• Profligate painter ARTS
PAUL GRINKE
The name of John Hamilton Mortimer hardly springs readily to the lips when eighteenth cen- tury English art is invoked, but a small band of devotees on both sides of the Atlantic are doing their best to remedy the situation. What I imagine to be the first exhibition of his work, organised by Mr Benedict Nicolson under the benevolent aegis of the Paul Mellon Founda- tion, has just arrived in town at the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, after a two-month showing at Mortimer's home town, Eastbourne.
Mortimer was an enigmatic figure in his own time and remains a puzzle today. His draughts- manship was extravagantly praised by his con- temporaries, one critic even going so far as to call him 'the most powerful and perfect master of the human form that has ever appeared, either among the living or the dead.' Others spoke of him in the _same breath as Michel- angelo and Raphael. He was a great conversa- tionalist and could even charm the irascible James Barry; an enthusiastic sportsman and dedicated cricketer, he was very fond of riotous sailing excursions with other painters round the Essex coast. But there was also a darker side to his nature which both fascinated and repelled his friends. He was a true rakehell, as wild as any and more extravagant than most.
His drawings and paintings show this dual side to his nature. Two self-portraits, one as a studious pleasant young man in front of an easel and the other a wild bonneted brigand enveloped in a cloak with hair blowing in the wind, indicate an early awareness of his own contradictory personality. Mortimer was a proto-Romantic, a Byronic figure without any ideals other than the virtuosity of his pen and the extravagant grotesqueries of which it was capable. One of the most revealing documents in the exhibition is a magnificent oil caricature group, quite unlike his other work and dating from early in his all too brief career. The scene is a riotous supper party which has degenerated into a sheer carousal: unshaven, wigs .askew, the tablecloth cascading to the floor along with oysters, glasses and an inebriated participant, the dozen or so diners who have been tentatively placed as artist members of one of the many . semi-private artists' societies which sprang up at this period, are viewed with dispassionate amusement by the young Mortimer, sitting sedately at a corner chair with his band at his breast, like Napoleon.
He was evidently an object of wonder and a certain amount of tongue-clucking to his con- temporaries. Edward Edwards in his collection of artists' biographies published in the 1800s reflected ponderously that 'Although he had given undoubted proof of his abilities yet he did not meet with much employment, which most probably resulted from his neglect of that de- partment of the art, by which alone the painter can acquire fortune in this country, for he rather neglected the study of portraiture.' This is hardly fair on Mortimer, whose portrait groups have on past occasions been confused with the work of Zoffany and show a perfect comprehension of the rather stylised formula of the conversation piece.
The subjects which fired Mortimer's imagina-
tion are all part and parcel of the embryonic romantic bestiary which was being formulated in the 1770s. Monsters, ecorche figures, bandits from Salvator Rosa, grotesque incidents from everyday life, Shakespearian scenes and recon- dite subjects from classical literature. His linear mannerisms have much in common with the early Rowlandson, with a characteristic shad- ing technique and dotted manner which he probably acquired from contemporary en- gravers. Other more polished performances owe much to the finely controlled line of Guercino. He was an extremely versatile draughtsman, and if his contemporaries found cause to object to the sober colour of his paintings they had nothing but praise for his drawings.
There are some splendid drawings in the pre- sent round-up, supplemented by prints after his drawings by Mortimer himself or by Blyth, an equally wild figure who cut his veins but lived long enough to engrave a major part of Morti- mer's work. The suite of twelve Shakespearian heads, much copied and reworked by other artists to form a knotty problem for the Mortimer scholar, have been interpreted by Mr Nicolson as various dramatic roles adopted by Mortimer, a kind of self-portrait tableau with the artist at one moment the windswept Lear or the ravaged figure of Caliban. Parallels in his own life are not too hard to find. Other drawings include a series of banditti either in the field or with captives, the finest of which is probably Bandits robbing fisherman, recently exhibited at the large American exhibition of 'Romantic Art in Britain,' and a characteristic group of Calibanish aquatic monsters. In a more decorous mood and again proving the contrary aspects of his nature Mortimer could produce the charming illustrations to Chaucer and Cervantes and a group of frontispieces to Bell's edition of 'Poets of Great Britain,' which are as delicate and sentimental as vignettes by Westall or Smirke. Such versatility would be unusual in any age and gives us added con- firmation of his Jekyll and Hyde temperament.
Removed from the world of Mortimer by more than longitude is the exhibition of Ameri- can Naïve Painting at Burlington House. One hundred and eleven paintings have been selec- ted from the vast collection of Mr and Mrs Edgar William Garbisch, ranging from 1700 to 1889 with only.the barest discernible alterations in style. Naive painting is a tricky subject and even more so when one has to take into account the absence of any kind of formal artistic train- ing in early colopial America. The early pictures in the exhibition are largely the work of pro- fessionals; the later work ranges from the de- liberately unsophisticated—a genuinely ver- nacular billboard manner—to the work of amateurs with a certain flair for simplicity.
The early eighteenth century paintings are fascinating as documents of an untutored style, often closer to tavern signs than to the tradition of country house portraiture. Later in the cen- tury individual hands become apparent with the work of Winthrop Chandler, John Durand and the negro portraitist Joshua Johnston. None of these or of the host of barely recorded local talents had much in common with the essentially
European grand manner of Benjamin West or J. S. Copley, and it is their close reflection of contemporary rural American life that makes their work so irresistible. There are one or two really extraordinary paintings that escape en- tirely from conventional portraiture. Rufus Hathaway's portrait of the stiff-lipped Mrs Leonard, clutching a flowery fan, two large feathers in her hair and a cockatoo perched on a hoop by her chair, is undoubtedly strange, but the anonymous portrait of little Emma Van Name standing by a glass of strawberries that comes up to her waist looks forward for sheer fantasy to Thomas Cole's Titan's Goblet (1833).
The subjects are almost stereotyped, with por- traits, stern, unyielding and decked out in their Sunday best, small children of mongoloid mien, villages and farms laid out in chequerboard simplicity and the occasional Indian as wooden
• as a tobacconist's shop sign. Always cited as the most imaginative of American naïve painters is .Edward Hicks, a Quaker preacher who painted any number of versions of a landscape peopled with lions, cows and children and a host of lesser animals, which he called The Peaceable Kingdom. Their appeal today lies perhaps in their affinities with Douanier Rousseau, though certainly Hicks remains one of the more re- markable members of this curious school.
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