Art
Portraits
ON Wednesday there was dispersed at Sotheby's one more of the great English collections of pictures, that, namely, from Ditchley, the seat of the Lee and then of the Dillon family. This collection was individual in that, whereas the few subject pictures in it were negligible, the portraits which it contained formed an almost continuous series covering the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The older English collections of paintings may be divided into two groups. First there are those formed mainly during the eighteenth century from the debris of Italian and French collections. Secondly, there are the slowly built-up collections of portraits. Collections of the first sort were formed chiefly by the " mad " English gentlemen who made the grand tour with plenty of money, buying recklessly whatever caught their fancy. The eighteenth century was a period perfectly suited to their activities, since the great Italian and French families were mostly in a bad financial situation and their collections were continually coming on the market. Many of the English enthusiasts of the time lacked dis- crimination and it was no doubt of them that Diderot wai thinking when he said of certain copies that they were so bad that they could only deceive E glishmen. But, if they bought wildly, these collectors bought so much that they inevitably brought back with them many masterpiece: among the shiploads of forgeries, copies and salved works with which they were fobbed off by the more subtle dealers. This method of acquiring works of art reached its climax at the time of the French Revolution when collections such as those of the Duke of Orleans and of Calonne were sold bodily, in London, where they had been discreetly moved for safety before 1789, the proceeds being devoted to the counter-revolutionary campaign. Never did English col• lectors make more or better hay in so short a time. It 15 true that many of the collections formed in this way fell into disrepute in the next century. The taste of the day compelled one to buy above all imitations of Raphael– the originals -being almost unobtainable—and works .by Poussin or the seventeenth-century Italian masters. 1%ltil the tendency of fashion towards a severer taste in the first half of the nineteenth century many seventeenth-century masterpieces, must have been consigned to corridors and servants' bedrooms from which they are still being rescued, but at any rate they survived and did not in general leave the country.
The fate of collections of the second kind has on the whole been smoother. The appeal of portraits has always been acknowledged to be largely one of historical and sentimental interest and consequently collections of portraits have been less affected by changes of taste and fashion than those of works whose appeal was more purely artistic. Those families who built up primarily collections of portraits have in general to their credit that they were patriotic in supporting the most distinguished kind of English painters, unlike the other kind of collector who simply bought what paintings he could find abroad. But in this matter the Dillon collection is excep- tional. For, whereas most groups of family portraits in England are dominated by the works of Reynolds, Gains- borough and artists of their generation, the Dillon series seems to end just before their time. It covers essentially the period from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century and one of the most striking points in the catalogue is the absence of English names. The conspicuous names in the early period are Marc Gheeraerts and Paul van Somer, both Flemings, and in the later Lely and Kneller who, however anglicized they may have become, were by birth Dutch and German respectively.
The Dillon collection, therefore, is not one of English paintings, nor is it essentially one of works of art. Some of the paintings are masterly, particularly the Portrait of James II as Duke of York, with his family (87), alternatively attributed to Lely or Huysmans, and the Portrait of Lady Tanfield (85) by Paul van Somer. But in general the portraits present a splendid pageant of history seen from every point of view— autocracy in Henry VIII, religious mania in Philip II, misfor- tune in Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, and romance in the Earl of Essex. Finally, manners and costume can here be studied over a period of two centuries.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
Previous page
