Art
Zoffany
John McEwen
Johan Zoffany, 1733-1810 (National Portrait Gallery annexe—NB: 15 Carlton House Terrace—till 27 March), is the first major exhibition devoted to the artist, and will give much pleasure to those many people Who wistfully look back to the eighteenth century as a paradisal age before the industrial fall. Clearly this was how Zoffany saw an age of theatricality and scholarly quiet, of delicate manners and exotic travel, °Ptimistically free of the puritanical guilt and social turmoil of the seventeenth century, but ending in the no less doomiaden shades of the French Revolution. Almost the last, and certainly the most uncharacteristic picture Zoffany painted is of the sack of the Tuileries in 1792: the contents of the King's cellar smashed and drunk, the piked heads of the Swiss guards overlooking the debauch. The fashion today, of course, is to view the past in terms of our own uncertain times. The eighteenth century we respond to is Hogarthian, all stews, sties, smallpox a_nd mother's ruin. One critic will applaud insborough for the accuracy of his landscape backgrounds, therefore his ironic awareness of the social significance of the Enclosure Acts; another will promote the Ultimate importance of Joseph Wright ,!Iteause of that painter's few pictures of the ,ent industrialism, or Stubbs because of nis connections with medicine. Zoffany does n°1 invalidate any of this but he certainly unteracts it. He had a whale of a time: 'At live house at Strand-on-the-Green . . . he rived in considerable style; his servants wore tih'ieries of scarlet and gold with blue facings, ue_ colours of the arms granted to him by iidria Theresa, and bore on their shoulders tke Zoffany crest.' Luxury is civilisation, iere has never been any dispute about that.. hp°claY we dress it in functional guise-ei;ating, baths, hi-fis—but in the pre-mod(l_ndaYs of the eighteenth century travel and th
..ccoration were the great luxuries. And raese are really what Zoffany paints, with a tether old-fashioned but very eighteenth
tturY German delight in lustrous detail. a:t-.°1Tany's early paintings in the intertas tuna' rococo style already betray this Was for the glint and sheen of things, and it ihns, from hack work as a drapery painter III"' Garrick rescued him two years later. mae,earlY commissions for Garrick, which bet"e Zofrany's reputation, tread uneasily theween the Dutch style and Canaletto, but o i. attention to detail, if not to perspective, brsnteadfast. It only took a year for him to I g his
scope figures indoors or, even in land 4libjectsettings, to make them the true slunPtof the composition, so that their uous clothes and furnishings could be painted in the detail they deserved. Payment for portraits was based on the number of people depicted, so single conversation pieces of whole families were very lucrative to an artist. Sitters were also happy to be seen with as many of their most prized possessions around them as possible, even if this meant that the painting did not give a totally accurate account of any particular interior Zoffany made more free of such licence than any other painter in the genre, and it is no surprise that h is masterpiece is of 'The Tribuna of the Uffizi,' the most famous room of the most famous gallery in Europe. Even there the artist insisted on rearrangements, introducing into it every treasure that
caught his eye throughout the entire GrandDucal collection. The result is an extraordinary cornucopian offering to the
grandeur of the grand tour, the luxury of being civilised.
No subject better matched his talent and interest than the Tribuni, but the exhibition convincingly demonstrates that he was not such a narrow painter as this, and his reputation for conversation pieces in general, might suggest. He is best on the smaller scale at his most fastidious, but he was capable of some handsome full-lengths
(often praiseworthily striving rather unsuc
cessfully to stretch the compositional conventions of that genre), is not above painting Cuff, the optician, in his workshop or the doings of his fellow Royal Academicians, and is excellent at instrumentalists and animals. Against this it must be said that his faces and figures are mostly expressionless and wooden and that his fashionable theatrical paintings, like all in that genre except the odd Fuseli, are a bore. He also went to India. It might seem that here was his perfect subject, but in reality India was too exotic, too disorderly for the very orderly Zoffany. Two or three of the Indian paintings are of documentary interest, but the others might just as well have been done in England, though this equally reflects the attitude of his sitters. Finally there is the uncharacteristically Hogarthian tirade of his old age against the Revolution, again too disorderly a subject for such a civilised man, in his indignant hands more of a rout than a riot. Everything Zoffany does conveys this civilised gentleness and a pleasant sense of
detached though unironic humour, not scoffing at all but as if he is looking at him
self as well as his sitters. His oeuvre is a highly intelligent appreciation of the best in his time. For more people than we probably care to think the eighteenth century was the golden age, and no one knew it better than he.
The lighting does not make this a very easy show to look at, but Mary Webster's compilation and researches appear impec cable. She published a book on Zoffany's English pupil Francis Wheatley in 1970, and is clearly working a rich mine. It would be appropriate if she now turned her attention to the artist's English counterpart Arthur Devis. As far as I know the last exhibition of his work in London was in 1930.
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