MASP

By Luciano Migliaccio and Luiz Marques
The subject, known by another portrait housed in the National Portrait Gallery in London, was a bright officer and colonial administrator of the Empire. Born in 1754 in Ireland, Francis Rawdon, first marquis of Hastings, joined the army in 1771 and also served, still in his youth, as a general of the British army in the American War of Independence (1776-1777 to 1781), and received several awards for his conduct in 1783. With the death of his father, in 1793, he becomes the second count of Moira. Active in the House of Lords, where he sided with the Whigs, Rawdon belonged to the group of the prince of Wales, later George iV, thanks to whom he is appointed Governor-General of Bengal in 1813 and Commander-in-Chief of the British troops in India. His military achievements in India resulted in his being awarded the title of marquis of Hastings in 1817. Unfair criticism of his alleged leniency with regard to a local bank led to his resignation in 1823, and to his accepting the less prominent position of governor of the island of Malta, in 1824. Two years after his death in Naples, in 1826, the members of the India House withdrew their charges against the marquis, awarding his son moral damages. Waterhouse (1958, p. 73, n. 353) states that this is the painting made for the Royal Academy’s 1784 exhibition, and subsequently exhibited at Shomberg House. It is, supposedly, one of the 18 pieces removed by the painter from the 1784 exhibition and displayed at his home in Pall Mall, at the time of his second and definitive breakup with the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions. The terminus post quem for the sitting is of course the date of Rawdon’s return from the United States in 1782, and more likely 1783, when he is awarded the title of Lord of Moira. Therefore, the tradition accepted by Camesasca (1987, p. 148) that places the work in Gainsborough’s peak period in 1787, based on the stylistic similarities with the Portrait of Samuel Whithread (Waterhouse, n. 720) housed in a private collection in London and very likely dating from 1788, is incorrect. As a matter of fact, the pose and the composition of the portrait on display at Masp seem to recapture and develop, quite unmistakably, those of the portrait of Gainsborough’s faithful friend, the Reverend Sir Henry Bate-Dudley, exhibited by the painter in the 1780 Royal Academy exhibition and which was, subsequently, engraved by his son, Gainsborough Dupont. On the other hand, the portrait at Masp was engraved by Saunders, based on a sketch housed at the Worcester Art Museum, in Massachusetts. Particularly noteworthy is the way in which Gainsborough merges the subject, both in terms of tonalities and feelings, with his immediate natural surroundings, which are extended continuously into the landscape. Reynolds admires Gainsborough’s ability: “of forming all the parts of his pictures together; the whole going on at the same time, in the same manner as nature creates her works”. Heralding the romantic Stimmung, the consonance of what is experienced with the “instant,” this ability of involving the sitter in the landscape, of nurturing the subject with nature’s grandeur and of, in turn, reprojecting his own feeling of grandeur in the landscape, bears testimony to the role played by Gainsborough in the history of his century’s portraiture. In this light, the portrait on display at Masp is the sentimental pendant of the Portrait of Soprano Elizabeth Linley (Mrs. Sheridan), Washington, N.G., a masterpiece of this same year: 1783.

— Luciano Migliaccio and Luiz Marques, 1998

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