Walpole's pictures revisit England - Sir Robert Walpole, Painting, Passion and Politics: Masterpieces from the Walpole Collection

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2002 by Donald Bruce

WE have misjudged Sir Robert Walpole. The prevalent image of Walpole, the 'first Prime Minister', is of an uncouth foxy squire (something like Sir Pitt Crawley in Thackeray's Vanity Fair) who managed the country for a total of twenty years by bribery and sly tricks. That image is belied by the present exhibition at the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House of a small selection of the pictures he collected; 204 of which (by far the greater part) his improvident heir sold to Catherine the Great of Russia. The exhibition goes under the alliterative misnomer, Painting, Passion and Politics. This jovial sceptic, this eighteenth-century 'man of sense', would have cast a ribald eye over the notion that he was moved by passion in any respect, even a passion for art. He may to some extent have sought status through his collection. He bought names, just as Catherine the Great, with similar social aspirations, bought other people's picture galleries. Sometimes through his agents on the continent of Europe, which he never vi sited, he bought pictures unseen, according to their attributions. Even so, he possessed taste and connoisseurship, which he passed in greater measure to his son Horace Walpole.

As far as Sir Robert was religious, which was not much, he was firmly Protestant. That a stolidly Low Church magnate of Hanoverian Britain, who was punctilious in his duty, as the King's first minister, to thwart Jacobitism and the Papacy that supported it, should buy Renis and Murillos was not surprising. Many Hanoverian supporters did. What was unusually tolerant was that he bought Reni's Disputation over the Immaculate Conception and Murillo's The Virgin Immaculate.

The disputation in Guido Reni's canvas is not about the immaculate conception and virgin birth of Christ, as the handbook to the exhibition mistakenly states. The Fathers of the Church would hardly dispute a fundamental article of Christian belief which, with scriptural authority, is part of the Athanasian creed. The disputation in Reni's picture, painted for the Borghese Pope Paul V, a former Franciscan friar, is about the immaculate conception of His mother Mary. The Franciscans had pleaded for the doctrine, the Dominicans had resisted it. Duns Scotus was for it, Thomas Aquinas against. Paul V promulgated it in a Bull of 1617. Reni's six Fathers, all loosely clad in toga-like robes as they sit around a table, their aged straw-coloured limbs scrawny but muscular, provide no clues to their identities. Five are writhing with thought and uncertainty (which may have appealed to Walpole as the veteran of many debates and a politic watcher of faces). Only one seems to perceive a vision in the clouds above them. Th ere Mary, adored by one angel and embraced by another, rests in the posture of a simple peasant-girl, her arms resolutely folded as she waits for a decision; as if it was not absurd to suppose that mortals can enhance the glory of a divine being. Horace Walpole offers a long account of the controversy in his Aedes Walpolianae, a catalogue of his father's collection at the family estate of Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

Murillo's two dozen simpering stereotypes of the Immaculada (including the version bought by Walpole) were a regrettable consequence of Pope Paul the Fifth's Bull. The scholars at the Hermitage Museum think that Virgo Immaculata means The Immaculate Conception, as if she was immaculately conceiving before our eyes. In fact it means The Virgin Immaculate, herself conceived without sin. An adolescent Spanish girl floats prettily in a wavy fog of coppery pink and encarmined grey, from which approving sugar-almond cherubs emerge, with unmeant comic effect, to hoist her upwards. She ascends, her knee on a cloud, with swimming arms and dark uplifted Andalusian eyes: one of Murillo's mass-produced icons of the Immaculada which have, until recently, been regarded as characteristic of his work, and therefore lowered his reputation. Radically insincere and painted to order, partly by his pupils, they lack the touching faith and honesty of his narrative biblical pictures. Walpole probably admired dark eyes, and wanted s omething exotic for Houghton Hall.

Less pious is Walpole's earliest Italian picture, Venus and Flora with Mars and Cupid, by Paris Bordone. Bordone came as an orphan to live in the house of kinsfolk in Venice where, according to Vasari, he became an accomplished musician. To judge by his later paintings, the house may not have been wholly reputable. He was first a pupil and later an enemy of Titian, whose jealously of rivals was one of the few characteristics Bordone acquired from him. Vasari describes Bordone as a virtuous man who led a quiet life, although his pictures discredit Vasari's commendation. Bordone's talent was dispersed among saturnine portraits, mannered religious scenes and images of dark and brooding eroticism.

He was a painter of pallid, flushed, disquiet lovers with furtive eyes; of rouged courtesans, bare-bosomed in accordance with Venetian sumptuary laws, and hectored by sinister bravos in the bordellos for which the seaport of Venice was notorious. Bordone is likely to have spent much time, in such places. Admittediy, they were ready sources for undraped models. In the London National Gallery Daphnis and Chloe, a deminude Chloe restrains Daphnis's lunging hand, whilst the painting wryly called The Lovers portrays a courtesan as she glances at her male accomplice, either cut-throat or cut-purse, over their victim's shoulder.