‘Not only increase but embellish the collection’: Political Satire and Lady Hervey's Imaginary Pictures

Abstract

Satirical literary portraits and caricatures were a much-loved feature of eighteenth-century cultural life. Women at the early Georgian court created circulating letters and journals that built on the literary games of French salonnières to discuss politics, sexuality, and visual art. One particularly evocative example of this little-known genre is found in a 1729 letter from Lady Hervey to Henrietta Howard, recognised mistress of George II. The letter contains a list of twenty-eight names, each juxtaposed with the name of an imaginary painting. In this article, the first two entries in the list are discussed as political texts, and their social meaning is explored through reference to specific works of art that may have informed their iconographic potential.

Notes

1 Mary Lepell Hervey, Lady Hervey, to Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Suffolk. This letter and the manuscript referred to in this article are in the British Library within The Suffolk Papers, ADD MSS 22628 [hereafter Suffolk Papers], fols 13–39. The list is contained within a letter dated Ickworth, 24 July 1729. Although the British Library's own manuscript cataloguing system ascribes to it a date from the early 1730s, the letter itself is clearly dated.

2 Lady Mohun (Elizabeth Lawrence Griffin Mohun Mordaunt), to Henrietta Howard, letter of July 1722, in Letters to and from Henrietta, Countess of Suffolk, and her Second Husband, the Hon. George Berkeley: from 1712 to 1767, John Wilson Croker, ed. (London, 1824), pp. 95, 96.

3 Ibid., p. 95.

4 For the cultural exchange between English noblewomen and French salon hostesses, see Evelyn Gordon Bodek, ‘Salonnières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 3:3/4 (1976), pp. 186–99 (specifically p. 186).

5 See Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2005), p. 88.

6 Antoine Lilti, ‘Sociabilité et mondanité : Les Hommes de Lettres dans les Salons Parisiens au XVIIIe Siècle’, French Historical Studies, 28: 3 (2005), pp. 415–45 (here p. 415).

7 Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark, 2005), p. 96; Susan Herbst, Politics at the Margin: Historical Studies of Public Expression outside the Mainstream (Cambridge, 1994).

8 Herbst, Politics at the Margin, p. 58.

9 Henrietta Howard, Letters to and from Henrietta, countess of Suffolk, pp. 340–46.

10 For Howard's life, and descriptions of her person and character, see Tracy Borman, Henrietta Howard: King's Mistress, Queen's Servant (London, 2007); Lewis Melville, Lady Suffolk and her Circle (London, 1924); Pat Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, 2004), p. 161; Julius Bryant, Mrs. Howard: A Woman of Reason (London, 1988). See also Marie Draper and William Arthur Eden, Marble Hill House and its Owners (London, 1970); and Ingrid Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 130.

11 See Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 91.

12 See Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), p. 165; Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power’, French Historical Studies, 19:4 (1996), pp. 1025–44 (p. 1027); Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (New York, 2004), p. 11; Ruth Dawson and Waltraud Maierhofer, ‘German Rediscovery of Life Writing: Introduction to Essays on German-Speaking Women as Rulers, Consorts, and Royal Mistresses in the long Eighteenth Century’, Biography, 27:3 (2004), pp. 483–94.

13 Andrew C. Thompson, ‘The Huguenots in British and Hanoverian External Relations in the early Eighteenth Century’, in The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Context: Essays in Honour and Memory of Walter C. Utt (Leiden, 2011), pp. 217–40 (esp. pp. 226, 228).

14 Charles Carlton, Royal Mistresses (repr. London, 1990), pp. 101–03.

15 R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, 1993), p. 104; Alexander Pope, The Twickenham Edition of Alexander Pope: Minor Poems, ed. by Norman Ault and John Butt (London, 1954), p. 184, n. 22. For the precedents, some of the formal duties (mainly limited to attendance on the sovereign) and the importance of elite female figures in public ritual of the time, see William John Thomas, The Book of the Court: Exhibiting the Origin, Peculiar Duties, and Privileges of the Several Ranks of the Nobility and Gentry, more particularly of the Great Officers of State and Members of the Royal Household (London, 1838), pp. 341–51. The numbers of maids of honour fluctuated over time: in 1727, there were six, each with a salary of 200 pounds, paid in quarterly instalments. See J.C. Sainty, ‘Office-holders: Household of Princess Caroline 1714–1727’, Institute of Historical Research (London, 1972), http://www.history.ac.uk/publications [accessed July 2012].

16 For an example of the historiographic frame erected, by later authors, over the very mention of young unmarried women who served as courtiers, an 1820 commentator claims that ‘had our English maids of honour been as remarkable for libertinism as they have been for virtue, their name and office would have long since ceased at St. James’. See Belle Assemblée: or, Court and Fashionable Magazine (London, 1820), p. 95.

17 For more on the life of Mary Lepell, known as Mary, Lady Hervey, see Mary Lepell Hervey, Letters of Mary Lepel [sic] Lady Hervey: With a Memoir and Illustrative Notes (London, 1821); Dorothy Margaret Stuart, Molly Lepell, Lady Hervey (New York, 1936); Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth Century Courtier (Oxford, 1973); Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey (London, 2000).

18 See Nicholas Cronk, ‘Voltaire, Lord Hervey et le Paradoxe du Modèle Anglais’, Revue Française, Numéro special: Numéro élèctronique, http://revuefrancaise.free.fr/Cronk.htm [accessed June 2011]; and Horace Walpole, ‘Walpole's Account of Lady Hervey, ca 1775’, Appendix 1, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, W.S. Lewis, ed. (48 vols, London and New Haven, 1961), vol. XXXI, p. 416.

19 Philip Dormer Stanhope, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Lord Mahon, ed. (4 vols, London, 1847), vol. II, pp. 40, 41.

20 Walpole, Correspondence, vol. XXXI, p. 416.

21 For the strongest archival proof of this relationship, see Lord John Hervey to Stephen Fox, Letter of 18 June 1728, Hervey MSS 941/47/4, pp. 77, 78. For relevant secondary literature, see Camille Paglia, ‘Lord Hervey and Pope’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 6:3 (1973), p. 358; and Hannah Smith and Stephen Taylor, ‘“Hephaestion and Alexander”: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales and the Royal Favourite in England in the 1730s’, The English Historical Review, 124:507 (2009), pp. 283–312. See also Eric Weichel, ‘“Fixed by so much better a fire”: Wigs and Masculinity in early Eighteenth-Century British Miniatures’, Shift: Queen's Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, 1 (2008), pp. 1–25.

22 Mary Hervey to Henrietta Howard, Suffolk Papers, letter dated Ickworth, 28 October 1728.

23 Timothy Mowl, An Insular Rococo: Architecture, Politics and Society in Ireland and England, 1710–1770 (London, 1999), p. 235; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, 1978), pp. 172–80; A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, Andrew W. Moore and Larissa A. Dukelskaia, eds (New Haven, 2002), esp. p. 40.

24 For innovative writing that retrieves personal meaning in inventories from the period, see Cynthia Lawrence and Magdalena Kasman, ‘Jeanne-Baptiste d'Albert de Luynes, Comtesse de Verrue (1670–1736): An Art Collector in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs (University Park, 1997), pp. 207–26 (pp. 210, 212); Marcia Pointon, ‘Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts’, Art History, 32:3 (2009), pp. 481–515 (esp. pp. 512–15).

25 Faith Evelyn Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), p. 31.

26 Mary Ann Smart, ‘Parlor Games: Italian Music and Italian Politics in the Parisian Salon’, 19th-Century Music, 34: 1(Summer, 2010), 39–60 (p. 40). See Smart, ‘Parlour Games’, p. 51, and Beasley, Mastering Memory, p. 30.

27 Smart, p. 51.

28 Philip Laundy, ‘Onslow, Arthur (1691–1768)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter ODNB] (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20788 [accessed 24 August 2011]. See also Paul Seward, ‘Introduction’, in Seward, ed., Speakers and the Speakership: Presiding Officers and the Management of Business from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2010), pp. 1–7 (p. 4); and James Alexander Manning, The Lives of the Speakers of the House of Commons (London, 1850), pp. 435–40.

29 Herbert M. Atherton, ‘George Townshend Revisited: The Politician as Caricaturist’, Oxford Art Journal 8:1 (1985), pp. 3–19 (p. 5). The sketch is currently in the National Portrait Gallery: see http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw04747 [accessed 17 October 2012].

30 C. E. Vulliamy, The Onslow Family, 1528–1874, With Some Account of Their Times (London, 1953), p. 94.

31 Frederic Shoberl, The Beauties of England and Wales (20 vols, London, 1813), vol. XIV, p. 206.

32 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet's History of the reign of King James the Second, Martin Routh, ed. (repr. Oxford, 1852), preface.

33 Fred Meijer, The Collection of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Paintings Bequeathed by Daisy Linda Ward, exh. cat. (Zwolle, 2003), pp. 22, 23. See also Alan Chong, ‘Contained under the name of Still Life: the Associations of Still Life Painting’, in Chong, ed., Still Life Paintings from the Netherlands, exh. cat. (Amsterdam, 1999) pp. 11–38; Eric Jan Sluiter, ‘Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century texts on paintings and the iconological approach to Northern Dutch paintings of the period’, in A. Freedberg and J. de Vries, eds, Art History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (Santa Monica, 1991), pp. 171–207; Simon Schama, ‘Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still Life Painting and the “Empire of Things”’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), pp. 478–88; James A. Welu, ‘Arrangement with Meanings: Dutch and Flemish Still Life’, in 600 Years of Netherlandish Art: Selected Symposium Lectures (Memphis, 1982), pp. 31–42.

34 Sheena MacKellar Goulty, Heritage Gardens: Care, Conservation and Management (London, 1993), pp. 112–16; Alison Hodges, ‘Painshill Park, Cobham, Surrey (1700–1800): Notes for a History of the Landscape Garden of Charles Hamilton’, Garden History, 2:1 (1973), pp. 39–68; Carole Fry, ‘Spanning the Political Divide: Neo-Palladianism and the Early Eighteenth-Century Landscape’, Garden History, 31:2 (2003), pp. 180–92 (p. 186); George Plumptree, Garden Makers: The Great Tradition of Landscape Design (New York, 1994), p. 76; John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds, The Genius of the Place: English Landscape Gardens 1620–1820 (5^th edn: Cambridge, 1988).

35 See Kenneth Bendiner, Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present (London, 2005), p. 135; Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London, 1990), p. 114; Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1750 (Dulwich,1996), p. 14; Meijer, Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Paintings, p. 32. See also Donna Barnes and Peter Rose, Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life, exh cat. (Albany, 2002), p. 116; and Sam Segal, A Flowery Past: A Survey of Dutch and Flemish Flower Painting from 1600 until the Present (Amsterdam, 1982).

36 For Francophilia among the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Dutch still life painters, see Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven, 2004), p. 221.

37 Alain Tapié, Symbolique et Botanique: Le Sense Caché des Fleurs dans la Peinture au XVIIe Siècle, Caroline Joubert, ed. (Caen, 1987), p. 30.

38 See Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, 1996), p. 75.

39 Ibid, p. 38. See also Christopher Wright, Masterpieces of Reality: French Seventeenth-Century Painting (New Walk, Leicester: Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, exh. cat., 1986), p. 85; Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 115; and Peter Mitchell, Great Flower Painters: Four Centuries of Floral Art (Woodstock, 1973), pp. 43, 45.

40 John Hervey, 1^st Earl of Bristol, The Diary of John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol. With Extracts from his book of Expenses, 1688–1742, S.H.A.H. Hervey, ed. (Wells, 1894), p. 150.

41 J. C. Weyerman, De Levens-Beschryvingen der Nederlandsche Konst-Schilders en Konst-Schilderessen (4 vols, The Hague, 1729–69), vol. III, p. 250, cited in Paul Taylor, ‘Verelst, Simon Pieterszoon (bap. 1644, d. 1710x17)’, ODNB, [accessed 10 June 2008]. See also George Aitken, The Tatler, Alexander Chalmers, ed. (4 vols, repr. London, 1822), no. 175, vol. III, p. 375.

42 Philip Mould, Still Life of Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1680s, http://www.historicalportraits.com [accessed 19 June 2008].

43 For the Francophile look of Verelst's flowers, see Frederick Peter Seguier, A Critical and Commercial Dictionary of the Works of Painters… (London, 1870), p. 221.

44 Taylor, ‘Verelst, Simon Pieterszoon’. Meijer is similarly dismissive of Verelst's portraits, writing that they are ‘not very successfully’ received by today's art historians: Dutch and French Still-Life Painting, p. 29.

45 ‘Jean Baptiste Monnoyer’, The Illustrated Magazine of Art, 2:12 (1853), pp. 353–6 (p. 354).

46 For Monnoyer and his English career, see Charissa Bremer-David, French Tapestries & Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, 1997), p. 75; James Parker et al., ‘French Decorative Arts during the Reign of Louis XIV, 1654–1715’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 46:4 (1989), pp. 10–64 (p. 28).

47 Dorothy (Savile) Boyle was a lady of the bedchamber from 1727–37, and was a talented amateur artist, caricaturist and copyist in her own right. See Judy Egerton, ‘Boyle, Dorothy, countess of Burlington (1699–1758)’, ODNB [accessed 28 Aug 2012].

48 See George Knox, ‘Sebastiano Ricci at Burlington House: A Venetian Decoration “Alla Romana”’, The Burlington Magazine, 127:990 (1985), pp. 600–09 (p. 602). The Monnoyer overdoor is now at Chiswick.

49 Sharon Fermor, The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons: Narrative, Decoration and Design (London, 1996), p. 20.

50 Ibid., p. 20.

51 Cathleen Sara Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael's Paintings (New York and Cambridge, 2011), p. 136. The proliferation of prints made after Raphael's cartoons made them influential for English history painters: see Stephanie Dickey, ‘The Passions and Raphael's Cartoons in Eighteenth-Century British Art’, Marsyas, 22 (1986), pp. 3–46.

52 Jonathan Richardson, ‘A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur’, in The Works of Jonathan Richardson, Horace Walpole, ed. (repr. London and Twickenham, 1792).

53 Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael's Paintings, p. 152.

54 See, for example, letters dated 1744 and 1753 in Mary Hervey, Letters (Croker edn), pp. 48, 59. Croker points out that ‘Lady Hervey used to be laughed at by her acquaintance for her fondness for things French’. See note, p. 49, where she writes of ‘my friends the French’. See also Katherine Thomson and Philip Wharton, The Queens of Society (London, 1860), p. 300.

55 Fermor, The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons, p. 23. The antiquarian George Vertue wrote that ‘in London about 1700, the state of Print Engraving on Copper was at a low ebb… til about 1707. Mr Griblins cartons in print from the pictures of Raphael were well received, and vast numbers of them [sold]’, quoted in the Victoria and Albert's online ‘Summary’ of The Seven Famous Cartons [sic] of Raphael Urbin; Raphael Cartoons, http://collections.vam.ac.uk [accessed 11 November 2011]. The Cartoons were engraved again by Nicholas Dorigny in 1719.

56 W. H. Pyne et al., The History Of The Royal Residences Of Windsor Castle, St. James's Palace, Carlton House, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court, Buckingham House, And Frogmore…( London, 1816–19), hand-coloured aquatint view of the Picture Gallery at Hampton Court (1819). As Jeremy Wood points out, the cartoons, as represented in Gribelin's 1720 engraving, were ‘arranged (out of narrative sequence)’. See ‘Raphael Copies and Exemplary Picture Galleries in Mid Eighteenth-Century London’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 62:3 (1999), pp. 394–417 (p. 397).

57 Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael's Paintings, p. 153.

58 For a compositional analysis of this work, stressing how landscape structure emphasises the main figure, see John White and John Shearman, ‘Raphael's Tapestries and Their Cartoons’, The Art Bulletin, 40:3 (1958), pp. 193–221 (pp. 205–06).

59 Just as Jesus fed the apostles (but not, seemingly, the crowd). See John 1:13: ‘Jesus then came and took the bread and gave it to them, and likewise the fish’.

60 James F. Wittenberger and Ronald L. Tilson, ‘The Evolution of Monogamy: Hypotheses and Evidence’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11 (1980), pp. 197–232 (p. 208); Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden, 2008), pp. 66–7; Fermor, The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons, p. 23. In British myth, the seagull is an emblem for the souls of the drowned,and of the absent life-presence of a sailor: see Boria Sax, The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature (Santa Barbara, 2001), p. 217.

61 Sharon Fermor and Alan Derbyshire, ‘The Raphael Tapestry Cartoons Re-Examined’, The Burlington Magazine, 140:1141 (1998), pp. 236–50 (pp. 246–9). See also Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, Illuminating Luke: The Public Ministry of Christ in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 49–82, which gives a very sound overview of the cartoon in both religious and art-historical literature (esp. pp. 64, 65, 71, 72, for the underdrawings and technical sophistication of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes). See also John White and John Shearman, ‘Raphael's Tapestries and Their Cartoons, II: The Frescoes in the Stanze and the Problem of Composition in the Tapestries and Cartoons’, The Art Bulletin, 40:4 (1958), pp. 299–323.

62 Jeremy Wood, ‘Raphael Copies’, p. 397.

63 Hornik and Parsons, Illuminating Luke, pp. 71, 72.

64 Walpole's notoriously cynical rejection of any kind of political morality is a leitmotif in histories of his career. See Philip Woodfine, ‘Tempters or Tempted? The Rhetoric and Practice of Corruption in Walpolean Politics’, in Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan, eds, Corrupt Histories (Rochester, 2004), pp. 167–96; Simon Targett, ‘Government and Ideology during the Age of Whig Supremacy: The Political Argument of Sir Robert Walpole's Newspaper Propagandists’, The Historical Journal, 37:2 (1994), pp. 289–317 (pp. 305, 307); Thomas Horne, ‘Politics in a Corrupt Society: William Arnall's Defense of Robert Walpole’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 41:4 (1980), pp. 601–14 (esp. pp. 603, 607).

65 See John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, From His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, John Wilson Croker, ed. (2 vols, London, 1848), vol. I, p. 128.

66 See Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal, 1998), pp. 184–7; see also Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London, 2003), p. 62, for the explicit association between femininity and flower painting. In the later eighteenth century, Queen Charlotte commissioned a female founding member of the Royal Academy, Mary Moser, to decorate her favourite room at Frogmore with flower murals, while her daughter Princess Elizabeth was a lifelong artist who specialized in the genre. See Jane Roberts, George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste (London, 2004), p. 146; and especially Catherine Horwood, Women and their Gardens: A History from the Elizabethan Era to Today (Chicago, 2012), p. 182, for the rejection of Moser by most of the masculine art establishment.

67 For the social spaces of politics and elite women's involvement with political life (informed by the writings of Elaine Chalus), see Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge, 2007), p. 11.

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Eric Weichel

Dr Eric Weichel is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. He has taught art history and classical studies at a number of Canadian universities and has been the recipient of awards from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Yale University. Weichel has published several journal articles and book chapters in Britain and Canada, most recently, a chapter on ladies-in-waiting at the English court in The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Julia Skelly, ed., 2014).