The Frick's Scottish National Gallery Exhibit & A Possible Reference To a Vleughels- Watteau Competition Over a Woman

The Frick's Scottish National Gallery Exhibit & Intimations of a Vleughels-Watteau Competition Over a Woman

John Constable, The Vale of Dedham, 1827–28, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, © Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland

Perhaps no painting better embodies the Romantic spirit of early nineteenth-century Scotland than the monumental portrait of one of the era's most colorful characters by Sir Henry Raeburn, Scotland's foremost portraitist during a time of great cultural vibrancy. Colonel Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell, 15th Chief of Glengarry was Raeburn's main contribution to London's Royal Academy exhibition of 1812. The imposing scale of the canvas and bravura technique speak to Raeburn's ambition to secure a place in the London art world, while the subject's swaggering pose and eye-catching costume attest to his own self-aggrandizing character.

Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell, known simply as "Glengarry," became the fifteenth Chief of the Macdonell Clan and inherited the family's extensive estates in 1788. Described by the celebrated novelist Sir Walter Scott as "a kind of Quixote in our age, having retained in its full extent whole feelings of Clanship and Chieftainship elsewhere so long abandoned," Glengarry devoted his life to preserving and perpetuating the customs and traditions of the heroic era of Highland life. In the eighteenth century, his clan and others had fought valiantly to restore the Stuart line to the British throne.

Following their defeat in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, a proscription was placed by the government on the wearing of Highland dress, which was lifted in 1782. In Raeburn's portrait, the flamboyant Glengarry chose to be depicted wearing his clan’s tartan and the 'Glengarry bonnet,' which is said to have originated in 1794, when he formed the Glengarry Fencibles. Tucked into the top of one of his long socks is a small single-blade knife, known in Gaelic as a sgian-dubh. The viewpoint from slightly below monumentalizes the subject, both literally and metaphorically. Glengarry's dynamic contrapposto stance, taken by Raeburn directly from the famous Apollo Belvedere, confers historical resonance. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had advised Raeburn at the outset of his career to study classical antiquity in Italy, had encouraged this kind of creative borrowing and had himself taken the pose of the Apollo Belvedere for his own portrait of General Burgoyne (c. 1766) in The Frick Collection.

In England, Romanticism found expression in the landscape painting of John Constable, whose work is well represented in The Frick Collection. The Scottish National Gallery's Vale of Dedham of 1827–28 is the definitive statement of the artist's long engagement with his native landscape, the Stour River Valley, now known as 'Constable country.' As a young man, Constable acquired a deep familiarity with the area while working in his father's mill on the river. Throughout his career, he aimed to represent it in as un-formulaic a manner as possible through direct observation as well as consultation with the works of the great masters who preceded him, such as Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, and, above all, Claude Lorrain, in Constable’s view "the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw."

The Vale of Dedham brings together his abiding love for his native landscape and dialogue with Claude. A steep rise, known as Gun Hill, provides the viewpoint for this sweeping prospect. From the wild and rugged foreground, the eye travels along the winding river through fertile farmland to the village of Dedham (marked by its prominent rectangular church tower) and beyond to the sea. With deft touches of his brush, palette knife, and even his fingers, Constable creates sparkling effects that convey the grandeur and luminosity of the vista.

The upper half of the canvas is filled with large, moisture-filled gray and white clouds against a blue sky. Patterns of light and dark on the ground beneath reflect their movement and the transitory nature of the weather. At left, a gnarled stump sprouting new foliage symbolizes the cycle of life. In a natural declivity below the clump of trees, a woman cradles her child next to a temporary shelter. In the text accompanying his English landscape print series, published between 1830 and 1832, Constable noted the significance to his art of the Vale of Dedham and the surrounding area, writing that it was there "that the Author's ideas of Landscape were formed; and he dwells on the retrospect of those happy days and years … passed in the calm of an undisturbed congenial study, with a fondness and delight which must ever be to him a source of happiness and contentment."

Although Henry Clay Frick filled his Fifth Avenue mansion with portraits of respectable upper- and middle-class British beauties — as well as a few of questionable repute — by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Lawrence, and Whistler, he never purchased a portrait by John Singer Sargent. It was not, however, for lack of interest. An undated letter from Sargent to Frick in the Frick archives indicates that the collector had written (in a letter now lost) to request an appointment with him in London. In his reply, Sargent noted that if Frick's visit was intended for a "commission for portraiture," that he was "not taking any commissions, and not adding any promises to those I have already made for the future."

No further correspondence between the two men is known, nor what the object of the visit was, or even if it took place. Ironically, in 1922, three years after Frick's death, Sargent's renowned portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw was offered to the Trustees of The Frick Collection by an agent of the then-widowed subject of the portrait, who was forced to sell it to pay off her debts. Helen Clay Frick, the founder’s daughter, turned the offer down, explaining that the Trustees were not purchasing at that time. Three years later, the painting entered the collection of the Scottish National Gallery.

This portrait, painted in 1892, represents a high point of society portraiture in late nineteenth-century London. The commission from Sir Andrew Noel Agnew of Lochnaw to paint his beautiful young wife, Gertrude Vernon, helped to propel Sargent to prominence. The lively personality of the then twenty-seven-year-old beauty and social hostess comes across directly through a combination of assertiveness and ease captured in Sargent's simple yet masterful composition and bravura brushwork. A French eighteenth-century upholstered bergère chair and a hanging of blue Chinese silk suffice to create a setting. Angled across the chair in a shimmering gown of white accented with a lilac sash, the supremely elegant Lady Agnew looks out with a direct and slightly appraising gaze. Mrs. Leyland

Flowing attire, decorative elements drawn from Eastern and Rococo art, and the simplicity of the composition also characterize the portrait of Mrs. Frederick Leyland in The Frick Collection, painted twenty years earlier by a fellow American expatriate, Sargent's friend and rival James McNeill Whistler. Mrs. Leyland looks off into the distance, her back turned to us — an object of beauty beyond our reach; Lady Agnew, in contrast, seems to engage the viewer in intimate conversation. Whistler's perfectionistic tendencies resulted in constant reworkings carried out over more than a year, while Sargent completed his portrait in a mere six sessions, remarking later to a friend that he sometimes obtained his best results with only a few sittings. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1893, Sargent's portrait of Lady Agnew met with an outpouring of praise. It was lauded in The Times on April 29, 1893, as "not only a triumph of technique but the finest example of portraiture, in the literal sense of the word, that has been seen here for a long time. While Mr Sargent has abandoned none of his subtlety, he has abandoned his mannerisms, and has been content to make a beautiful picture of a charming subject, under conditions of repose."

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland, 1871–74, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. (Not on display)

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with entries by the curators of the Scottish National Gallery and an introductory essay by Michael Clarke. The book (hardcover, 72 pages, 40 illustrations; $20.00, Member price: $18.00) will be available in the Museum Shop or ordered through the Frick’s Web site (www.frick.org) and by phone at 212.547.6848.

A note to SeniorWomen.com's readers: Children under ten are not admitted to the Collection.

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The Frick's Scottish National Gallery Exhibit & Intimations of a Vleughels-Watteau Competition Over a Woman

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