion of a saint or the Triumph of the Eucharist, which proclaimed the doctrine of Transubstantiation. In the English Protestant context, such images found no support in the text of scripture and as such were deemed superstitious fantasy and manifestations of idolatry. Other, more venerable religious subjects also fell into the same category, and it is here that the image of the Pietà must be positioned. From its beginnings in Northern Europe in the early fourteenth century, the image of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ became immensely popular, especially in sculpture, but also in painting. The most poignant of the seven sorrows of the Virgin, the Pietà distils into a single image the psychological and theological drama of the Virgin‟s profound grief at her son‟s death.19 The Pietà is an episode undescribed in the scriptural narrative and this, along with the Eucharistic resonances of the image, rendered the subject problematic for a Protestant audience.

It is clear that different Counter-reformation images posed different levels of difficulty for Protestant viewers. Images of God the Father were strictly prohibited by nearly all Reformers, and individual images of Christ, Mary and the Holy Spirit were also highly problematic.20 The subject of the Madonna and Child, the second of the Chelsea porcelain sculptures, although strictly speaking non-biblical, does not seem to have encountered the same degree of resistance in Protestant contexts. Paintings of this subject appear with some frequency in English picture collections of the eighteenth century and

18 Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household. Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 19 Henk van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300 – 1500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 104. 20 Hamling 2010, 50. 26 works on this subject were frequently exhibited in the second half of the century at the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy Exhibitions.21 The image, on its own, did not necessarily embody any specifically Counter- reformation doctrinal position and it seems that by the latter part of the eighteenth century the subject had become emblematic in the English context of a notion of appropriate motherly love, and could be viewed without any particular devotional significance being construed. An illustration of this is to be seen in the pair of Derby biscuit porcelain figures produced in c.1790 where a figure of the Madonna and Child forms the pendant to a figure of the Prudent mother (Fig.7).22

Ceramic Devotional Figures in Continental Europe

Earthenware devotional images are known in Europe from at least as early as the late Medieval period and Renaissance terracotta, maiolica and faience examples from France, Germany and Italy survive in large numbers. Many of these works, like the terracotta figures executed for the Ferrarese court of the Este by the Modena-born sculptor Guido Mazzoni, or the terracotta works of the Bolognese sculptor, Niccolò dell‟ Arca, represent masterpieces of Renaissance religious sculpture.23 The Florentine workshop of the Della Robbia family similarly produced maiolica sculptures – terracottas finished in coloured lead glazes – of religious subjects, many intended for ecclesiastical

21 For paintings of the Madonna and Child in eighteenth century English collections see: Martyn 1766 The English Connoisseur; Tessa Murdoch (ed.) Nobel Households. Eighteenth- Century Inventories of Great English Houses. Cambridge: John Adamson, 2006. On the exhibitions see A. Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760 – 1791, The Free Society of Artists, 1761 – 1783: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from the foundation of the societies to 1791. London: George Bell 1907; and A. Graves, A Dictionary of Artists who have exhibited works in the principal London exhibitions from 1760 – 1893. (First published 1901) Bath: Kingsmead Reprints, 1969. On images of motherhood see Jordanova, Ludmilla J. Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine, 1760 – 1820. (London: Longman, 1999), 219-27. 22 British Museum: 1936, 0715. 39, 40. See Peter Bradshaw, Derby Porcelain Figures, 1750- 1848 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 145, 274. 23 Roberta Olson, Italian Renaissance Sculpture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992; James H. Beck, "Niccolo dell'Arca: A Reexamination," Art Bulletin 47 (1965), 335–344. 27 settings, which demonstrated the expressive qualities inherent in this medium.24

The secret of the production of a true, hard-paste porcelain like that produced in China since the seventh century CE was first discovered in Europe in 1710 at the Meissen factory in Saxony. From the outset, devotional images were produced at Meissen. The Dresden Porzellansammlung includes a Corpus executed in Böttger stoneware, a hard, high-fired red stoneware body which was an early stage on the path to discovering a hard-paste porcelain formula. Ascribed to the sculptor Balthasar Permoser, this figure probably dates to before 1711.25 A crucifixion group modelled by the court sculptors Balthasar Permoser (the crucifix) and Benjamin Thomae (the figures of the Virgin and John) was executed in the early Böttger porcelain body c.1719 (Fig.8).26

With the arrival at the Meissen factory in 1731 of Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-75), arguably the greatest porcelain sculptor of the eighteenth century, porcelain figure production was utterly transformed, becoming the chief glory of Meissen‟s output from the first half of the eighteenth century. Alongside such great projects as the production of the menagerie of life-size animals for Augustus the Strong‟s Japanisches Palais,27 the factory also produced a range of sculptures of religious subjects, including a number that are known to have been special court commissions.

Already in 1732, Johann Gottlieb Kirchner (born 1706),28 Kändler‟s predecessor as model master at the Meissen factory, had produced a figure of Maria Immaculata, executed in white porcelain, embellished with reticent

24 I. Gentilini, I. (ed), I Della Robbia. Il dialogo tra le Arti nel Rinascimento. Milan: Skira, 2009. 25 Porzellansammlung P.E. 844; Ingelore Menzhausen, Early Meissen Porcelain in Dresden. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 197. 26 Porzellansammlung P.E. 3879. See Menzhausen 1990, 197, no.33 27 Samuel Wittwer, The Gallery of Meissen Animals: Augustus the Strong's Menagerie for the Japanese Palace in Dresden. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006. 28 Rainer Rückert, Biographische Daten der Meissener Manufacturisten des 18. Jahrhunderts. Kataloge des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums München, Band XX: Katalog der Meissener Porzellan-Sammlung Schloss Lustheim, Oberschleissheim vor München Beiband, (München 1990), 114. 28 enamel and gilt decoration (Fig.9).29 In 1735, Augustus ordered an altar garniture for Cardinal Annibale Albani who had played a crucial role in negotiating the marriage of Augustus‟ eldest daughter, Maria Amalia, to the King of Naples.30 The garniture, which is today preserved in the Museo Diocesano Albani in Urbino, consists of a crucifix, six candlesticks, figures of St Peter and St Paul, a chalice, two cruets and stand, three frames containing pages of the canon of the Mass, a ewer and basin, a bell, a tray and a holy- water basin.31 In 1737 Augustus ordered for his mother-in-law, Dowager Empress Wilhelmine Amalia of Brunswick, a second altar garniture intended for use in her private chapel, consisting of the same elements as the Albani garniture, but this time with twelve figures of the apostles, the whole set bearing the Hapsburg arms (Fig.10 & 11).32

Although obviously functioning as diplomatic gifts, porcelains such as these were also clearly intended for liturgical use, and in the case of the Immaculata, they probably also functioned as devotional objects. That this was the case is emphasised by the existence in a private collection of a porcelain crucifix and calvary with accompanying figures of the Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Saint John. Modelled by Kändler between 1737 and 1747, this group is an adaptation of elements from Kändler‟s crucifixion group created for Wilhelmine Amalia and another large crucifixion group begun in 1743. This smaller crucifixion group is distinguished by the fact that it is provided with a carefully constructed fitted leather case decorated with gilt tooling. This would appear to indicate that the group was intended to travel –

29 Porzellansammlung P.E. 406; Menzhausen 1990, 205, no.107 30 Timothy H. Clarke, “Die „Römische Bestellung‟. Die Meissener Altar-Garnitur, die August III dem Kardinal Annibale Albani im Jahre 1736 schenkte,” Keramos 86 (1979), 3-52. 31 A porcelain and gilt-metal monstrance associated with the garniture is probably of Italian manufacture and post-1740 in date. See Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts ca. 1710-63 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 212-13. 32 This altar garniture is today divided between a number of collections including the Geistliche Schatzkammer, Kunsthisorisches Museum, Vienna, the Würtemburgisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart, the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Schloss Lustheim and a private collection. 29 we have here an example of a portable crucifixion group probably intended for devotional use (Fig.12).33

This list is not exhaustive and religious sculpture formed only a small part of Meissen‟s output in the early years of production. The presence of numerous court commissions amongst these works indicates, however, the importance of these devotional sculptures in this newly mastered material.

Despite attempts to maintain the secrecy of porcelain production at Meissen, the knowledge of the requisite formulae soon spread with migrant workmen and porcelain factories were established in Vienna in 1719 and Venice in 1720. Soon further factories were established in other German states and in Italy. Many of these factories produced images of religious subjects, and although we cannot always identify specific commissions that show that they were destined for use in devotional contexts, in many instances the devotional function of these images is clear. Thus, for example, a crucifixion group including figures of the Virgin and St John modelled by the great Rococo porcelain sculptor, Franz Anton Bustelli for the Neudeck factory between 1755-56, is to be found installed in a domestic shrine, c.1760, now held in a private collection (Fig.13).34 Other extraordinary works of porcelain devotional sculpture were produced at the Doccia factory, established by Carlo Ginori near Florence in 1737.35 Doccia‟s output was distinguished by its creation of porcelain versions of models by leading Florentine late Baroque sculptors like Massimiliano Soldani Benzi and Vincenzio Foggini.36 The most outstanding of the factory‟s devotional works must be the magnificent Pietà or Large Lamentation, c.1744, from a model by Soldani Benzi (Fig.14). This work, 92.5 cm high with its ebonised fruitwood base and some 92.5 cm wide, is a monumental example of the technical feats the Doccia factory could achieve

33 Angela Gräffin von Wallwitz, Celebrating Kaendler 1706 – 1775 (München: Angela Gräffin von Wallwitz Kunsthandel, 2006), 131-135. 34 Bustelli. Nymphenburger Porzellanfiguren des Rokoko (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 2004), 184-86. 35 Alessandro Biancalana, “The Origins of the Doccia Manufactory”, in Baroque Luxury Porcelain. The Manufacturies of Du Paquier in Vienna and of Carlo Ginori in Florence. Lichtenstein Museum Vienna (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005), 69. 36 Lankheit, Klaus. Die Modellsammlung der Porzellanmanufaktur Doccia. Munich: Bruckmann, 1982. 30 in this new sculptural medium. Ginori gifted the Pietà to his wife‟s uncle, Cardinal Neri Corsini, a leading figure in the artistic and cultural life of Rome.37

It is in the context of these porcelain devotional sculptures produced by many of the leading continental factories that we need to consider the very small number of porcelain sculptures on religious subjects produced by eighteenth century English porcelain factories. Porcelain production in England only begins in the mid eighteenth century, some decades after the establishment of the leading factories in Germany, Austria, France and Italy. From the outset, English porcelain production was heavily influenced by the products of the major established continental factories, especially Vincennes and Sèvres in France and Meissen in Germany, as well as by Chinese export-porcelains. Figure production formed a part of most English factories‟ outputs from an early period.38 However, figures employing explicitly Counter-reformation imagery are very rare.39 The two most important examples, in terms of technical and aesthetic quality, are the Pietà and the Madonna and Child, both modelled by Joseph Willems and produced by the Chelsea Factory, whilst a third significant example, a Holy Family after Raphael‟s Small Holy Family, c.1750, was produced by the St James Factory of Charles Gouyn, an off-shoot of the early Chelsea concern (Fig.22).40 The St James Factory also produced a figure of the Mater Dolorosa (Fig.6).41 An example of a Crucifixion group by the Derby factory is known, produced during the directorship of William Duesbury and dating to 1760-65 (Fig.4), and Derby also produced a

37 Baroque Luxury Porcelain. The Manufacturies of Du Paquier in Vienna and of Carlo Ginori in Florence. Lichtenstein Museum Vienna (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005), 468. 38 See Peter Bradshaw, 18th Century English Porcelain Figures 1745-1795. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1981. 39 Omitted from this discussion are the figures of monks and nuns produced by a number of English factories. The interpretation of these figures is complex and not straightforward and I hope to address this subject in another forum. These figures, however, do not represent devotional subjects per se. Some of these figures, for example some of the Chelsea toys, bear mottos referring to fidelity or spiritual love, suggesting that these images could function in an emblematic fashion. 40 Adams 2001, 52. This work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (1996.197). 41 Two examples of this figure are known, a white version in the British Museum c.1752-54 (inv. 1940,1001.1) and a coloured version sold at Phillips London in 1985 (Adams 2001, 53). 31

Madonna and Child group during the period 1770-96 (Fig.7) and a figure of St Francis (Fig.5), dated c.1750.42

The very small number of extant models of religious subjects in England compared to Continental Europe suggests a significant difference in the reception of these figures and their imagery in the English context. The figures nevertheless exist. It is to the questions surrounding the creation of porcelain sculptures employing Counter-reformation iconography in eighteenth-century England that this thesis will address itself through a detailed examination of the circumstances of the production and consumption of the Chelsea Pietà figures, perhaps the most significant of this small group of works.

It is of note that the puzzlement expressed by writers like Lane, Adams and Young concerning the use of Counter-reformation imagery at Chelsea is framed entirely in terms of production. Lane and Adams in particular consider it strange that a factory that they assume to be directed by a Protestant businessman should produce objects incorporating Catholic subject matter. These writers do not at all engage with questions surrounding the objects‟ possible meaning or the circumstances of their consumption – such questions may be implied in their statements, but they are not directly addressed. Taking the comments of these writers as a starting point, the first chapter of this thesis will consider the context of production at Chelsea of Counter- reformation images and will show how, without adequate consideration of the questions of audience and consumption, a proper assessment of the significance and meaning of these porcelain sculptures is not possible.

The world of eighteenth-century porcelain production was an international one. Skilled craftsman moved from factory to factory around Europe, carrying with them a range of technical skills and familiarity with fashionable design styles. The first chapter will examine the London Chelsea factory against this background. Although long considered an essentially Huguenot enterprise,

42 Madonna and Child: Bradshaw 1990, 274. Crucifixion group: Bradshaw 1990, 135, 138-9. St Francis: Bradshaw 1990, 255-56. 32 the principal artists of the Chelsea factory appear to have included Catholics and craftsmen of indeterminate confessional allegiance amongst their number. Essentially an association of Franco-Flemish artists, ties of profession and language appear to have united the Chelsea craftsmen – religious affiliation does not seem to have been a major consideration. Close examination of available sources, some of them only recently published, suggests that the eighteenth-century world of luxury commodity production was a milieu of religious tolerance where social and commercial ties were paramount. As a commercial enterprise, the production of saleable products was the chief goal of the Chelsea factory. In the absence of any staunchly „Protestant‟ identity attributable to the Chelsea factory‟s principals, the production of porcelain sculptures employing Counter-reformation imagery takes on a far less problematic cast. But as the director of a commercial enterprise, Nicholas Sprimont, manager of Chelsea, must also have identified a market for these objects – why else were they produced?

It is to the identification of the audience for this Counter-reformation art that the next three chapters are dedicated.

Chapter Two will explore the reception of Counter-reformation art in eighteenth-century England. As it happens, such art was surprisingly common in English collections. Protestant English elites had by the middle of the eighteenth century developed strategies for engaging with Counter- reformation images. Such images were unavoidable as some of the most admired art of the day was created by Catholic artists for Catholic patrons and possessed explicitly Catholic content. In order to be able to acquire French and Italian paintings and enjoy the prestige that accrued from these cultures, Protestant elites pursued a policy of aestheticising such works, gauging their merits in terms of composition and technical accomplishment whilst bracketing out their problematic content. Careful calculation of contexts of display was also employed to manage the art‟s Catholic meaning. The Chelsea Pietà was not, therefore, automatically unacceptable to an English audience simply on the basis of its Catholic subject matter. And indeed, it is interesting to consider that the manner in which this figure group is dealt with 33 by the writers cited at the outset of this introduction – where a reluctance to explore in any detail the meaning of these works is in evidence – is effectively a continuation of this eighteenth-century Protestant neutralisation of the meaning of Counter-reformation art through avoidance of engaging with the work‟s content.

But in the eighteenth century, not all Counter-reformation imagery was necessarily susceptible to such strategies of mediation. Sculpture in particular remained especially problematic because of its overt associations with idolatry and religious sculpture in England remained exceedingly rare, Catholic sculpture even more so. As a three-dimensional object, the Chelsea Pietà would have shared in this awkwardness. At least one of the Chelsea Pietà groups is known to have been in Catholic ownership during the eighteenth century and the combination of Catholic devotional subject and sculptural form makes the probability that these objects were specifically intended for a Catholic, and not Protestant, audience seem almost certain.

Chapter Three presents a detailed iconographic analysis of the extant examples of the Chelsea Pietà. Such a basic exercise in art-historical analysis has rarely if ever been applied to porcelain figures in the past. This study aims to challenge the characterisation of these figures as mere „decorative‟ objects and instead will attempt to engage seriously with the sculptural character of these artworks, submitting them to similar degrees of formal iconographic study as would be deemed appropriate for any other work of sculpture. It will be demonstrated that Joseph Willems, the Catholic modeller of this work, has not merely produced a reduction of the monumental sculpture from which the Pietà draws inspiration, but that he has produced a dynamic recomposition of the original which in numerous details amplifies the Catholic devotional associations of the image. It will be shown that Willems‟ Pietà reflects the modeller‟s familiarity with a range of devotional images from the Flemish baroque tradition. Although previous studies have identified sources in print and sculpture for eighteenth-century porcelain figures, this analysis attempts to take seriously Willems‟ role as an interpreter of his sources and presents Willems as the creator of a powerful devotional image 34 charged with affective Catholic spirituality. The decoration of the extant Pietà groups is also subjected to analysis. Again it is argued that many details of the decorative embellishments to the sculptural model serve to enhance the specifically devotional aspects of the work. Not only do many of these decorative details suggest a familiarity with Catholic devotional art on the part of the artists responsible for their execution, but their evocation of aspects of Counter-reformation devotional practice, such as the cult of the Wounds of Christ and the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, render these images even more problematic for a Protestant audience.

In the final chapter, the English Catholic elite is examined as the probable audience for the Chelsea Pietà groups. In eighteenth-century England, prior to the Relief Act of 1791 the public practice of Catholicism was illegal and English Catholics accused of recusancy, or non-conformity to the Church of England were in theory subject to a range of severe legal penalties. These included losing inheritances to Protestant relatives, an inability to buy land, a ban on sending children abroad for Catholic education,43 and an inability to enter politics, to hold commissions in the armed forces, or to study at the universities.44 Although with the progress of the eighteenth century magistrates came to apply the penal laws less and less, English Catholics observed their faith largely in private.45 Public reactions to overt displays of Catholic piety remained unpredictable, and frequently violent.46 Until 1791 Catholic chapels were illegal according to the letter of the law. In country districts, services were traditionally held in house chapels in gentry homes, or in attics or upper rooms where no chapel existed. Such house chapels might serve as a church for an entire Catholic community gathered around and dependent upon a Catholic gentry family. In London worship was conducted in a variety of settings: in garrets, for the Irish poor; in small mass-houses; or in the chapels maintained by the embassies of the great Catholic states47 –

43 Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England c.1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester, 1994), 47. 44 Haydon 1994, 14 45 Haydon 1994, 47. 46 See in general Haydon 1994. 47 See John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. 35 most splendidly, in the beautiful Sardinian Chapel, or in the Portuguese Chapel with its sumptuous baroque decoration celebrating a triumphalist Catholicism.48

Despite the legal proscriptions, there remained a Catholic elite in eighteenth- century England and members of this elite could occupy significant social positions. A number of Catholic aristocrats, the Duke of Norfolk chief amongst them, remained politically powerful and high gentry families like the Jerninghams of Costessey in Norfolk had close ties with the court.49 Some families like the Throckmortons of Coughton Court managed to maintain their lands and fortunes largely intact.50 There were notable figures like John Talman, the first Director of the Society of Antiquaries appointed at its foundation, who had converted to Catholicism in the 1690s and spent the remainder of his life dreaming of the restoration of Catholicism in England.51 Although their political position could at times be precarious – the greatest crises of the eighteenth century being the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745 – the Catholic elite retained political influence and used this influence to defend the interests of their co-religionists. The Duke of Norfolk interceded with the House of Commons against a proposal in 1706 to increase the severity of the penal laws and following the 1715 rebellion prominent Catholics desperately sought to placate the government. The 1778 Relief Act was secured by the negotiations of a group of Catholic gentlemen, acting independently of the clergy whilst the skilful negotiations with the Younger Pitt's government of a second Catholic Committee produced the granting of official toleration in 1791.52

48 Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England, From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 50. 49 Virginia C. Raguin (ed), Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850 (Worcester, MA: Trustees of the College of the Holy Cross, 2006), 4. 50 Peter Marshall and Geofrrey Scott (eds), Catholic Gentry in English Society. The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 51 See C. Sicca (ed.), John Talman: An Early-Eighteenth-Century Connoisseur, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009. 52 See Bossy 1975. 36

Despite their often fraught political situation and their general exclusion from the nation‟s political life, English Catholic elites continued to participate in the cultural life of the country. Many of the leading Catholic gentry families of the eighteenth century were active as collectors and patrons of art and architecture, spheres in which the accrual of cultural and social prestige remained possible. Whilst these were undertakings shared with many of their Protestant peers, Catholic patrons nevertheless pursued these activities in a manner which expressed their distinctive English Catholic identities, whether through patronage of Catholic artists, or by the acquisition of works which employed Counter-reformation imagery or which evoked a distant, pre- Reformation past. For these Catholic elites Counter-reformation imagery served as a focus for their shared Catholic identity, an identity that they held in common with the wider Catholic Church in Continental Europe.53 It is in the context of this English Catholic art patronage that the Chelsea Pietà groups find their most likely audience. Fashionable and desirable luxury commodities probably commissioned by Catholic patrons, their Counter-reformation imagery simultaneously makes of them powerfully charged Catholic devotional objects.

Although questions of patronage and reception are central to traditional art- historical research, objects like the Chelsea Pietà have rarely been subjected to such analysis in detail. This is a function of the ambivalent perceptions of porcelain figures as artworks – dismissed as decorative objects, their sculptural characteristics and ability to bear independent meaning are frequently overlooked. The literature devoted to eighteenth-century porcelain figures is largely authored by collectors and evidences an overwhelming concern with the details of manufacture: which models were produced by which factories, how and when. Even questions of authorship are dealt with in only the most cursory of terms: as decorative, reproductive objects porcelain figures are assumed to provide only the most tenuous access to the independent creative processes of the artists responsible for these works. A close examination of the context of production of a work like the Chelsea

53 Marie B. Rowlands (ed.), English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–1778 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1999), 347-48. 37

Pietà reveals the problems of these approaches. It is to such an examination that we turn now. Scrutiny of the assumptions made about the circumstances surrounding the creation of Counter-reformation images at Chelsea will reveal how, without adequate consideration of issues of audience and reception, a proper assessment of the significance and meaning of these porcelain sculptures is not possible.

CHAPTER ONE

NICHOLAS SPRIMONT AND THE CHELSEA PORCELAIN FACTORY

It has long been the custom to characterise the Chelsea porcelain factory, like so many other innovative luxury industries involving francophone émigrés in eighteenth-century England, as a Huguenot enterprise. Charles Gouyn, the co-founder, was certainly of Huguenot heritage and a Huguenot identity has frequently been assumed for Nicholas Sprimont, a relatively recent francophone arrival from the largely Catholic Southern Netherlands.54 It is the presumed Protestant character of the factory and its principals which has contributed to the uncertainty about what significance is to be attached to the factory‟s production of sculptural works whose subject matter has strong Catholic devotional associations. A close examination of sources suggests that this anxiety about Protestants being associated with Counter-reformation imagery is a contemporary one, not necessarily an eighteenth-century one. The characterisation of the Chelsea enterprise as „Huguenot‟ would appear to be an oversimplification of a complex situation where Protestants and Catholics formed social and commercial alliances seemingly unconcerned by issues of confessional identity.

The Chelsea porcelain factory was established by Nicholas Sprimont, a silversmith from Liège in Flanders, in partnership with Charles Gouyn, a French jeweller from Dieppe, in 1744 in a house and premises which Sprimont leased in Church Lane East, Chelsea and for which, in the same year, he took out an insurance policy.55 The factory was the first English undertaking to produce porcelain of the soft-paste type on a commercial scale. Unlike the slightly later Bow and Worcester factories, from the outset

54 On Gouyn see Bernard Dragesco, English Ceramics in French Archives: The Writings of Jean Hellot, the Adventures of Jacques Louis Brolliet and the identification of the ‘Girl-in-a- Swing’ factory. (London, 1993), 14, and further below. 55 Guildhall MS 8674, vol.66, p.141. Hand-in-Hand Fire Insurance Policy 3320. Cited in Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: The British Museum Press, 2001), 13. 39 the Chelsea factory aimed its wares at a wealthy aristocratic clientele.56 The luxury status of the productions of the Chelsea factory is confirmed by the testimony of Mrs Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte, who wrote in 1783, more than ten years after Sprimont‟s death, of the setting up of her first home years earlier:

Our tea and coffee set were of Common India China [i.e., Chinese porcelain imported by the English East India Company from their factory in Canton], our dinner service of earthenware [presumably referring to the fine earthenwares, like creamware, produced by the Staffordshire potteries, including the Wedgwood factory], to which for our rank, there was nothing superior, Chelsea porcelain and fine India china being only for the wealthy. Pewter and Delft ware could also be had, but were inferior.57

This focus on the market for luxury commodities reflects both Sprimont and Gouyn‟s previous involvements in luxury trades. Sprimont (d.1771), baptized in Liège on 23 January 1715, was the son of Gertrude Goffin and Pierre Sprimont, a goldsmith. It has been suggested that he may have been apprenticed to his uncle Nicholas Joseph Sprimont (c.1678–1744), but there seems to be little direct evidence for this. Given his knowledge of contemporary styles in French silver and porcelain it seems likely that at some point he trained in Paris; the sophisticated silver centrepieces he was producing for English patrons in the 1740s have no close parallels in the contemporary silver of the Southern Netherlands or England, their designs instead suggesting links to the Parisian world of Meissonier and Germain.58

56 Adams 2001, 12. 57 Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: Mrs Papendiek‟s Journals (London 1887), i. 181. Quoted in Bevis Hillier, Pottery and Porcelain 1700-1914 (London: Weidenfled & Nicolson, 1968), 81. 58 John V.G. Mallet, “Rococo in English porcelain: A study in style”, Apollo 90 (August 1969), 104. Pierre Colman noted that the Liègeois silversmith Louis Joseph Lehendrick had a working relationship with the Parisian silversmith Thomas Germain and that, furthermore, Lehendrick was on occasion assisted by one Charles-Louis-August Spriman. Colman explains that in the French spoken in Liège, „Spriman‟ is likely to be a variant spelling of Sprimont. It is thus possible that Nicholas Sprimont had a relative in the centre of the Parisian silversmiths trade. Pierre Colman, L’Orfèvrerie Religieuse Liégoise (Liège: Université de Liège, 1966), 55-56, n.35. See also Tessa Murdoch, “International Influences on Paul de 40

Sprimont‟s presence in London is first recorded in 1742, when he took on his first apprentice, James Lamistre, although the fact that in November of the same year he married Ann Protin at Knightsbridge Chapel may suggest that he had already been in London for some time.59 Sprimont's documented silver is rare and those pieces that are known bear date marks for 1743 through to 1747. Amongst these is an important commission, the Marine Service of 1742-43 executed for Frederick, Prince of Wales, which Sprimont worked on in collaboration with the Huguenot goldsmith Paul Crespin.60

Given his success as a silversmith in court and aristocratic circles, it is a wonder that Sprimont should have ventured into the risky field of experimental porcelain production. Although the Chelsea factory was in operation by 1745, that we find Sprimont‟s mark on silver pieces as late as 1747 suggests that he exercised some caution in entering into this new enterprise, continuing to remain active as a silversmith until he felt sufficiently confident about the probable success of the fledgling porcelain factory. What Sprimont‟s undertaking does highlight is the role of porcelain as a desirable luxury commodity in mid-eighteenth-century England. Viewed in this light, Sprimont‟s decision may be seen as the swapping of one luxury medium for another by a well-connected craftsman familiar with the fashionable and fashion-conscious markets that desired prestige objects in both materials.

Like Sprimont, Charles Gouyn (d.1785), a jeweller who maintained premises in Bennet Street in St James‟s, Westminster, was involved in the London luxury trade.61 He appears to have provided a proportion of the financial backing for the Chelsea factory and was the senior partner in the concern until he withdrew his funds in around 1748, subsequently establishing the St James, or „girl in a swing‟, factory somewhere in the West End – the precise

Lamerie” in Tessa Murdoch (ed) Beyond the Border. Huguenot Goldsmiths in Northern Europe and North America. (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 111. 59 Arthur Grimwade, London Goldsmiths, 1697-1837 (3rd edition). (London, 1990), 768; John V.G. Mallet, “A Chelsea greyhound and retrieving setter”, Conoisseur 196 (1977), 224. 60 Arthur Grimwade, “Crespin or Sprimont? An Unresolved Problem of Rococo Silver,” Apollo, (August 1969), 126-28; Grimwade 1990, 668. 61 Adams 2001, 46. 41 location of the factory remains elusive.62 The St James factory appears to have operated between 1748-49 and some time after mid-1760.63 It specialised in the production of figures and of small scent bottles, etuis and needle-cases, these small objects, collectively referred to as „toys‟, usually mounted in gold or gilt-metal. Scent bottles and etuis had previously been made from precious metals and Gouyn, as a jeweller no doubt familiar with these classes of objects and the markets for them, pioneered their production in porcelain, an innovation subsequently emulated by the now-rival Chelsea factory.

Despite the departure of Gouyn, Sprimont retained the financial backing of Sir Everard Fawkener, Secretary to the Duke of Cumberland – victor of the Battle of Culloden and second son of George II – and of his brother William Fawkener, Governor of the Bank of England. The Fawkeners had been providing financial support to the Chelsea enterprise since 1746, eventually withdrawing from the partnership in 1757, when Sir Everard Fawkener sold his interest in the business to Sprimont.64 Everard Fawkener was also instrumental in negotiating in 1751 the loan to Sprimont of pieces of a Meissen dinner service for copying at Chelsea from Sir Charles Hanbury- Williams, British Envoy to the Saxon Court in Dresden, who had received the service as a gift from Augustus III.65 In possessing this support from a member of the elite close to court, the Chelsea factory was atypical of British factories. Princely and aristocratic support for porcelain factories was the rule on the continent where such enterprises contributed to the competitive prestige of Kings and Princes – the examples of the Meissen and Sèvres factories immediately suggest themselves. In England, however, porcelain

62 On Gouyn see Dragesco 1993 and Nancy Valpy, “Charles Gouyn and the „Girl-in-a-Swing‟ Factory,” TECC 15:2 (1994), 317–20. 63 The terminal date for production at the St James factory is not precisely known. On the basis of a porcelain seal depicting the Marquis of Granby in uniform as Colonel of the Royal Horse Guards, based upon a mezzotint after Joshua Reynolds published by Richard Houston in 1760, Errol Manners has recently argued that Gouyn‟s factory must have remained in operation until at least after the Battle of Warburg on the 31st July, 1760, the period when Granby achieved public fame. Errol Manners, “ A Documentary „Girl-in-a-swing‟ Seal and other considerations on the porcelain of Charles Gouyn‟s factory,” TECC 18 (2004), 402-407. 64 E. Benton, “Payments by Sir Everard Fawkner to Nicholas Sprimont”, TECC 10:1 (1976), 57; Adams 2001, 64–73. 65 Adams 2001, 69-71. 42 production remained largely the realm of dilettantes and entrepreneurs and depended upon the innovation and commercial acuity of these men for success. Only a handful of English porcelain factories founded in the eighteenth century survived into the early nineteenth century; the majority failed within a few years of their inception.

From its earliest output, the Chelsea factory concentrated on fashionable figures, vases and dessert wares, leaving the production of useful wares to others. This was no doubt in part due to what was until about 1758 the factory‟s impractical glassy paste – easily scratched and prone to crack on impact of boiling water – but it must also reflect the backgrounds of both Sprimont and Gouyn in the luxury trades, as well as the elite connections of the factory‟s patrons. Even the lavishly decorated Chelsea tablewares were probably intended only for light use, if not simply as ornamental objects. Chelsea wares were expensive luxury objects intended for a wealthy, fashion- conscious clientele. This is the context in which we must view the factory‟s production of porcelain sculptures that make use of Counter-reformation imagery.

THE CHELSEA FACTORY AND THE HUGUENOTS

Since the Reformation, France had witnessed almost unceasing conflict between Protestant Calvinists and Catholics and these clashes continued in various forms up until the time of the Revolution. The term „Huguenots‟ is used, in its broadest sense, to refer to these French Protestants.66 Beginning in the sixteenth century, many French Protestants abandoned their homeland to take up residence in Northern European states – Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and England – where Protestantism was officially recognised and protected. A number also emigrated to the European colonial possessions in the Americas. The flight of French Protestants increased in

66 The etymology of the term remains unclear. It may derive from the Dutch eedgenot or the Swiss German eidgenoss meaning „confederate‟, a word used in Geneva where Calvin and many Huguenots settled. Tessa Murdoch, The Quiet Conquest. The Huguenots: 1685 to 1985 (London: Museum of London, 1985), 19. 43 the second half of the seventeenth century reaching its apogee in the late 1680s. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes which had been issued by Henry IV in 1598 and which provided legal protections for the practice of Protestantism in France. The promulgation of the Edict of Fontainebleau saw the banning of public worship by Protestants, the outlawing of Protestant ministers, the necessity for Protestant children to be baptised in the Catholic Church, the barring of Protestants from the professions and the civil service, and prohibitions on Protestant ownership of property.67

Many of the French Calvinists were from the middling classes: bankers, merchants, craftsmen and lesser nobility. They were affluent and educated and a large minority of them – it is estimated around 200-250,000 – departed France for neighbouring Protestant territories in what became known as „la Refuge‟.68 It is estimated that some 40,000 of these Huguenots settled in England in the late 1680s.69 The majority of French Protestants, however, remained in France where they became known as “New Converts” or “New Catholics”.70 For many of these “New Converts”, their change of belief was genuine and, following the path of least resistance, they became Catholics. Others, especially the urban-dwelling classes of Paris and other French cities, pragmatically adopted public observance of Catholicism‟s outward rites but continued to observe their Protestant faith in clandestine fashion in domestic settings. A third group, for the most part living in the rural south of the country, refused to give up public worship and actively pursued their traditional religion in the face of potential loss of life and property. This group formed what became known as the „Desert‟ church. They were involved in direct and open struggle with the French government in pursuit of the right to public worship and freedom from the penal laws directed at Protestants for over a century before the so-called Edict of Toleration of 1787 granted freedom of religion to all French citizens.71

67 Murdoch 1985, 36-38. 68 Murdoch 1985, 51 69 Gwynn, Robin. Huguenot Heritage. The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain. Second Revised Edition (London: Routledge, 2001), 29-31. 70 Margaret Maxwell, “The Division in the Ranks of the Protestants in Eighteenth Century France,” Church History 27 (1958), 107. 71 Maxwell 1958, 107-8. 44

Whilst the situation of the French Protestants in their homeland during the eighteenth century is only of secondary interest to us here, it is nevertheless worth bearing in mind that, unlike the policy of civil disobedience pursued by the „Desert‟ church, urban Protestants chose a path of public conformity, willingly giving up the public profession of their faith in order to obtain civil rights to stabilise their social and economic position.72 Correspondingly, although there were occasional outbreaks of official persecution, the authorities in Paris were by and large willing to tolerate the presence of Protestants in the interests of civic order, so long as they did not draw attention to themselves and refrained from openly proselytising or assisting co-religionists flee the country.73 Thus we find in early eighteenth century Paris Protestant members of the city guilds, despite the nearly universal requirement for guild members to be Catholic.74 This point is of importance when we are considering the eighteenth-century porcelain industry, an industry that was decidedly international in its scope. Skilled craftsmen, artists and chemists moved from factory to factory across Europe carrying with them technical skills and design styles. As we shall see below, the confessional allegiances of individual craftsmen does not appear to have been an obstacle to their movement, their skill and ability to contribute to the production of marketable products being of primary concern to their employers.

The arrival of Huguenots craftsmen fleeing persecution in France had an enormous impact on the luxury trades in England, and in the capital London in particular. They brought with them considerable skill, French technical innovations in a range of fields, and an intimate knowledge of the latest French court styles, something of enormous attraction to English elites. A

72 Maxwell 1958, 110; David Garrioch, “The Protestants of Paris and the Old Regime,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar. Volume 2 (Melbourne, 2009 a), 23. 73 Garrioch 2009a, 18. 74 Garrioch 2009a, 19; Alfred Franklin, Dictionnaire historique des arts, métiers et professions exercés dans Paris depuis le treizième siècle (Paris, 1906), 160. 45 sizable francophone community was established in London with its centres around Spitalfields in the east and Soho in the west.75

It has often been assumed in the literature on the Chelsea factory that, Nicholas Sprimont, its founding manager, was of Huguenot heritage.76 It has become clear however that this and other assumptions about the Huguenot identities of many French-speaking craftsmen working in eighteenth-century London can no longer be accepted without question.

To begin with, the manner in which the term Huguenot itself is employed requires examination. The Huguenot Refuge is usually employed to refer to the flight of Protestant refugees from France in the years immediately before and after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 when legal discrimination against the French Protestants was at its most active and inhumane. Certainly when the London Huguenot community is spoken of, it is usually to the members of this emigration and their descendants that reference is being made. By the mid-eighteenth century, these „Huguenots‟ had been living in London for two or three generations and had begun slowly to abandon many of their distinctive social institutions and to assimilate into mainstream English society, even abandoning the use of the French language.77

A quite different group are represented by those Protestants who arrived from France in the early to mid-eighteenth century, although the blanket term “Huguenots” is still employed to refer to them. Although there are occasional outbursts of active discrimination in the major urban centres of France, including Paris, throughout the eighteenth century until the time of the Revolution, the policy pursued by most urban authorities, and especially the Parisian authorities, of ignoring Protestants so long as they and their piety remained discretely out of the public eye, meant that the imperative to flee

75 Robin Gwynn. The Huguenots of London (Brighton: The Alpha Press, 1998), 15-21. 76 W.B. Honey, Old English Porcelain. London, 1928, cited in Young 1998, 35; Adams 2001, 13; Tessa Murdoch, „Sprimont, Nicholas (bap. 1715, d. 1771)‟, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/53779, accessed 27 Nov 2010] 77 Gwynn 1998, 49f. 46 was nowhere near so great as it had been sixty years previously.78 And it must be borne in mind that, by the mid-eighteenth century, London represented a major European trading and financial centre which supported a substantial luxury commodity industry. There existed considerable financial incentive for skilled craftsmen, whatever their religion, to seek employment in London, especially artists with knowledge of the fashionable, up-to-date French styles so popular amongst many members of the English elites.79 Such economically motivated migration cannot necessarily be construed as a direct result of active religious persecution and, furthermore, it cannot be assumed that all such migrants were necessarily Protestant. This is especially the case for those migrants originating from regions outside of France proper.

It is with this later group of émigrés that Nicholas Sprimont, who arrives in London in the early 1740s, is to be associated. Sprimont was thought of by his English contemporaries as a Frenchman – both Horace Walpole and the Swiss artist André Rouquet speak of him as such – but this was no doubt based upon the fact that his first language was French.80 Sprimont was in fact born into a family of goldsmiths and jewellers in Liège. Today part of the Kingdom of Belgium, francophone Liège was until 1795 the seat of a Catholic Prince-Bishopric and, in the eighteenth century, was still a part of the Holy Roman Empire.81 In the wake of the Reformation the diocese remained predominantly Catholic, but little or no persecution of Protestants is known to have taken place there. There is certainly no direct evidence that Sprimont

78 Garrioch 2009a, 16-24. 79 Hilary Young, Anti-gallicanism at Chelsea: Protestantism, protectionism and porcelain”, Apollo CXLVII (June 1998), 35-41. 80 Walpole‟s letter to Horace Mann, 4 March, 1763: “I saw yesterday a magnificent service of Chelsea china which the King and Queen are sending to the Duke of Mecklenburgh. There are dishes and plates without number, an epergne, candlesticks, salt-cellars, sauce-boats, tea and coffee equipages – in short, it is complete – and costs twelve hundred pounds! I cannot boast of our taste; the forms are neither new, beautiful, nor various. Yet Sprimont, the manufacturer, is a Frenchman: it seems their taste will not bear transplanting” (Lewis, 1960, vol.22, 121-122); Rouquet in observations on the Chelsea factory, presumably made before he left England in 1752: “A rich private individual sustains its finances [reference here, presumably, to Fawkner]; an able French artist supplies or directs the models of everything that is manufactured there (Un habile artiste françois fournit ou dirige les modèles de tout-ce- qui s’y fabrique).” (Rouquet 1755, 143). 81 John V.G. Mallet, “Rococo in English Ceramics,” in Michael Snodin (ed.), Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth’s England (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), 237. 47 came to England as a Protestant refugee, and it is of note that his family remained resident in Catholic Liège after he left for England.82

Sprimont‟s relationships with other Protestant French-speaking artists and craftsmen working in London have contributed to assumptions about his Huguenot heritage. Charles Gouyn, his early business partner in the establishment of the Chelsea factory, is known to have been a Huguenot. In an important document to survive in the Sèvres archive in France, the Swiss- born industrial spy Jacques Louis Brolliet, on being debriefed at Sèvres by the chemist Hellot, comments on the Chelsea factory in around 1759, stating that

It [the Chelsea factory] was first established by Mr Gouin, brother of a Paris Jeweller of that name, born at Dieppe of the so-called Reformed Faith [lit: la R.P.R].83 His paste was compounded by d‟Ostermann, a German, chemist and artist of Dr Ward, a famous empiric. Mr Gouin left, with the loss of part of his funds, and makes at his house in St James‟s Street, very beautiful small porcelain figures. The present undertaker of the Chilsea (sic) factory is one named Sprémont, from Liege. His turner was a Frenchman named Martin. He left Chelsea and went to Lambeth, to work for Jacson, a faience-maker. The modeller is one named Flanchet, a pupil of Mr Duplessis. The Draughtsman is named Du Vivier: he is Flemish.84

On the basis of his partnership with Gouyn, it has been assumed that Sprimont too was a Protestant.

Other evidence is cited to adduce Sprimont‟s Protestant identity. Upon his death in 1771, Sprimont was buried in the Deschamps family vault at Petersham Church, near Richmond. Sprimont‟s sister-in-law Susanna Protin had in 1742 married the London upholsterer Francis Deschamps, of the Huguenot Deschamps family.85 Similarly, in 1744 Sprimont stood as godfather to a daughter of the great sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac (1705-

82 Young 1998, 37. 83 La R.P.R. = la religion prétendue reformée (the Pretended Reformed Religion). 84 Dragesco 199), 14. 85 Geoffrey Beard, Upholsterers and Interior Furnishing in England, 1530-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 156 48

1762) at the French Protestant chapel in Spring Gardens. Sprimont and Roubiliac appear to have enjoyed a close association. A Chelsea model of the painter William Hogarth's pug dog Trump, dating from 1747–50, was based indirectly upon a model by Roubiliac.86 Sprimont‟s silversmithing premises in Compton Street, Soho, were in close proximity to the St. Martin's Lane Academy and the nearby Slaughter's Coffee House where artists from the academy, including Hogarth and Roubiliac, are known to have congregated.87 An association between Roubiliac and Sprimont is further indicated by the fact that in 1745 it was stipulated that a large panel of Chelsea porcelain should be incorporated into the base relief of Roubiliac's monument to Bishop Hough in Worcester Cathedral, although this plan was never carried through.88

Roubiliac‟s Huguenot identity has been held by many to be unequivocal and Sprimont‟s standing as godfather to Roubiliac‟s daughter has been taken to confirm Sprimont‟s Protestantism beyond reasonable doubt. But in fact Roubiliac‟s confessional allegiance is not as clear-cut as has often been assumed. Roubiliac was born in 1702 in the Catholic parish of St Nizier in Lyons where he was baptised, the son of Pierre Roubiliac, a merchant, and his wife Suzanne.89 The Roubiliacs appear to have been a well-established merchant family with ties to the silk industry. Although the Lyon silk industry had seen the flight of many Huguenot refugees in the 1680s, there is no positive evidence that Roubiliac‟s family was Protestant. Around 1720, Roubiliac moved to the Catholic Saxon court at Dresden, apparently sponsored by a relative employed there, where he appears to have worked with Balthasar Permoser, the sculptor responsible for the rich late Baroque decoration of the Zwinger, Augustus the Strong‟s court Festspielhaus. During the late 1720s, Roubiliac was a pupil at the Académie Royale in Paris, probably under Guillaume Coustou and Robert le Lorrain. In 1730 he won the second prize for sculpture. The winner of the second prize was normally

86 V&A C.101-1966; Malcolm Baker “Roubillac and Chelsea in 1745”, TECC 16:2 (1997), 224. 87 Young 1998, 34. 88 Baker 1997, 224. 89 It is interesting to note that the parish of St Nizier in Lyon was also the birthplace of Antoine Coysevox and Nicholas and Guillaume Coustou. David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 52. 49 awarded the first prize the following year, bringing with it a period at the French Academy in Rome. However, by the end of 1730, Roubiliac had for unknown reasons already moved to London.90 Roubiliac‟s presence in England is first indicated by his inclusion in a list of members of the White Bear Masonic lodge in 1730. Roubiliac appears to have associated with Huguenot circles in London and on 11 April 1735 he married Catherine Magdalen Helot, of Huguenot descent, in the church of St Martin Orgar, an Anglican church used by the French Protestant community.91 The couple had a daughter Sophia before Catherine‟s death, sometime between 1744 and 1752, and it is this child for whom Sprimont stands as godfather.

There is nothing in Roubiliac‟s family or personal history which indicates any overt association with Protestantism before his settling in London and that Roubiliac may only have converted to Protestantism upon his arrival in England is a possibility that must be seriously considered. This suggests that confessional identities were potentially far more fluid at this time than has often been allowed. It also reinforces the notion that reasons other than religious persecution might have led a francophone artist to emigrate to England. Roubiliac‟s case does suggest the possibility that, upon arrival in London, the attractions of shared cultural background and language offered by the London francophone community – a community that was, at this time, made up of a large proportion of Protestants – may have led to his association with, and presumed eventual conversion to, Protestantism, rather than his seeking out this community because of any pre-existing interest in Protestantism. In this regard it is worth noting that Roubiliac apparently never completely mastered the English language after 32 years of residence in England.92

To assume Sprimont‟s Protestantism on the basis of his business and social alliances with known Huguenot members of the London French community is to countenance an extreme over-simplification of the nature of French

90 Bindman and Baker 1995, 60. 91 Bindman and Baker 1995, 52; T. Murdoch, „Louis François Roubiliac and his Huguenot Connections,‟ Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 24 (1983), 27. 92 Bindman and Baker 1995, 48; 373, n.1. 50

Catholic and Huguenot relations amongst eighteenth century French émigrés in England. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that many artists and craftsmen of French heritage based in London in the eighteenth century maintained commercial and social relationships across confessional lines. Brolliet‟s account of the Chelsea factory, cited above, is of note in this regard insofar as all of the craftsmen of whom he makes direct mention bear French surnames and, indeed, one, the turner Martin, is identified as a Frenchman. The confessional allegiances of all of these figures are not known with certainty. It is of note, however, that only Gouyn is explicitly – and in a condescending fashion – identified as a Protestant by Brolliet. Brolliet uses the expression la religion prétendue reformée in reference to Gouyn‟s faith; this is the term employed in the 1685 Edict of Fontainbleau to refer to Protestants.93

Not named in Brolliet‟s list of workers at Chelsea is Joseph Willems, author of our Pietà group and creator of what amounts to the „house-style‟ for Chelsea figures, whom we know to have been supplying figure models to Sprimont throughout the 1750s. It is highly probable that Willems was a Catholic. The francophone Willems was born at Brussels in 1715. By the age of 24 he was at Tournai where he married Marie-Josephe Lahaize on 16 November 1739. He may have continued to work at Tournai in the faience factory of François Joseph Carpentier for the next few years, leaving it to go to England where he is recorded in the rate books for Chelsea from 1748, apparently living in a house somewhere close to the Chelsea factory. It is likely that his first wife Marie-Josephe was dead before Willems had moved to England.94 Willems appears to have remarried on or before 1758 to Mary Ann Nollekens. Mary Ann Nollekens was the widow of Joseph Francis Nollekens, or „Old Nollekens‟, the Antwerp-born painter. Their offspring included Joseph Nollekens, the famed sculptor. Old Nollekens had been a Catholic, he and Mary being married in the Sardinian Chapel off Lincoln‟s Inn Fields in 1733,

93 Murdoch 1985, 37-38. 94 John Kenworthy-Browne, “The Wife of Joseph Willems: Mary Ann Nollekens (née Lesac)”, TECC 19:2 (2006), 249; Adams 2001, 88. 51 the same place where their son Joseph Nollekens was baptised.95 Whilst Mary‟s father Sebastian Lesac had been married in St Benet‟s church, Paul‟s Warf – an Anglican church – in 1710, at this date this does not preclude him having been a Catholic. Mary apprenticed her son Joseph to the sculptor Scheemakers, another Catholic from Antwerp working in London. The strong Catholic connections in Mary Nollekens‟ life suggest that she too was probably Catholic, and in turn, that her second husband Joseph Willems, from Brussels in the Catholic Netherlands, was also a Catholic.96

If we return to Brolliet‟s 1759 report on the Chelsea factory we find other workers mentioned there whose confessional identities are less clear-cut than that of Willems. There is some confusion about the identity of the Flemish draughtsman Duvivier, a French name which was not uncommon in England at the time. A William Duvivier from Liège who arrived in England c.1742/43 worked at the Chelsea factory as a painter until his death there in 1755.97 He was probably not however, as has been claimed, the father of the Duvivier who was working at Chelsea at the time of Brolliet. Indeed recent research makes it seem probable that there were two Flemish Duviviers working for Sprimont in the late 1750s, Michel-Joseph and Henri-Joseph (possibly, but not necessarily related), both of them moving to Tournai around 1762/63 where they are both given employment by François Joseph Peterinck, director of the Tournai porcelain factory.98 During the late 1750s and early 1760s Sprimont‟s health began to deteriorate and this interfered with the functioning of the Chelsea factory; indeed, this would ultimately lead to his sale of the factory in 1769. The ebb and flow of his health can be quite closely correlated

95 Kenworthy-Browne (2006), 246; John Kenworthy-Browne, „Nollekens , Joseph Francis (1702–1748)‟, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20243, accessed 27 Nov 2010] 96 Kensworthy-Browne (2006), 249. 97 His burial is recorded on 9 March at St. Anne‟s in Soho, an Anglican church. Charlotte Jacob-Hanson, “„Deux-viviers?‟ A Critical Re-appraisal of the Duvivier family tree,” TECC 19:3 (2007), 477. 98 Jacob-Hanson 2007, 478. Much earlier writing on the Duviviers has conflated the references to Michel-Joseph and Henri-Joseph Duvivier, assuming them to be one and the same person. I here follow Jacob-Hanson in assuming that these two names refer to two, distinct persons, as seems almost certain given that Peterinck refers specifically by name to both an Henri-Joseph Duvivier and a Michel-Joseph Duvivier. 52 with the departure from and arrival at the factory of artists and craftsman from both England and the Continent.99

The Duvivier spoken of by Brolliet, who served as dessinateur or draughtsman at Chelsea, may well be Michel-Joseph Duvivier (c.1736-71) who ended up occupying a similar position at the Tournai factory after 1763.100 Conflicting information exists concerning the confessional identity of Michel-Joseph Duvivier‟s family. His brother Fidelle Duvivier, another porcelain decorator who worked at the Derby and Newhall Factories in England, the Sceaux factory in France, the Oude Loosdrecht factory in the Netherlands, and possibly the Tournai factory in Belgium, married Elizabeth Thomas in Derby in 1769.101 Their first son, Peter Joseph Duvivier, was baptised on 20 March 1771 at St Alkmund‟s church in Derby. The denomination of St Alkmund‟s at this time was Church of England, leading to the supposition that Fidelle Duvivier was Protestant. However, twelve years later, on October 24 1783, another child of Fidelle and Elizabeth, Maria Susanna Frederica, was baptised at a Catholic church in Slootdijk near Loosdrecht in the Netherlands, where Fidelle was working as a porcelain decorator. This has led to the claim that Fidelle, and by implication his family, including his brother Michel-Joseph, was Catholic, not Protestant.102 Either of these claims about the confessional identity of Fidelle Duvivier may be correct. It is apparent that there is not necessarily a simple one-to-one mapping of public ecclesiastical affiliation and confessional allegiance. Indeed, it is of particular interest that Johann Friedrich Daeuber (d. 1800) who occupied the position of works manager at the Loosdrecht porcelain factory often served as a baptismal witness for factory workers at both the Protestant

99 Young 1999, 56. 100 Jacob-Hanson 2007, 478. Draughtsman here probably means head of the decorating studio (Dragesco 1993, 18). 101 It has been suggested that Elisabeth Thomas was perhaps the daughter of Francis Thomas, works manager at the Chelsea factory, but this remains unproven. Geoffrey Godden, New Hall Porcelains (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collector‟s Club, 2004), 160; Charlotte Jacob-Hanson, “Fidelle Duvivier in France and the Netherlands,” The Magazine Antiques (January 2006), 172. 102 Zappey 1988, 103; Jacob-Hanson 2007, 480. It is of interest that many of the decorators at the Loosdrecht factory at this time were German Catholics who worshipped at the Slootdijk church (W. M. Zappey, Den Blaauwen, A.L. et al. Loosdrechts Porselein, 1774-1784 (Zwolle, Waanders, 1988),102. 53 church in Loosdrecht and the Catholic church in nearby Slootdijk. Among his godchildren was the Duviviers' daughter Maria Susanna Frederica. That Daeuber was particularly esteemed by the family is suggested by the fact that their daughter was named, in part for, him.103 All of this evidence suggests that social aloofness driven by confessional difference was not automatically a given for these porcelain artists and craftsmen and that, on the contrary, other bonds of professional and social fellowship were more important than an excessive focus on ecclesial differences might lead one to expect. More importantly, the example of Daeuber makes it obvious that the fact of Sprimont‟s standing as godfather for Roubilliac‟s daughter Sophie cannot be taken necessarily to prove Sprimont‟s Protestant identity.

What these sources clearly indicate is the complexity of the relationships between Protestantism and Catholicism in the international world of the European porcelain industry. Even Fidelle‟s marriage in the Church of England does not necessarily imply, at this date, 1769, that he was not Catholic – the Marriage Act of 1753 rendered invalid any marriage taking place outside the Anglican church and not according to the tenets of that church, except in certain special circumstances.104 It was not unknown for English Catholics to be publicly married in the Established Church in accordance with this law, with a Catholic ceremony having been celebrated beforehand to legitimise the union.105 And whilst we must acknowledge that Fidelle Duvivier‟s tenure at the Loosdrecht factory takes place nearly twenty years after many of the Franco-Flemish artists had left Sprimont‟s Chelsea factory – and that the setting is the Netherlands, not England – it nevertheless suggests the real possibility that similar social, professional and cultural bonds took precedence over confessional differences in determining how people related to one another in everyday life.

103 Jacob-Hanson 2006, 174 104 J Hugh Aveling, “Marriages of Catholic Recusants,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 16 (1963), 68-83. 105 Marie Rowlands (ed.): English Catholics of Parish and Town, 1558–1778. London: Catholic Record Society, 1999Marie Rowlands 1999, 270-72. 54

The extant evidence relating to the principle figures at the Chelsea factory in the late 1750s suggests the presence of a Catholic chief modeller, Joseph Willems, and a chief decorator, Michel Joseph Duvivier, whose family background reveals both Protestant and Catholic affiliations. In addition to this, we have no positive evidence one way or the other regarding the confessional identity of Nicholas Sprimont. The Chelsea factory was not unique in this regard. Other significant Catholic figures in the eighteenth- century English porcelain world exist. Agostino Carlini (c.1718-1790), the highly talented Genoese-born sculptor who settled in England and became, in 1768, a founding member of the Royal Academy is most probably the source for the finest models produced at the Derby factory during the so-called „Dry- edge‟ period. These include, interestingly, figures of St Thomas and St Philip.106

Whatever the personal faith of Nicholas Sprimont might have been it seems quite clear that confessional allegiances did not play a determining role in his commercial and personal networks. He apparently sought out artists and craftsmen for his porcelain business on the basis of their skill and their ability to contribute towards the production of a high quality, saleable product. Whether they were Protestant or Catholic does not appear to have been a primary consideration. He also seems to have retained the services of a disproportionate number of francophone craftsmen. Here training in centres which fell within the wider French cultural sphere appears to have been important. The productions of Sprimont‟s porcelain factory were aimed at the English luxury market where a taste for French fashions was actively cultivated. That Sprimont should attempt to attract to his business artists, designers and craftsmen familiar with fashionable French modes makes perfect sense in the context of a commercial enterprise. Furthermore, the attraction for a first generation migrant like Sprimont of a social network of other francophones resident in London is not to be underestimated.

106 J V G Mallet, “Agostino Carlini, Modeller of „Dry-edge‟ Derby Figures?” in Tom Walford and Hilary Young (eds), British Ceramic Design 1600-2002 (London: English Ceramic Circle, 2003), 42-57. 55

In the Introduction we drew attention to a question posed by a number of writers: how could a Protestant concern like Sprimont‟s Chelsea factory produce a powerful, Counter-reformation image like Joseph Willems‟ Pietà? We can see now that the characterisation of Sprimont‟s business as „Protestant‟ is rather difficult to maintain in any meaningful way. We have seen that, whether Catholic or Huguenot, Sprimont does not seem to have shown any particular religious prejudice in whom he employed. The same was likely true of his factory‟s production. Output was probably not determined by Sprimont‟s personal religious scruples. He was an entrepreneur; the important consideration was that there was a market for the porcelains produced.

Students of painting from the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic have long been aware of the fact that the confessional allegiances of artists do not always translate directly into the subject matter of their paintings: just as many of the finest artists of this period were Catholics, including Vermeer, Steen and van Goyen, many Protestant artists produced paintings and altarpieces for Catholic churches.107 In this regard it is important to note the evidence suggesting that commercial pragmatism characterised many Huguenot artists and their business enterprises – Huguenot artists and craftsmen appear to have had no qualms about working for Catholic patrons. So, the Catholic Earl of Arundel had been patron to the Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, best known for his printing of Calvin‟s Institutes in English and Latin.108 This pragmatism even extended to the production of ritual and devotional objects for Catholic clients. Huguenot silversmiths are known to have produced ecclesiastical plate for Catholic use: for example, the altar cruet set and stand attributed to Jean Sonjé, produced in The Hague in 1712 and 1713 and the architectural Tabernacle dating to 1720, made by Jesaias van Engauw, again in The Hague.109 The Huguenot ivory carver David le Marchand seems to have produced devotional sculptures of a decidedly Counter-reformation cast

107 Xander van Eck, “The Artist‟s Religion: Paintings Commissioned for Clandestine Catholic Churches in the Northern Netherlands, 1600-1800”, Simiolus 27:1/2 (1999), 70–94. 108 Gwynn 2001, 97. 109 Jet Pijzel Dommisse, “Huguenot goldsmiths and French influence in The Hague in the late 17th century,” in T Murdoch (ed) Beyond the Border. Huguenot Goldsmiths in Northern Europe and North America (Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 21-22, 26-27. 56 early in his career, including a Virgin and Child and a Corpus Christi (Figs.53 & 54).110 The Protestant Charles Gouyn‟s St James factory too produced at least two figures employing Counter-reformation imagery: the Holy Family group and a figure of the Mater Dolorosa, which was perhaps copied from an ivory.111 And Stephen Janssen, senior partner of the Battersea enamel factory, a Huguenot and a member of the Antigallican Association, oversaw the production of enamel crucifix pendants and plaques transfer-printed with scenes of the Passion, Mary Magdalene, St James of Compostella and other Catholic saints, all intended for export to the Continent.112 Thus, even if Nicholas Sprimont were a Protestant, this would not necessarily have prevented him from permitting his porcelain factory to produce objects charged with Counter-reformation devotional associations.

Whether Catholic or Protestant, Sprimont, with his skilled, French-trained senior craftsmen, would have found himself capable of supplying to a select market keen for luxury commodities some of the most superb porcelains ever produced by an English factory. In Joseph Willems, Sprimont had at his service a Catholic artist, trained in a Catholic context, who was more than capable of producing a porcelain model like the Chelsea Pietà, imbued with affective Catholic devotional spirituality and referencing a great Parisian work of Catholic devotional art admired by many connoisseurs. But although Sprimont possessed the resources to produce such a work, and in the absence of any significant impediment to his overseeing the production of an object of this nature, we are still left with the question as to why the Chelsea factory produced these sculptures which employ such potent Counter- reformation imagery. To invoke once more the model of luxury commerce, we need to identify a market for these porcelains. In a discussion of the history of scholarship on Huguenot silversmiths working in London, Christopher Hartop makes the telling observation that much early commentary looked to the Huguenot refugees of the late seventeenth century as the agents whereby new French styles were introduced into the repertoire of English

110 Charles Avery, David Le Marchand 1674–1726 ‘An Ingenious Man for Carving in Ivory’, (London: Lund Humphries, 1996), 104–05; see Chapter Three below. 111 Adams 2001, 52. 112 Young 1998, 38. 57 silversmithing. However, as Hartop observes, it is not to the craftsman but to the patron that we must turn in order to understand these stylistic innovations. The English elites of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were decidedly international in their outlook. They travelled and were exposed to innovations in design, dining practice and table decoration, especially in France. It was these elites who demanded the new forms of silver that the London silversmiths‟ trade, enlarged by the recent influx of skilled Huguenot workers, was able to supply.113 This observation is equally applicable to the production of the Chelsea porcelain factory. A sculpture like the Chelsea Pietà must have been produced to satisfy a demand of the market, whether a general trend of fashion, or the specific requirement of an individual patron. It is the identification of the audience for these Chelsea figures that the following chapters will explore.

113 Christoper Hartop, The Huguenot Legacy. English Silver, 1680-1760, from the Alan and Simone Hartman Collection (London: Thomas Heneage, 1996), 10-11 58

CHAPTER TWO

COUNTER-REFORMATION IMAGERY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

In eighteenth-century England, a nation which styled itself a bastion of the Reformation, the works of art that met with the widest admiration by connoisseurs were Catholic in both subject matter and origin. Raphael‟s Cartoons, although recognised as exercises in Catholic apologetic, were deemed the finest works of art in England and were a source of great national pride. Domenichino‟s Last Communion of St Jerome was widely accepted by English connoisseurs as one of the greatest works of art in the world, although simultaneously, it was acknowledged to be a work of “beggarly modern devotion”.114 This apparent paradox at the heart of English attitudes to art in the eighteenth century must form the background to an investigation of the production and reception of the Chelsea Pietà group modelled by Joseph Willems. English elites valued highly taste in art as an index of social- standing. At the same time, the art that was most admired by the pan- European culture of which English elites were eager to be counted a part was largely produced in Catholic states and much of it was possessed of Catholic religious content. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, English Protestant elites had begun to develop strategies to allow them to engage with widely admired works of Counter-reformation art without their Protestant loyalties being impugned. As an image with explicitly Counter-reformation devotional content, the Pietà was a potentially problematic subject for a Protestant viewer. These potential difficulties were further exaggerated by the Chelsea Pietà‟s three-dimensional character. Sculpture retained far stronger associations with the threat of idolatry and popery than painting for an

114 Raphael: Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760, (Aldershot: Ashgrove, 2006), 46-73. Domenichino: Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters: or, the Language of Forms, edited by B.Rand (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 119. 59 eighteenth-century audience.115 Whilst eighteenth-century English art collections might contain continental paintings on religious subjects, religious sculpture remained exceedingly rare.

This chapter will consider how English Protestant attitudes to Counter- reformation images may have impacted on the reception of the Chelsea Pietà. The Pietà group will be shown to occupy an extremely ambiguous position. Its overtly Counter-reformation subject matter did not, of itself, discount it from being acceptable to an English audience. But as we shall see, the strategies which English Protestant elites deployed to enable them to collect Counter- reformation art were driven by the need to be able to admire and acquire the works of acknowledged European great masters. Joseph Willems, a little- known Catholic modeller working in London, did not fall into this category and thus the cultural capital to be gained by possessing an example of his work was, according to this index, minimal.

The three-dimensional character of the Chelsea porcelain group exaggerates the problematic nature of its Counter-reformation imagery. In the extremely rare instances where we are aware of the existence of religious sculpture in eighteenth-century English collections, they are generally examples of distinguished works by admired masters and the circumstances of their display are carefully calculated to minimise any overt devotional significance being attributed to them. Porcelain models in eighteenth-century England were largely luxury commodities and thus desirable to elites, and those aspiring to such status. The extent to which they might be perceived as sculpture was, however, ambiguous and whether they were to be considered „artworks‟ or „decoration‟ was not uniformly clear. Nevertheless, even in the latter case, it cannot be assumed that the subject matter of „decorative‟ images was deemed ideologically neutral and remained unread by viewers. The absence of an author of art critical renown to counterbalance the associations with idolatry of an image in the round – an overtly Catholic image at that – makes the benefits in social eminence to be gained through

115 Haynes 2006, 27-8. 60 ownership and display of an object like the Chelsea Pietà difficult to determine. The prestige deriving from acquisition of a grand porcelain figure would not necessarily be sufficient to justify the problematic imagery. In the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Chelsea Pietà most probably appealed to, and indeed was intended for, an audience for whom its Catholic imagery presented no obstacles, namely members of the English Catholic elite.

Engaging with Counter-reformation Imagery

The briefest inspection of inventories of eighteenth century English art collections will reveal the presence of Catholic paintings displayed in the spaces of English homes. It is sometimes suggested that, since eighteenth- century Protestant English collectors and connoisseurs of Old Master paintings, drawings and prints were prepared to tolerate Catholic Counter- reformation imagery, then English porcelain figures like the Chelsea Pietà could have been collected by the same connoisseurs and appreciated simply as works of art.116

We must recall that taste in art had a privileged role in the procurement and demonstration of political and social identity in this period.117 English elites found themselves bounden to admiration of Italian and French artists, artists who frequently produced religious works with explicitly Counter-reformation Catholic content.118 In eighteenth century England, the works of art that were most prized were Catholic in origin and possessed explicitly Catholic doctrinal content: Raphael‟s Cartoons, were considered the greatest works of art in England;119 and Domenichino‟s Last Communion of St Jerome, for all its

116 Hilary Young, “Anti-gallicanism at Chelsea.: Protestantism, protectionism and porcelain”, Apollo June 1998, 37; Hilary Young, English Porcelain 1745-95. Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 50, n.29. 117 Ian Pears, The Discovery of Painting: the Growth of Interest in the Arts in England 1680– 1768, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 36. 118 Haynes 2006. Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe. (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 157-161. 119 John Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons in the Collections of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries from the Sistine Chapel. (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1972), 151. 61

Counter-reformation Catholic devotional content, was widely accepted by the English as one of the greatest paintings in the world.120 The Grand Tour, an essential component of the education of English male elites, not only allowed young men to tread in the footsteps of great classical authors, but it also allowed them to develop their appreciation for both ancient and modern art. In Rome, these young Englishmen were surrounded by art that was by the most admired of modern artists,121 but also frequently possessed of Catholic devotional content. Furthermore, the location of many of these works in Catholic churches forced the English Grand Tourist to confront directly the devotional and liturgical functions of this art, highlighting what Bruce Redford has described as „the problematic role of aesthetic experience within a religious context‟.122

This tension between the cultural authority of Continental art and its frequent Catholic content was overcome, in elite English circles especially, by the active aestheticisation of works of religious art – that is, by emphasising their character as works of beauty and technical accomplishment rather than as objects bearing devotional significance. This was a development which had its origins in the late seventeenth century where a specialised language of art criticism and analysis developed allowing the formal description and classification of an artwork to become an aim in and of itself, the content of the work being bracketed out if necessary.123 For English Grand Tourists, attention was directed to composition, draughtsmanship and colour in the masterpieces of Counter-reformation art to be viewed in Italy. Their ideological content was largely considered a distasteful ethnographic addendum to their purely aesthetic merits, and further evidence of the Englishman‟s superior spiritual values – as Catholicism was, by definition,

120 Shaftesbury 1969, 119; Robert Samber, Roma Illustrata. (London: W. Chetwood & S. Chapman, 1722), 163; E. Wright, Some Observations Made in Travelling through France, Italy etc., Second Edition. (London, 1764), 251. 121 Haynes 2006, 25. 122 Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 20. 123 Aston 2009, 66; David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century England (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1993), 175; Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665-1800, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 238-42. 62 superstitious, no reasonable and educated man was likely to fall prey to its doctrine through artistic means.124 Many of the Grand Tour guidebooks of the day, such as those of Tobias Smollett and Samuel Sharp, counselled and encouraged such reading of Counter-Reformation devotional art.125 The position of an artwork in the canon – that is, whether or not it was by an artist greatly admired at the time like Michelangelo, Raphael, Domenichino, or Correggio – actively shaped the response an English Protestant was advised to assume to the work.126 Works by „great‟ artists like Domenichino were treated with the language of art criticism, while less conventionally prestigious works had their devotional functions duly noted and were employed to further argument against Popish superstition.127 Good paintings were by the canonical masters; bad paintings were not. A corollary of this was that it was only bad paintings that had their continuing devotional significance acknowledged by English Grand Tourists. The reality that all these religious paintings – whether good or bad according to the standards of Protestant connoisseurship – were created to fulfil devotional functions in Catholic contexts was largely ignored.128

The need to manage the content of Catholic paintings was not restricted to the experience of viewing such works in Italy on the Grand Tour. The acquisition of paintings with Counter-reformation content for English collections brought the problem into the houses of the English elite. As Haynes argues, in the period 1660-1760 religious pictures were not neutral in religious terms when hung in homes, and arguments were developed to control the meaning of such works in the contexts of domestic ornament and display.129

124 Aston 2009, 71. 125 Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy. Frank Felsenstein (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; Samuel Sharpe, Letters from Italy. London, 1766. See Aston 2009, 158-59. 126 Clare Haynes, „Art and anti-Catholicism in England, c.1660–c.1760‟, Historical Research 78 (2005), 493–95. 127 Haynes 2006, 37. 128 Haynes 2006, 495, n.16. 129 Haynes 2006, 74-101. 63

Colin Haydon‟s work on anti-Catholicism has shown that elite anti-Catholicism gradually declined as a political force in the wake of the failed 1745 rising and the end of Jacobitism as a serious political threat.130 This did not mean, however, that Catholicism became less of a cultural problem. A serious issue remained even for those subscribing to the most tolerant of attitudes towards Catholicism when it came to images which depicted Catholic doctrine – such images manifested in visual form ideas in which they did not believe. The Church of Rome remained in many ways fundamental to the construction of English Protestant self-identity, both for the Church of England, and for any other Protestant denomination: English Protestantism was everything that was not Popery. Thus whether or not one actively expressed distaste for Catholicism, images of Catholic doctrine could not be absorbed into a picture collection, elite or otherwise, without difficulty.

The substantial market for art in eighteenth century England was a late seventeenth century development, the first public auction of paintings in London being recorded in 1674.131 Published evidence of middle-class ownership of works of art remains scarce and it is on elite collections that attention must be focussed in order to understand how Catholic images were received. It is also important to bear in mind that, whilst many great eighteenth-century English art collections were „private‟ in the sense that they were held in private houses, these collections were also „public‟, insofar as they were accessible to visitors to these houses who were admitted on the basis of their display of the outward markers of politeness and taste.132 Knowledge of collections was even more broadly disseminated in the public sphere through the distribution of catalogues and engravings after particular paintings.133

130 Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England c.1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), esp. Chap.5; Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland c.1650-c.1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 131 Pears 1988. 132 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 87-114; Haynes 2006, 76. 133 See for example Thomas Martyn, The English Connoisseur, London, 1766, which brings together the catalogues of a number of prominent picture collections including those at Chiswick, Devonshire House, Chatsworth, Blenheim, Ditchley, Stowe, Houghton and 64

Haynes argues that picture collections were not merely tools for asserting status, which was clearly one of their functions, but that they were complex constructions with social and cultural resonances on multiple levels. The contents of picture collections were looked at, read and thought about, and also argued about. They can aid us in generating understandings of the social and political roles of art in a given period.134 It is of interest then that eighteenth century sale catalogues, inventories and guidebooks make it clear that many English collections included paintings on religious subjects, many of them subjects with clear Catholic doctrinal content. A considerable number of these works were also circulated in print form by entrepreneurial print- makers like Arthur Pond, Elisha Kirkhall and John Boydell.135

How did English Protestant elites reconcile their admiration for paintings embodying explicitly Catholic doctrinal content by great continental masters – religious painting being a sub-class of history painting, the most esteemed genre in the contemporary hierarchies of art – with the potential for popish idolatry that was inherent in these pictures?

Haynes draws our attention to two eighteenth century texts which, she argues, indicate how English elites overcame this difficulty: One is Horace Walpole‟s Sermon on Painting of 1742 from the Aedes Walpolianae, the other Charles Lamotte‟s An Essay upon Poetry and Painting, with Relation to the Sacred and Profane History of 1730. In the course of the Sermon, Walpole argues that painting itself is innocent; the potential for error and idolatry lies with the viewer. Drawing upon pictures from his father Robert‟s collection at Houghton as examples, Walpole argues that only those who are susceptible to the skill for verisimilitude present in the work of the greatest masters, those who are ignorant and vulgar, are at risk of being led astray by Catholic paintings. So, speaking of Guido Reni‟s The Doctors of the Church, a work

Hampton Court and Kensington Palaces, as well as important collections like those of Charles Jennens, John Barnard and Paul Methuen. On engravings see Timothy Clayton, The English Print, 1688-1802. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. 134 Haynes 2006, 77 135 Haynes 2006, 78. 65 which was considered the jewel of the Walpole collection and which hung in the Gallery at Houghton, Walpole argues that “ so great is the perfection” of the painting that it is no surprise that

the poor vulgar, who adore what seems to surpass the genius of human nature…see miracles made obvious to their senses by the hand of a Raphael or a Guido. Can we wonder at a poor illiterate creature‟s giving faith to any legend in the life of the Romish Virgin, who sees even the Doctors of the Church disputing with such energy on the marvellous circumstances ascribed to her by the Catholicks? He must be endowed with a courage, a strength of reasoning above the common standard, who can reject fables, when the sword enforces, and the pencil almost authenticated the belief of them.136

Walpole here stresses the greatness of the painting as a work of art, acknowledges its dubious „popish‟ content, but clearly states that only the „illiterate‟ who live „where the sword enforces‟ need fear the temptation to idolatry. Walpole implies, in the words of Haynes, “that in the enlightened liberty of an English picture gallery (in which the vulgar and illiterate are presumed never to trespass), the spectator is able, through his education and good judgment, to discern the „fable‟ that the picture depicts, while he derives pleasure from the artist‟s performance.”137 Walpole does not reject that painting might guide the properly discriminating viewer to true religion. Providing justification for the presence of religious images in a private collection he states

Here are stronger lectures of piety, more admonitions to repentance…Sights like these, must move, where the preacher fails; for each picture is but scripture realised…The painter but executes pictures, which the Saviour himself designed.138

136 Quoted in Haynes 2006, 86. 137 Haynes 2006, 86. 138 Quoted in Haynes 2006, 87. 66

Walpole asserts the value of pictures drawing upon episodes from Scripture, by implication rejecting the illustration of „fables‟ like the contents of Reni‟s The Doctors of the Church. Thus Walpole recognises two types of religious picture: one that depicts subjects explicitly contained in Scripture; the other illustrating elements drawn from Catholic doctrine. Clearly the latter type of picture is unsuitable as a vehicle for religious edification, but may still be appreciated in an English gentleman‟s collection for the qualities of its execution. The use to which a picture is put is here highlighted as a key concept.139 A Catholic picture is only dangerous if it is used in an inappropriate fashion. Policing such usage must clearly form a part of a gentleman‟s responsibility to those in his household who depend upon him for guidance and protection.

When we turn to Charles Lamotte‟s Essay, we find the grounds upon which objections to the contents of Catholic paintings might be raised dealt with more extensively. The primary interest of Lamotte‟s Essay, a lengthy comparison between the arts of painting and poetry, is in the problem of artistic and poetic licence. Lamotte takes particular issue with the appearance of anachronism in the work of painters and poets, and in the fabrication of elements not found in the history that a work of art purports to represent. In this regard, he concentrates a great deal of his attention upon what he refers to as „ecclesiastical history‟, that is, the lives of the saints and other aspects of Catholic doctrine not represented in Scripture but depicted in works of art. Lamotte finds both anachronism and fabrication unacceptable in a work of art and he has no time for painters who paint such untruths. Lamotte argues that artists have an even greater responsibility to adhere to the truth when they are dealing with religious subjects. So, for Lamotte, the depiction of a Nativity with the Virgin “arrayed like a glorious queen…a crown upon her head” is “absurd and preposterous”.140 Lamotte argues that

139 The same concept is noted by Pears: Pears 1991, 41. 140 Charles Lamotte, An essay upon poetry and painting, with relation to the sacred and profane history. With an appendix concerning obscenity in writing and painting, (London: printed for F. Fayram and J Leake, at Bath, 1730), 69. 67

The Christian religion disclaims such false and deceitful props…A judicious painter therefore in matters so sacred and solemn, should be more prudent and cautious, should strictly confine himself to truth, should have recourse to the Scriptures, those divine springs,… and not build upon such weak and sandy foundations as forged and fictitious legends.141

Lamotte will allow only a very close, literal reading of Scripture, with little scope for artistic licence or the painter‟s own invention. Artists should not treat of non-scriptural images of religious figures. Lamotte insists that the painter must be “perfectly skilled in history, both sacred and profane, which will enable him to discern truth from falsehood, to distinguish the history from the fable”.142 This represents a rather different relationship with religious pictures from that expressed by Walpole. Walpole can approach a painting containing Catholic content on the basis of the artist‟s skill and reputation; Lamotte implies that such work cannot be praised because those artists who depict the fables of „ecclesiastical history‟ cannot be deemed great. Yet for all this, Lamotte still describes Raphael as a great painter, and when he comes to acknowledge the nine best works of art extant in the world, they are all religious, eight of them are by Catholics, and many of them contain elements of the „ecclesiastical history‟ of which he is so critical.143 Lamotte does not discuss any specific pictures held in English collections. His is clearly a theoretical position which does not engage with the problems of interpreting Catholic pictures which were displayed in Protestant spaces. He does however highlight the areas of content and execution of religious paintings which were problematic for an eighteenth century English audience.144 He demonstrates, though his catalogue of the world‟s greatest paintings, the significance that these paintings held in English culture of the period.

What is also demonstrated is that the language and methodology of art criticism was employed to mediate these religious images. Both Lamotte‟s

141 Lamotte 1730, 73-5. 142 Lamotte 1730, 164. 143 Lamotte 1730, 127. 144 Haynes 2006, 94. 68 and Walpole‟s essays show how the doctrinal content of Catholic paintings was not ignored by spectators, but that „errors‟ of doctrine were recognised and sometimes commented upon. Painting itself is defended as neutral and works containing suspect content can still be admired as exercises in technique. The works which are admired as great paintings, regardless of their content, are works by artists considered to be the greatest of modern times.145 The regard in which a canonical artist was held and the fame they enjoyed played an important role in valuing works.146 This is in part a function of the English imagining of art being largely restricted to the Vasarian scheme in which Romano-Florentine artists dominate. This was a pan-European culture to which the English elites felt compelled to subscribe. It was these works whose content was religiously suspect that it was necessary somehow to manage.

Catholic images by great masters might be safely displayed in a gentleman‟s Gallery, a secular space, where his own learning and discrimination allowed him to derive aesthetic pleasure from such works, without the risk of his being led into error by their fallacious content. Such appreciation of these images was also available to a similarly discerning public who, on the basis of their politeness and standing, were admitted into the spaces of these collections.147 The gentleman was also able to exercise a guiding role for the members of his household, ensuring that these images were appreciated in an appropriate fashion. Such paintings would not, however be appropriate for the parish church. Uncontrolled access to such images by the uneducated might easily lead to idolatry.

The existence of these strategies to manage the Catholic content of religious paintings helps us to a partial explanation of how English elites might collect Counter-reformation devotional art without jeopardising their standing through association with popery. But these strategies, the contours of which Haynes

145 Haynes 2006, 95. Modern times here means the Italian Renaissance onwards but does not necessarily include contemporary artists. See below. 146 Haynes 2006, 87. 147 On the idea of politeness in eighteenth century England see Lawrence Klein, “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 18;2 (1984- 85), 185-214. 69 has outlined in some detail, deal specifically with painting; indeed the majority of scholarship dealing with the issue of religious art in eighteenth century England has, up until now, had painting as its primary focus. Moreover, the strategies outlined above are largely concerned with paintings by widely admired past masters – „Old Masters‟ in other words. Indeed, it is of note that Joseph Smith, British Consul to Venice and the key figure in the network which arranged for purchases of paintings by British Grand Tourists passing through Venice was extremely cautious about the extent to which religious paintings by contemporary artists would find ready buyers amongst Britons. The commissioning of pictures with religious subject matter by English patrons was also very rare, though some connoisseurs did so by retaining Protestant artists to undertake them.148

It does not immediately follow that the approach whereby a religious painting is aestheticised, bracketing out its ideological content, can be equally applied to an object like the Chelsea Pietà.

First, Joseph Willems‟ Pietà is not the work of a great master, as such were defined in contemporary English art criticism. He falls outside the acknowledged canon of artists. Willems had aspirations as a sculptor and appears to have taught drawing and modelling, but he was no Roubiliac, Rysbrack or even Nollekens.149 Indeed, the extent to which Willems‟ authorship of a particular porcelain model was widely known is open to question. It is likely that it was simply as a work of the Chelsea Factory that such objects were generally recognised – this is how the contemporary sales catalogues read, ascribing porcelain works to the Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory and its proprietor Mr Nicholas Sprimont.150 As a consequence,

148 Aston 2009, 162. On Consul Smith see Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. Revised and enlarged edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 299-310. 149 In Mortimer’s Dictionary for 1763, pt.1, p.19 there is this entry: “ Willems, Joseph. Modeller, At the Brussels Coffee House, Chelsea; This Artist teaches Drawing, Modelling, & has modelled for the Chelsea China Manufactory for many years.” Quoted in Arthur Lane, English Porcelain Figures of the Eighteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 134. 150 See James E. Nightingale, Contributions towards the History of Early English Porcelain from Contemporary Sources (Salisbury, 1881), ix-xxviii; Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from 70 the prestige attached to ownership of a work by Willems is unlikely to have been great simply on the grounds of his authorship. The Chelsea Pietà, too, was a local London production. Whilst the ownership of luxury porcelains was of interest to contemporary English elites, there is little positive evidence to indicate that such objects conveyed the same cachet as ownership of painting or sculpture by Continental masters and it is of note that, whilst paintings and sculptures are frequently individually identified in eighteenth-century inventories, porcelain figures are not.151 If porcelains do receive qualification in an inventory, it is often to identify them as being Asian, French or German in origin, this foreign origin apparently amplifying the prestige of the objects.152 This is suggested by the comment of Elizabeth Montagu in 1750 who, comparing ornamental porcelain by Chelsea and Bow with her own collections, states that such English works were not so sumptuous as her own „mighty pagodas of China and nodding Mandarins‟.153

Second, Willem‟s Pietà is a three-dimensional object; images in the round remained a far more problematic category than paintings as the associations with the dangers of idolatry remained relatively overt.154 Whilst there was an active market for sculpture in eighteenth-century England, it was almost exclusively restricted to the production of tomb and other forms of commemorative figure sculpture, or to portrait sculpture.155 Figurative sculpture on religious subjects remained extremely rare. Exceptions include statues of Moses and Aaron erected as part of the altarpiece at All Hallows

Eighteenth Century London Newspapers,” TECC 11:2 (1982), 122-30; Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from Eighteenth Century London Newspapers,” TECC 12:1 (1984), 58-89. 151 See, for example, the inventories in Tessa Murdoch (ed.), Noble Households. Eighteenth- Century Inventories of Great English Houses. A Tribute to John Cornforth. Cambridge: John Adamson, 2006. 152 E.g. Murdoch 2006, 162. 153 Anna Somers Cocks, “The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House During the Eighteenth Century” in G. Jackson-Stops, G J Schochet, L C Orlin and E B MacDougall (eds) The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 206. 154 On the ambivalent attitude to sculpture in England see Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. But this ambivalence was not restricted to Protestant England. Similar ambivalence can be found in French attitudes to Church sculpture; see Anne Betty Weinshenker, “Idolatry and Sculpture in Ancien Régime France”, Eighteenth–Century Studies 38:3 (2005), 485-507. 155 Haynes 2006, 27-8; Malcolm Baker, “Public Images for Private Spaces? The Place of Sculpture in the Georgian Interior,” Journal of Design History 20:4 (2007), 315. 71

Thames Street, London towards the end of the seventeenth century, but images that might be deemed Catholic in content are almost unknown.156 Haynes considers in some detail the controversy generated in 1681 by the introduction of a carved image of St Michael over the altar of the church of All Hallows Barking, London.157 Much of the dispute centred on the three- dimensional physicality of the object, this being seen by opponents of the sculpture as the very embodiment of an idolatrous image. Although this incident dates from the late seventeenth century, this issue remained alive through the eighteenth century, in part, as Haynes clearly outlines, because the Church of England retained an ambivalent attitude to the appropriateness of images as adornments to divine worship.158

Religious sculpture is almost entirely absent from descriptions of eighteenth century English art collections. The sculpture gallery of Charles Lennox, Third Duke of Richmond, which was opened for the use of artists in 1758 contained casts of both antique and modern sculpture. All of the modern casts, by figures like Michelangelo, Ghiberti and Giambologna, were of secular subjects. Casts of religious subjects by Bernini and Legros existed only as fragments – the hands of Fate and Charity from Bernini‟s tomb for Urban VIII in St Peter‟s, and the hands of Legros‟ statue of St Ignatius in the Gesù.159 A rare exception to this pattern is to be found in the collection of the Marquess of Rockingham who, in the mid-eighteenth century, had in the library of his house in Grosvenor Square a bronze version of Algardi‟s c.1730 Flagellation of Christ.160 This admired small-scale sculpture by an acknowledged late Baroque Roman master was displayed in the company of other bronzes on classical subjects which would seem to suggest its function as a Grand Tour souvenir and a marker of antiquarian learning. This example highlights the role of display context – both location in the house and other objects with which a religious work is displayed – in managing the meaning of an artwork,

156 Haynes 2006, 133. 157 Haynes 2006, 112-121. 158 Haynes 2006, 102-135. 159 J. Coatu, „ “A very grand and seigneurial design”: The Duke of Richmond‟s Academy in Whitehall‟, The British Art Journal 1:2 (2000), 47-54. 160 On the Algardi flagellation group see Jennifer Montagu, Alessandro Algardi. Vol.1 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 197-200. 72 as we have observed was the case with the English gentleman‟s picture gallery.161

161 Malcolm Baker, Figured in Marble. The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2000), 147. 73

Porcelain figures as sculpture

If the Chelsea Pietà‟s character as a three-dimensional object exaggerates the problem of its Counter-reformation subject matter, it also begs the question of the extent to which porcelain figures were considered sculpture in mid-eighteenth century England – that is figural works bearing an independent meaning which were viewed and engaged with as such, rather than objects which were seen as components subsumed into a larger decorative scheme. By and large, porcelain has acquired overwhelmingly decorative connotations in art historical discourse and this has overshadowed its place in sculptural aesthetics.

Much European porcelain sculpture was initially employed as part of the adornment of the dining table where it served as a substitute for the sugar sculptures which formed a part of the decoration for the dessert service in European court circles. This was an important function informing the early production of figures at the Meissen factory.162 That this was also a primary function of porcelain sculptures in mid-eighteenth century England is supported by period advertisements for sales of porcelain objects. In an advertisement published in the Public Advertiser on 17/18 and 20/21 May 1756 we read: “MR. TURNER will expose to Sale, at his shop on the Terras, in St. James‟s-street, several hundred Sorts of Figures, Birds and Animals, for Desarts, or Ornament”.163 An advertisement for a sale of Chelsea porcelain published in the Public Advertiser in March of 1763 states that a planned sale of Chelsea porcelain will include “a large variety of handsome Candlesticks, large Groups of Figures, and single ditto of all sizes for Deserts”.164

To dismiss this use of porcelain figures as merely “decorative” in function is, as Sarah Richards suggests, to seriously misconstrue the significance of such

162 See Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, “The Hof-Conditorey in Dresden: Traditions and Innovations in Sugar and Porcelain”, in Triumph of the Blue Swords. Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie, 1710–1815, (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2010), 121-131. 163 Valpy 1984, 67 164 Nightingale 1881, 22 74 rituals of display in the context of late Baroque elite culture.165 The porcelain figures employed as table adornments were frequently selected for their relevance to the celebrations at hand, the subjects depicted making complex allusions to the significance of the occasion, these references often being cast in emblematic and allegorical guise. The necessary learning to read and appreciate the references embedded in such displays was an index of the viewer‟s social standing and was an important component of the function of these table adornments.166 It is, however, true that porcelain figures intended for the dessert table were generally not permanently on view and were often stored in the pantry with other valuable porcelain and plate when not in use, as the listing of thirteen small china figures amongst the contents of the Housekeeper‟s room and ground floor pantry in the 1772 inventory from Ditchley in Oxfordshire suggests.167

Nevertheless, right from the earliest period of European porcelain production, and on through the eighteenth century, academically trained sculptors like Permoser, Thomae, Kändler, Bustelli, Doell, Desoches, Falconet and Flaxman were involved in the creation of sculpture in porcelain.168 From the very outset, Kändler‟s work at the Meissen factory had seen the porcelain medium turned to the production of original large-scale sculptural works, including the famed menagerie of near-life-size animal sculptures, still preserved in the Saxon state collections, and Kändler‟s projected, although never completed, monumental over-lifesize equestrian statue of Augustus III –

165 Catriona MacLeod, “Sweetmeats for the Eye: Porcelain Miniatures in Classical Weimar” in Moore, Evelyn and Patricia Simpson (eds), The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 58-59; Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-century Ceramics: Products for a civilised society (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1999), 183-84. 166 Meredith Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked. The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) 247-48. 167 Murdoch 2006,162. 168 Angela Gräffin von Wallwitz, Celebrating Kaendler 1706 – 1775, (München: Angela Gräffin von Wallwitz Kunsthandel, 2006), 13–25; Gordon Campbell, "Bustelli, Franz-Anton” in The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts, Vol. 1, (Oxford: Oxford University Press US, 2006), 163; Marie-Noëlle Pinot Villechenon, Falconet à Sèvres, 1754 – 1766, ou, L’art de plaire. Paris: Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001; Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire. Design and Society, 1750–1980. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 13-28; MacLeod 2007, 45. 75 in its final form the monument would have stood nine metres tall.169 It is also of note that Permoser, Thomae, Kändler and Bustelli all produced original devotional sculptures in porcelain, a genre which can hardly be dismissed as merely decorative and which had occupied some of the greatest European sculptors since the Renaissance.170 Indeed, the very earliest productions of sculpture at Meissen include religious subjects intended to function as devotional images, as was outlined in the Introduction.

Sculpture and reproduction

The place of porcelain sculpture in art-historical discourse has been problematic because of the serial, reproductive character of these objects. The use of moulds to form the sculptures implied the individual mark of the artist was effaced. In this way, porcelain is often associated with plaster as a secondary medium, dependent upon and imitative of a material such as marble or bronze. But in recent decades, the historically contingent nature of definitions of such concepts as authorship, originality and reproduction has been recognised more and more.171 Eighteenth-century English connoisseurship certainly valued ideas like authorship and technique – concepts critical to the management of meaning of religious artworks as we have seen. But the copy was also valued. The English painter and printmaker Jonathan Richardson the younger (1694-1771) stated that:

A copy of a very good picture is preferable to an indifferent original; for there the invention is seen almost entire, and a great deal of the expression and disposition and many times good hints of the colouring,

169 Samuel Wittwer, The Gallery of Meissen Animals: Augustus the Strong's Menagerie for the Japanese Palace in Dresden. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006; Ingelore Menzhausen, Early Meissen Porcelain in Dresden (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 21-22. 170 Menzhausen 1990, 197, no.33; Ulrich Pietsch (ed.), Die Arbeitsberichte des Meissener Porzellanmodelleurs Johann Joachim Kaendler, 1706 – 1775 (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 2002), 15; Renate Eikelmann, Franz Anton Bustelli. Nymphenburger Porzellanfiguren des Rokoko. Das Gesamtwerk (München: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 2004), 184-86. 171 For an overview of these issues see Rosalind Krauss, “Retaining the Original? The State of the Question”, in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions. Studies in the History of Art, Volume 20, National Gallery of Art Washington (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 7-11. 76

drawing, and other qualities. An indifferent original hath nothing that is excellent, nothing that touches which such a copy I am speaking hath.172

Malcolm Baker has traced the increasing marginalisation of small-scale sculpture in Northern Europe through the course of the eighteenth century as the canons of art were being formulated in accord with academic norms. At different points during this period, the significance of issues like authorship and seriality varied in their import for determining whether a work was deemed a work of art, or a decorative object.173

In the early eighteenth century porcelain, as a material, still bore some of the prestige of its status as a Wunderkammer treasure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.174 Small-scale sculptures in ivory and boxwood had also enjoyed similar prestige in Wunderkammer and Kunstkammer collections and it seems clear that in the first decades of the Meissen factory‟s output, porcelain figures were highly regarded in aristocratic circles where they were valued as luxury works of art.175 As Baker notes, it seems that the serial character of porcelain figures was downplayed by early eighteenth century viewers, only becoming a source of negative associations in the latter part of the century.176

In this regard it is worth noting that figural objects in a reproductive medium like plaster were not necessarily excluded from being treated as sculpture either. From the 1720s on in England, as Baker has argued, there appears to be a shift in both the use of sculpture in the domestic interior, and in the way

172 Quoted in Richard Spear, “Notes on Renaissance and Baroque Originals and Originality”, in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions. Studies in the History of Art, Volume 20, National Gallery of Art Washington (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989), 97. 173 Malcolm Baker, “The Ivory Multiplied: Small-scale Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century”, in Hughes, Anthony and Erich Ranfft (eds), Sculpture and its Reproductions. (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 61-78. 174 From the outset, Böttger‟s ambition was for his porcelain and stoneware bodies to be substitutes for silver, capable of being transformed into anything that silver was employed for, including furniture and sculpture. See Menzhausen 1990, 11-12. 175 Malcolm Baker 1997, 64–7. 176 Malcolm Baker 1997, 68. 77 sculpture is viewed. Guidebooks specifically addressing sculpture began to appear, indicating a new interest in this material.177 In The London Tradesman of 1747 Robert Campbell states that “The Taste of Busts and Figures in these Materials [clay, wax and Plaster of Paris] prevails much of late Years, and in some measure interferes with Portrait Painting: The Nobility now affect to have their Busts done that Way rather than sit for their Pictures, and the Fashion is to have their Apartments adorned with Bronzes and Figures in Plaister and Wax.”178 This interest in sculpture developed still further in the second half of the century where a burgeoning exhibition culture saw sculpture assume an important place alongside painting.179

A common place to encounter sculpture in the domestic interior was the library adorned with busts of suitable worthies. Whilst these might be sculptures of marble or bronze, more frequently sets of plaster busts of literary notables sold by dealers like Johne Cheere were used.180 Although clearly less expensive than bronze or marble, and even terracotta, and although also products of serial production these were by no means cheap products for a mass market. Such busts were frequently combined with costly marble pedestals and other expensive display accoutrements.181

Porcelain figures too appear in the mid-eighteenth-century English interior, beyond their use at the dessert table. Evidence is limited, but enough is known to allow us to reconstruct the broad outlines of the role porcelain sculpture played in the eighteenth-century English interior. French and English biscuit porcelains were clearly displayed on wall brackets by the mid- 1770s, as is demonstrated in a letter that Lady Sarah Bunbury wrote to the Duchess of Leinster in 1775 offering advice on the decoration of the drawing room at Carton:

177 J.Richarson, An Account of some Statues, Bas Reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy &c. with Remarks, J.Knapton, London, 1722; An Historical Description of Westminster Abbey, Its Monuments and Curiosities. Designed as a Guide to Strangers, J. Newbery, London, 1753. 178 R. Campbell, The London Tradesman (London: T. Gardener, 1747), 139 179 Malcolm Baker, “Public Images for Private Spaces? The Place of Sculpture in the Georgian Interior,” Journal of Design History 20:4 (2007), 315. 180 Timothy Clifford and Terry Friedman, The Man at Hyde Park Corner. Sculpture by John Cheere, Temple Newsam House, Leeds, 1974. 181 Baker 2007, 318. 78

If the hangings are white their plainness must be broken by your pretty blue and green Sèvres china vases, on pretty brackets…If you have coloured hangings…the biscuit china figures (of which there are some beautiful of eighteen inches high now made) [should be shown against] the grey or green hangings.182

Many glazed porcelain figures have frontal designs, relatively poorly finished backs and are of considerable scale; it is clear that they were never intended for the dessert table where figures would have been visible in the round. Other evidence suggests that by the middle of the century English porcelain figures were being set out in rooms. In 1750, Elizabeth Montagu, writing of a friend who had only a modest lodging, suggested that „with her economy she might furnish it in the present fashion, of some cheap paper and ornaments of Chelsea China or the manufacture of Bow‟, noting that they „make a room look neat and furnished‟.183 In 1755 the Bow factory advertised „all sorts of enamelled figures for Mantle-pieces, Toilets etc.‟184 and in 1767 William Littler of West Pans advertised „figures and essence pots for decoration of chimney pieces‟.185 As we have noted, figures could be displayed on brackets, „single figures for brackets‟ being among the objects offered at the Chelsea sale held in 1759.186

The emphasis here placed on the location for display of these porcelain figures, rather than on their particular subjects, would seem to emphasise their function as elements in a decorative scheme, rather than as objects bearing independent meaning as we might expect from a work of sculpture. But it is also clear that the subjects depicted by porcelain figures were not without significance and were often the subject of considered selection. Large portrait busts were rarely made in porcelain, but a handful were produced by Derby in the 1770s and 1780s and these were probably intended, like their

182 Somers-Cocks 1989, 207. 183 Somers-Cocks 1989, 206. 184 S. Smith, “Norwich China Dealers of the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” TECC 9:2 (1974), 208. 185 Mavis Bimson, J. Ainslie and Bernard Watney. “West Pans Story – The Scotland Manufactory,” TECC 6:2 (1966), 171. 186 Nightingale 1881, 7. 79 plaster counterparts, to be displayed in libraries.187 The smaller busts of philosophers and political and military celebrities produced at Bow and Derby may have been intended for use on library desks, or, where issued in pairs or with ill-finished backs, for mantelpieces. Figures of public personalities of the day, which often echo the conventions of public monumental sculpture, were obviously charged with political significance and must have been displayed as statements of political allegiances and civic virtue.188 The same may be said of a figure like the Chelsea Roman Charity which was at once a statement of classical learning, as well as of filial loyalty (Fig.43).

Although the evidence is a little less direct, another location in the domestic interior for the display of porcelain appears to have been the bedroom. Most of the major English factories were in production by about 1750.189 Thus it can be no coincidence that the China „case‟, or cabinet, as a piece of freestanding furniture first appears in the 1750s. Thomas Chippendale published a number of designs for these, beginning in 1754.190 They are the descendants of the cabinet in which Kunstkammer objects were kept, to be brought out and admired by cognoscenti. The emergence of the China cabinet implies that porcelain was both collectable and worthy of storage in a secure but accessible piece of purpose-built furniture. Nearly all surviving examples of China cabinets (and they are not a common class of furniture) are executed in Chinoiserie style, an evocation of the ultimate origins of the material displayed in them.191 The use of this style suggests these items of furniture were made for women‟s bed chambers or closets, since Chinoiserie was used almost exclusively for these types of rooms – it was not a style considered appropriate for formal or State rooms.192 These less formal spaces were, thus, clearly also sites where porcelains might be displayed.

187 Young 1999, 187. 188 Young 1999, 187. 189 Chelsea: Young 1999, 197; Bow: Young 1999, 197; Lund’s Bristol: Young 1999, 198; Worcester: Young 1999, 198; Derby: Young 1999, 202. 190 Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet Makers Director, (London 1754), pl.132-37. 191 Anna Somers Cocks 1989, 204. 192 David Beevers (ed.), Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain, 1650-1930. (Brighton and Hove: The Royal Pavilion and Museums, 2008), 16, 22-24. 80

The use of porcelain to produce busts and figures of philosophers, literary men and other contemporary public figures, subjects associated with public sculpture of the period, suggests that porcelain could be construed as a sculptural medium at this time, in the sense that these objects were capable of bearing independent meaning beyond any function they might possess as part of an interior decorative scheme. Indeed, the general absence of interest concerning individual authorship of a given porcelain figure that we find at this period suggests that subject matter was the most important attribute of these objects and the basis upon which selection was made. The choice of particular subjects demonstrates that these objects could be possessed of calculated significance and, through display, communicate to a viewer some aspect of the owner‟s public persona. This has important implications for any contemporary display of sculpture employing Counter-reformation imagery. As sculpture remained a highly problematic medium for religious imagery, porcelain figures of Catholic subjects are likely to have attracted associations with popish idolatry. The choice to display such a figure was, then, presumably a calculated act. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the significance of the subject matter for the owner of the figure outweighed any concerns about accusations of popish idolatry. The most likely candidates for such a person are, of course, members of the English Catholic elite.

Such evidence as survives for the display of porcelain sculpture in the eighteenth-century English interior suggests that it was generally not in formal apartments that these objects were to be found, but in more informal spaces associated with the individual or the immediate family: libraries, closets and bedchambers. This pattern was not necessarily restricted to porcelain figures; Sir Lawrence Dundas‟ collection of bronze statuettes after the antique, an essential mark of a learned amateur at this period, was displayed on the mantelpiece in his library (Fig.15). We should not confuse the lower level of formality associated with these spaces with modern notions of privacy – a bedroom was a far more public space in eighteenth-century England than is the case today – but these rooms remained, nevertheless, spaces to which

81 access was controlled.193 This is of significance. The display of a porcelain sculpture employing Counter-reformation imagery, like the Chelsea Pietà, most likely took place within a space of the house where admission was monitored by the owner. Moreover, within the broad Catholic context, spaces like the bedroom had formed the locus of lay private devotions since the middle ages and such rooms were common sites for the location of private devotional images.194 It is probable then that the Chelsea Pietà was displayed in a domestic space where only those known to the owner would have had ready access and from whence, conversely, those who may have taken offence at such an object could be carefully excluded.

Grand Tour Souvenir?

We have attempted to reveal some of the ambiguity an object like the Chelsea Pietà embodies. Although English Protestant elites could collect Counter- reformation painting through the strategy of aestheticising these works, the three-dimensional character of the porcelain Pietà allies it closely to sculpture, a far more problematic category of image. The display of religious paintings in the eighteenth-century English interior makes it clear that context of display was important in controlling the meaning of such objects. Such display strategies could also be applied to religious sculpture, as the example of the Algardi flagellation group in the collections of the Marquess of Rockingham demonstrates, but the general rarity of such sculpture in eighteenth-century English collections suggests that such material remained problematic.

The presence of the Algardi bronze in the Rockingham collection and the probability that it functioned – in conjunction with a larger group of bronzes on classical subjects – as a Grand Tour souvenir does raise the possibility that something similar may have been at work with the Chelsea Pietà. The Pietà

193 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1980), 205-6. 194 Henk van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300-1500. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 8; David Morgan, “Domestic Devotion and Ritual: Visual Piety in the Modern American Home”, Art Journal 57:1 (1988), 47-48. 82 group, as we have observed, is ultimately derived from the marble Pietà by Nicholas Coustou in the choir of Notre Dame in Paris. The Coustou altar group was certainly known to and admired by at least some contemporary English connoisseurs. In his Paris Journal for 1734 the painter Joseph Highmore mentions this group on the Great Altar with admiration, only he wished that the figure of Christ “lay higher in the lap or that the Virgin‟s knees were more horizontal for this fig: seems as if it might slip off her hands too being elevated supposes it secure.”195 It was generally via France that English Grand Tourists made their way to Italy and the monuments of Paris were a feature of many Grand Tourists‟ itineraries.196 By recalling works viewed on the Grand Tour, such souvenirs functioned as a token of their owners‟ taste and education, and to the extent that the subject matter was recognisable to others with similar education and experience, they served to reinforce solidarity amongst members of the ruling cultural elite.

Whilst a possibility, it is difficult to attribute such a function to the Chelsea Pietà with any certainty. As we shall examine in detail in the next chapter, although the Coustou sculpture was the ultimate inspiration for Willems‟ figure group, the porcelain group is the product of considerable creative recomposition on Willems‟ part and the degree to which its model may have been immediately recognisable is debateable. The Chelsea Pietà group‟s local London manufacture also adds to this uncertainty. If the ultimate source of Willems‟ model is not immediately apparent, then the Willems‟ group effectively assumes the appearance of an original composition on a Counter- reformation theme and any advantage to be had in terms of social prestige and cultural eminence through its ownership is immediately diminished.

Conclusions

195 Johnston I970, 73-74. Note, too, that Highmore‟s response to this Catholic liturgical sculpture takes the form of a compositional critique. This is in line with what we have outlined above: a Catholic devotional work is aestheticised and treated as an essay in the skill of the artist, with the devotional content of the art being largely ignored. 196 Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, Grand Tour. The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996), 93. 83

The Chelsea Pietà group is revealed to be a highly ambiguous object from a number of perspectives. Its Counter-reformation imagery dictated the manner in which the Protestant English elite might approach the work – and that is as an exercise in compositional creativity and technical accomplishment, bracketing out consideration of its symbolic content. The relative anonymity of its authorship, however, reduced the advantage in prestige which ownership of the object might generate from the perspective of connoisseurship. Luxury porcelain objects were certainly desirable commodities, with interest in them being shown by both the aristocracy and members of the middling orders. But the Pietà‟s three-dimensional character exacerbates the problematic nature of its Catholic imagery through overt associations with idolatry. As a porcelain figure, the status of the Pietà as „sculpture‟ or „decoration‟ was equally ambiguous. If considered sculpture, then an emphasis lay upon authorship and aesthetic merit in determining the work‟s value. However, as we have suggested, it is unlikely that Joseph Willems was of sufficient standing as an artist for this to outweigh the difficulties represented by the Pietà‟s Catholic imagery. If, on the other hand, deemed „decoration‟ then it was the object‟s subject matter which would be emphasised and, once again, the porcelain group‟s Counter-reformation content would have rendered its reception problematic. As the product of a London manufactory, albeit an elite one, the Chelsea Pietà could provide neither the prestige of a Continental masterwork, nor necessarily exploit its reference to a modern French sculpture to function as a Grand Tour souvenir. Yet the Chelsea Pietà exists, and although the extant numbers are small, it was clearly not a unique production.

In light of the preceding arguments it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Chelsea Pietà was of immediate interest to a particular audience precisely because of, and not in spite of, its subject matter. Such an audience was readily to be found in Catholic members of the eighteenth-century English elite. And indeed, we know that at least one of the surviving Pietà groups, the Melbourne example, was owned by a Catholic collector in the eighteenth century: Hugh, 4th Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. For a Catholic audience, the Pietà imagery would have held special significance and the Chelsea group 84 could readily have served as a devotional image for private prayer and meditation.

Support for the contention that the Chelsea Pietà possessed such a devotional function is to be found in a detailed examination of the iconography of the extant examples of the Willems model. Such analysis reveals that aspects of the form and decoration of these porcelains are calculated to heighten the devotional associations of these objects. It is to such a detailed iconographic examination of the Willems Pietà that the next chapter is devoted.

CHAPTER THREE

THE WILLEMS PIETÀ GROUPS AS DEVOTIONAL IMAGES

Much of the history of European art may be framed in terms of the use and re- use by artists of famed models by masters of the past, the apprehension of references to these past models and the artist‟s introduction of innovations both forming part of the criteria by which an artist‟s compositional skills are assessed. It is almost without precedent for a porcelain figure to be the subject of detailed iconographic and compositional analysis of the type that is carried out regularly for other forms of sculpture. In this chapter, just such an analysis will be undertaken. Although work has been carried out in the past on the identification of sources – printed, painted and three-dimensional – informing the creation of eighteenth-century porcelain figures, in general these enquiries have rarely been developed beyond the simple identification of an individual image or work of art as the initial inspiration for the modeller.197 There has been little attempt to interrogate the role of the modeller in interpreting the sources they may have drawn upon in creating a sculptural work. Bernard Watney observes that porcelain figures from the Chelsea factory appear to have been copied from a range of sources including engravings, small bronzes, artists‟ sculptural sketches and porcelain figures by the Meissen factory.198 He identifies unusual correspondences between an original source – such as the Borghese Gladiator, a favourite academy model of the period – and its adaptation into porcelain – the Chelsea figure of A Fisherman (Fig.16).199 But he does not consider in any detail the actual work of adaptation which has gone on in the creation of a model in a new medium from a source image, be it of two or three dimensions. There is a

197 Bernard Watney, “Origins of Designs for English Ceramics of the Eighteenth Century”, The Burlington Magazine 114 (Dec 1972), 818-31; Siegfried Ducret, Keramik und Graphik des 18. Jahrhunderts: Vorlagen für Maler und Modelleurs. Braunschweig, 1973; Maureen Cassidy- Geiger, “Graphic Sources for Meissen Porcelain: Origins of the Print Collection in the Meissen Archives”, Metropolitan Museum Journal 31 (1996), 99-126. 198 Watney 1972, 818-22. 199 Bernard Watney, “Some Parallels and Proto-types in Ceramics”, TECC (1980), 350; Watney 1972, 818; William King, English Porcelain Figures of the X VIII Century, (London: The Medici Society, 1925), Fig.28. 87 creative process at work in such adaptation and the modeller clearly has direct imaginative input into the form and aesthetic effect of the final figure: the radical reimagination which Watney himself identifies in the recasting of a bellicose classical sculpture as a porcelain figure of a fisherman clearly attests to this.

The failure to consider the work of the porcelain figure modeller as an exercise in compositional creativity is symptomatic of the more general failure to consider porcelain figures as art and their creators as artists. Being manufactured from moulds, porcelain figures have been placed in the category of reproductive, serially produced objects. As products, not of the efforts of a single craftsman, but of a team of different specialists – designer, modeller, repairer, decorator – porcelain figures are deemed to lack the immediate imprint of the artist and his spontaneous creativity. The process of a porcelain figure‟s creation, especially when the figure is based upon a pre- existing design, be it a painting or a sculpture, has seen the modeller‟s role caricatured as a mechanical exercise in reproduction. But this is clearly not the case. Draughtsmanship and modelling, skills often combined in the one person in the eighteenth century luxury trades, were necessarily creative activities and the ability of porcelain artists consciously to imbue a model with particular aesthetic and symbolic qualities, even when adapting a pre-existing prototype, must be given due attention.200

The Willems Pietà exists in three porcelain versions: two versions produced at Chelsea and a third produced at the Tournai factory in Belgium. Differences exist between all three versions. However, Willems appears to have been involved in some capacity in the creation of both the English and Belgian examples. This chapter will present a close visual analysis of the Pietà group. A careful consideration of the sources upon which Willems draws to create his porcelain sculpture will demonstrate that, far from being a mechanical reproduction of its marble prototype, Willems‟ Pietà is a carefully nuanced composition demonstrating a keen awareness of the exigencies of the

200 Hilary Young, English Porcelain 1745-95: Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 95-97. 88 porcelain medium and of the requirements for successfully transforming a monumental ecclesiastical sculpture into a domestic-scaled figure group. It has been broached in the previous chapter that an object like the Pietà group could have formed part of the broad phenomenon of the Grand Tour souvenir, based as it is upon a work of modern French sculpture widely admired in the eighteenth century which would have been encountered by English Grand Tourists passing through Paris. It will be argued below, however, that Willems‟ adaptation of his French model involves a relatively sophisticated recomposition of the original work resulting in a sculpture that differs from its model in ways which serve to emphasise and enhance the subject‟s devotional associations. Further, the decoration of the extant versions of the porcelain Pietà group further emphasise the Catholic devotional dimension of these objects. Even in a milieu where Protestant English elites had developed strategies for engaging with Counter-reformation art, the emphatic highlighting of the devotional potential of the Chelsea Pietà, together with its nature as a three-dimensional sculpture in the round, would have rendered it difficult for a Protestant audience to have embraced this object comfortably. The conclusion that the Chelsea Pietà was explicitly intended to function as a Catholic devotional image becomes difficult to escape.

Models

Earlier commentators sought the model for Willems‟ Pietà in an engraving after Van Dyck or Rubens.201 It certainly appears to be the case that Willems drew upon engravings after Flemish artists like Rubens and Van Dyck for inspiration for some of his models, an unsurprising set of circumstances for a Flemish modeller working for a factory run by a Walloon.202 Willems‟ immediate model for his Pietà group, however, would appear to lie, not in a painting, but in the marble sculpture of the Pietà (1712-28) by Nicolas

201 E.g. Arthur Lane, English Porcelain of the 18th Century, (London: Faber, 1961), 73; Patrick Synge-Hutchinson, “A Unique Essay in English Ceramic Art”, The Connoisseur 156 (June 1964), 86-87. 202 See Arthur Lane, “Chelsea Porcelain Figures and the Modeller Joseph Willems”, The Connoisseur 145 (May 1960), 245-51. 89

Coustou (1658-1733) in the choir of Notre Dame in Paris (Figs. 17 & 18).203 This sculpture formed part of a larger installation memorialising Louis XIII and Louis XIV. The initial conception for the memorial had come from Louis XIII who had, in 1638, dedicated his kingdom to the Virgin in thanksgiving for the delivery of an heir – the future Louis XIV – after twenty-two years of marriage.204 Louis XIII died before the project could be realised and it was Louis XIV who saw his predecessor‟s wishes fulfilled, inserting himself into the monument in the process. Louis XIV was more than sixty years old when he commissioned the memorial. It was begun in 1699 to designs by the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1645/46 – 1708) and completed nearly fifteen years later under the direction of Robert de Cotte (1656 – 1735). The elaborate ensemble consisted of many statues, reliefs and decorative elements. Only parts of the monument remain in Notre Dame today, much of the material being removed during the French Revolution and partially returned in the nineteenth century. Coustou‟s Pietà was set in a niche behind the high altar, flanked on either side by the kneeling figure of Louis XIII offering up his crown to the Virgin, this work by Nicolas‟ brother Guillaume Coustou, and Louis XIV, by the Coustous‟ uncle Antoine Coysevox, kneeling before the Virgin, giving thanks for his life. A gilt-bronze mise au tombeau relief by François Girardon adorns the front of the altar upon which the Pietà sits (Fig.19).

Although the Coustou Pietà appears to be the ultimate model for Willems‟ porcelain group, it remains open to question whether the inspiration was derived through direct observation of the original, or via a print source after Coustou‟s sculpture. Knowledge of Coustou‟s Pietà was disseminated throughout Europe via engravings. An engraving of the memorial of which the Pietà forms a part by Jacques François Blondel, after Ferdinand Delamonce, was published by Jean Mariette in Paris in 1727 (Fig.20).205 Another

203 François Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th centuries. The reign of Louis XIV. Illustrated Catalogue A–F (Oxford: Cassirer, 1977), 170-71; 61a. Coustou was the sculptor with whom Roubiliac, the pre-eminent sculptor working in the rococo taste in eighteenth century England and Sprimont‟s friend, had trained. See Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: The British Museum Press, 2001), 199 n.25. 204 John B Wolf, Louis XIV (New York: Norton, 1968), 3. 205 M,37.31. See Emil Kaufmann, “The Contribution of Jacques-François Blondel to Mariette's Architecture Françoise,” The Art Bulletin 31:1 (1949), 58-59; Inventaire du Fonds Français: Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Estampes (Paris, 1930), 4.1. 90 engraving of the Notre Dame altar installation, by Antoine Hérisset, was published in J.A. Piganiol de La Force, Description historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs in 1765 (Fig.21).206 And as we have observed previously, Joseph Highmore‟s Paris Journal indicates that the Coustou altar group was certainly known to and admired by at least some contemporary English connoisseurs.207

In general, eighteenth-century English porcelain figures that reproduce preexisting artworks seem to have been taken either from terracotta or plaster models of original sculptures, or else from engravings of well-known paintings. It should be recalled that artists at this time often supplemented their income by selling small-scale models of sculptural works at modest prices208, and engravings of major paintings were produced in quantity. So, for example, the St James factory group of the Holy Family (Fig.22) in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria is likely to have been inspired by an engraving of the Raphael painting known as The Small Holy Family (Fig.23), such as that by François de Poilly the elder (Fig.24), rather than from the original painting itself.209 When Willems died at Tournai in 1766, an inventory of his effects included “un grouppe représentant la Vierge et le Saveur descendu de la croix, avec un adorateur”, along with other models in white-painted terracotta – including a Roman Charity group – of subjects which were also produced as porcelain figures at Chelsea.210 The inventory suggests that these models

206 J.A. Piganiol de La Force, Description historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs, Paris, 1765, vol.1, 323. 207 Elizabeth Johnston, “Joseph Highmore's Paris Journal, 1743,” The Walpole Society 1968- 1970, (Glasgow, I970), 73-74. 208 Watney 1980, 350; Lane 1961, 31; Peter Bradshaw, 18th Century English Porcelain Figures 1745-1795 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1981), 51; James David Draper and Guilhem Scherf, Playing with Fire. European Terracotta Models 1740-1840. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991),18; Malcolm Baker, “Public Images for Private Spaces? The Place of Sculpture in the Georgian Interior,” Journal of Design History 20:4 (2007), 318-20. 209 Watney 1972, 821; Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from Eighteenth Century London Newspapers,” TECC 11:2 (1982), 129. (NGV 1996.197) 210 From the 5 March 1767 inventory of the effects of Joseph Willems quoted in Lane 1961, 135-136. A version of the Chelsea Roman Charity is in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (D21.a-b-1984). That Willems produced porcelain sculptures after terracotta models of his own making is clearly demonstrated by the presence in the collections of the Cecil Higgins Museum of a signed terracotta by Willems of a girl with flowers (the so-called “Gardner‟s companion”) (S.12), the Chelsea porcelain example of which is held in the same collection. 91 were of Willems‟ own creation: “plusieurs grouppes de ronde bosse de terre cuite et colorées en blanc de sa composition, et par lui modelés”.211 Whether or not the terracotta model of the Pietà was modeled from direct observation of the Coustou sculpture in Paris or whether it derives from one of the print sources is difficult to assess with certainty. It should, though, be noted that there are differences between the extant print sources for the Notre Dame Pietà and the actual sculptural group itself, differences that are not reflected in Willems‟ porcelain models which agree in the majority of details with Coustou‟s marble. So, for example, the orientation of the Virgin‟s gaze upward to the left in the 1727 Blondel engraving is the reverse of the direction of the Virgin‟s gaze in the Coustou sculpture, and the angel kissing the hand of the dead Christ in Coustou‟s composition is replaced by two putti in the Blondel print (Fig.20). In both of these details, Willems‟ porcelain models follow Coustou‟s original and not the engravings. This does seem to suggest that Willems may have had some direct familiarity either with the marble sculpture in Notre Dame de Paris, or with one of the models of the sculpture which appear to have been in circulation.212

The Chelsea versions

The Willems‟ Pietà was produced in two versions at the Chelsea factory. The earlier of the two dates to around 1756-58 and is from the Red Anchor period of the factory‟s production (1752-58). The single known example of this version, held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, is embellished with polychrome enamel decoration (Fig.2).213

The second version, produced during the factory‟s Gold Anchor period (1759- 65), is known from two examples. The first of these, in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, lacks polychrome decoration and is instead in the

211 Lane 1961, 135. 212 Watney 1980, 351. 213 Acquired by the V&A in 1985, formerly in the collection of Capt. J.J.Tufnell. 92 unadorned white glazed porcelain (Fig.1).214 Unlike the Red Anchor example, the Melbourne Pietà is set upon an integral porcelain pedestal base decorated in a mazarine blue ground with gilded decoration that includes a depiction of the Lamb of God.

A second example of the Gold Anchor version was sold on the London market in 1991, current whereabouts unknown.215 This example is finished with polychrome enamels, but includes a porcelain plinth decorated in a mazarine blue ground upon which the figure group sits (Fig.25). This plinth is decorated with tooled gold ornament and a central polychrome vignette depicting the Deposition. The porcelain plinth is itself mounted upon an ormolu base.

Whilst the Coustou Pietà in Paris would appear to be the primary inspiration for Willems‟ model, the extant porcelain groups do not precisely reproduce the marble sculpture in every detail, nor are all of the Chelsea examples identical to each other. The Chelsea figure groups differ from Coustou‟s original in a number of ways, chief amongst these being the manner in which Willems‟ has modified the strongly frontal orientation of Coustou‟s composition. In Coustou‟s Pietà, the Virgin with her outstretched arms directly faces the viewer before the altar. The body of Christ lies across her lap horizontally, mirroring the orientation of her arms. The angel who leans in to adore the wounded hand of Christ is also oriented on the planar parallel to the body of Christ, presenting his left side to the viewer. The putto grasping the fallen Crown of Thorns on the proper right side of the Virgin gazes upward and across at the head of the dead Christ, emphasising the strong right to left horizontal plane of the composition.

In adapting this monumental sculpture to his porcelain model, Willems disrupts this frontal orientation of Coustou‟s composition. Although Willems‟ porcelain group has a definite front and reverse to it – this is particularly emphasised in the Gold Anchor versions by the addition of the pedestal base

214 Acquired by the NGV in 1989; Stevens Collection, Melbourne, acquired Christies, London, June 5, 1978, lot 137; formerly in the collection of Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, sold Sotheby‟s, London, October 27, 1953, lot 140; Hugh 4th Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, c.1761. 215 Christies, London 11 February 1991, Lot 90. 93

– the overall effect of the porcelain model is of a sculpture fully “in the round”, with the work providing viewing interest from all angles. This is achieved in part by Willems‟ introducing various changes in the positioning and poses of Coustou‟s figures, in this way altering the overall dynamic of the composition.

A number of different sources present interesting parallels to the compositional innovations that Willems‟ introduces into his model. In his 1922 book on the Chelsea factory, William King had suggested that the Chelsea Pietà group drew its inspiration from a painting by Rubens in the Prado and may have been adapted from an engraving after this painting.216 King was writing before the identification of Coustou‟s sculpture as the source for Willem‟s model had been made217 and the „Rubens‟ he mentions is most likely the Pietà previously in the monastery of El Escorial, now in the Prado, a painting which has been reattributed to Van Dyck subsequent to the time of King‟s writing.218 It is unlikely that Willem‟s model was based directly upon the Prado Van Dyck, but King was right to look to Flemish devotional painting of the seventeenth century for influences on Willems‟ work. As a Catholic born in the Catholic Netherlands, and no doubt receiving at least part of his artistic training there, it is highly probable that Willems was familiar with many of the best known devotional images of the seventeenth century produced by

216 William King, Chelsea Porcelain (London: Benn Brothers, 1922), 52; pl.64. 217 Watney 1972 seems to be the first time that the Coustou Pietà is identified in print as the source for Willems‟ model. Soil de Moriamé had identified Coustou‟s sculpture as the inspiration for the Tournai Pietà group but attributes this model to Nicolas Lecreux (Eugéne- Justin Soil de Moriamé, La Manufacture impériale et royale de porcelaine de Tournay: fondée en 1751. Préface de Marcel Laurent (Tournai et Paris: Casterman, 1937), 309, pl.570.). 218 Prado Van Dyck Pietà P1642. A version of this painting, with the addition of an angel on the right-hand side, dated 1618-20 is held in the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Inv.486) (Fig.31). There is confusion over the attribution of the Prado painting. For many years attributed to Rubens and dated prior to 1618, the work was in 1974 given to Van Dyck by Díaz Padrón, and it remains catalogued as such (M. Díaz Padrón, Archivo Español de Arte, vol.47, April 1974; Museo del Prado. Inventario General de Pinturas I, La Colección Real (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1990), 132 no.439). Erik Larsen, however, rejects this new attribution, considering the execution of the work to leave no question of Rubens‟ authorship (Erik Larsen, The Paintings of Anthony Van Dyck. (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1988), vol.ii, 112 no.267). An engraving by Cornelis Galle I after the version of the painting in Vienna (Fig.32) attributes that work to Rubens, suggesting that the Vienna Van Dyck may be a copy of a Rubens model (see Larsen 1988, vol.ii, 423 no. A 35). The absence of the angel in the Prado picture, however, suggests that it is not the direct model for Galle‟s engraving and thus the value of the engraving‟s attribution of its subject to Rubens remains unclear for determining the author of the Prado work. Although an interesting problem, the question of the true authorship of the Prado Pietà does not directly affect our arguments here and the attribution to Van Dyck will be accepted for the purposes of this study. 94 the great Flemish painters Rubens and Van Dyck, especially those works which were reproduced in engravings and circulated in that form. It should also be borne in mind that engravings after paintings were not merely a means of circulating images of famed modern artworks for the benefit of other artists – woodblocks, engravings and other prints after religious paintings were themselves circulated as relatively inexpensive devotional objects.219 Moreover we know from the inventory of his possessions taken upon his death that Willems owned a sizeable number of engravings on various subjects.220 It should not surprise us then to find such images providing inspiration for Willems when he comes to dealing with a devotional subject. It is also quite probable that devotional paintings by Rubens have informed Coustou‟s sculpture – both artists, Coustou and Willems, are very much working in a shared tradition of Franco-Flemish Baroque devotional imagery.

Two paintings in the Prado offer interesting parallels to particular details of Willems‟ Chelsea porcelain model: the 1628-32 Van Dyck Pietà probably referred to by King, and the c.1629 Van Dyck Lamentation in the same collection, a reduced copy of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ painted by Van Dyck for the high altar of the Begijnhofkerk in Antwerp, now held in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (Fig.26).221 Of particular note is the figure of the kneeling Magdalene who lifts the hand of the dead Christ to her lips to kiss. This makes for a suggestive comparison with the way in which Willems has modified the pose of the angel leaning over Christ‟s hand found in the Coustou marble. The figure of an angel holding the dead hand of Christ ultimately goes back to Paolo Veronese‟s c.1581 Pietà intended for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, now in the State Hermitage, St Petersburg (Fig.28), and which was circulated in a 1582

219 See for example David Areford, “The image in the Viewer‟s Hands: The Reception of Early Prints in Europe,” Studies in Iconography 24 (2003), 2-42; Rebeccah Zorach, “Meditation, Idolatry, Mathematics: The Printed Image in Europe Around 1500”, in Michale Cole, Rebecca Zorach (eds.) The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 317-41. 220 Lane 1961, 135-36 221 Prado no. P1475. Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe, Van Dyck 1599–1641 (London: Royal Academy Publications, 1999), 66-77. 95 engraving by Agostino Caracci (Fig.29).222 In his porcelain model, Willems has the adoring angel not merely hold the hand of the dead Christ to gaze at his wound, but lean his head in, like the Magdalene in van Dyck‟s painting, to kiss the lifeless hand. The smaller version of the Antwerp Lamentation in the collection of the Prado was circulated in the form of an engraving by the Antwerp artist Paulus Pontius (Fig.27). Pontius‟s engraving was in turn copied by other engravers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and could have been available to Willems in any of these forms.223 An even more compelling comparison may be made here with the Magdalene kissing the wounded hand of the dead Christ in the 1628-32 Prado Pietà of Van Dyck (Fig.30). Here the Magdalene holds Christ‟s hand up to her mouth with her left hand, her open right hand brought up before her chest. These gestures are very closely reproduced in the pose of the angel in Willems‟ model. Although there is no known print version of this Prado Pietà, an engraving was executed by Cornelis Galle I after the version of this painting in Vienna (Fig.32).224

There exists a subtle difference in the manner in which this gesture of kissing Christ‟s hand is rendered in the extant Chelsea models. The Red Anchor version shows the angel holding Christ‟s hand and moving to kiss it. The Gold Anchor versions, by contrast both show the angel in the act of kissing the hand. This is, of course, the sort of subtle difference in detail between individual examples of a porcelain sculpture which is the result of the actions of the repairer, the craftsman who assembles a porcelain model from its individually moulded components. We will return to consider this particular compositional detail below as it is an iconographic element of devotional significance, but it is worth considering the fact that the repairer too was

222 BM U,2.29. On Veronese‟s painting see Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese (Milan, 1995), Vol.II, pp.405-406, no.293. 223 See C. Depauw and G. Luijten, Anthony van Dyck as a printmaker. Museum Plantin- Moretus/Stedelijk Prentenkabinet, Antwerp and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1999, 258-62 no.35. Examples of this engraving are held in the British Museum: R,2.34. 224 See n.22 above. Whilst it is generally agreed that Van Dyck‟s composition is based directly upon an engraving of the Pietà by Goltzius, the figure kissing Christ‟s hand is absent from Goltzius‟ depiction (Fig.33). See n.33 below. 96 capable of creatively influencing the final appearance of a porcelain model, subtly altering details of the modeller‟s composition.

One of the more significant changes that Willems introduces into his model is in the pose of the Virgin. Coustou‟s Virgin sits with her upper torso turned in the direction of the viewer, her arms spread wide in a gesture of grief, her hands open, palms up. Her head is tilted slightly to the left and her gaze is cast upward. The overall effect is of a sorrowful but contained appeal to heaven. Willems transforms this pose into something far more dramatic. Willems‟ Virgin sits at an exaggerated angle to the viewer, her legs and torso facing to the right of centre. Where Coustou‟s Virgin tilts her head a little to the left, Willems‟ Virgin has noticeably turned her head to the left, her neck elongated in an exaggerated sinuous curve, her upward gaze paralleling the upward sweep of her left arm. The angle at which Willems‟ Virgin holds her outstretched arms is also more exaggerated than that of Coustou, forming a powerful diagonal, her left arm tracing a line heavenward which is followed by her gaze. The palms of her hands are turned downward. This series of gestures, fully present in the earlier Red Anchor model, are even more developed in the Gold Anchor versions. The result is a dynamic, circular torsion in the body of the Virgin whose form traces a vigorous, upward spiral, in total contrast with the hieratic frontality of the Virgin in Coustou‟s composition.

A comparison may be made here with the gestures of the Virgin in the 1635 Van Dyck Lamentation in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, in Antwerp (Fig.34).225 The outstretched arms in particular, held at an exaggerated diagonal find an echo in Willems‟ composition. Similarly, the 1617-20 Pietà with St Francis from the high altar of the Capuchin church in Brussels by Rubens shows the weeping virgin, head turned to the left, eyes cast heavenward, in a pose highly reminiscent of that of the Virgin in Willem‟s

225 Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe, Van Dyck 1599–1641 (London: Royal Academy Publications, 1999), 290-91, n.85. 97 figure group (Fig.35).226 This image too was available as an engraving executed by Paulus Pontius (Fig.36).227

Differences may be noted in the figure of Christ in the Chelsea groups when compared to the Coustou marble. Willems‟ Virgin sits in a more elevated position than Coustou‟s and the body of Christ sits higher upon her lap, resulting in the dead Christ‟s head being thrown back more violently, and the fall of his pelvis and legs more exaggerated. Where the head of Coustou‟s Christ has fallen to the side, his long hair pooling on his mother‟s knee, leaving his face subject to contemplation by the viewer standing before the altar, Willems‟ Christ lies with his head strained back in an unnatural position and his face, especially in the two Gold Anchor examples, is best viewed from a slightly elevated perspective – that is to say, by a viewer looking down upon the figure group. Christ‟s body is twisted into an exaggerated s-curve by Willems, the legs projecting towards the front of the figure group, the feet overhanging the edge of the group formed by the softly folded drapery of the funerary shroud. The fall of the drapery covering the body of Christ mirrors the slack fall of Christ‟s limbs, the hanging end of the shroud echoing Christ‟s hanging arm. This is all in marked contrast to the positioning of Christ‟s body in Coustou‟s sculpture where the body lies in a vertical plane parallel to the front of the altar and where the legs are drawn slightly back towards the tending angel. Coustou positions Christ‟s body turned slightly on its side, thus conforming to the iconographic convention of Mary presenting the body of her son to the viewer. Willems‟ innovations serve to heighten the drama of the figure group, the distortions of Christ‟s body emphasising the violence of his death. The viewer is forced to approach the group closely and contemplate it from a variety of angles in order to read the composition. Willems effectively transforms Coustou‟s composition, which must be viewed frontally and at a distance, into an object with which the viewer must engage in three- dimensional space.

226 Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Brussel, Inv.164. See Rubens – A Genius at Work (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium, 2007), 183-84. 227 British Museum 1891,0414.656 98

This more intensely dramatic positioning of the body of Christ is again reminiscent of details of certain seventeenth century Flemish paintings, including the unsupported, thrown-back head and falling right arm of the figure of Christ from the 1617 Descent from the cross by Rubens executed for the high altar of the Church of the Capuchins in Lille (Fig.37),228 and, in particular, the Madrid Van Dyck Pietà of 1628-32.229 This latter painting sees the Virgin seated in an elevated position which, as in the Willems group, exaggerates the fall of Christ‟s body. The resultant arching of the back highlights the exposure of the ribcage and the sunken abdominal region, details to be observed in Willems‟ model, although the exaggerated inflation of the chest in Willems‟ figure is even more pronounced than that in the painting. This dramatic, distorted treatment of Christ‟s torso recalls a number of late medieval Pietàs and crucifixes and is a feature more typical of Flemish and German art than French art of this period.230

Indeed, this particular Van Dyck Pietà from the Prado provides very strong compositional echoes of Willems‟ model in general (Fig.30). A fundamental difference between the two compositions, however, is the setting for this scene of mourning. Van Dyck‟s Pietà is placed in the context of the tomb – there is a rock wall in the background of the scene, whilst the Virgin is seated upon a stone bier as she holds the body of her son. Willems‟ Pietà, by contrast, appears to take place upon Calvary. The Virgin is seated upon a rock, but she appears to be in an outdoor setting: there are flowers strewn across the ground at her feet. This is in keeping with Coustou‟s sculpture which forms Willems‟ primary inspiration. There it is clear that the scene takes place upon Calvary, with the Virgin portrayed seated at the foot of the cross with the body of Christ and the adoring angel.

228 Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchardt Part VI, J. Richard Judson, The Passion of Christ (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000), 192-194 no.48. 229 (Prado no. P1642). The painting is first documented at El Escorial in 1657 and is based directly on a 1596 engraving by Hendrick Goltzius. For an example see British Museum 1868,0822.609 (Fig.33). Concerning this engraving see C. Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1981), no. 7; H. Leeflang and G.Luijten, Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617): Drawings, prints and paintings (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2003), no. 81. 230 See Walter Passarge, Das deutsche Vesperbild im Mittelalter. Köln: F. J. Marcan, 1924. 99

A final difference we should note between Willems‟ and Coustou‟s Pietà groups is the absence in Willems‟ model of the putto clutching the crown of thorns to the right of the Virgin. The appearance of the putto in Coustou‟s composition finds no precedent in the work of the Flemish artists we have been considering, but the 1599-1600 Pietà by Annibale Carracci in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples, his most moving treatment of this subject, provides an obvious parallel (Fig.38).231 Here, two putti accompany the mourning Virgin, both positioned to her left, one holding the dead Christ‟s left hand, the other recoiling in pain, having pricked his finger on the crown of thorns which lies at Christ‟s feet. A 1650-63 etching of this Pietà by Pietro del Pò, with the composition reversed, was published in Paris by Noël Coypel (Fig.39).232 It is therefore quite possible that this etching was a source for Coustou‟s sculpture. The position of the putto holding the crown of thorns to the right of the Virgin, in particular, would seem to reflect the reversal of Carracci‟s composition reflected in the print version. In depicting, in the Gold Anchor porcelain version, the crown of thorns lying on the ground to the Virgin‟s right, omitting the putto included by Coustou, Willems‟ seems to be preferring a compositional structure closer in spirit to that of the 1628-32 Van Dyck Pietà, or even that of Veronese‟s 1582 masterpiece. It is of note however that the crown of thorns appears to be omitted entirely from the earlier Red Anchor porcelain version. Its inclusion thus seems to be an innovation to the model‟s original conception added in the Gold Anchor period and, as such, forms part of a series of embellishments reflected in the extant Gold Anchor examples. We shall return to consider this iconographical detail further below, but suffice it to say here that it is an example of the manner in which the Gold Anchor period models are enhanced by the addition of various elements which can be construed as explicitly devotional in character.

The modifications that Willems introduces into Coustou‟s original conception for the Notre Dame Pietà have radical results. The monumental frontality of Coustou‟s sculpture is broken down, with all three figures in the porcelain

231 Clare Robertson, The Invention of Annibale Carracci. (Rome: Silvana Editoriale, 2008), 128-29. 232 BM U,1.131. Walter L Strauss, The Illustrated Bartsch (New York, 1978), 4510.010 S3; Adam Bartsch, Le Peintre graveur, 21 vols (Vienna, 1803), XX.249.10 100 model – the Virgin, Christ, and the angel – now seeming to occupy different spatial planes (Figs.40-42). The powerful upward right-to-left diagonal formed by the turn of the Virgin‟s upper body, her outspread arms and her heavenward gaze contrasts both with the orientation to the right of her legs and lower body, and with the twisted s-curve of Christ‟s body on her lap, his feet projecting over the front edge of the model, emphasising a downward right-to-left diagonal. There is also a considerable sinuous elongation of form apparent in the figures of the Virgin and Christ. The neck, arms and fingers of the Virgin, especially in the slightly later Gold Anchor examples, display elegant, elongated forms that verge on Mannerism in their exaggeration. This serves to amplify even further the powerful diagonals formed by the figures of Christ and the Virgin. The figure of the angel has been pulled in beside the Virgin when compared to the marble original, creating a left-to-right diagonal which contrasts with the orientations of the bodies of both Christ and the Virgin, whilst visually emphasising the act of the angel‟s kissing Christ‟s wounded hand. The dramatic gestures of the Virgin serve to emphasise her emotional appeal to heaven in response to the death of her son. The same emphatic pose, however, also creates a distance between the Virgin and the dead Christ, her lack of physical contact with Christ‟s body and her heavenward gaze establishing her anguish and suffering as the central focus of the drama depicted.

All of these modifications serve to subtly and powerfully transform Coustou‟s composition. Created to be viewed front-on and at some distance by a worshipper approaching the high altar behind which the sculpture stood, Willems reconfigures Coustou‟s Pietà to create a scene which is close to being in the round and impossible to read fully from a single viewpoint. In addition, by omitting the putto holding the crown of thorns, possibly under the influence of the 1628-32 Van Dyck Pietà, Willems simplifies Coustou‟s grouping of figures, allowing for an increased emphasis upon the far more dynamic relationship which he has established between the three protagonists in the scene. More than mere modification, this is a striking piece of sculptural recomposition on Willems‟ part involving sophisticated dialogue with models of the past. It is interesting here to compare Willems‟ adaptation of the Notre

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Dame Pietà with his creation of another Gold Anchor period figure group based upon a Rubens painting of Roman Charity, current whereabouts unknown (Fig.44).233 Here Willems appears to have employed the 1631 engraving of William Panneels after this painting as the basis for his model (Fig.45). An example of the c.1763 Chelsea figure group is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (Fig.43).234 As with the Pietà group, Willems‟ adaptation of the Panneels engraving creates a dynamic three-dimensional sculpture out of a more restrained two-dimensional model. By depicting Cimon with his right leg thrust forward and Pero with her head angled upward but turned towards the front, Willems creates a powerful pyramidal composition in the round with strong intersecting diagonal lines, just as he does in the Pietà (Fig.46). The noble self-sacrifice and unwavering filial piety of Pero are expressed through a static but powerful heavenward gaze comparable to that of the Virgin in the Pietà. Although we witness here the transformation of an engraving into sculptural form, rather than the reduction of a monumental figure group, similar compositional strategies inform Willems‟ work.235

Willems appears to have thought of himself as a sculptor. The exhibition catalogues of the Society of Artists of Great Britain for the years 1760-66 contain annual entries for sculptural models exhibited by Willems.236 And it is of note that a letter of February 1766 from Peterinck, director of the Tournai porcelain factory, to the city fathers of Tournai, seeking support for the employment of Willems as a professor at the art academy associated with the

233 Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard (London: Harvey Miller, 1997) Part XIII, Elizabeth McGrath, 1. Subjects from History, Vol.1, Fig.72; Vol. 2, 103-105 no.19. 234 NGV D21.a-b-1984. Other examples are to be found in the British Museum (1927,0411.1) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Yvonne Hackenbroch, Chelsea and other English Porcelain, Pottery and Enamel in the Irwin Untermyer Collection (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957), 97 no.75). Nightingale cites lot 76 in first day's sale of the 1770 Chelsea factory auction of 'One large and very curious group, representing the Roman Charity, on a pea-green and gold pedestal, 6l. 16s. 6d” and lot 76 in 4th day's sale 'One very large and curious group, representing the Roman Charity, upon a very magnificent blue and gold pedestal. 8l. 15s.' (James E. Nightingale, Contributions towards the History of Early English Porcelain from Contemporary Sources. Salisbury, 1881). 235 By depicting flowers growing at the feet of the protagonists, the locale for the episode has been moved from the prison to an outdoor setting. This may not be an intentional relocation of the story on Willems‟ part, but rather the result of the efforts of decorators working at a later stage of the figures‟ production. See the discussion of the floral decoration on the base of the Pietà group below. 236 Lane 1961, 133-34. 102 factory, speaks of Willems as one “très entendu dans la partie de la sculpture et du modelage”.237 Indeed it is interesting to speculate whether or not Willems‟ aspirations to the title sculptor are not indicative of an attempt to claim a higher status for the art of porcelain modelling. We have observed in Chapter Two that in the first half of the eighteenth century porcelain could still lay an ambiguous claim to the status of sculptural medium. Willems‟ self- perception as a sculptor, a perception also held by Peterinck, may be evidence that the debate about the place of porcelain in sculptural aesthetics remained ongoing in the 1760s.

Notwithstanding this, Willems‟ porcelain models are often taken as evidence of a competent talent, but a talent lacking genius. Lane describes a pair of signed terracottas of dancing peasants, dating to 1749, as possessed of “ponderous realism”, “heavily built, with disproportionately short legs” and conveying “little of the intended sense of movement”.238 Watney speaks of “Willem‟s [sic] rather ponderous Flemish style”.239 Bradshaw is more generous, stating that Willems‟ figures have a “stately appearance” but “lack animation owing to his failure to represent secondary postural adjustments that normally accompany action”.240 Young speaks of the “ponderous realism” of certain of Willems‟ models, although he allows that Willems has a legitimate claim to being considered a gifted artist.241

I would argue that Willems‟ adaptation of Coustou‟s sculpture into a porcelain form demonstrates considerable skill and sensitivity and evidences an appreciation of the compositional modifications required in order to successfully translate a monumental marble group into a small-scale sculptural work. It may well be that hieratic subjects especially suited Willems‟ talents. A lack of a sense of movement is not necessarily to be counted a flaw in a composition where pathos and nobility inform an image designed to serve as a focus of contemplation. But it would be an injustice to

237 Lane 1961, 134. 238 Lane 1961, 64. 239 Watney 1972, 818. 240 Bradshaw 1981, 64. 241 Young 1999, 104, 94. 103

Willems to attribute to his Pietà a lack of animation. On the contrary, the group is a highly dynamic composition, the exaggerated torsion of all three constituent figures tracing a single, taut, ascending spiral in space. By compressing space and drawing the individual figures in close to one another, Willems‟ heightens the tension and drama of the whole. Indeed it may be argued that Willems has succeeded in producing what is, in the end, a more successful composition than that of Coustou. It is Coustou‟s sculpture which is hieratic and static; constrained by liturgical requirements it is overwhelmingly frontal in orientation, its extension to the sides in order to accommodate the flanking figures of the royal donors draining the work of tautness and thus diminishing its dramatic impact. It is a work intended to preside over an altar, not to form the focus of close, private contemplation.

It is well to recall that if, as has been suggested in Chapter One, Willems was a Catholic, it is almost certain that he was familiar with the rituals of domestic devotion in a Catholic household and understood well the characteristics required of an image serving as a focus for such devotions. Willems‟ Pietà transforms its monumental ecclesiastical model, a liturgical image, into an intimate, domestic work. He establishes a dynamic visual relationship between the three protagonists in the scene, inviting the contemplative viewer to enter themselves into the drama depicted, experiencing the maternal anguish of the mourning Virgin and the sorrow of the attending angel who kisses the very wounds of Christ. This latter detail in particular is a powerful image associated with Counter-reformation devotional practice. The cult of the Wounds of Christ had been widespread in the Middle Ages and continued on into the post-Tridentine period.242 Explicitly eucharistic in its resonances – the devout are sometimes depicted drinking blood from the Wounds – Counter-reformation devotion to the Wounds emphasises the material presence of the salvific blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist and, in so doing, evokes the doctrine of Transubstantiation, a point of fierce doctrinal

242 D. Gray, “The Five Wounds of Our Lord”, Notes and Queries 208 (1963), 50-51, 82-89, 127-34, 163-68; Gabriele Finaldi, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery, 2000), 160 no.62; 166 no.65. 104 dispute between Protestant and Catholic theologians.243 Similarly, the inclusion of the Crown of Thorns in the Gold Anchor Pietà groups is yet another iconographical detail which evokes this devotional tradition. As an element of the Arma Christi, the instruments of the Passion, the Crown of Thorns serves to recall the bodily agony of Jesus. The Arma Christi continued to be a focus of Catholic devotion in England in the period following the Reformation and they were often represented on the segments of the foot of Recusant chalices.244 Together these representational genres, the Wounds and the Instruments, emphasise the centrality of both the Eucharistic body of Christ and the suffering flesh of Jesus as objects of devotional contemplation.

Willems‟ Pietà group can be seen to heighten the devotional significance of its subject when compared to its Parisian model. This devotional aspect of his composition would have been immediately apprehendable by any Catholic viewer literate in the visual language of their faith and its rituals. All of this speaks for a significant role for Willems as a creative mediator keenly alert to the symbolic potential of these small and highly concentrated dramatic sculptures.

Decoration

We have examined Willems‟ porcelain sculpture in relation to the models upon which he drew, or by which he might have been influenced. Now we must turn to consider in more detail aspects of the decoration of the three individual surviving examples of the Chelsea Pietà. Each of the extant models is different. This is in part a function of the fact that a porcelain sculpture is a workshop production – a number of artists and craftsmen are involved in the creation of the final artwork, including the repairer, decorators and gilders, although all of these tasks would have been carried out under supervision, thus limiting the opportunity for radical reinterpretations of a

243 David Nirenberg, “The Historical Body of Christ” in James Clifton, The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain 1150 – 1800 (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 22 244 Virginia C. Raguin (ed), Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850 (Worcester, MA: Trustees of the College of the Holy Cross, 2006), 120-21. 105 figure subject.245 We are, nevertheless, unable to ascribe details of the decoration of the figures directly to Willems and what, if any, input he had into this stage of the figures‟ production cannot be ascertained. What is of enormous interest, then, is that various aspects of the decorative treatment of the extant Pietà groups serve to amplify the potential devotional associations of the objects. This is suggestive of the fact that any devotional role intended for these figure groups was not an invention of Willems alone; the complementary decorative treatments indicate a coordinated workshop approach to the production of sculptures capable of serving as devotional images.246

The earliest of the three known Chelsea examples, c.1756-58, lacks the integral porcelain base that forms part of the two Gold Anchor versions of the same group (Fig.2). Monumental porcelain pedestal bases are associated with many Gold Anchor period porcelain figure groups and they appear to be a characteristic of the factory aesthetic of this period. The bases could be separate from the figure proper with the sculpture merely sitting atop the pedestal, as is the case with the Melbourne example of the Roman Charity group, or the bases could be integral to the figure group, as is the case with the two Gold Anchor Pietà groups where applied porcelain floral decoration sits across the juncture of the separately formed figure and base and has been fired in place. The absence of an integral porcelain base on the surviving Red Anchor period figure group may reflect a technical rather than a specifically aesthetic issue. Without the bone-ash present as a stabilising agent in the later Gold Anchor period paste, the firing of a large figure nearly 40cm high may not have been feasible in the earlier period.

The Red Anchor period Pietà is distinguished by its polychrome decoration. Such enamelling is characteristic of the majority of sculptures produced at the

245 Young 1999, 110. 246 Lane suggested that this supervisory role would have been the responsibility of Nicholas Sprimont whose taste must have determined much of the character of the painted decoration applied to the factory‟s productions. Arthur Lane, “Chelsea Porcelain Figures and the Modeller Joseph Willems”, Connoisseur 145 (May 1960), 251. That Sprimont occupied a very central role in the work of the factory would seem to be indicated by the fact that his illness in the mid 1750s leads to a temporary near-cessation of production. See Adams 2001, 138. 106

Chelsea Factory and may be seen as part of the general aesthetic of eighteenth-century European porcelain models, especially those executed in soft-paste porcelains. A soft-paste body was less capable of holding crisp sculptural detail when compared to true, hard-paste porcelain and the addition of polychrome decoration was often employed to create surface detail and compensate for this limitation in the sculptural medium.247 But this use of colour does represent a radical departure from the white marble model upon which Willems‟ figure group is based and it is a detail difficult to reconcile with the notion that these figures were intended purely as Grand Tour souvenirs. The polychromy of the Red Anchor Pietà is mimetic in character and serves to enhance the naturalism of the group. The flesh tones of the Virgin and the angel are contrasted with the pallor of the dead Christ whose wounds seep red blood, a colour repeated in the robe of the Virgin whilst green grass and coloured flowers lie at her feet. Polychromy was employed in devotional sculpture from the Medieval through the Baroque periods where the very naturalism created by the use of colour served to heighten the affective devotional power of the work.248 This was a notion explicitly articulated in the Tridentine decrees on the use of images in Catholic worship.249 Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti‟s Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582), the most comprehensive and influential attempt to explain the rulings of the Council of Trent concerning sacred art, argued against the perceived distortions of Mannerist art and argued for an art that was naturalistic and direct.250 The Spanish mystic St John of the Cross, who had spent a part of his youth in a sculptor‟s workshop, wrote of the value of polychrome sculpture

247 Watney 1972, 818. 248 On polychromy see Roberta Panzanelli, “Beyond the Pale: Polychromy and Western Art,” in The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, Roberta Panzanelli (ed.), (Los Angeles; The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, 2008), 2-17; Andreas Blühm, “In living colour: A short history of colour in sculpture in the 19th century,” in The Colour of Sculpture 1840-1910 (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 1996), 14-15. 249 The Decree On the invocation, veneration, and relics, of saints, and on sacred images issued at the 25th session of the Council of Trent. J. Waterworth (ed. and trans.) The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent, (London: Dolman, 1848), 233- 36. 250 Stefano della Torre (ed.) Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alla imagini sacre et profane (Bologna, 1582). Monumenta Studia Instrumenta Liturgica, 25. Città Del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002. 107 to inspire reverence for the saints, to move the will and to inspire devotion.251 Through the instilling of lifelike qualities in a sculpture the viewer is encouraged to identify with the protagonists depicted and enter into the sacred drama. In this instance, the naturalistic application of coloured enamels has the concomitant effect of, once more, drawing attention to the devotionally charged Wounds of Christ. We must, in this regard, also direct our attention to the decorative patterning applied to the mantle worn by the Virgin (Fig.47). The red five-pointed stars, which form a part of this decoration, are quite likely a symbolic reference to the five Wounds. Such rosettes, evoking the Marian symbol of the rosa mystica, are found employed as decorative motifs in conjunction with numerous late medieval images of the passion, especially Vesperbilder from Northern Europe.252 Simple, sparse floral decorations are to be found in the treatment of drapery on a number of early Chelsea figures, but the repeating geometric pattern found on the Virgin‟s mantle is atypical253; indeed it is to a Red Anchor period figure of a seated nun, or the Gold Anchor group of the Madonna and Child, that we must turn for examples of a similar style of pattern.254

The second version of the Chelsea model, produced during the factory‟s Gold Anchor period, is known from two examples. The first of these, in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, lacks polychrome decoration and is instead in the unadorned white glazed porcelain (Fig.1). Unlike the Red Anchor example, the Melbourne Pietà is set upon an integral porcelain pedestal base decorated in a mazarine blue ground with gilded decoration. The tooled gold ornament includes a depiction of the Lamb of God surrounded by putti, with the inscription Agnus occisus a [sic] origine mundi

251 Saint John of the Cross, Subida al Monte Carmelo, chap.35; cited in Marjorie Trusted, “Art for the Masses: Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in Sculpture and its Reproductions, eds. A. Hughes and E. Ranft (London, 1997), 28-29. 252 On the symbol of the Rosa mystica see Michael Camille, “Mimetic Identification and Passion Devotion in the later Middle Ages: A Double-sided Panel by Meister Francke,” in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late Medieval Culture, ed. A.A. MacDonald et al., (Groningen, 1998), 198; Passarge 1924, 99. 253 E.g. the dress of the Raised Anchor period figure of Isabella from the Commedia dell’arte (Adams 2001, 93 Fig.7.37); the dress on the Red Anchor period figure of a Polish lady (Adams 2001, 132 Fig.9.19). 254 Seated Nun: Adams 2001, 135 Fig.9.23. Madonna and Child: BM 1948,1203.57 and the star-spangled head-covering of the Virgin (Fig.52). 108

(Fig.55).255 A second example of this Gold Anchor version was sold on the London market in 1991, current whereabouts unknown (Fig.25).256 This example is coloured with polychrome enamels, like the earlier Red Anchor period group, but as in the case of the Melbourne example, also includes an integral porcelain plinth decorated in a mazarine blue ground. This plinth is embellished with tooled gold ornament and a central polychrome vignette depicting the Entombment. The gold borders of the vignette include depictions of the Instruments of the Passion.

Both the Gold Anchor examples of the Pietà group are dramatised by the addition of the monumental pedestal. The version sold in 1991 is further embellished by the addition of an ormolu mount to the porcelain base. These are grand sculptural works of high visual impact, clearly intended for display. But the addition of the richly ornamented bases to the Gold Anchor groups does not merely increase the monumentality of the sculptures. Details of the bases‟ decoration serve to amplify the devotional associations of the objects in general.257

The Gold Anchor Pietà sold in 1991 features a scene of the Entombment on the porcelain pedestal (Fig.48), possibly related to a 1596 engraving by Hendrick Goltzius (Fig.50).258 The addition of this vignette serves to emphasise the associations of the subject of the sculpture, the timeless, iconic Pietà, with the events of the passion narrative. This is further

255 Rev.13:8 „The lamb slain from the beginning of the world‟. The Latin as read contains a clear error: a origine mundi for ab origine mundi. Such orthographic infelicities are not uncommon in recusant Latin. However, it should also be noted that French mottos which appear on Chelsea toys also frequently contain errors. It is possible that the issue lies with the literacy levels amongst the Chelsea Factory‟s decorators. See W.B. Honey, English Pottery and Porcelain. Second edition (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1945), 122. 256 Christies, London 11 February 1991, Lot 90. 257 The complexity of the decoration on the pedestals of these figures is exceptional. The bases of other large-scale Gold Anchor period sculptures tend to have much simpler decoration. So for example the c.1763 Roman Charity group (Fig.43). Even the Gold Anchor Madonna and Child in the British Museum (Fig.52), although more complex than usual – including laurel (intellectual virtue), palm (moral virtue) and a wreath (victory) – has much simpler decoration on its base than either of the Gold Anchor Pietà groups. 258 A 1788 engraving by John Goldar after Daniel Dodd (British Museum 1939,1104.2) is clearly very closely related to the Entombment depicted on this Chelsea group (Fig.51). On Dodd see Hans A. Hammelmann, Book illustrators in eighteenth-century England, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 29-30. 109 highlighted by the depiction in the vignette‟s gilt borders of the instruments of the Passion. As we have already indicated above, the honouring of the Arma Christi serves to recall Christ‟s wounds and his suffering for the redemption of humanity and was a focus of devotional contemplation. But there is an additional dimension to the inclusion of a depiction of the Entombment upon the ornamental base of the Willems‟ Pietà group: the eighteenth century installation of the Coustou Pietà in the Choir of Notre Dame includes a gilt- bronze mise au tombeau relief by François Girardon on the front of the altar above which the Pietà sits (Fig.19). It would appear that the decoration of this particular example of the Willems‟ Pietà is making a direct allusion to the configuration of the altar and the marble Pietà in Notre Dame.

One might argue that such a visual quotation serves to increase the porcelain group‟s formal similarity to the original sculpture in Paris, thereby enhancing the potential of the model to function as a type of Grand Tour souvenir. But conversely, one can also argue that the very specific iconographic allusion to the presence of an Entombment image on the altar in Notre Dame serves to heighten the devotional associations of the porcelain sculpture – the model‟s porcelain plinth is effectively transformed into an analogue of the high altar in Paris and the sacrificial, and by extension Eucharistic, symbolism of the Virgin and dead Christ upon the altar is highlighted. Further, it must be admitted that strict formal similarities between the Chelsea porcelain group and Coustou‟s marble sculpture are in fact relatively limited. Willems‟ adaptation of Coustou‟s composition is sufficiently innovative that, with the addition of the polychrome decoration, apprehension of the source upon which the modeller was drawing may not have been immediate, except to a very acute viewer.

We might also here make some comment on details of the use of polychrome decoration on this particular figure. The colours of this Gold Anchor example are much stronger than those found on the earlier Red Anchor period group and the decoration is distinguished by the use of applied gold highlights to the edges of the Virgin‟s robe and mantle and the edges of the angel‟s cloak. Such use of gold is typical of the rich decorative effects employed on Gold

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Anchor period figures in general.259 The Virgin‟s mantle, worn over a red robe, lacks the geometric decorative treatment observed on her Red Anchor period counterpart, instead being a solid blue, a traditional colour for the garb of the Virgin in Western iconography, reflecting her role as Queen of Heaven.260 The subtle coloration applied to the faces of the Virgin and the angel on the Red Anchor group are here replaced by an emphatic application of colour which leaves both the Virgin and the angel appearing to sport fashionably rouged cheeks. But this heightened use of colour also serves to emphasise Christ‟s Wounds which, on this Gold Anchor example, are portrayed as bleeding, trickles of blood running from the wound in Christ‟s chest, and down his pierced hands and feet. Once more we find decorative treatments serving to augment devotionally charged elements in the porcelain group‟s composition.

In contrast to the Gold Anchor example sold in London in 1991, the Melbourne Gold Anchor Pietà avoids the use of polychrome decoration and is instead in unadorned white porcelain. It is possible that this is to be read as a neoclassical gesture, the white porcelain referencing the white marble of classical statuary, just as it echoes the marble of Coustou‟s Notre Dame Pietà. And, indeed, it is of note that the porcelain pedestals of both Gold Anchor Pietà groups are relatively classicising in form and border decoration when compared to the more overtly rococo base of the contemporaneous Roman Charity group.261 It could be argued, too, that by making visual reference to the white marble of the original Coustou sculpture, the porcelain group is again intentionally attempting to evoke that work for the viewer.

Whilst this is possible, another possibility must also be considered. The creamy coloured porcelain and the lack of polychrome ornament combined with the domestic scale of the porcelain group all serve to recall carved ivory, a traditional medium for devotional figurines since the Middle Ages and, since the mid-seventeenth century, superseding bronze as a favoured medium for

259 Adam 2001, 150-51. 260 Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, vol.2, (Rome: Herder, 1968),14. 261 The c.1761 Gold Anchor Madonna and Child group in the British Museum has a similar pedestal to the Pietà groups (Fig.52). 111 small cabinet sculptures, particularly in Northern Europe.262 Especially relevant here are a group of ivory devotional images by the great Huguenot sculptor David Le Marchand, born in Dieppe in 1674, and who had arrived in Edinburgh by 1696, eventually establishing himself as a leading British artist working in ivory.263 An image of the Virgin and Child, of a type common in France since the Middle Ages and continuing in the repertoire of the Dieppe ivory carvers late into the eighteenth century (Fig.53), and a superb Corpus Christi (Fig.54) demonstrate a familiarity with, and sensitivity to, Counter- reformation imagery often thought unusual from the hand of a Protestant artist.264 It is possible that the Virgin and Child was executed before Le Marchand had departed France, but the Corpus appears to date from after his arrival in Britain, probably after 1700. Avery comments that it is likely that neither of these images would have found immediate favour with a Protestant audience in England so early in the eighteenth century, but that they could have been executed covertly for recusant or Jacobite patrons.265 And indeed, Le Marchand‟s aristocratic patrons in Edinburgh are known to have included both Protestants, and Catholics and Jacobites.266 These sculptures thus provide us with an important precedent for the production and consumption of ivory devotional sculpture in Britain in the early eighteenth century. Although the fashion for ivory sculpture declined towards the end of the eighteenth century as the material itself, and the working of it, became firmly associated with the applied arts rather than the fine art of sculpture, the conservative character of devotional sculpture as a class of object meant that the production of ivory devotional figures appears to have continued throughout this period. It is important to recall too that the sensuous, tactile surface qualities of ivory could imbue images of the human form with life-like qualities and this was intentionally exploited by Baroque sculptors; it is no doubt in part

262 Lane 1961, 39; Charles Avery, David Le Marchand 1674 – 1726: ‘An Ingenious Man for Carving in Ivory’, (London: Lund Humphries, 1996), 26 263 Avery 1996, 13. 264 Avery 1996, 104 no.92, no.93. R. Foah, “David Le Marchand‟s Madonna and Child”, Muse – Annual of the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia 7 (1974), 38-43. 265 Avery 1996, 104. 266 Avery 1996, 14; 58 no.11; 59 no.13; 60 no.14; 61-62 no.15; 63 no.18. It is interesting to note that the allegorical scene probably celebrating the birth of Prince James Francis Edward Stewart, „the Old Pretender‟, no.15 in Avery‟s catalogue includes a misspelled motto: EX DIE for ICH DIEN. Compare the misspelled Latin motto in n.59 above. 112 for this mimetic quality that the material continued to be employed in the production of devotional images.

As was the case with the polychrome Gold Anchor Pietà, the decoration of the base of the Melbourne group makes explicit use of devotional imagery. The depiction of the Agnus Dei along with the quotation from Revelation serves to highlight the sacrificial and Eucharistic symbolism of the work as a whole (Fig.55). Here there can be no recourse to the claim that these additions to the sculpture serve to augment any formal similarity to its model in Notre Dame. The decoration on the plinth instead amounts to a theological commentary on the subject of the figure group. Christ, whose redemptive sacrifice was the salvation of humankind, has been referred to as the Lamb of God since New Testament times.267 Within the Canons of the Mass, following the consecration of the Gifts and the recitation of the Lord‟s Prayer, the Agnus Dei has been sung since the early Middle Ages.268 The Eucharistic meaning of the metaphor, an interpretation that was universal from the High Middle Ages onwards, is made clear when the priest raises the Sacrament before distribution of communion and declares: “Ecce Agnus Dei”, “Behold the Lamb of God”.269 The juxtaposition of Christ‟s body in sculptural form and the image of the sacrificial lamb on the Chelsea figure group‟s base presents this metaphor in visual form. The quotation from Rev.13:8 „The lamb slain from the beginning of the world‟ serves to emphasise the continuous nature of Christ‟s sacrifice, a sacrifice re-enacted at every celebration of the Eucharist. The attribution of this continuous character to Christ‟s sacrifice and the presence of Christ‟s body in the materials of the Eucharist is in accord with the Tridentine emphasis on the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The devotional iconography of the Melbourne Pietà group would thus appear to be explicitly Catholic in character.270

267 E.g. John 1:29 “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world”. 268 G. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. 2 (London: Lund Humphries, 1972),118. 269 Maurice Vloberg, L’Eucharistie dans l’art. (Paris, 1946), 159-63; G. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. I (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), 119-21. 270 It is also of note that the image of the Agnus Dei, in the form of the disc-shaped wax impressions gifted by the Popes as tokens of esteem, was in the English context explicitly associated with Catholicism, such images being banned during the Elizabethan period as 113

Catholic devotional practice often involved the faithful physically interacting with the object of devotion through, for example, the acts of touching, caressing or kissing.271 The focus of such devotional practice will, thus, often bear physical traces of such activity. It is of interest then to observe that the tooled gold decoration on the base of the Melbourne Pietà suffers from localised surface wear. The central cartouche with the depiction of the Lamb of God and its accompanying inscription is now extremely difficult to read with the naked eye and, indeed, the use of raking light is required to render the tooling of the gilt legible. This appears to be the result of abrasion. The tooled gold decoration on other areas of the base evidences no comparable degree of wear. Whilst any proposed explanation for this surface wear must remain speculative, the localised nature of the abrasion is very suggestive of repeated touching of this particular area of the base‟s decoration, as one might expect with a ritual object which has served as the focus of Catholic devotions.

A decorative feature common to all three extant Chelsea examples of the Pietà, both Red and Gold Anchor versions, is the decoration of the ground around the Virgin‟s feet with flowers. This is a detail not reflected in any of the possible sources – sculpture, print or painting – which may have informed Willems‟ model. It must be acknowledged that the use of applied porcelain flowers as decoration on the bases of figures in eighteenth century England, especially during the mid-century height of the Rococo, was not uncommon, including at the Chelsea Factory. This style of decoration was no doubt intended to evoke a pastoral setting. The phenomenon also appears to have been symptomatic of an horror vacui which characterised much porcelain decoration of this mid-century period. At the same time, given the careful attention paid to other details of plastic ornament in the creation of these Pietà groups, it would be imprudent not to give due attention to the possibility that

“popish trumperies”. See Robert Scully SJ, “The Society of Jesus: Its Early History, Spirituality, and Mission to England”, in Raguin 2006, 137. 271 See Soren Kaspersen (ed.) Images of Cult and Devotion: Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004. 114 the applied floral decoration may here be employed to enhance devotional purpose.

The flowers executed in porcelain on the bases of the figure groups are extremely difficult to identify with any certainty. Those on the Red Anchor group include red, rose-like flowers, and small, open blue flowers similar to daisies (Fig.56). The base of the polychrome Gold Anchor group is decorated with an even greater density of flowers in a wider range of colours and forms. The base of the Melbourne group has a similar density of flowers, but of course lacks colour. Christian tradition accords a number of flowers particular symbolic significances, including the rose, the lily and the carnation.272 It is difficult to ascribe any particular associations or significance to individual flowers on the bases of the Chelsea Pietà groups because the flowers themselves cannot be clearly identified. But a close examination of the Melbourne Pietà does reveal a preponderance of five-petalled flowers (Figs. 57 & 58). This includes a large flower with five petals in the middle of the crown of thorns, together with a (rose)bud. The five-petalled flowers are, as was the case with the rosettes on the Virgin‟s cloak, suggestive of the five Wounds of Christ, an association emphasised by the large flower positioned inside the crown of thorns. The placing of a closed flower-bud adjacent to this flower, again within the Crown of Thorns, is perhaps suggestive of the potential for new life which will come with the resurrection. Even though the accurate identification of the blooms depicted is difficult, the presence of wild flowers in the midst of this scene of lamentation and mourning must be of some significance. They surely speak of life in the midst of the sorrow and death of the crucifixion and, as such, encourage the viewer to contemplate the prospect of the resurrection which is the fulfilment of Christ‟s sacrificial death.

It can be clearly seen that, although the various embellishments and decorations applied to the extant versions of the Chelsea Pietà group may not have taken place under the direct oversight of the group‟s modeller, Joseph

272 Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, vol.4, 620-21; Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 115

Willems, they nevertheless appear to have been part of coordinated efforts to enhance the devotional character of Willem‟s already quite devotionally charged sculpture. If not executed under the guidance of the Catholic Willems, it was quite probably Nicholas Sprimont himself who oversaw the distinct decorative programmes, carried out by the repairers and decorators and detectable in each of the extant examples. It would seem impossible to imagine that these sculptures were not intended to be able to serve as devotional images. The Willems model does draw its ultimate inspiration from an admired work of modern sculpture in the French capital, and the possibility that many mid-eighteenth century English viewers may have looked upon it as a type of Grand Tour souvenir of this Parisian monument cannot be ruled out. But Willems‟ sculpture is no mere replica of its model. It is instead a dramatic recomposition of Coustou‟s marble group. Its immediate derivation thus may not necessarily have been instantly apparent to every viewer, and it is noteworthy that the identification of Coustou‟s work as the primary source for Willems‟ figure group evaded modern commentators until the 1970s.273

The ambivalence and ambiguity surrounding the significance and meaning of an image like Willems‟ Pietà may be the necessary product of the strategies developed by English Protestant elites to neutralise the devotional dimensions of Counter-reformation imagery in the service of art connoisseurship, but the devotional significance of the work remains, and the clear intent on the part of the objects‟ makers to imbue the sculptures with devotional meaning cannot be avoided. This fact, in conjunction with the small number of examples of the Chelsea Pietà, even allowing for accidents of survival, strongly suggests that they were the products of special commissions. We will consider the circumstances of these sculptures‟ reception and consumption in detail in the following chapter, but suffice it to say that the cultivation of a connoisseurial gaze on the part of Protestant English elites which bracketed out the devotional function of Continental Catholic art and allowed for its collection without the suspicion of papist sympathies being aroused, is very different to

273 See n.21 above. 116 taking the step of actively commissioning an artwork with overtly Counter- reformation devotional content.

The Tournai version

A version of Willems‟ Pietà group was produced at the Tournai factory in the Austrian Netherlands (Fig.59). The Tournai factory was founded in 1751 by François Peterinck. It produced wares in soft-paste porcelain and indeed was the only factory within the territories of the Holy Roman Empire to do so, the standard German body being a hard-paste. In 1752 Peterinck was granted a warrant by the Empress Maria Theresa bestowing upon his factory the title “manufacture imperiale et royale”. The Tournai factory enjoyed a range of privileges, such as an exemption from duties on raw materials and the ability to sell manufactured goods tax-free throughout Austrian territories, which saw it expand rapidly and achieve considerable commercial success.274 The fact of the Tournai factory‟s location in the Austrian Netherlands, a largely Catholic state, does mean that the Tournai Pietà group‟s Catholic devotional imagery has never been considered an issue worthy of comment; no commentator has been especially surprised that a porcelain factory in a Catholic city might produce a Catholic image. This makes a comparison of the Chelsea and the Tournai version of the Pietà an interesting exercise which tends to reinforce the notion that the Chelsea versions were produced with the intention that they might function as devotional objects.

The Tournai Pietà is crisply and delicately modelled in white biscuit porcelain. Because the porcelain has been fired only once and is unglazed, it bears a resemblance to marble and retains far more sharpness in the modelling than was possible with the soft-paste body employed at Chelsea. Porcelain produced in this way is known as biscuit, and its advantages for sculpting figures were realized and developed at the Sèvres factory from around 1751, where it rapidly supplanted the production of figures in glazed porcelain. Like

274 Illustrated Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Tournai and Chelsea Porcelain, (London: Belgian Institute, 1953), 7. 117 all popular fashions in the industry, the method quickly spread to other European porcelain factories. The biscuit wares produced at Tournai, which was noted for its complex and dramatic figurative groups, are particularly successful because of the high quality of the clay and the expert modelling of the figures. The Pietà ranks as one of the factory's finest figure works.

The attribution to Willems of the Tournai Pietà group has not been universal; it has been suggested in the past that the figure group is the work of Nicolas Lecreux (1733/34–1799), a sculptor who produced a number of models, mainly rustic groups, for the Tournai factory between 1757 and 1760 and who was then appointed professor of drawing and modelling at the academy associated with the factory in 1765.275 Lecreux is known to have produced religious sculpture for churches in Tournai including a monumental group of St Michael casting down the demons (1763) in the cathedral of Notre Dame, and the Assumption of the Virgin (c.1760) in the Église de Séminaire in the rue des Jésuites.276

Certainly there are differences between the Chelsea Pietà group and that produced at Tournai. At least four examples of the Tournai Pietà are known. The first, held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, adds to the Chelsea composition a cross behind the figure of the Virgin, with Christ‟s cloak draped across its arms as well as other instruments of the Passion - a ladder, the spear and the sponge on reed, and the titulus. A bowl containing a sponge lies by Christ‟s feet and a basket containing rope, nails and the Crown of Thorns is positioned below his left arm. A pair of pincers, for the removal of the nails, lies near the base of the rockwork upon which the three figures are elevated (Fig.59). The whole figure group is mounted in an ormolu base of neoclassical taste; in stylistic terms this would appear to owe more to Dutch metalworking than French. A similar Pietà group was exhibited at the Loan Exhibition of Tournai and Chelsea Porcelain, held at the Belgian Institute in London in 1953, bearing a similar, but slightly different ormolu

275 William H. Tapp, “Joseph Willems China Modeller – D.1766”, The Connoisseur 101 (April 1938), 178. 276 See H. Nichaise, “Porcelains de Tournay et de Chelsea-Derby,” Revue Belge d’archeologie et d’historie de l’art 5 (1935), 5-15; Bradshaw 1981, 44. 118 base, with a different central cartouche and lacking the line of beading seen around the upper edge of the Pittsburgh example (Fig.60).277 The Pittsburgh group was acquired in 1963 from the London dealers Newman and Newman Ltd who noted at the time that a “related example” with a gilt-bronze mount was illustrated in the 1937 publication La Manufacture impériale et royale de porcelaine de Tournay.278 This appears to be the same example exhibited in London in 1953. A further example of the figure group, lacking the ormolu base, is held in the collections of the Musée Royal de Mariemont (Fig.62), and yet another example was sold on the Belgian market in 1997. This latter group includes the cross behind the Virgin, but lacks some of the other instruments of the Passion, like the ladder, spear, sponge, drape and titulus, although it is possible this may be due to damage (Fig.61).279 The whole group is set upon a purpose carved wooden base which appears to emulate the form of the ormolu bases known from the other Tournai examples. Unfortunately the present whereabouts of this group is unknown.

The addition of the Arma Christi is a distinct difference between the Chelsea and Tournai Pietà groups. So too is the treatment of the base of the figure group; the piled-up rockwork base of the Tournai group is a feature commonly encountered in porcelain figures from the Sèvres factory and is very much a French device, also to be found on figures from Mennecy.280 But these differences are balanced by the striking similarities evidenced in the treatment of the individual figures in the Chelsea and Tournai groups. Although there are differences in the treatment of the drapery on all three figures, and slight differences in the way Christ‟s body sits on the Virgin‟s lap, the poses of the Virgin, Christ and the angel are essentially similar, as is the distinctive

277 Illustrated Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Tournai and Chelsea Porcelain, (London: Belgian Institute, 1953), 27-28 no.64. This example appears to be the same as that illustrated in Tapp 1938, 181, where it is said to be in the collection of Tournai porcelain at Château Mariemont, in the guardianship of Monsieur and Madame Faider. The figure group as illustrated by Tapp has suffered damage – the head of the spear and the reed with the sponge are missing. The work must have been restored at some point between 1938 when this photograph was taken and 1953 when it appeared in the Belgian Institute exhibition. 278 Soil de Moriamé 1937, 309, pl.570. I wish to thank Rachel Delphia, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh for generously providing this information concerning the Pittsburgh Tournai Pietà. 279 Christies, Kasteel van Rumbeke sale, 20-23 May, 1997, Lot 3107. 280 See for example Christopher Maxwell, French Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century (London: V&A Publications, 2009), 68 Fig.62; 70 Fig.63; 72 Fig.65. 119 modelling of Christ‟s body. We have argued that Willems‟ Chelsea Pietà group represents a very careful reconceptualizing of the composition by Coustou upon which it is based, breaking down the hieratic, planar frontality of that work to create a dramatic, dynamic sculptural group, fully viewable in the round. The likelihood that another artist should entirely independently arrive at a similar solution to the reduction of Coustou‟s monumental work into a porcelain group seems quite unlikely. The formal similarities between the two porcelain versions are too striking.281

Willems had returned to Flanders to take up a position at the Tournai factory at the director Peterinck‟s invitation just months prior to his death in 1766.282 We also know that a terracotta model of the Pietà, presumably that which formed the basis for his Chelsea figure, was amongst Willems‟ possessions at the time of his death.283 This is strong evidence in support of Willems‟ ultimate authorship of both the Chelsea and Tournai porcelain groups – either Willems, in the period between his arrival in Tournai sometime after February 1766 and his death in November of that year, was directly involved in the production of a new version of his Pietà model first produced at Chelsea; or, following his death, the terracotta of his Pièta was employed by a Tournai factory modeller as the basis for a biscuit porcelain version of the group.

It is also of note that, despite the predominance of Catholicism in France and the southern Netherlands, religious subjects are extremely rare amongst the figure productions of the French porcelain factories, and for these purposes we may consider factories in the Francophone regions of the lowlands, like the Tournai and Arras factories, „French‟. There is nothing like the range of porcelain devotional sculptures produced by the German factories in the eighteenth century. The reason for this paucity of religious images remains unclear, but it does emphasise the singularity of the Tournai Pietà and its very close relationship to the Joseph Willems model. That the two are connected seems indisputable.

281 This makes the Willems Pietà the earliest known example of an English porcelain model being copied by a Continental factory. 282 Lane 1961, 134. 283 See n.14 above. 120

The Tournai Pietà group is of some iconographic interest insofar as the addition to the composition of the Instruments of the Passion dramatically enhances the work‟s Catholic devotional content. Except for the Crown of Thorns, the instruments of the Passion do not feature in Coustou‟s Pietà in Notre Dame, although the monument of which the Pietà forms a part does include a large cross positioned behind the sculpture. Their addition, like the decorative schemes on the bases of the Gold Anchor Chelsea groups – one of which includes a depiction of the Arma Christ – is an intentional amplification of the devotional iconography. The elegant neoclassical ormolu mounts with which at least two of the known Tournai groups are embellished speak of these objects being luxury display items and call to mind the elaborate bases of the Gold Anchor Chelsea Pietà groups, one of which also sports an ormolu mount. It seems unlikely that anyone would ever question the probable devotional intent of the Tournai group: it is produced in a Catholic city in a predominantly Catholic state, an environment where domestic devotions would have been a commonplace, and objects intended to serve as the focus of such devotions, ubiquitous.

Both the Tournai and the Gold Anchor Chelsea groups augment the devotional content of Willems‟ Pietà when compared to its earliest iteration in the Red Anchor example: in the Tournai groups by the addition of the instruments of the Passion; in the Chelsea groups by the decoration of the porcelain pedestals. This represents two quite different strategies for emphasising the devotional character of the sculpture. The incorporation of the Arma Christi into the material of the figure group of the Tournai Pietà effectively takes the supplementary iconographic material that was deployed on the bases of the Gold Anchor Chelsea groups and integrates it into the main sculptural composition. The devotional nature of the sculpture itself is thus rendered more overt, rather than additional iconographic material providing an indication of how the sculpture is to be read. It is tempting to read this as a function of the Tournai group‟s production in an environment where its Catholic content was unlikely to attract any untoward comment; indeed, where an emphasis of its devotional character would, in fact, make it 121 a more desirable object. The Chelsea groups, by comparison, adopt a more circumspect approach to the intensification of the sculpture‟s devotional iconography by including images of the entombment, the Arma Christi or the Lamb of God, in decoration which is ancillary to the figure group itself.

The meaning of images is culturally contingent and the transference of an image from one social and cultural environment to another rarely takes place without some change, no matter how subtle, to that semantic content. Thus, some caution must be exercised in attributing meaning to the Chelsea Pietà group on the basis of the model‟s reception in Tournai. That being said, the emphasis on the overtly devotional in the Tournai Pietà does suggest that, in a largely Catholic environment, the devotional dimension of Willems‟ model was readily apprehended. Mid-eighteenth century London was a very different place to contemporary Tournai in the Austrian Netherlands, but it seems extremely probable that this devotional content was equally as legible to an English Catholic viewer. That this was the case is supported by the fact that the extant Chelsea models tacitly acknowledge this devotional character by the addition of further devotional iconography in the surface decorative treatments. The figure of Willems himself also provides a point of continuity between the Chelsea and Tournai models. If the Tournai Pietà was executed from his terracotta model under Willems‟ own guidance, before his death in November 1766, then this suggests that Willems was fully aware of the devotional dimensions of his model. This further suggests that this devotional content was already a part of Willems‟ conception for the Chelsea versions.

Conclusion

The leading figure modeller at the Chelsea Factory in London throughout the 1750s and into the early 1760s, it was Joseph Willems who effectively created a factory style for the figures produced at Chelsea. It is clear that Willems aspired to the status of sculptor. Although identification of print and sculptural sources for a number of Willems‟ models has been made in the past, little attention has been paid to Willems‟ role as a creative interpreter of his 122 sources. Willems based his Pietà group upon a well-known Parisian sculpture by Nicholas Coustou but did not simply produce a reduction of Coustou‟s work. Instead he drew upon a range of visual sources – the pictorial vocabulary that an artist who had received a formal training in the Netherlands might reasonably have been familiar with – to produce a radical recomposition of Coustou‟s Pietà which engages in creative dialogue with masterworks of the past. Willems‟ dramatic figure group is powerfully imbued with Counter- reformation devotional symbolism. As a Flemish Catholic, Willems would have understood well the culture of Catholic domestic devotions and the requirements for images intended as the focus of such devotions. But we cannot attribute the Catholic devotional content of the extant Chelsea Pietà groups solely to the intentions of Willems the sculptor. The decorative treatments applied to all three examples involve the addition of iconographic content of devotional significance, yet these decorative schemes would not have been carried out by Willems, or even necessarily under his direction. Nicholas Sprimont, the factory director, must have at least approved the production of the figures, if not actively overseen their decoration. The production of these highly charged images was, then, a corporate effort and it is clear that whatever the confessional allegiances of Sprimont himself, and the other artists working for him at the Chelsea Factory, this presented no obstacle to the production of an image replete with Counter-reformation devotional significance.

Although by the mid-eighteenth century Protestant English elites had developed a connoisseurial lens which permitted them to engage with Catholic Counter-reformation art without impugning their loyalty to the Established Church, this strategy was largely driven by the desire to be able to collect paintings and sculptures by acknowledged Continental masters, both past and present. As the rulers of an ascendant European economic and political power, it was essential that the English elite be able to lay claim to major artworks of the pan-European canon. Willems‟ Pietà would not have fallen into this class of object in the mid-eighteenth century. The work‟s reference to the roughly contemporary sculpture upon which it is ultimately based was, due to Willems‟ dramatic recasting of this model, not necessarily 123 immediately apparent. The Chelsea Pietà is essentially a Catholic devotional image created de novo by an artist who would have occupied a relatively inconsequential position in the hierarchies of eighteenth-century English art connoisseurship. There is a significant difference between the collecting of paintings by admired masters, even if they contain Catholic imagery, and the cultivation of a taste for Catholic imagery, even where it is by relatively unknown artists.

The very fact of these objects‟ production demonstrates that there was a market for them – the Chelsea factory was a commercial concern and could not afford to gamble on the production of costly objects for which there was no obvious audience. The fact that the Pietà group survives in multiples from across an extended period of the factory‟s production confirms that they were not a one-off mistake based upon misjudgement of the market; the small number of surviving examples, however, suggests that this market was itself also small. The powerful, affective Catholic devotional imagery of the Pietà groups suggests that it was to a Catholic audience that they were intended to appeal. Such an audience was to be found amongst the eighteenth-century English Recusant elites, as is confirmed by the presence of the Melbourne Pietà in an eighteenth-century English Catholic collection. It is to an examination of the eighteenth-century English Catholic elites as active and culturally-engaged patrons and collectors of art that we shall turn in the next chapter.

124

CHAPTER FOUR

THE AUDIENCE FOR THE CHELSEA PIETÀ

We have revealed the Chelsea Pietà group to be a small but accomplished porcelain sculpture which, in its extant versions, evidences sculptural and decorative details that are imbued with Catholic devotional significance. Modelled by a Catholic, Joseph Willems, and produced by a factory where Catholics and Protestants appear to have worked side by side, the Chelsea Pietà is evidence for a far more laissez faire attitude to religion and religious imagery in the eighteenth-century English porcelain industry than many previous commentators on this material have allowed. The Chelsea factory was, after all, a commercial concern and the production of saleable goods was a primary goal. There is sufficient evidence from the eighteenth century and earlier to suggest that many European craftsmen and artists were prepared to accept commissions from opposing sides of the Reformation confessional divide. To put it bluntly, business was business.

That being said, there does remain the question of whom the market for the porcelain Pietà may have been. Although eighteenth-century English Protestant elites had developed strategies to facilitate the consumption of Continental Counter-reformation art, we have outlined in Chapter Two why an object like the Pietà would have remained problematic for many Protestant collectors: its imagery was explicitly Catholic in content – indeed, details of modelling and decoration of the extant examples appear to be calculated to heighten the objects‟ potential devotional function; it was a three-dimensional sculpture, exaggerating the associations with popish idolatry; and it‟s author was probably of insufficient stature to attract adequate prestige to render the toleration of these first two points worthwhile.

In some ways we already know, at least in part, where a market for these objects lay. The Melbourne Gold Anchor period example of the Pietà was, in 125 the eighteenth century, owned by a member of one of the leading English Recusant families: Hugh, 4th Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. Despite the frequent characterisation of the eighteenth century as a period of cultural decline and growing isolation and provincialism for England‟s Catholic elite, the contrary appears to have been the case. Although their political influence could be limited, many Recusant families were fully engaged in the cultural and social world of the Hanoverian establishment. Indeed, the connections that many Recusants had with the exiled Stuart Court on the Continent gave them a more international and cosmopolitan perspective than that of many of their Protestant fellows. Denied full participation in the political life of the country, art collecting and patronage presented to many Catholic families alternate spheres of endeavour in which to accrue prestige and standing.

This chapter will explore the eighteenth-century English Catholic elite as a market for the Chelsea Pietà groups. Although there is insufficient scope here to present a comprehensive examination of Catholic art collection and patronage in eighteenth-century England, the activities of two families, the Baronets Throckmorton of Coughton Court and the Barons Clifford of Chudleigh, will serve as examples of this phenomenon. It will be seen that many Catholic families engaged in major building projects, collected and commissioned art, and acquired luxury commodities, just like their Protestant peers. But the Catholic elites did so in a fashion that also reflected their distinctively English Catholic identity. It will be argued that the extant Chelsea Pietà groups probably represent specially commissioned luxury porcelain sculptures intended for devotional use, and that not only the Melbourne Pietà, but in all likelihood all three known examples are the products of Catholic patronage.

Religious Identity and the Meaning of Things

Elizabeth I‟s Act of Uniformity in 1559 established Protestantism as England‟s only legal religion. The century following the Act saw English Catholics excluded from the churches and other traditional holy sites which had 126 structured their public, communal and ritual identities. Although some Catholics continued to frequent the ruins of holy wells and shrines, or even attempted to take over Protestant churches, this dispossession prompted many clergy and laity to seek new types of space for the practice of their religion.284 Historian Lisa McClain has argued that in the wake of the 1559 Act, English Catholics who found themselves deprived of their traditional places of worship and devotion began to develop strategies for imaginatively creating sacred space out of mundane places and spaces, like private houses and gardens, prisons where priests were incarcerated, even courthouses and places of execution where Catholic clergy and loyalists went to martyrdom. An examination of English Catholic pastoral literature reveals detailed instructions as to how and where Catholics could create new types of holy places. Catholics converted ordinary space into religious space by using it in ritualised ways. In his 1617 work, A new manual of Old Christian Catholick Meditations & praiers, Richard Broughton suggests that such ritualised action hinged upon a separation from nonbelievers:

If because of misbelievers, we cannot go to the Church, but the wicked occupy the place, thou must flee from that place, because it was profaned by them. For as the priests do sanctify holy things, so the impious defile them. If the true believers cannot assemble together neither at home nor in the Church, let everyone by themselves sing, read, pray, or two or three gathered together. For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the middle of them (Matthew 18).285

The detachment from the impious that Broughton proposes could manifest itself in three ways: as physical, ritual or imaginative separation. Physical separation involved the believers and nonbelievers occupying different spaces. By using their homes as religious sites to hear Mass, make

284 Christopher Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation”, Past and Present 93 (1981), 61. 285 Quoted in Lisa McClain, “Without Church Cathedral or Shrine: The Search for Religious Space among Catholics in England, 1559–1625”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 33: 2 (2002), 383. 127 confession or socialise with Catholic friends, Catholics separated themselves into distinct communities. Ritual separation might involve each group employing different gestures or different words in the same or separate spaces. A Catholic attending a Protestant service might hold a rosary in her pocket and recite Latin prayer, thus ritually separating herself from the Protestants who shared the space of the church. Imaginative separation could occur in the minds of the believers, in either shared or separate spaces.286 The scarcity of priests and substantial communities of Catholics meant that ritualised use of quotidian space by lay Catholics was the most common means of creating sacred space by English Catholics. The Jesuit Robert Southwell in his A Shorte Rule of good lyfe counselled English Catholics to engage in the private reconceptualisation of ordinary physical locations into spaces for religious use. So Southwell suggests, for example, that in every room of a house, a Catholic might imagine a throne or chair of state and dedicate the room to a particular saint; whenever she or he enters that room it would be as if they had entered a chapel or a church.287 A bedroom might become a shrine to Saint Anne, a corner of the main room a shrine to one of the Mysteries of the Rosary. In this way an entire house could be transformed into sacred space for Catholic devotions without the need for any physical change to the environment, such as the introduction of images or special furniture which were a source of potential danger if the house was ever searched by Protestant authorities. English Catholics could find the sacred in the ordinary.

What McClain outlines is the development in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century of an English Catholic culture of imbuing the everyday with sacred and devotional significance. There is evidence that, despite the gradually lessening threat of imposition of the full weight of the penal laws, this established culture of investing the quotidian with specifically Catholic, devotional meaning survived into the eighteenth century. One of the most important of English Catholic families, the Throckmortons of Coughton Court, provides us with an example of this phenomenon. The Little Drawing Room

286 McClain 2002, 383. 287 Southwell, quoted in McCain 2002, 384. 128 of Coughton Court, the Tudor house which has been the ancestral home of the Throckmortons since 1409, today houses an item of furniture which is conventionally described as a “Mass Cabinet”.288 A Flemish cabinet-on-stand of late seventeenth century date, this cabinet is of a form and type typical of such items of late baroque display furniture (Fig.68).289 The two doors of the cabinet open to reveal banks of small drawers and a further central single door. This door opens to reveal a „perspective‟ – an illusionistic arrangement of mirrors, arches, balustrades and a geometrically patterned black and white floor which creates a series of miniature, artificial architectural vistas. According to family tradition, in conjunction with a portable altar stone, this cabinet was used as an altar for the celebration of Mass, the host being stored in the central cupboard formed by the perspective. When the outer doors are closed, the cabinet appears to be a conventional piece of Flemish Baroque furniture, quite unobtrusive and giving no hint of its function. What is of especial interest about this particular piece of furniture is that it appears to be, not a purpose-made item of devotional furniture, but a wholly conventional, secular cabinet-on-stand. The painted male and female figures in Baroque theatre costume in the perspective of the cabinet emphasise this. This is an example of a conventional object of a type which might be found in many elite houses of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England being put to a special devotional function by its Catholic owners. Historian David Garrioch has recently outlined a similar phenomenon in the context of eighteenth-century Paris. In an examination of the connection between material culture and religious identity, Garrioch has argued that whilst the inventories of eighteenth century Catholic and Huguenot homes reveal the presence of objects distinctive to each group, there are types of object found in the houses of adherents of both religions, like family portraits,

288 Marshall, Peter and Geoffrey Scott, Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation. Catholic Christendom, 1300- 1700 ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 176. 289 Monique Riccardi-Cubitt, The Art of the Cabinet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 196-97. 129 for example, which clearly could hold quite distinctive Protestant or Catholic significances in each particular context.290

The Coughton Mass Cabinet illustrates how English Catholics might take an everyday object and imbue it with a sacred significance which was not necessarily apparent to a casual (and/or Protestant) observer. The use of the term „everyday‟ here should perhaps be qualified since a cabinet like the Coughton example is an item of luxury furniture. But the Throckmortons were an elite family; such a piece of furniture would not have been unusual in the context of an elite interior of the period and the family‟s ownership of such a cabinet should not surprise us. Indeed, the Coughton Mass Cabinet serves to illustrate how members of the Catholic elite in eighteenth-century England engaged in the acquisition of luxury commodities in the same way that their Protestant fellows did, but in a manner which served to express their distinctive English Catholic identity. It is this particularly Catholic collecting and patronage of art and luxury goods which we will explore below as a window onto the circumstances of the Chelsea Pietà group‟s creation.

The Catholic Gentry as Collectors and Patrons

In the wake of the brief florescence of Catholic public culture in England during the adumbrated reign of James II, the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 has often been characterised as a time of decline into provincial isolation and cultural stagnation for the English Catholic gentry.291 Such an historiographic commonplace has, however, recently been subjected to challenge. Historian Gabriel Glickman has argued that, far from representing an etiolated remnant in decline, the Catholic gentry maintained an active presence in the

290 Garrioch, David. “Religious Identities and the Meaning of Things in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” French History and Civilization. Papers from the George Rudé Seminar. Volume 3 (Melbourne, 2009b), 17-25. 291 For example Angus McInnes, “The Revolution and the People”, in Geoffrey Holmes (ed.) Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689 – 1714, (London: Macmillan, 1969), 80-95; Richard C. Wilton, “Early Eighteenth Century Catholics in England”, Catholic Historical Review 10 (1924), 367-87. 130 mainstream patrician world of Augustan England whilst assuming the role of lay guardians of the Catholic faith, the clergy being seriously constrained by the reinvigorated application of the penal laws.292 Whilst the Catholic gentry‟s practice of religion might necessarily be discrete, their habits of sociability remained open to the public gaze. Of course, rebellion, religious apostasy and episodes of economic hardship took their toll on the recusant elite, but a majority of families successfully navigated these trials. And where earlier histories have characterised the attachment of many recusant families to the cause of the exiled Stuarts as an outward symptom of cultural decline, Glickman rightly highlights the fact that, on the contrary, contact with the world of the Jacobite court in exile, first in France, then from 1718 in Rome, provided many Catholic gentry with an international, cosmopolitan outlook.293

Numerous members of the eighteenth century recusant elite participated wholeheartedly in the English patrician world of conspicuous sociability and hospitality, so crucial in the accumulation of social standing in this period. Rejecting confessional seclusion, many recusant families participated in the circuits of hunt and race meetings, seasons in York and Bath, ventures to the London opera, blending into the larger world of the landed elites which were becoming more homogenous as the century progressed, united by shared tastes and ambitions.294 The converging influences of family honour, private religion and public aspiration found expression in the houses and gardens of Catholic elites. In the years following the 1688 Revolution, when Sir John Vanbrugh declared “all the World are running mad after building”, many Catholic squires entered fully into this gentry fashion.295 The Swinburnes rebuilt their seat at Capheaton Hall, Northumberland in the Baroque taste to designs by Robert Trollope “in a very moderne fashion” (Fig.63).296 The Tempests transformed Broughton Hall, Skipton into a temple of neo-Palladian

292 Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688-1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology. Studies in Early Modern Cultural Political and Social History 7. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2009), Chap. 2. 293 Glickman 2009, 54. 294 Glickman 2009, 63; Leo Gooch, “ „The Religion for a Gentleman‟: The North Country Catholics in the Eighteenth Century”, Recusant History 23 (1997), 543-68. 295 Sir John Vanbrugh, Complete Works, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Geoffrey Webb (Bloomsbury, 1928), vol.4, 25. 296 Glickman 2009, 69. 131 splendour (Fig.64) whilst Sir Nicholas Shireburne aggrandized Stonyhurst Hall with flanking towers, marble halls and fine gardens (Fig.65).297

For many, this process of improving and beautifying their estates was clearly part of a vision for an alternative English polity, distinct from the realities of the post-Revolution state. In their estates, Catholic Gentry could establish ordered realms, demonstrating their willingness and ability to discharge public office, office denied them under the current political regime.298 It would seem too that, as with their peers in the Hanoverian establishment, the accumulation of appropriate cultural capital – the creation of art collections, undertaking the Grand Tour – was pursued by recusant elites as part of the demonstration of their moral fitness to assume leadership roles.

It is clear that many members of the Catholic gentry were equally at home on the Continent as they were on their estates in England and Scotland. The scions of many elite recusant families had received their educations on the Continent, in France, the Catholic Netherlands or Portugal, at the colleges and convents established in the sixteenth century in the wake of the English Reformation.299 Similarly, upon crossing the channel, English Catholics found themselves able to enter into a familiar Catholic, aristocratic culture centred around the Stuart court in St Germain, with its own diplomatic, cultural and social networks throughout Europe. Many recusant families owned property on the Continent. The Waldegraves and Staffords owned residences in the French capital and mixed freely with Parisian elites, whilst the Throckmortons maintained a complete household in Brussels, where they are said to have enjoyed outings to the opera and the theatre.300

The influence of this familiarity with a cosmopolitan life in a wider Catholic Europe was felt in England. English recusants became early exponents of the Grand Tour and many adolescents had their cultural horizons widened in

297 Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England, Lancashire II, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 220-22, 239-42. 298 Glickman 2009, 69-70. 299 Glickman 2009, 74-76. 300 Glickman 2009, 77. 132 the company of cultivated tutors, like Thomas Marwood who was employed by the recusant Bedingfields in both Norfolk and Paris.301 Catholic Grand Tourists, like their Protestant fellows, exploited the opportunities provided by their travels to acquire art – Sir Edward, 6th Baronet Gascoigne, toured Italy in search of art for his collections in 1723-26, during which time he commissioned a customary Grand Tour portrait of himself from Francesco Trevisani (Fig.66), as well as acquiring paintings, marbles, prints and Roman coins.302 Catholic gentry could also augment their collections through patronage. Henry, 8th Baron Arundel, was patron to John Thorpe, an English Jesuit living in Rome in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thorpe acquired on the Baron Arundel‟s behalf artworks in Rome including the sumptuous ebony and lapis lazuli mounted silver Flagellation group by Algardi which is now in the collections of the Martin D‟Arcy Gallery of Art at Loyola University.303 The role of recusant elites in the creation of art collections in eighteenth century England has not, to date, been thoroughly explored. It is clear, however, that many Catholic gentry were involved in such activities, both as buyers, and as patrons commissioning artworks, and that this played an important role in their self-representation. In undertaking such activities, they may be seen to have been active participants in the quest to demonstrate gentility through connoisseurship which occupied the whole spectrum of the eighteenth-century English elite, not merely members of the Catholic squirearchy.

Here we may focus our attention on the activities of two important recusant families in the eighteenth century where available sources permit us to gain some idea of the scope and range of their collecting and patronage: the Baronets Throckmorton of Coughton Court, Warwickshire, and the Barons Clifford of Chudleigh, of Ugbrooke, Devon.

301 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: The History Press, 2003), 51-2, 234-48; Glickman 2009, 77. 302 John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 393. 303 Virginia C. Raguin (ed.), Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850 (Worcester, MA: Trustees of the College of the Holy Cross, 2006), 4. 133

The Throckmortons of Coughton

The Throckmortons are a prime example of a Catholic magnate family who through careful political manoeuvring maintained their fortunes and reputations intact through the particularly difficult years between 1688 and 1750, despite their implication in the Popish Plot scare of 1678-81. One of the leading English recusant families they were key members of the Catholic network which, from the 1530s and the break with Rome, kept Catholicism alive in England for nearly 300 years, culminating, in the wake of the Catholic Relief Act, with Sir Robert George Throckmorton being elected the first English Catholic MP in 1831.304

The Throckmortons maintained a range of houses throughout the eighteenth century. The family generally resided at Weston House, Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire (demolished in 1827), and then later at Buckland House in Berkshire. A chapel was maintained at each of these houses, as well as at Coughton and Harvington, where chaplains and estate agents lived throughout prolonged absences of the family. A new chapel had been finished at Coughton by the 3rd Baronet, Sir Robert Throckmorton (1662- 1721) in May 1687, only for it to be destroyed by a mob a year later in December 1688. It was soon replaced by another which served the chaplain and the family‟s retainers into the nineteenth century, when it became the saloon.305 The presence of these chapels encouraged the growth of Catholic enclaves dependent upon the Throckmortons as patrons and protectors.306

Buckland House, the family‟s primary residence in the second half of the eighteenth century was rebuilt in 1757 by Sir Robert Throckmorton (4th Baronet, 1702–1791) to designs by John Wood the Elder, revised and carried out by John Wood the Younger, and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Palladian architecture (Fig.67).307 John Wood the Younger was a leading architect active in and around the city of Bath where he designed the Royal

304 Marshall and Scott 2009. 305 Marshall and Scott 2009, 175. 306 Marshall and Scott 2009, 174-75. 307 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Berkshire. London: Penguin Books, 1966. 134

Crescent and the Bath Assembly Rooms.308 Here we see Robert Throckmorton patronising a leading fashionable architect associated with one of the great centres of polite Georgian society, Bath, a city where he spent much time.309 Combined with the outfitting and maintenance of their private chapels, the eighteenth-century Throckmortons‟ interest in building and architecture may be seen as evidence of, simultaneously, an active participation in the polite activities contributing to the accumulation of status and prestige amongst the elites of Augustan England generally, as well as an effort to contribute to the prestige of an English Catholic polity.

Sir Robert, the 3rd Baronet, established a famous library, now widely dispersed, which included Calvinist and Anglican writings alongside Catholic devotional literature.310 As was the case with many recusant families, the Throckmorton library included a small collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts including the c.1370-80 Buckland Missal, now in the Bodleian library in Oxford, and the Norwich Missal from Harvington.311 These appear to have come into Sir Robert‟s possession through his marriage in 1686 to Mary of the Yate family of Harvington and Buckland.312 Such manuscript collections had often been preserved by Catholic families in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries and clearly held for latter generations romantic and nostalgic associations with the idea of an undivided Christendom.313

The connections maintained by recusant families with European centres of English Catholicism provided opportunities for a cosmopolitan approach to collecting and patronage. The late seventeenth-century Flemish cabinet-on- stand, the so-called „Mass Cabinet‟, today housed in the Little Drawing Room at Coughton Court, provides an example of a fashionable form of late Baroque display furniture which may have been acquired by the family in

308 Eileen Harris, “John Wood‟s system of architecture”, The Burlington Magazine 131 (1989), 101-7. 309 Marshall and Scott 2009, 180. 310 Glickman 2009, 66. 311 MS.Don.b.5 312 Marshall and Scott 2009, 175-76. 313 A.I. Doyle, “The Rescue of Books from the Suppressed Religious Houses”, in Virginia Raguin (ed.), Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538–1850 (Worcester, MA: Trustees of the College of the Holy Cross, 2006), 111-114. 135

Flanders – we recall the Throckmortons maintained a residence in Brussels in the early eighteenth century (fig.68). The Throckmortons also had strong connections with Paris. A majority of their children were sent to schools and convents in Paris for their educations.314 The family produced a preponderance of daughters during the eighteenth century and relatively few sons – Sir Robert, 3rd Baronet, had eight daughters, a number of whom became marriageable around 1720, each being able reasonably to expect a dowry of £6,000.315 Concerns about the potential financial burdens of dowries are a common feature of the family‟s correspondence during this period.316 It is perhaps little surprise then that many of the family‟s daughters were encouraged to profess as nuns and enter one of the English convents on the continent, a number of them ending up in Paris. The daughters of Sir Francis, 2nd Baronet (1641-80), Anne and Elizabeth, both entered convents. Anne (1644-1734) was professed an Austin canoness in Paris in 1687 (Sister Anne Frances) and was abbess from 1720 to 1728. Her sister became an English Poor Clare of Rouen. Three of Anne and Elizabeth‟s nieces also became Austin canonesses in Paris: Mary and Frances (daughters of their sister Mary and her husband Martin Wollascott), and Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert, 3rd Baronet. This Elizabeth (Sister Elisabeth-Theresa-Pulcheria) became abbess twice (1736-44 and 1756-60) despite extreme poor health.317

These Throckmorton abbesses, Anne Frances and Elisabeth, along with their niece and cousin, Sister Frances Wollascott, are the subjects of a series of refined portraits by Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746), dating to 1729 and commissioned by Sir Robert, 4th Baronet (Figs.69-71) in the year of his return from the Grand Tour. A portrait of Sir Robert himself (Fig.72) rounds out the group which may have been commissioned to commemorate his aunt Anne Frances‟ retirement as abbess in 1728. The paintings are housed in superb early French rococo frames. Largillière was a leading portraitist to both the court of Louis XIV, and the Jacobite court at St Germain. By commissioning this suite of portraits from Largillière, Sir Robert was affirming both his

314 Marshall and Scott 2009, 184-89. 315 Marshall and Scott 2009, 179. 316 Marshall and Scott 2009, 190. 317 Marshall and Scott 2009, 190-91. 136 considerable wealth and his connections to Catholic court culture beyond the confines of England. His portrait is very much in the grand, rhetorical French court manner.318 The images of his female kinfolk, members of the English Augustinians in France, are also a celebration of his family‟s ancestral religion. Each of these women is depicted with some emblem of her rank and position. Sir Robert‟s aunt Anne is shown holding the seal of her office (Fig.69). Sir Robert‟s sister Elisabeth is shown holding a prayer book, symbol of her life of devotion and her literary aspirations – she devised antiphonal mnemonics in her psalter (Fig.70).319 Sister Frances, aged 21, is shown working at embroidery and engages the viewer with a direct gaze (Fig.71). Embroidery was typical of the work commonly undertaken by members of female religious communities in France at this time.320 Geoffrey Scott has drawn attention to the similarity between the embroidered work upon which Sister Frances is engaged and the richly embroidered coat which Sir Robert sports in his portrait.321 This echoing of these sumptuous textiles across the two portraits, in concert with the way the three nuns‟ Augustinian habits echo each other, assists in creating a visual unity for the whole series of works – works which were displayed together; by 1749 they were hanging as a group in the dining room of Weston House, at that time, residence of George Throckmorton.322 But more than this, the conspicuous appearance of fine needlework also directly ties Sir Robert to the cloistered lives of his professed female relatives: in the context of this group of portraits, Sir Robert literally wears his Catholicism on his sleeve, for all to see.323

318 On the distinction between French and English styles of portraiture at this time see Arline Meyer, “Re-dressing Classical Statuary: the Eighteenth-century „Hand-in-Waistcoat‟ Portrait”, The Art Bulletin 77:1 (1995), 45-63. 319 F.-M.-Th. Cédoz, Un Couvent de Religieuses Anglaises á Paris de 1634 á 1884 (Paris, 1891), ch.13, 228-35. Pauline Johnstone, High Fashion in the Church: The Place of Church Vestments in the History of Art from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, (Leeds: Maney 2002), 98 319 Marshall and Scott 2009, 195. 320 Johnstone 2002, 98. 321 Marshall and Scott 2009, 195 322 George Vertue Notebooks, V, The Walpole Society 26, (1937-38), 105. 323 Needlework, too, may have had special resonances for English Catholics. The liturgical embroidery known as Opus Anglicanum had been admired and sought after throughout Europe in the pre-Reformation period and examples of this work were to be found preserved amongst Recusant families. See Virginia Raguin, “Liturgical Vestments”, in Raguin 2006, 62- 68. 137

Although Sir Robert chose a celebrated French court painter to record himself and his family members for posterity, we must not forget that the portrait was a genre of painting particularly admired by English collectors and connoisseurs. Indeed, the overwhelming preponderance of portraiture in eighteenth century English painting collections has long been noted.324 In commissioning portraits to celebrate his family‟s cosmopolitan European ties and Catholic piety, Sir Robert was also engaging in activity typical of an English art patron of his age. This Throckmorton tradition of art patronage and collecting continued on into the later eighteenth century. Sir Robert‟s eldest grandson, Mr Robert Throckmorton (1750-79) went to Rome on Grand Tour in 1769 where he stayed for two years with Augustine Walker, the English Benedictine Procurator at the papal court. Before his departure in 1772, he sat for Pompeo Batoni, the pre-eminent English Grand Tour portraitist (Fig.73).325 This engaging portrait shows the young Robert Throckmorton holding a rolled-up drawing of the Pantheon. Whilst this pictorial gesture is a nod in the direction of classical learning typical of a Grand Tour portrait, it must also be recalled that this admired icon of ancient Roman architecture functioned, in the eighteenth century, as the Catholic church of S. Maria ad Martyres. By 1772, a year after the Catholic Relief Act of 1771, the position of the English Catholic elite was more secure than it had been in nearly 300 years and nothing like the prejudice and persecution of former times was faced. Nevertheless, Throckmorton patronage may be seen to continue an established pattern of participation in activities reflecting the interests and concerns of the ruling English elites whilst bringing to them a dimension borne of their European cosmopolitanism that emphasized their distinctive English Catholic identity.

324 Haynes 2006, 79-80. 325 Ingamells 1997, 942, although here the portrait is said to be of John Courtney Throckmorton or his brother George; the inscription clearly identifies the sitter as their brother Robert, Sir Robert‟s grandson. See the useful Throckmorton family tree in Marshall and Scott 2009, 271. 138

The Cliffords of Chudleigh

A similar phenomenon may be observed when we turn to the history of another great recusant family of the eighteenth century, the Barons Clifford of Chudleigh. The Barony Clifford of Chudleigh was created in 1672 for Thomas Clifford (1630-1673) by Charles II (Fig.74).326 One of the five counsellors who formed the Cabal ministry, he was Lord High Treasurer from 28 November 1672 to June 1673, when, as a convert to Catholicism, he found himself unable to comply with the 1673 Test Act and resigned, retiring from public life.327 He died some four months later and it was rumoured that his death was a suicide, although this was quite likely a libel founded on religious prejudice.328 Despite this somewhat inauspicious start – and the financial and legal impedments imposed by the family‟s new recusant status – the Lords Clifford of Chudleigh prospered in the eighteenth century, compensating for their exclusion from political and military office by acquiring art and engaging in building projects. Thomas 1st Lord Clifford had already acquired a significant collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings and had commissioned portraits from Lely and Dankers.329 Hugh, 2nd Lord Clifford (1663-1730), spent his teenage years quietly in the country. He increased the family property by his marriage in about 1685 to Anne, co-heiress of Sir Thomas Preston of Furness in Lancashire, who brought with her estates in Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Westmoreland.330 By 1695 he was able to purchase the remaining parts of the Manor of Chudleigh in Devon and by his death in 1730 the family finances were in reasonably good condition. By around 1700, the Clifford family fortunes were already sufficiently restored that the 2nd Lord Clifford began a programme of commissioning domestic silver adorned with the Clifford armorials, much of which remains in family ownership, although an important pair of William III

326 Arthur Clifford, Collectanea Cliffordiana in Three Parts (Paris, 1817), 88 327 This act required the juror to deny transubstantiation and to take Eucharist in the Church of England within three months of assuming office. (25 Car. II. c. 2) 328 Ronald Hutton, „Clifford, Thomas, first Baron Clifford of Chudleigh (1630–1673)‟, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5664, accessed 9 Nov 2010] 329 Ibid. 330 Arthur Clifford, Collectanea Cliffordiana in Three Parts (Paris, 1817), 93; Mary Jones, The History of Chudleigh in the County of Devon (London, 1852), 145. 139 sconces by Thomas Corbett, c.1701, made their way onto the market in 1987 (Fig.75).331 These objects reflect the 2nd Baron's desire to continue the family tradition of collecting silver, following Charles II's sumptuous Christening gift to his godson Charles Clifford of a silver-gilt dish and ewer made by Johann Jäger of Augsburg in 1671.332 Fashionable silver was symbolic of status and reflected the important role the Clifford family had held in the life of the nation.

Like the Throckmortons, the Cliffords of Chudleigh also assembled an impressive library which included a small collection of medieval manuscripts the most significant of which is probably the Cartulary of the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter at Chertsey.333 The other medieval manuscripts include French, English, Netherlandish and Italian illuminated Books of Hours ranging in date from the 13th to the 15th centuries, as well as a 13th century French vulgate bible, an English prayer book and a 15th century German Breviary. The entirety of the Clifford library, some 10,000 volumes, was sold to meet death duties in 1963 and is now held in the National Library of Australia in Canberra.334 As the Cliffords were only recent converts to Catholicism, the acquisition of these manuscripts, almost all of which are devotional in character, must have been calculated. This adds weight to the suggestion that these literary survivals from an unruptured Christian past held special significance for English Catholics.

In 1763 Hugh 4th Lord Clifford (1726-1783) retained the great Scottish Neoclassical architect Robert Adam to rebuild the ancestral seat of Ugbrooke House (Fig.76). Carried out between 1764 and 1768, this is the first of twelve houses executed by Adam in the so-called castle style. The appearance of the house today reflects alterations made in the nineteenth century, apparently in an effort to further “Gothicise” its already medievalising features. The Adam refurbishment of the house included the interior of the chapel, dedicated to St Cyprian, which had been built by the 1st Lord Clifford in 1671

331 Sotheby's London, 30 April 1987, lot 111. 332 Charles Oman, “Restoration Silver at the Royal Academy”, The Burlington Magazine 103 (1961), 47. 333 NLA Canberra MS1097/65 334 Clifford collection of manuscripts mainly relating to Roman Catholicism, 1306-1915, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 1097. 140 and is still in use today, although this too has been the subject of alterations carried out during the nineteenth century.335

The commissioning of Robert Adam to rebuild his house indicates that the 4th Lord Clifford was both wealthy and fashion conscious. The choice of the castle style for the refurbishments, the first such project undertaken by Adam, is perhaps indicative of a wish to evoke a long family history reaching back to a chivalrous, pre-Reformation Christian past, a notion also perhaps reflected by the treasured medieval manuscript collection. It is interesting to note that the chapel, built by the first baron, is one of the few parts of the original house which has been incorporated into Adam‟s new structure. This is highly suggestive of the symbolic significance of this space as a marker of the family‟s Catholic identity, located at the core of the sophisticated, fashionable facade which was presented to the world. Further evidence of the 4th Lord Clifford‟s fashionable tastes is to be seen in his retaining Capability Brown, the pre-eminent eighteenth-century English landscape architect, to landscape the parklands surrounding Ugbrooke, at the same time as Adam was rebuilding the house. All of this indicates the 4th Lord Clifford to be a man confident of his place in the world, actively engaged in the interests and pursuits which occupied the leaders of polite society, but doing so in a fashion which simultaneously reflects his Catholic loyalties.

Beyond his architectural and landscaping endeavours, the 4th Lord Clifford also engaged in the acquisition of other fashionable luxury objects. A Chinese export porcelain service bearing the arms of Clifford of Chudleigh was commissioned around 1740, with further pieces for the service being ordered in around 1785 by Hugh 5th Lord Clifford (Fig.77).336 This is evidence not only of an interest in porcelain wares, but also of the active

335 David King, The Complete Works of Robert and James Adam, and Unbuilt Adam (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2001), 156-59; Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Robert Adam (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1987), 45. 336 A pair of plates from the 1740 service sold at Northeast Auctions, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, August 21-22, 2010, lot 943. A pair of plates from the c.1785 service was sold by the New York dealers Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge Inc.: (http://www.vandekar.com/archives/details.asp?inventoryNumber=NY03836). Accessed on 4/12/2010. 141 interest of the Lords Clifford in the commissioning of such objects. This latter point is of note, for amongst the porcelain objects acquired by the 4th Lord Clifford was the Chelsea Pietà group now in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria.337 We have in previous chapters considered the context of production of these figure groups and have argued that the surviving examples of the Willems Pietà are, in their modelling and in their applied decoration, powerfully devotional in their resonances. That such an image may have appealed to a Catholic connoisseur, like the 4th Lord Clifford, should not then surprise us. The Chelsea Pietà represents a luxury porcelain sculpture of the type acquired by fashionable English elites in the eighteenth century. Its devotional dimension, however, renders it of especial interest to a recusant collector like Lord Clifford who, as we have seen, conforms to the fashionable tastes and interests of the polite society of his day, but like other recusant patrons and collectors, does so in a fashion which also reflects his distinctive English Catholic identity.

The Chelsea Pietà as a commissioned work

Whilst one must make allowances for accidence of survival, it is of note that the two large-scale Chelsea models on religious subjects, the Madonna and Child and the Pietà, survive in quite different numbers. There are only three known examples of the Pietà group, but there are at least eight known versions of the Madonna and Child group in public collections: six red anchor period examples, one each in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Lady Ludlow Collection at the Bowes Museum and the Cecil Higgins Museum, and two in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and two gold anchor period examples, one in the David Roche collection in South Australia and one in the British Museum.338

337 The Right Honourable Thomas Hugh Clifford, 14th Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, personal communication to the author, 3 November 2010. 338 Cleveland Museum of Art: 1941.45; Fitzwilliam Museum: illustrated in Adams 2001, 133; Boston Museum of Fine Arts: 30.293, 1988.639; Cecil Higgins Art Gallery: C230; British Museum: 1948,1203.57; Bowes Museum: 2004.63/CER; David Roche Collection: C. Menz, Empires and Splendours: The David Roche Collection (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2008), 48. 142

The Chelsea management sold their wares through several channels, including showrooms or warehouses on the factory site, annual auctions (from 1754 advertised as consisting of the entire year‟s production), and, during the 1750s, through West End warehouses leased by Sprimont and presumably run under his direction.339 Much was probably sold to independent middlemen. It is of note then that, although there survives no specific mention of the Pièta group in the Chelsea Factory auction records, the catalogues for the Chelsea sales of 1755, 1756 and 1761 mention the model of the Madonna and Child. In the catalogue of the 1761 auction, item 80 in the Third Day's Sale, 2 May is described in the following terms: 'A most magnificent groupe of a MADONA and JESUS, curiously enamelled, upon a PEDESTAL of the fine mazarine blue enriched with gold'.340

The presence of this figure group at the factory‟s London sales strongly suggests that it was intended for the home market – that is to say, the model does not represent a production specifically intended for export to the Continent. And although no mention of the Pietà group can be identified in the surviving sales catalogues, it is important to recall that there is little evidence that the Chelsea factory engaged in any significant export trade to continental Europe outside of the specialised object class of toys: diminutive scent bottles, seals, etuis, snuffboxes, knife handles and the like.341 Instead,

339 Hilary Young, English Porcelain 1745-95. Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption. Victoria and Albert Museum Studies in the History of Art and Design (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 162 and literature cited there. 340 Reproduced in F. Severne Mackenna, F. Chelsea Porcelain: The Gold Anchor Wares (With a Short Account of the Duesbury Period). (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1952), 92. Patrick Synge-Hutchinson assumed that this reference in the 1761 sale catalogue was to the Melbourne Pietà group (Patrick Synge-Hutchinson, “A Unique Essay in English Ceramic Art,” The Connoisseur (June, 1964), 87). It is far more likely that it is the British Museum example of the Madonna and Child (1948,1203.57) that is being referred to, as the mention of enamelling (i.e. polychrome decoration) suggests (Fig.52). The Chelsea sale catalogue for 1756, day 4, lot 57 reads: A Most beautiful groupe [sic] of a Madonna with a child standing on a globe, holding a cross‟ (Savage 1952, 367). The figure group in the Bowes Museum is the only example to retain the cross in the child‟s hand. 341 A definition of porcelain toys is provided in an advertisement appearing in the Public Advertiser from 23 November to 21 December for an auction of Chelsea porcelains held in London on the 16th to 21st of December 1754. Quoted in James E. Nightingale, Contributions towards the History of Early English Porcelain from Contemporary Sources (Salisbury, 1881), 10-11. See also Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from Eighteenth Century London Newspapers,” TECC 11:2 (1982),126. 143

Chelsea appears to have actively sought to imitate Japanese, German and French porcelain styles in an attempt to compete with imported luxury wares in the home market.342

The number of surviving examples of the Madonna and Child group and its appearance at the Chelsea Factory‟s public sales suggests that this particular model was more readily capable of finding a market than the Pietà group. This invites us to speculate why this might have been the case. Whilst both figure groups employ religious imagery, it is certainly the case that the Pietà, as a subject, is non-scriptural and therefore far more explicitly Catholic in its associations than the depiction of the Madonna and Child, and in the eighteenth-century English context, a far more problematic image. A brief survey of the contents of eighteenth-century painting collections in England, where known, reveals the presence of a surprising number of images of the Madonna and Child.343 Indeed, the recent study of religious art in post- Reformation British domestic settings in the period 1560–1660 by Tara Hamling suggests that images of the Virgin, and the Virgin and Child, never really fell entirely out of fashion in England.344 Against this must be weighed the porcelain group‟s character as a three-dimensional, sculptural object, but as we observed in Chapter Two, even this does not necessarily exclude it from appealing to a Protestant owner; display context provided a method of controlling the potentially dangerous meaning of such objects.

The presence of the Madonna and Child group in some numbers tends to make more conspicuous the absence of the Pietà group from the public sales. Whilst the Madonna and Child group may have been a speculative creation by

342 The extant evidence for the export trade in English porcelain does not tell us much about the identity of the consumers or the size and make-up of the export markets. Sales of Chelsea were held in 1758 in Ireland (J. C. Austin, Chelsea Porcelain at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, Virginia: 1977), 9-12; John V.G. Mallet, “A Chelsea Talk” TECC 6:1 (1965), 23). The Public Advertiser published on 3 April 1756 an advertisement for the auction of the stock in trade of Laumas and Rolyat, late of Lisbon, which consisted of toys (Nightingale 1881, 14). On the eighteenth century English porcelain export trade in general see Young 1999, 194 n.21. 343 For paintings of the Madonna and Child in eighteenth century English collections see: Martyn 1766 The English Connoisseur; Tessa Murdoch (ed.) Nobel Households. Eighteenth- Century Inventories of Great English Houses. Cambridge: John Adamson, 2006. 344 Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household. Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 144 the factory, demonstrating some confidence that a market for such an object existed, it is quite possible that the extant examples of the Pietà may, by contrast, represent individual private commissions. The distinctive appearance of each example of the Pietà group reinforces this idea; the Madonna and Child groups present a much greater overall impression of uniformity (Fig.78).

If the Pietà groups were the products of individual commissions then the role of the patron in determining the final appearance of the work must be considered. Whilst we know that at least one of the Pietà groups was owned by a Catholic collector in the eighteenth-century – the Melbourne example – we unfortunately do not currently have any direct archival evidence to support the role of Hugh, 4th Lord Clifford as commissioning patron of the work. Nevertheless, the distinctive decorative treatments of all three extant Pietà groups, especially the decoration of the pedestals of the two Gold Anchor examples, may well represent the individual choices of such a patron, and as we have observed above, we know of the 4th Lord Clifford being involved in the commissioning of other porcelains.

If the Chelsea Pietà groups do represent individually commissioned works, then the likelihood that all of them – not only the Melbourne example – were produced for Catholic patrons is greatly increased. Whilst we have observed that eighteenth-century English Protestant elites had developed strategies of connoisseurship and display which enabled them to manage the popish devotional associations of much admired Counter-reformation art from the Continent, the actual commissioning of a sculptural work on a highly problematic Counter-reformation subject by a Protestant represents something quite different and, I would suggest, quite unlikely. We have observed in Chapter Three that details of the composition and decoration of the Chelsea Pietà appear to be calculated to heighten the Catholic devotional associations of these objects, even when compared to the Catholic liturgical sculpture by Nicholas Coustou which forms the model‟s ultimate inspiration. The potential benefit to prestige accruing from the ownership of a luxury porcelain figure is unlikely to have outweighed the difficulties for a Protestant 145 represented by the Catholic subject matter of a work created by a relatively minor artist. Catholic, not Protestant, patronage seems most likely.

The Pietà group‟s absence from the public sales of the Chelsea factory‟s productions also raises the question of how multiple commissions of the same model may have come about. If the surviving examples of the Pietà were the results of private commissions and not of speculative factory production, it does suggest that the commissioning parties subsequent to the first may have been familiar with this particular model, possibly having already seen one of the earlier commissioned examples. If this model was not to be seen at the normal public sales, this further suggests that the commissioning patron may have been familiar with other examples of the object in the context of the private residences of previous purchasers. This begins to become suggestive of a relatively small, close-knit social circle – indeed, something like the circles of the Recusant elites in mid-eighteenth century England.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have argued that in the eighteenth century, far from being an isolated and provincial group in cultural decline, many Recusant gentry families were fully engaged in the elite culture of their day. This included the assembling of art collections, undertaking grand building projects and the commissioning of works of art, just as their Protestant peers did. By and large, these activities were undertaken in a manner that expressed these families‟ distinctive English Catholic identities. Sometimes this distinctiveness found expression through the seeking out and commissioning of prestigious Catholic artists, as was the case with the Throckmorton family portraits by Largillière, an artist associated with the French and Stuart courts. On other occasions, such as Adam‟s rebuilding of Ugbrooke in the castle style, or the assembling by a number of families of collections of medieval manuscripts, Catholic identity was expressed through the evocation of a romanticised, unfractured medieval Christendom. It should be of little surprise to us then that a Catholic patron might acquire a fashionable, luxury porcelain sculpture 146 from the pre-eminent English porcelain factory of the day – as did Hugh, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh when he acquired the Melbourne Pietà. Nor should we be surprised that that sculpture should take the form of a Catholic devotional work – no more distinctively Catholic subject matter could be imagined. We have also argued that the other extant examples of the Chelsea Pietà more than likely represent a similar phenomenon – that is, they probably represent commissions by Catholic patrons. Whilst there clearly existed a broad spectrum of attitudes to Counter-reformation imagery in eighteenth-century England, too many factors conspire to make these objects unlikely candidates for Protestant ownership. Although cognisant of the problems of accidence of survival, the very small number of these sculptures known – especially compared to the less problematic Madonna and Child – already suggests an extremely restricted audience for this powerful image of Counter-reformation piety. That this audience came from amongst England‟s cultured, Catholic elite seems almost certain.

147

148

CONCLUSION

This study began with the questions raised by a number of writers concerning the place of porcelain sculptures employing Counter-reformation imagery in the production of the Chelsea porcelain factory in mid-eighteenth century England. A concern expressed by some authors was with the congruity of a manufactory with Huguenot connections producing porcelain images replete with Catholic associations. We have seen that, contrary to frequent assumptions, there is little concrete evidence to justify the characterisation of the Chelsea factory as a „Protestant‟ enterprise. Indeed, it has been argued here that sufficient evidence exists to suggest that the chief artists at Chelsea in the 1750s and 60s represented people from a range of confessional backgrounds. Even Nicholas Sprimont, the factory‟s proprietor, cannot conclusively be shown to be a Protestant. What the senior staff of Sprimont‟s factory do seem to have had in common is their Franco-Flemish backgrounds and their possession of skills essential to the success of a luxury porcelain manufactory. Even if the factory could be shown to have been managed largely by Protestant personnel, this does not of itself preclude the production of a figure like the Willems‟ Pietà. There are numerous examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of Protestant artists and craftsmen working for Catholic patrons, both in England and elsewhere in Europe.

The concerns, then, over Chelsea‟s role in the production of objects employing Counter-reformation imagery can be seen to be a product of caricatures about Protestant-Catholic relationships in eighteenth-century England. These caricatures also apply to the way possible reception of such objects has been construed. By the eighteenth century, Protestant English elites had in fact developed strategies to manage the meaning of Counter- reformation art, allowing them to collect this material and so engage in the pan-European cultural world of which it was such a significant component and of which English elites wished to be counted a part. Indeed, religious imagery had never entirely vanished from England in the wake of the Reformation; context of display and management of viewing played an important role in 149 controlling the meaning of such images. Nevertheless, certain images were always problematic, especially when such images assumed sculptural form. Depictions of extra-biblical subjects and subjects which explicitly depended upon Counter-reformation doctrinal positions do appear in Protestant painting collections, but examples of sculpture on such subjects are virtually unknown.

The Chelsea Pietà falls into this latter class of image. A detailed iconographic analysis of the extant Willems‟ Pietà groups reveals the complexity of this work as a visual and symbolic composition. A fundamental of art historical investigation, such iconographic analysis is an innovative undertaking in relation to porcelain figures and is motivated by the conviction that eighteenth- century porcelain models deserve to be taken seriously as sculptural works. Joseph Willems was clearly an artist with aspirations to be considered more than just a modeller of decorative trifles. His Pietà shows him to be engaged in sophisticated dialogue with various examples of Franco-Flemish Baroque devotional imagery by masters of the past. Although the Notre Dame Pietà of Nicolas Coustou is Willems‟ primary inspiration, Willems porcelain group is a skilled reimagining of his model that transforms Coustou‟s monumental, hieratic, liturgical sculpture into a powerful, affective Catholic devotional image.

The decoration of the Pietà groups serves, each in its own distinctive fashion, to enhance the devotional associations of the individual sculpture. Such decorative schemes were probably not carried out under Willems‟ immediate direction but, nevertheless, were clearly the product of a coordinated workshop environment where model and decorative treatment were integrated towards the goal of achieving an image encouraging Catholic devotional contemplation. The role of individual patrons was presumably significant in determining the particulars of iconographic embellishments, especially in the case of the Gold Anchor period examples. Such patrons we have suggested were almost certainly Catholic, more specifically members of the English recusant elite, as ownership of the Melbourne Pietà by the fourth Lord Clifford of Chudleigh suggests. But the possibility of individual patronage also invites us to reconsider blanket characterisations of porcelain figures as relatively 150 anonymous, reproductive objects intended to fulfil purely decorative roles. The Willems Pietà does not appear to have been a regular, speculative production of the Chelsea factory. The implication is that these works were the results of commission. The presence of a patron implies a process of dialogue to determine the final appearance – and symbolic content – of an individual figure. The three extant examples of the Chelsea Pietà are all different, each representing a unique constellation of Counter-reformation devotional iconography. The Chelsea Pietà groups thus provide evidence for a continuing fragile alliance between porcelain and sculpture in mid- eighteenth-century England. Porcelain is revealed as a medium deemed suitable for the commissioning of unique artworks intended for a purpose that was anything but ornamental or frivolous.

As was indicated in the introduction, the Chelsea Pietà, although it is undoubtedly the most important, is only one of a small number of porcelain sculptures of religious subjects produced in eighteenth-century England. The various subjects represented – the Holy Family, the Crucifixion, the Mater Dolorosa, St Francis, amongst others – differ in their degree of specifically Catholic associations and would have presented a range of levels of difficulty for different Protestant audiences. Each of these figures might be made the object of detailed investigation as we have done for the Pietà. The small numbers of surviving examples of all of these figures suggests, however, that the audience for them was only ever small. Nevertheless, an audience clearly existed and the present study has argued that that audience is to be sought amongst members of the English recusant elite. It is clear that many eighteenth-century English Catholic gentry families were active participants in the elite culture of their day. Like their Protestant peers, they assembled art collections, they engaged in grand building projects and they patronised leading artists of the day. All of these activities provided opportunities for the accrual of prestige denied them by their exclusion from the political life of the nation. Many of these activities were also pursued in a manner that manifested their unique English Catholic identity. The commissioning of a fashionable luxury porcelain sculpture on a Catholic devotional subject is an example of just this. 151

This study has detailed one instance of English Catholic art patronage in the eighteenth century. The prospect of future research in recusant family archives to profile further the role of English Catholic elites as art collectors and patrons is an exciting one.

152

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Abbreviations TECC Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle

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------

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