A Tantalizing New Portrait of Lady Hester Stanhope?

I was doing a book signing at the Winter Fine Arts and Antiques Fair at Olympia last weekend, organized by Martyn Downer, fellow author and curator of this year’s loan exhibition, ‘The Earl’s Machine,’ in association with Clarion Arts,

“There’s something you have to see,” said Martyn, steering me in the direction of a stall on the other side of the hall. There, on prominent display, was this portrait, apparently of Hester. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked.

I’d like to think this is indeed Hester, very young, no more than 16 or 17. It has an unfinished quality, of a work swiftly drawn, apparently from life, costing its sitter no more than an hour or two of her time. Perhaps it was intended as a sketch for what be a more defined and elaborate finished portrait. It hints at her beauty, less so perhaps, at her character. The pose seems very traditional for a young girl: head tilted, eyes averted, gaze off to one side.

In my book’s illustrations, you can see a portrait of Hester Pitt, Hester’s mother, and if you compare the two, there does indeed seem to be a strong family resemblance, especially around the nose.

The portrait’s owners, Noel and Gwyennth James, bought it privately 22 years ago from a large house Hungerford, West Berkshire. Noel James described how at the time he knew nothing about Lady Hester Stanhope, but was attracted to it “as a fabulous painting’ in its own right. Later, when the couple moved to Old Sarum - Thomas - ‘Diamond’ - Pitt’s famous old rotten borough, they became intrigued by the family connection, and decided it was too precious and intriguing to part with. However, now it is up for sale.

Details of the portrait are sketchy. The artist is unknown. The identification of the sitter is written in early typeface on the back of the portrait, estimated as ‘circa 1800.’ According to another old label, it was loaned for an exhibition at the South Kensington Museum by Mr C.Elphinstone Dalrymple of Aberdeen, in 18(?)6 as Lady Hester Stanhope.

Noel James had an unofficial appraisal by an art expert who speculated that it may be a late work by Gainsborough Dupont, Gainsborough’s nephew and assistant, which might date it therefore to the early 1790’s, which would certainly match the youthfulness of the subject. Gainsborough Dupont painted Hester’s uncle William Pitt and her relative Lord Wyndham Grenville, and other society figures, including Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. If you look at Gainsborough Dupont’s portrait of Pitt, and again at this portrait there are indeed clues to consider, especially in the similarity in the treatment of the background.

But elements of this portrait, especially in its rendition of facial features and dress, brought to my mind the earlier work of Thomas Lawrence, who also painted a great many of Hester’s relatives and contemporaries, many of them leading politicans, including Pitt.

Among them were her friends and confidants Sir Francis Burdett and George Canning. Lawrence also painted her lover, Granville Leveson Gower and the man she might have married, General Sir John Moore. Around the turn of the century, Lawrence made many portraits of Caroline of Brunswick, the Princesss of Wales, and is generally assumed to have been one of her (plentiful) lovers. (Another was Hester’s cousin Sir Sidney Smith). This overlaps a time frame in which Hester found herself acting rather reluctantly as Caroline’s lady-in-waiting at Blackheath so Lawrence may well have encountered Hester then.

Hester once remarked to her doctor Charles Meryon that she intended never to have her portrait made. By then she was in her late 30’s. Yet surely she must have had numerous opportunities, at a time when having one’s portrait made was de rigueur. She was living with Pitt, for example, when he sat, numerous times, for John Hoppner - I always found it intriguing to imagine what he might have made of her. I came to the conclusion that this claim of Hester’s - that she had deliberately refused to sit for a formal portrait and therefore commit an image of herself to posterity - did not necessarily include portraits for which she may well have posed, albeit fleetingly, in her youth, or those which she was not willing to acknowledge publicly. We can certainly suppose that the two reproduced in my book - Lady Stanhope as Hebe and the mysterious miniature assumed to be of Hester at Chevening – might fall into this category.

As for this portrait, yet to be verified beyond the details known about it, we shall have to see….

Imagined portraits of Hester form another category. There are the concocted versions of her in supposedly characteristic scenes by Robert Jacob Hamerton which were commissioned to illustrate Charles Meryon’s Memoirs and Travels between 1840-45, and a number of generic Victorian-era ‘Hesters’ – swathed in Orientalist robes and turbans, yet categorically not painted from life. Hester’s popularity as a Victorian talking point was given a final flourish in 1850 with the production by Thomas Parr of a set of Staffordshire porcelain figures, in which you can see a rather demure snowy-faced, apple-cheeked Hester, atop her camel, with the ever-faithful Meryon, bringing up the rear.