- Artist
- James Northcote 1746–1831
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 1105 × 864 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented in memory of Frank Lloyd by his daughter Mrs Garwood 1927
- Reference
- N04376
Summary
A Young Lady Playing the Harp ?exhibited 1814 is an oil painting by the English artist and author James Northcote. It depicts a young harpist wearing a white dress tied with a long green sash, with a string of red beads around her neck. The harpist gazes forward, both hands raised to pluck the strings. She is seated against a rural backdrop dominated by a large, dark tree on the right, which frames her compositionally. The backdrop on the left, seen through the strings of the harp, features a twilit sky over hills and a lake.
This painting has been identified as the ‘Portrait of a lady playing the harp’ that was listed under Northcote’s name in the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue for 1814 (The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy, London 1814, p.10, no.166). However, it is not known exactly when the painting was made. Northcote presumably painted it in his London studio. The identity of the sitter is unknown, but the scene is typical of a group of artworks produced during this period that portray women playing or holding musical instruments, the likes of which would have appealed to the cultured, well-to-do classes visiting the Royal Academy. Northcote’s teacher Sir Joshua Reynolds had adopted a similar composition in his painting The Countess of Eglinton 1777 (private collection), depicting the harp-playing countess in front of a landscape punctuated by classical pillars. Another example is Thomas Lawrence’s full-length portrait Miss Laura Dorothea Ross (Mrs Francis Robertson) c.1798–1804 (Tate). Such representations of women in the act of music-making were strongly idealised, reinforcing a then commonplace association between femininity and such ‘polite’ pursuits as art, literature and music, through which a family’s taste and refinement could be shown off. This ideal underpinned the expectation that women from upper-class families should study music and attain accomplishment at playing musical instruments from a young age – as evoked by the particularly youthful appearance of the sitter for Northcote’s painting.
The composition of the painting’s landscape background is loosely similar to that of Northcote’s earlier portrait A Lady Wearing a White Dress 1795 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), in which the subject is also accompanied by a large tree in the background and a picturesque landscape on the left. However, while the figure in the earlier portrait appears to be indoors, the sitter in A Young Lady Playing the Harp looks to be outside, immersed in the landscape, evoking an association between music and idyllic landscapes that was common in British art and literature during the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Having moved from his hometown of Plymouth to London in 1771, Northcote undertook a five-year apprenticeship to Sir Joshua Reynolds. In A Young Lady Playing the Harp, Northcote appears to have paid particular attention to the rendering of the young woman’s clothing and the drapery of her skirt, a skill he learned from Reynolds; as the art historian Martin Postle notes, during his apprenticeship Northcote completed the drapery and other details for portraits by Reynolds including James Calthorpe 1773 (private collection) and James Beattie 1774 (University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen) (Postle 2008). Northcote dabbled in history painting, small-scale fancy pictures and illustrations to works of literature. He was also well known as a writer, for instance authoring the two-volume Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1813–15) along with other art historical and art theoretical works. However, portraiture seems to have been his steadiest source of employment as an artist. Among his other portrait subjects were, notably, Napoleon (1801) (location unknown), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1804; Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere), the infant John Ruskin (1822; National Portrait Gallery, London) and Ira Aldridge (1826; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester). A Young Lady Playing the Harp came relatively late in Northcote’s artistic career, though at a time when he was still exhibiting annually at the Royal Academy and in other exhibitions across Britain.
Further reading
Martin Postle, ‘Northcote, James (1746–1831)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford 2008.
Caroline Anjali Ritchie
June 2022
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