BY RICHARD GREEN
ONE OF THE best-known
and most attractive works in the extensive collection of drawings by Paul
Sandby in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, apart from topographical views
of the Castle and Windsor Great Park, is the watercolour hitherto titled A lady painting (Fig.2).1 Exactly how
and when this entered the library is not certain, but it is first recorded in a
group of Sandby drawings lent from Windsor to the Royal Academy’s great
exhibition of British art in 1934.2 Since then it has regularly featured in the
Sandby literature and in exhibitions, most recently being included in the
monographic show held in 2009–10.3 While the watercolour has generally been
dated to the 1760s on the basis of comparison with other works by the artist
and of costume, the sitter has remained unidentified. Closely related is a drawing
by Sandby in red and black chalk of exactly the same size at the Yale Center
for British Art, New Haven (Fig.1).4 This depicts the same young woman in a
similar setting, although from a viewpoint further to the left, working at the
same table but, rather than painting, using a porte-crayon to copy a print or
drawing of a head mounted in front of her, perhaps on a vertical flap
projecting from her angled worktop. This drawing has also been dated to the 1760s,
but again no attempt has been made to identify the sitter.5 And if, as seems
likely, both the Windsor watercolour and the New Haven drawing remained in the
artist’s possession until his death, we cannot hope for early provenance clues
to guide us to her identity.6 Although there are critical, even conflicting, differences
between these two works – which will be addressed below – they will initially
be scrutinised in tandem.
An important but little documented aspect of Sandby’s career
was his activity as a drawing master. Probably instructing the sons of George
III,7 and certainly members of the Greville, Harcourt, Williams Wynn and other
noble or landed families, he clearly operated at the top end of this particular
market. In the two closely related works under discussion there can be little
doubt that Sandby has recorded one of his pupils – the young daughter of a wealthy
family. The scale of the window behind her suggests a room of generous
proportions. She sits at an ingenious painting table with sliding trays,
containing shells of colours, which can be pulled out for work in watercolours
or left partly closed for drawing; a palette for mixing colours attached to one
of the front legs may be swivelled in or out according to the activity.
Probably, with the trays fully closed and the adjustable top laid flat, this
piece of furniture functioned as a card table or something similar. All of this
confirms that the young pupil is on home territory, rather than in Sandby’s
studio. More clearly in the watercolour than in the chalk drawing, we see that
the lower sash of the window behind her (which would have been subdivided by
glazing bars holding small panes) has been fully raised. While, incidentally,
indicating that the time of year is summer, as does the lightweight character of
the sitter’s clothing and her bergère hat,
the open window offers a valuable clue to the location of the room. The view we
glimpse through it – in the watercolour – was first identified by the present
writer in 2009.8 In 1947 Paul Oppé described this as being ‘over a river to
houses’, while more recent commentators have seen the latter as ‘warehouse-type
buildings’ or ‘a castle’.9 In fact the Palace, with Archbishop Morton’s
gatehouse seen sideways on, the lantern on the roof of the great hall to the
left of it and the turreted tower of St Mary’s (the former parish church of
Lambeth, now the Garden Museum) to the right. Although these medieval buildings
are partly obscured by trees today, their distinctive configuration remains
unchanged (Figs.3 and 4).
The most likely candidate for consideration as a sizeable
house on the river bank almost opposite Lambeth Palace where Paul Sandby might
have been employed in the 1760s to instruct the daughter or daughters of a
wealthy family is the old Grosvenor House.10 Formerly known as Peterborough
House, it appears as Belgrave House on Richard Horwood’s London map of 1792–99 at
the very end of Millbank Row, a continuation of Millbank Street, and marked the
then southern extremity of the city. Of seventeenth-century origin, but
extensively remodelled in the early 1730s, it had passed from Alexander Davies
into the Grosvenor family through the marriage of his daughter Mary in 1677, at
the age of twelve, to Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet. A substantial
red-brick house of two main storeys, it was set back from the river by a garden
and was skirted by a public pathway. It stood until 1809 when it was
demolished, having been vacated by the Grosvenors, presumably in the light of
proposals for the building of what was eventually to be the Millbank
Penitentiary on land to the south. A painting by Daniel Turner, probably dating
from just before its demolition, strikingly illustrates the relationship of
Grosvenor House, seen obliquely on its extreme left, to Lambeth Palace in the
distance, on the right (Fig.5). A less oblique view of the house, in
watercolour, by George Shepherd is dated 1809 (Fig.6), while fully frontal
views are provided by an unattributed watercolour perhaps of c.1810 (London
Metropolitan Archives) and an etching by Thomas Dale after Thomas Hosmer Shepherd,
dated 1821. All three of these corroborate the evidence of Turner’s painting,
presenting the house’s river façade in more detail, including its balcony at
first-floor level with iron railings. Curiously, however, in the Shepherd
watercolour alone the firstfloor windows do not reach down to the level of the
balcony to allow easy access to it, although they do fall below the top of the
railings. There seems to be a correspondence in this with the window in the New
Haven drawing, but not that in the Windsor watercolour, although in the latter
Sandby has taken pains to record the red brickwork to the left of the opening.
The old Grosvenor House was the principal London residence of
the Grosvenor family from 1719 to 1755. Thereafter, however, it was leased to
John Delaval (1728–1808) of the famous Northumberland land-owning family which
had seats in that county at Ford and Seaton Delaval, as well as at Doddington
in Lincolnshire, and had acquired new wealth from coal-mining, salt-production
and bottle-making in Seaton Delaval and nearby Hartley.11While taking the lead
in developing these industries, Delaval was elected Member of Parliament for
Berwick from 1754 to 1761, from 1765 to 1768 and again from 1780 to 1786, and
Grosvenor House would have been extremely convenient for the Palace of
Westminster.12 He adopted the middle name Hussey in 1759 on succeeding to the Doddington
estate, was created a baronet in 1761 and elevated to the peerage as Baron Delaval
in 1783.13 Robert Wilkinson recorded in or around 1819 that after 1755
Grosvenor House was ‘inhabited by Lord Delaval and Mr. Symmons’.14 Joshua
Reynolds, in his pocketbooks, noted Sir John Hussey Delaval’s address in the week
beginning 2nd April 1764 as Grosvenor House, Millbank;15 while the Delaval
papers held at the Northumberland Archives include a visitors’ book for
Grosvenor House kept by Lady Hussey Delaval in 1769 and letters written by her
daughters Sophia Ann and Elizabeth from that address in 1770 and 1771.16
If we accept that the setting of Sandby’s watercolour and
chalk drawing is a room in the old Grosvenor House during the years it was
leased to John Delaval, it follows that the sitter who appears in both is
almost certainly one of his five daughters, all by his first wife, the widowed
Susanna Potter, née Robinson, whom he had married in 1750 – namely, Rhoda
(1751–70), Sophia Ann (1755–93), Elizabeth (1757–85), Frances (1759–1839) and
Sarah Hussey (1763–1800). In determining which, it is necessary to consider the
evidence of the sitter’s costume, datable to around 1760. A vital clue is
provided in the watercolour by the leading strings falling from the top of the
sitter’s dress down her back, as recently noted by Aileen Ribeiro.17 Leading
strings were narrow strips of fabric with the practical purpose of supporting
or restraining a child learning to walk but ‘were retained in female dress
until about the mid-teens’ as a decorative conceit. Of the five Delaval daughters
the only one who can be reasonably matched both with these determinants and
with the apparent age of the subject is Rhoda – if we assume she was portrayed
by Sandby in around 1763 or 1764, when she would have been twelve or thirteen
years old. Although the leading strings do not appear in the New Haven drawing,
Ribeiro comments that ‘the back of the dress has a reinforced bodice, possibly
to help with either a slight deformity or [. . .] deportment’.18 There is no
evidence that Rhoda was deformed, but an aid to deportment would not seem
inapprop riate for a young woman of twelve or thirteen at that time.
Rhoda, John Delaval’s first daughter, was born on 18th Feb -
ruary 1751 at Seaton Delaval and died, aged only nineteen and probably of
consumption, on 7th August 1770 at Doddington, where she was buried in the
churchyard. Very little evidence of her brief life survives, apart from a
handful of letters among the Delaval papers in the Northumberland Archives.
This includes dutiful missives in an elegant hand addressed to her parents. One
of them written in French (at the age of eight) to her mother and correspondence
in Italian with her tutor at the British Museum demonstrate proficiency in
foreign languages.19 Rhoda was the third member of the family to bear this
first name. Her paternal grandmother was Rhoda Apreece, who had brought
Doddington Hall into the family through her marriage to Captain Francis Blake Delaval.
Their eldest daughter (John’s sister) was the second Rhoda, who married Edward
Astley and was an amateur artist of considerable standing, having taken lessons
from Arthur Pond, starting in 1744.20 Her artistic practice will undoubtedly
have set an example for her nieces, including the third Rhoda. Moreover, it is
perhaps not too far-fetched to speculate that the painting table seen in the
two Sandbys under discussion passed from her to these nieces on her untimely
death probably following childbirth in 1757. While it was common practice for
members of wealthy families in the eighteenth century to be instructed in the
polite art of drawing by teachers such as Sandby, Rhoda Astley exemplifies a
particularly strong tradition of artistic activity in the Delaval family. Her
younger brother George was actually apprenticed to train under Pond, for £300,
in 1754,21 while her younger sister Anne Hussey Delaval, later Lady Stanhope,
was portrayed full-length by Reynolds in 1763–64 (Baltimore Museum of Art),
holding a porte-crayon and surrounded by other accoutrements of an artist.22
In order to conclude the argument we need to return to the discrepancies
between the Windsor watercolour and the New Haven drawing, which have thus far
become apparent, hoping to find a way of reconciling them. The major difference
concerns the background. In the chalk drawing, the window opening falls considerably
lower than in the watercolour – not fully to the floor, but nevertheless
indicating that it probably gave access to a balcony, thus locating the scene
on the first floor (or at least an upper floor) of the house and tying in with
George Shepherd’s view. By contrast, the window in Sandby’s watercolour could
not possibly give access to a balcony, its lower edge being more or less at
waist height. Perhaps the scene has been moved to a downstairs room. A more sustainable
hypothesis, however, taking into account other differences, is that in the
watercolour Sandby has created an enhanced and more considered version of the
chalk drawing, involving a degree of invention. The painting table has been
refined, for example, by making the legs more slender, and the implied stool of
the sitter, concealed by her skirt, converted to a chair. Her costume has been
elaborated not only by the leading strings referred to above but also by a
generous frill to the apron, thus promoting the latter from a protective
garment to something both practical and decorative. The room has been furnished
with a rug and a somewhat notional checked curtain (suspiciously like those,
and chair covers of the same fabric, which appear in Sandby’s drawings of
subjects set in the artist’s own house).23 Not least, the watercolour has been finished
by including the view across the river to Lambeth Palace – to allow for which
Sandby needed to eliminate any balcony railings which might have impeded the
prospect – and the normalised window provides an effective frame for this. The
glimpse of Lambeth Palace is slightly less oblique than a viewpoint at
Grosvenor House might have afforded, but this view could well have been taken, independently,
from a position more directly opposite – for the sake of clarity – or indeed
from an existing print or drawing. The corollary of this hypothesis is that the
New Haven drawing was Sandby’s initial,
ad vivum response to the subject, whereas the Windsor watercolour was an
elaborated version intended for sale or presentation to his presumed patron,
the sitter’s father.
For several reasons, the argument offered here cannot be absolutely
conclusive. There is no reference to any of the Delavals in the literature on
the artist, while there seems to be nothing in the Delaval papers in the
Northumberland Archives documenting payments to Paul Sandby. Moreover, despite
the undeniable resemblance of Sandby’s subject to members of the Delaval
family, there is no certain portrait of Rhoda Delaval with which the two works
under discussion might be compared.24 Because of her early death in 1770 she
narrowly missed featuring in the series of full-lengths that Sir John
commissioned of himself and his family from the Newcastle upon Tyne artist William
Bell from 1770 onwards, remaining at Seaton Delaval.25 Nevertheless, it is
hoped that the facts of the matter, as presented here, will be persuasive. The
name of Delaval would be a significant addition to the existing, very short
list of known patrons of Paul Sandby as a drawing master.
I am indebted to James Birch for information about pictures
at Doddington Hall, to Hugh Dixon for insightful comments based on his
extensive knowledge of the Delavals, and to Aileen Ribeiro, whose advice on
costume has been crucial to my argument. Grateful thanks are offered to them,
and for help received from Michelle Goodman, Julie Hawthorn, Paul Lewis, Kate
Phillips and Jane Roberts, and to the staff of the Northumberland Archives.
1 Also called A young
lady painting; RL14377; see A.P. Oppé: The
Drawings of Paul and Thomas Sandby in the Collection of His Majesty the King at
Windsor Castle, Oxford and London 1947, p.65, no.259.
2 [W.G. Constable and C. Johnson, eds.]: Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of
British Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London, January–March 1934, London
1935, p.150, no.601, as A lady painting a
miniature.
3 See J. Bonehill and S. Daniels, eds.: exh. cat. Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, Nottingham
(Castle Museum and Art Gallery) and elsewhere 2009–10, p.172, no.66, as A lady drawing.
4 B1975.4.1881. The
meaning of the letter ‘F’ inscribed on this drawing (lower right) and on others
by Paul Sandby is not known.
5 Sandby’s chalk drawing has been included in several
exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art since 1977. See for example [B.
Robertson]: exh. cat. The Art of Paul
Sandby, New Haven (Yale Center for British Art) 1985, p.53, no.69.
6 For the provenance of the Sandby drawings in the Royal
Library, see Oppé, op. cit. (note 1),
pp.1–4; and J. Roberts: exh. cat. Views
of Windsor: Watercolours by Thomas and Paul Sandby from the Collection of Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) and elsewhere 1995–97,
pp.136–38. Only a minute proportion of the Sandby drawings at Windsor can be
connected with royal commissions from the artist and none was commissioned by
George III, so there is no reason to believe that the work under discussion
depicts a member of the royal family. Most of the Windsor figure studies came
from the posthumous Paul Sandby sales – either direct, as in the case of the
Prince Regent’s purchases from that of 1811, or indirectly. The New Haven
drawing was sold from the collection of drawings by Paul and Thomas Sandby ‘formed
by William Sandby’ (great-grandson of Paul’s brother Thomas), and left by him
to his cousin G.T.A. Peake, father of Hubert Peake, the vendor, Christie’s, London
(in the first of two sales), 24th March 1959 (lot 113), bought by Agnew’s, London,
from whom purchased by Paul Mellon in 1960. Many of the drawings had passed to
William Sandby by family descent, but others came from various sources.
7 Anon.: ‘Paul Sandby’, Arnold’s
Magazine of the Fine Arts 1 (1833), p.434; see also K. Sloan: exh. cat. ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600–1800, London (British
Museum) 2000, p.140.
8 See R. Green: review of Paul Sandby exhibition, THE
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 151 (2009), p.790.
9 Respectively, Oppé, op.
cit. (note 1), p.65; Sloan, op. cit.
(note 7), p.232; and G. Waterfield: ‘The scenic route’, RA Magazine 106 (Spring 2010), p.51.
10 For old Grosvenor House, see F.H.W. Sheppard, ed.: Survey of London, XXXIX (The Grosvenor
Estate in Mayfair, Part 1 [General History]), London 1977, pp.3, 4, 7, 21, 36
(note) and 43; and XL (The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 [The Buildings]),
London 1980, pp.240 and 242.
11 For the Delavals, see F. Askham (pseudonym of J.E.C.
Greenwood): The Gay Delavals, London
1955; and M. Green: The Delavals: A Family History, 2nd ed., Newcastle upon
Tyne 2010.
12 John’s younger brother Edward Delaval (1729–1814), a natural
philosopher, had a very oblique view of Lambeth Palace, looking upstream, from
the riverside terrace of his ‘neat Gothic house in Parliament Place’,
immediately adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. This is recorded in an
unattributed painting of c.1810 at Doddington Hall.
13 In the Irish peerage; a barony in the peerage of Great
Britain followed in 1786.
14 R.Wilkinson: Londina
Illustrata, I, London 1819, p.171. If Delaval and Symmons occupied the
house concurrently, then the latter was presumably John Symmons of Lanstinan,
Pembrokeshire, Member of Parliament for Cardiganshire from 1746 to 1761. In any
case, it would seem to be his elder son, also John Symmons, who wrote to his
mother from Grosvenor House on 14th November 1785; see F. Jones: ‘Some Slebech
Notes’, National Library of Wales Journal
7, part 3 (Summer 1952), p.203.
15 D. Mannings and M. Postle: Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New
Haven and London 2000, I, p.165, under no.503.
16 Ashington, Northumberland Archives, 2/DE/43/13 (the
visitors’ book, unlocated at the time of writing); 2/DE/39/3/2–7 and 13; and
2/DE/39/6/1–4. The 1st Earl of Grosvenor bought back the lease on Grosvenor
House in 1789, by which time the then Lord Delaval’s London home was in
Portland Place.
17 Private communication with the author, 30th August 2011.
18 Ditto, 1st September 2011.
19 Ashington, Northumberland Archives, 2/DE/39/3/1; and NRO
429/18/20–25.
20 L. Lippincott: ‘Arthur Pond’s Journal of Receipts and
Expenses, 1734–1750’, Walpole Society
54 (1988), pp.260 ff.
21 Idem: Selling Art
in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond, New Haven and London 1983,
pp.42 and 96.
22 Mannings and Postle, op.
cit. (note 15), I, pp.430–31, no.1689; and II, pl.759.
23 Oppé, op. cit.
(note 1), pls.123, 124 and 129; and E.H. Ramsden: ‘The Sandby Brothers in
London’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 89 (1947), p.19, pl.A.
24 The closest contender is an unattributed half-length
portrait of a girl at Doddington Hall. Although she holds a rose, or roses,
which may allude to the name Rhoda, there is no certainty about the identity of
the sitter.
25 William Bell, who probably taught Sir John’s children
drawing when they were in Northumberland, exhibited two views of Seaton Delaval
at the Royal Academy in 1775, giving his address as ‘At Sir John Delaval’s’,
presumably Grosvenor House.