ISSN 1753-9854 SPRING 2004
Sir Anthony
van Dyck's Portraits of Sir William and Lady Killigrew, 1638
KAREN HEARN
| ‘I ... doe desire
nothinge in this world more then to have my Wife live [with] me' Sir William Killigrew 1655 |
Van
Dyck (1599-1641) was one of the most significant painters to work
within the British Isles. In the centuries following his death he had
a far greater influence on portraiture there than any other artist. The
forms of portrait that he introduced during the years that he worked for
the Stuart king Charles I and members of his Court were to be an inspiration
to numerous later artists, including Sir Peter Lely, Thomas Gainsborough,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Richard Parkes Bonington and John Singer Sargent.
Yet until 2002 Tate possessed only a single work by this most influential
of masters, the full-length portrait of an unknown lady thought to be
a member of the Spencer Family, which had been acquired in 1977. Although
delightful, this work was not in tip-top condition.
Tate's
acquisition of the portrait of Sir
William Killigrew came in part through the 'acceptance in lieu'
scheme, under which pre-eminent works of art and important heritage objects
can be transferred into public ownership in payment of inheritance tax.
The story might have ended there, but for the sudden unexpected appearance
in an auction in January 2003 in New York of the companion piece to this
picture, van Dyck's portrait of Sir William's wife, Lady
Mary Killigrew. This picture had been known to be in a private
collection somewhere in the USA, but exactly where had been unclear. Through
an exceptional combination of circumstances, it became possible for Tate
to bid for it, and thus to acquire it, too.
Thus the two portraits by van Dyck, both dated
1638, closely related in size and clearly conceived as a pair, are
re-united at last within the Tate collection. We do not know how
long they have been apart, but at the very least it has been a century
and a half. Certainly by the early nineteenth century, Sir William's
portrait was owned by the Carpenter family, who sold it at auction
in 1853. At the same date, Lady Mary's portrait was almost definitely
with the Grey family, who were Earls of Stamford. During the nineteenth
century, the 7th Earl kept it at the family's house at Enville in
Staffordshire, but research is currently under way to establish
whether it was previously at the family's original residence, Dunham
Massey (now a National Trust property).
Like many other artists, van Dyck painted
a number of matching husband-and-wife portraits, particularly when
he was living and working in Antwerp. One English pair are his early
full-lengths of Sir Robert and Lady Shirley of 1622, thought to
have been painted in Rome (Petworth House). It is thought, however,
that the Killigrews, now at Tate, may be the only example from van
Dyck's English period of a (non-royal) pendant pair in a British
public museum.
Over the previous century, it had not been
unusual for artists in Britain to receive commissions to produce
such paired portraits. Hans Holbein II, who worked for Henry VIII
and his court during the years 1527-9 and 1534-43, painted a number,
including those of Sir Henry and Lady Guildford, 1527 (The Royal
Collection and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri), and Dr William
and Margaret, Lady Butts (Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston).
View in Tate Collection
Tate's
own collection includes the two portraits of the Suffolk landowner Sir
Thomas Kytson and his wife Lady
Kytson for which the smart London painter George
Gower was paid in 1573 (Tate N06090 and N06091). The Kytsons’
portraits may not, in fact, have been designed as a pendant pair for,
in both images, the sitter faces to the viewer's left, whereas it was
customary, in companion portraits, for the sitters to be positioned in
complementary directions. Almost invariably - as in the case of the Killigrews
- the man is placed in the position of higher status, that is, on the
viewer's left, a practice thought to derive from the rules of heraldry.
The Killigrews’ portraits make up a true pair,
he to our left, she to our right, with the outward arm of each curving
gracefully inwards and low, in near mirror-images of one another.
Behind each, in the distance, are beautifully depicted complementary
landscapes. Van Dyck could be an accomplished landscape painter
- as we know from the handful of remarkable watercolour sketches
and drawings in ink that he made of English terrain (including that
around Rye in Sussex) such as the Landscape with Trees and Ships
in the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham. Here he has translated
the freshness of such impressions into paint.
William Killigrew was descended from an old
Cornish family, whose heraldic arms included a double-headed eagle
on a white background (officially described as ‘within a field
Argent, an imperial eagle with two necks, within a bordure Bezante
Sable'). William was baptised on 28 May 1606 in the parish church
of Hanworth, Middlesex, where his parents had a country residence.
He was the eldest of the twelve children of Sir Robert Killigrew
and his wife Mary Woodhouse, nine of whom were to live to adulthood.
Hanworth was conveniently placed for the royal palace of Hampton
Court, and Sir Robert was an ambitious and energetic courtier on
the rise, having been knighted by James I in 1603. He saw to it
that all his children received a good education, and most of his
daughters were to hold significant court positions. Anne (1607-41),
for instance, was to become dresser to Charles I's French queen,
Henrietta-Maria. Her marriage in 1627 to George Kirke, one of Charles’s
gentlemen of the robes, was attended by the monarch himself. Elizabeth
Killigrew (1622-81) on the other hand, a maid-of-honour to Henrietta-Maria,
was to marry the future 1st Viscount Shannon, and in 1652 became
the mistress of Charles II, bearing him a daughter called Charlotte-Jemima-Henrietta-Maria
(a good string of Stuart family names, emphasising the infant's
parentage!).
William's younger brother Thomas (1612-83),
to whom we shall return later, was to become the best known of all
the siblings, as a minor courtier and dramatist and, principally,
as a theatrical manager after 1660. Another brother, Henry (1613-1700),
entered the Church and became chaplain to the Duke of York - the
future king James II - and Master of the Savoy Hospital in London.
William himself may have been educated at
Thomas Farnaby's pioneering school in the City of London, near his
parents’ London residence in Lothbury. Certainly, in July 1623 he
entered St John's College, Oxford as a gentleman-commoner, but did
not stay long, for in April 1624 he was given a pass to travel abroad,
with his cousin Maurice Berkeley and three servants. William thus
set off on the Jacobean version of a ‘Grand Tour', although
his precise itinerary is not known. It is however, probable that
he visited the Netherlands, where his younger brother Charles had
a position as a page to the Prince of Orange and where the Killigrews
had a well-placed friend, the diplomat and scholar, Constantijn
Huyghens.
By May 1626, William was back in England,
where he was knighted by Charles I. And it is likely that at about
this time, or shortly before, he was married - to Mary Hill, daughter
of John Hill of Honiley in Warwickshire. Thus William would have
been aged around twenty at the time of his marriage; Mary's age
at this time is unknown, as her date of birth is not recorded.
Mary and William were to have seven children.
Their eldest son, Robert, was to be knighted at Breda in 1650 by
the exiled Charles II; he spent many years as a soldier in the Netherlands.
Another son, William, also had a military career; Henry died before
his father. The couple's eldest daughter, Mary, was to marry a Dutch
aristocrat, Frederick Nassau de Zuylestein, and to attend Charles
I's daughter Mary, Princess of Orange at the Hague in the Netherlands.
Elizabeth (died 1677) was to marry the future 6th Earl of Lincoln,
and subsequently became a dresser to Charles II's queen, Catherine
of Braganza. The third daughter, Susan (born 1629) married the 2nd
Earl of Barrymore, and was to attend queen Henrietta-Maria in her
Civil War exile. A fourth daughter, Cecilia, was born in 1635, but
lived only two months. So, it is clear that the children of Sir
William and Lady Killigrew continued the family tradition of court
service.
At around the time of his marriage, William
was appointed a Gentleman-Usher of the Privy Chamber to Charles
I. At court, he moved in the circles of those who participated in
the lavish entertainments - called 'masques’ - that mingled drama,
music, dance and rich costumes and elaborate settings within the
ideals of platonic love imported by the French-born Henrietta-Maria.
Although William's own plays were not performed or published until
after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, their format and
sentiments echo those of the court dramas created for Henrietta-Maria
in the late 1620s and 1630s.
In 1628, Sir William was elected Member of
Parliament for both Newport and Penryn in Cornwall - although he
subsequently waived his adoption for the former borough. From 1633
to 1635, he was Governor of Pendennis Castle, a post previously
held by his father, who had died in 1633. He also involved himself
in his father's project of draining fen lands - the Lindsey level
- in Lincolnshire. This project was ultimately to exhaust his economic
resources, and meant that he was to be financially hard-pressed
for much of the rest of his life.
We know nothing of the circumstances in which
the portraits of Sir William and his wife were commissioned or executed.
What we do know is that the two works bear inscriptions - thought
to be contemporary, or nearly contemporary - identifying the sitters,
stating that they were painted by van Dyck and with the date 1638.
Similar inscriptions and the same date are also found on pictures
of other members of the Killigrew family.
These are a half-length portrait of Thomas
Killigrew with a large dog, which survives in various versions
- the prime one now at Weston Park in Shropshire - and a sombre
double portrait of Thomas Killigrew and a gentleman 'not known
certainly' (according to the eighteenth-century observer George
Vertue), surrounded by symbols of mourning (The Royal Collection).
Undated, but clearly from the same period is the beautiful full-length
portrait of the Killigrews’ sister, Anne Kirke in a gold
dress (Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, California), thought
to mark her appointment in 1637 as dresser to Henrietta Maria. Anne
Kirke appears again in a double portrait, with an unknown slightly
older lady, also by van Dyck and dated 1638 (Hermitage, St Petersburg).
The year 1638 was a significant one for the
family, for on 1st January they suffered the loss of Cecelia Crofts,
the wife of Thomas Killigrew. Only a month later Cecelia's sister
Anne Crofts also died. It seems certain that the elegiac quality
of the male double portrait in the Royal Collection directly relates
to this tragic event. It may also explain the pensive presentation
of William in his own portrait. The viewer's attention is drawn
to a ring, tied by a ribbon to the centre of his costly black satin
jacket. Such rings are often seen in earlier portraits, and are
thought to be in allusion to - or in memory of - a loved one.
Meanwhile, the political situation in England
was deteriorating. With the outbreak of Civil War, the royalist
William became captain of one of the two troops of horse guarding
the person of Charles I, whom he accompanied to Oxford, after London
was claimed by the Parliamentarians. Indeed, William seems to have
treasured a letter written to him by the king in Oxford in January
1643, signed 'Your assured frend / Charles R.' After a riot in Lincolnshire
in 1641, William was never able to regain his property in that county.
Having paid the fines levied on royalists by
the winning Parliamentarians, he and his family found themselves
in even worse financial straits. As he wrote in 1655, 'my wants
do drive me live wherever I am welcome' and the republican general
John Lambert gave him shelter from his creditors on the former crown
property at Nonsuch, in Surrey. Poverty, it seems, necessitated
Sir William and his wife living apart. In another letter, he wrote
that the loss of his estate '... doth force me from the comforts
of livinge with my Wife and Children, we being compelled to begge
our bread in severall Countryes ... and this lookes as if my Wife
and I were parted through discontent, though all our frends doe
knowe that in thirty yeares beinge Maried we have never had one
discontent or anger between us, ... I ... doe desire nothinge in
this world more then to have my Wife live [with] me' (British Library,
Add. MSS. 21,423, fol. 193). This may indicate that Lady Mary was,
like many royalists – and not least, the surviving members
of the Royal Family itself - in exile on the Continent. It is possible
that the fine van Dyck portraits of Sir William and his wife could
have been distrained or sold at this difficult time.
With the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy
in Britain in 1660, Sir William's situation - although not his finances
- improved considerably. He was re-appointed to his court post as
Gentleman-Usher of the Privy Chamber and took up lodging in the
palace at Whitehall. A plan of the palace from 1668 shows that he
had an apartment near the river front close to those of the queen,
Catherine of Braganza, whose Vice-Chamberlain he became. His wife,
meanwhile, became dresser to their old patroness, the Queen-Dowager,
Henrietta-Maria. He continued to pursue his interest in fenland
drainage, but between 1662 and 1666 also concentrated on writing
a number of tragi-comedies, in a by-now rather old-fashioned idiom,
resonant of the themes and preoccupations of Charles I's court.
No doubt they would have appealed particularly to Henrietta-Maria.
These plays are: Selindra, a chivalric adventure, staged
by William's brother Thomas at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in
March 1662; Pandora or the Converts, a drama of matrimonial
debate that was originally designed as a tragedy but reworked as
a comedy and staged in around 1662; Ormasdes or Love and Friendship,
written almost entirely in couplets, and printed in 1664; The
Siege of Urbin, often considered his best work and written
in circa 1665; and his least satisfactory play - actually a translation
of a twenty-year-old Latin text - The Imperial Tragedy,
published in 1669. Not all of them appear to have been performed
on stage.
In 1660-1, as a mark of favour, Henrietta-Maria
had granted William's wife Mary a lease on an extensive marsh in
Lincolnshire. We do not know, however, how long the elderly re-united
couple had together before Lady Mary died. It is certain that during
the 1680s William continued to have money problems. By July 1693
he was reduced to lodging with his brother Henry, in his residence
attached to Westminster Abbey. Towards the end of his life William
published collections of his own writings on religious and moral
themes. The 1694 dedication at the front of his Mid-night and
Daily Thoughts. In Prose and Verse begins, ' I Live so much
alone, that I have not found a Friend to whom I could communicate
this new Bundle of my ... Thoughts’ which suggests that he was now
a widower. Certainly Lady Mary is not mentioned in William's will,
which is dated 3 October 1695 (Public Record Office, PROB 11/427
s. 152). His principal bequest - 2,000 acres of fen-land - went
to his sons Robert and William. Very soon after - the precise date
is not known - he died. On 17 October 1695 he was buried at the
Savoy Chapel in London.
The painter of these two portraits, Sir Anthony
van Dyck, was born and trained in Antwerp, in present-day Belgium.
After Sir Peter Paul Rubens, from whom he received some of his training,
he was the leading Flemish painter of the seventeenth century. Van
Dyck spent a few months in London between October 1620 and March
1621, before setting off for Italy, where he worked for some years,
particularly in Genoa and Palermo. He also travelled to Venice and
other cities where he was able to study the works of current and
past artists in depth. He returned to Antwerp in 1627, and by the
spring of 1632 had arrived in London to be immediately employed
by king Charles I, who knighted him on 5 July 1632. Van Dyck lived
and worked at Blackfriars in London, in a property on the river
Thames. His portraits of Charles and members of his family re-defined
the image of the British monarchy. In late 1633 or early 1634 he
went back to Flanders, but was back in England in spring 1635, where
he produced some of his finest portraits. Van Dyck also collected
art, and is known to have owned works by Titian. In March 1638,
the year inscribed on the Killigrew portraits, van Dyck was granted
denization - a form of naturalisation which gave him certain citizenship
rights in Britain. Towards the end of his life, he suffered considerable
ill health, perhaps compounded by overwork, and died in London in
December 1641, eight days after the birth of a daughter to his wife
Mary Ruthven, a Scottish noblewoman.
Sir Oliver Millar has described the characteristics
of van Dyck's English portraits as’lustrous colour, nervous draftsmanship,
linear rhythms, consummate elegance, the sense of strain or melancholy,
and a nervous tension' - qualities that the paired portraits of
Sir William and Lady Killigrew demonstrate in abundance.
The prolific van Dyck seems to have worked rapidly, organising his
professional day in order to work on as many portraits as possible.
Eberhard Jabach, a Paris-based collector who knew the artist in
London, and sat to him three times, described the experience thus:
‘Van Dyck told people what day and hour to arrive for a sitting,
and he never worked more than one hour at a time on each portrait,
whether it be to sketch or finish ... After making the next appointment
for his client, van Dyck's servant would clean his brushes, present
the artist with another palette, and he would paint the next sitter
for an hour.'
Van
Dyck shows Sir William, who is attired in black, in a spirit of
contemplative melancholy. This had become a fashionable mode of
self-presentation, signifying not so much depression as intellectual
seriousness. It was appropriate for a courtier who, as we know,
had already written some poetry and was later to produce a number
of plays - and, later still, to publish volumes of moral and religious
reflections. Both the composition and the setting reveal van Dyck's
own study of Italian painters, notably Titian, who had frequently
included a column in the background of his male portraits to convey
the status and worth of the sitter. He probably first used it in
the three-quarter-length portrait of Giacomo Doria, dressed
in black satin circa 1533-5 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
Lady Mary, on the other hand, gazes out at
the viewer directly. By the late 1630s, van Dyck seems to have devised
for his female portraits a less specifically fashionable form of
dress. Clearly the prestige of being painted by him was such that
his sitters were prepared to accept this. Lady Mary is shown in
just such a gown - simplified, and minus the kind of richly textured
lace that was so time-consuming to paint - and which thus becomes
a 'timeless’ version of contemporary dress. The border of her shift
appears just above the edge of her deep red gown, both pulled low
to reveal a luscious expanse of creamy breast. Again van Dyck has
absorbed ideas from the Venetian painters: Titian's Flora,
circa 1515-20 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), is a comparable image
of a beautiful woman, perhaps in the role of Venus, golden hair
trailing across her cheek, cream shift barely covering her breast
and exposed shoulder, and roses held in one hand. Furthermore, Lady
Mary's position behind a stone parapet is also paralleled in such
works by Titian as his Man with a Quilted Sleeve, circa 1510
or his’La Schiavona' (the Dalmatian woman), circa 1510-12
(both National Gallery, London).
Van Dyck not only re-used motifs that he inherited
from other portraitists but he also introduced new settings for
his sitters. His most innovative ones, which first appear around
1630, were stark natural elements in the form of caves, boulders
and cliffs, of the kind we see behind Lady Mary. In the emblem books
of the period, bare rocks symbolised constancy.
Until recently, the blonde Lady Mary's portrait
has sometimes been mis-identified as an image of her recently deceased
sister-in-law, Cecelia Crofts. It is clear, however, from other
sources that Cecelia was dark-haired and dark-eyed.
No other portrait of Sir William by van Dyck
is known (though there is a later copy of the present work at the
Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, USA). Mary herself was portrayed
again by him, this time with her face in semi-profile, seated in
a double friendship portrait alongside a lady traditionally but
probably wrongly identified as Anne Villiers, Countess of Morton,
later Lady Dalkeith (died 1654). The prime version of this is at
Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire and another is at Wilton House, Wiltshire.
Anne Villiers herself was painted by van Dyck in a solo half-length.
Although this is now lost, we know what it looked like, both from
painted copies and from the seventeenth-century engraving made after
it by Pierre Lombart (National Portrait Gallery archive collection).
Intriguingly, these show the brunette Anne Villiers at half-length,
standing behind a parapet, her left hand resting by a pair of roses
- a very similar composition to the present image of Lady Killigrew.
As Sir Oliver Millar has pointed out, van Dyck seldom used the same
posture for more than one sitter. Anne Villiers is, however, shown
more conventionally dressed than Mary, a fur stole over one shoulder,
and the print has her in front of a plain stone wall and a wholly
different landscape. Which of the two ladies did van Dyck paint
first? And did the other so admire her friend's image that she insisted
on being portrayed in very similar style?
As
the seventeenth-century painter and writer Bellori asserted, in
his biographical notes on van Dyck published in 1672,' he had deservedly
acquired the greatest name that any portraitist had merited since
Titian. And in truth, besides capturing a likeness, he gave the
heads a certain nobility and conferred grace on their actions’ -
a verdict with which we can wholly agree, as we admire the reunited
portraits of Sir William and Lady Mary Killigrew.
Acknowledgements
The author would like particularly to thank Mrs Jacqui Beecroft, sponsor of this Patrons’ Paper. Much gratitude is also owed to the Acquisitions Committee of the Patrons of British Art 2001-3 (James Curtis, Christopher Gridley, Lady Amabel Lindsay, Ernle Money CBE, Andrew Withey, and the PBA chairman, Sir William Proby); Tanya Barson; Emilie Gordenker; Robert Holden and his colleagues; David Jaffé; Alastair Laing; Gerry McQuillan and Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA); Sir Oliver Millar GCVO; Christopher Ondaatje; the National Art Collections Fund; Dr Malcolm Rogers; and Tate Members.
This article was published in abridged form as the sixth in the series British Art in Focus: Patrons’ Papers, Tate, London, 2003.
Karen Hearn is a Curator in the Curatorial Department of Tate Collection.
Tate Papers Spring 2004 © Tate
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