Chats on Old Miniatures

These interesting portraits were once at Strawberry Hill, where they hung in "the blue breakfast room." The way they came into the possession of Horace Walpole is worth telling. It aptly shows how easily treasures of this kind may be forgotten and lost. Writing about Peter Oliver's habit of making duplicates of his works, Walpole says: —

"Since this work was first published a valuable treasure of the works of this master, and of his father Isaac, was discovered in an old house in Wales, which belonged to a descendant of Sir Kenelm Digby (Mr. Watkin Williams). The latest are dated 1633, but being closed in ivory and ebony cases, and the whole collection locked up in a wainscot box, they are as perfectly preserved as if newly painted. They all represent Sir Kenelm and persons related to or connected with him. There are three portraits of him, six of his beloved wife at different ages, and three triplicates of his mistress, all three by Isaac Oliver, as is Lady Digby's mother, which I have mentioned before. But the capital work is a large miniature copied from Van Dyck of Sir Kenelm, his wife, and two sons, the most beautiful piece of the size that I believe exists (see p. 289). There is a duplicate of Sir Kenelm and Lady Digby from the same picture, and though of not half the volume, still more highly finished. This last piece is set in gold, richly inlaid with flowers in enamel, and shuts like a book. All these, with several others, I purchased at a great price, but they are not to be matched."

It is noteworthy that nearly all the portraits of Sir Kenelm and his wife ascribed to Isaac Oliver must be by Peter, as Isaac died when the originals were boy and girl. Sir Kenelm Digby was born in 1603. Isaac Oliver was buried in October, 1617. One of the portraits is dated 1627. This discrepancy in Walpole's account, wherein, as we have seen above, he speaks of Sir Kenelm's mistress as being painted by the elder Oliver, may be owing to his misreading the monogram. The large copy after Van Dyck of the family group is dated 1635.

Amongst the Digby portraits at Sherborne Castle is that remarkable one of Venetia Lady Digby lying dead in her bed. This is ascribed to Peter Oliver. Walpole had six portraits of her at different ages, and Lord Clarendon speaks of her as "a lady of extraordinary beauty and of as extraordinary fame." Nor was her husband less remarkable. I have somewhere seen him described as "the bravest gentleman and the biggest liar of his time." Be that as it may, he was certainly of handsome appearance, extraordinary strength, and distinguished as a soldier, scholar, and courtier. His father was Sir Everard Digby, who was executed for his share in the Gunpowder Plot. Sir Kenelm renounced the faith of his father, and was entered at Gloucester Hall, Oxford. He was on the Continent at an early age, and, returning in 1623, was knighted by James I. Five years later we hear of him commanding a small squadron in the Mediterranean. During the Civil War he had the prudence to retire to France. Returning to England at the Restoration, he lived at his house in Covent Garden till the year of his death, namely 1665.

His wife, Venetia Anastasia, was the youngest daughter of Sir Edward Stanley, and was born at Tong Castle, in Shropshire, in 1600. They had two sons – Kenelm, killed during the Civil War in a skirmish at St. Neots; and John, who was disinherited by his father, but ultimately succeeded to a portion of the property.

Judging from the lovely group after Van Dyck which, by the courtesy of the late lamented Baroness Burdett-Coutts, I am able to show of this interesting family, these two sons would seem to have inherited the physical beauty of their parents. Another group not less remarkable, and in a sense more interesting in this connection, inasmuch as it is an original work of the artist himself, and not a copy from any other, is that of the three brothers, Anthony Maria, John, and William Browne. This noble piece, which measures ten inches by nine, is now at Burleigh, the owner of which historic house, the Marquess of Exeter, is descended from the eldest of these young men. The work was known to Walpole, and was at Cowdray in his time. He thus describes it: "At Lord Montague's at Cowdray is an invaluable work of Isaac Oliver's. It represents three brothers of that lord's family, whole lengths in black. These young gentlemen resemble each other remarkably, a peculiarity observable in the picture, the motto on which is figuræ conformis affectus. The black dresses are relieved by gold belts and lace collars, and contrasted by the silver-laced doublet of another young man, presumably a page, who is entering the room."

This beautiful group is in perfect preservation, of absolutely superlative quality, and, as we have seen, upon an important scale. It possesses also the interest of having, with three other pictures, escaped the disastrous fire at Cowdray in 1793. This fatality is said to have marked the end of the race of the Lords Montague, and the last scion of the house lost his life over the Falls of Schaffhausen just at the time the flames destroyed the old family mansion. It is said that messengers – one bearing the news of the death of the last Lord Montague by water and the other of the destruction of the home of the race by fire – met one another in Paris. Earl Spencer possesses a very fine copy of this work in oils, painted by Sherwin in 1781.

Any readers who may desire further genealogical details of the brothers represented will find them in my book on "Miniature Painters, British and Foreign," pp. 39 and 40.

I am not aware of Isaac Oliver holding any appointment at Court, but of courtiers and of the aristocracy of his day he must have painted a great number. This was made clear at the exhibition of the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1889, when some five and twenty or thirty more or less well-authenticated works by Isaac Oliver were shown, besides a number by Peter Oliver.

That masterpiece of Oliver's, the Earl of Dorset, now in the Jones Collection, at Kensington, has already been described, and reference has been made to the portrait of Buckingham belonging to the King. There was another of "Steenie," by Isaac Oliver, in the Propert Collection. Mr. Jefferey Whitehead owns, or did own, a couple of portraits of Sir Francis Drake. Lord Derby possesses one of the ill-fated Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, appears to have been painted oftener, almost, than any one of his time. Thus, the Duke of Devonshire possesses two Olivers of him, the King another, and there was one in the Propert Collection also assigned to him. The "wicked" Countess of Essex, Frances Howard, afterwards Countess of Somerset, condemned to death for her share in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, was also painted by Oliver. The Earl of Derby and Major-General Sotheby possess miniatures of her.

The temptation to stop and gossip about some of these people, as, for instance, the lady to whom reference has just been made, is almost irresistible; in truth it may be said that almost all the people painted by Oliver are remarkable either for their virtues, their vices, or their misfortunes; in this latter category must be placed the unfortunate Arabella Stuart, of whom Major-General Sotheby and Mr. J. K. D. Wingfield Digby possess examples, the latter owning two.

The number of portraits existing of this lady, of various kinds, is somewhat remarkable, and I am led to surmise that it may be accounted for by the sympathy aroused by the fate of this unhappy creature. I may mention, in support of this conjecture, the existence of a miniature that belonged to a collection which may be described as the Stuart Collection, inasmuch as it once belonged to James II., and has a circumstantial history which we must not stop to go into here, further than to say that these miniatures are all supposed to possess historical authenticity, and are works of high quality. Amongst them is one of Lady Arabella Stuart, ascribed to Peter Oliver. Now, the ill-fated victim of the political jealousy of James I. ended her days in the Tower in 1615, and Peter Oliver, whose work it is supposed to have been, was not born till 1601, or as some say 1604; hence it is almost impossible that he could or did paint it from life. The fact that he painted her at all, a political prisoner, whose reason had given way before the artist was in his teens, points to an interest in her fate, whether felt by him or by others, such as led, as I have said, to a multiplication of her portraits.

Catherine Cary, Countess of Nottingham, whose portrait is in the Duke of Buccleuch's Collection, and Lady Teresa Shirley are both ladies with stories which belong to the byways of history.

Before leaving Isaac Oliver, there is one other kind of work of which he did a good deal, and to which I must refer, namely, the copying in miniature of paintings by the old masters, of which – but this is by the way – Peter Oliver appears to have done still more. Isaac did not live to finish all his work of this nature, as is shown by an entry in the catalogue of Charles I. of a "great limned piece of the Burial of Christ, which was invented by Isaac Oliver, and was left unfinished at his decease, and now, by His Majesty's appointment finished by his son Peter Oliver."

Peter Oliver erected a monument to his father in the Church of St. Anne's, Blackfriars; it was a bust, and both the monument and the church perished in the Great Fire of 1666. Vertue recalls having seen a model of the bust; and with a copy of the entry occurring in the register of this church I may conclude my remarks on Isaac Oliver: "Isaack Oliver buried 2nd October 1617. Mr. Peter Oliver buried September 22 1647."

Peter Oliver was the eldest son of his father, and was born, as we have before observed, at the very opening of the seventeenth century. There is a portrait of him by Hanneman, a Dutch painter who came to this country soon after Van Dyck, at Hampton Court, which, if we may trust it, shows him to have been a man with dark brown hair and dark, dreary eyes. As he did not live to be fifty years of age, dying two years before the execution of Charles I., he must have worked hard. The Van der Doort catalogue, of which frequent mention has been made, includes thirteen of the paintings once in the possession of Charles, which were copied in water colours by Peter Oliver, as were portraits of the Stuart family.

He married, and had children, and Vertue tells a story, upon the authority of Russell the painter, who was connected with the Olivers, which shows that Peter Oliver's work for and in connection with the Court was well known to Charles II. We do not hear much of the "Merry Monarch" as a patron of art, nor as a model of filial affection, but some motive or other took him incognito, we are told, to Isleworth on a visit to the widow of Peter Oliver to make inquiries about miniatures which she was supposed to possess. "The King went very privately … to see them, the widow showed several finished and unfinished; asked if she would sell them, she said she had a mind the King should see them first, and if he did not purchase them, she would think of disposing of them; the King discovered himself, on which she produced some more pictures which she seldom showed. The King desired her to set her price; she said she did not care to make a price with His Majesty, she would leave it to him, but promised to look over her husband's books, and to let him know what prices his father, the late King, had paid. The King took away what he liked, and sent Rogers to Mrs. Oliver with the option of £1,000, or an annuity of £300 for life, and she chose the latter. Some years afterwards, the King's mistresses having begged all or most of these pictures, Mrs. Oliver said, on hearing it, that if she had thought that the King would have given them to such unworthy persons, he never should have had them. This reached the Court, the poor woman's salary was stopped, and she never received it afterwards."

Apropos of the return of the many treasures which we know were dispersed at the close of the Civil War, I may mention an instance of a piece which was formerly in the Royal Collection, and has gone back to Windsor of recent times. It is an interesting work by Peter Oliver, dated 1628, and is a copy of Raphael's "St. George," about half the size of the original, which latter, by the way, was presented to Henry VII. by the Duke of Urbino, in return for the Order of the Garter. The copy found its way back to the Royal Collection in 1883, having been purchased at the sale at Christie's of the Hamilton Palace treasures in that year.

There is an interesting entry in John Evelyn's diary just after the Restoration, which runs as follows: "I went with some of my relations to the Court, to show them His Majesty's cabinet and closet of varieties, the rare miniatures of Peter Oliver after Raphael, Titian, and other masters, which I infinitely esteem."

Judging from the amount of work in the shape of copies of the old masters, which we know to have been executed by Peter Oliver, and, further, the comparatively small number of portraits by him one meets with, it would seem probable that he did less in the way of portraiture than his father. Thus at the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition works assigned to Isaac Oliver were at least three times as numerous as those assigned to Peter Oliver. I may mention here that besides the Digbys, the younger artist was also credited in this collection with having painted the Countess of Nottingham and the Earls of Somerset and Southampton, Lady Arabella Stuart, and others.

Where there are two artists of the same name working at the same period, as in the case of the Olivers, mistakes easily occur, and we have seen an instance of it in the case of Walpole's error with regard to the Digby family, as shown on a preceding page. I may therefore call collectors' particular attention, in distinguishing the works of these great limners, to the fact that the elder Oliver signed his works with a monogram F, whilst the younger used the initials P. O. connected.

The researches both of Vertue and of Walpole have resulted in discovering but very little about the career of that excellent miniature painter John Hoskins, and both quote an extract from Graham's "English School," to this effect: "He [Hoskins] was bred to face painting in oils, but afterwards taking to miniature, far exceeded what he did before. He drew Charles, his Queen, and most of the Court, and had two considerable disciples, Alexander and Samuel Cooper, the latter of whom became much the more eminent limner"; and though it must be conceded there is not much to be gleaned about the life of the man, it is evident that he had a considerable share of the Court and aristocratic patronage in his day.

The Earl of Wharncliffe possesses, or did possess, portraits of the Countess of Carlisle, as well as one of Oliver Cromwell. Mr. Whitehead does, or did, possess one of Lucy, Viscountess Falkland; also one of John Gauden, Bishop of Worcester. Lord Derby owns a portrait of the ill-fated Henrietta Maria; the Duke of Devonshire one of Thomas Hobbs, philosopher; General Sotheby owns portraits of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey and Sir Charles Lucas.

We miss in the works of Hoskins the minute touch of Hilliard, the refinement of the Olivers, and the breadth of Samuel Cooper; yet Sir Kenelm Digby, in his "Discourses," says that "by his paintings he pleased the public more than Van Dyck." Horace Walpole allows his heads to have great truth and nature, but finds fault with the carnations as "too bricky and wanting a degradation and variety of tints."

The few lines quoted above virtually sum up the approximate rank and position of John Hoskins, and I am not aware that recent biographers have discovered anything of importance to add to them. That he was master to such an artist as Samuel Cooper, and that his pupil's manner was clearly formed on that of the master, constitute, perhaps, the strongest claim that can be urged for Hoskins in connection with this subject.

There is a great deal of truth to nature in Hoskins's work. Elsewhere I have termed his style virile and unaffected, and I do not know that I can find more appropriate epithets. At the same time, the justice of Walpole's criticism, that Hoskins is defective in colour, must be admitted. It is quite true that the carnations are too bricky, and wanting in gradation and variety of tint. This deficiency, which is a very serious one in miniature painting, depriving the flesh tints of their charm, may be traced in part to the medium employed. The amount of body colour used by limners of this period was so great, that the transparency of tone attained by later painters was impossible.

The work of the incomparable Cooper himself is not free from this defect, and we see it carried to excess both in the case of Cooper's master and in that of his pupil Flatman. All three are marked by a certain dryness of colour attaining to brickiness, only Cooper generally avoids the extremes into which the other two artists fall. This fault, it may be said, is characteristic of examples I have seen and possess.

The character of Charles I., whose melancholy visage Hoskins has drawn in a miniature now at Windsor, and here shown, is extremely well rendered. In the Duke of Rutland's valuable collection at Belvoir Castle there is an interesting portrait of Charles, when Prince of Wales, aged fourteen, ascribed to Hoskins, but infinitely inferior in the rendering of expression. Lord Carlisle owns, I believe, a replica of the last named. One of the finest examples of the master that I have met with is a portrait of Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, now in the collection of Lord Aldenham, and this nobleman also possesses a portrait of Elizabeth, wife of Frederick, fifth King of Bohemia.

The question has been raised whether there were two John Hoskinses, father and son. It will be noticed that in an extract from Graham which I have given he speaks of but one Hoskins, and those who argue that there were two appear to rest their contention mainly upon the foundation of a variation in the manner of signing the portrait. Thus the mark + is said to distinguish the works of the father from those of the son, which have I. H. simply. But if this be the test, then it may be urged that there were several John Hoskinses, since amongst the miniatures shown at Burlington House from Windsor, and by the Duke of Buccleuch, ascribed to Hoskins, there were the following different signatures: H. only, I. H. 1645, I. H. fc, I. H. (connected).

I am unable to give the date of the birth of John Hoskins, but he died in 1664, and was buried in St. Paul's, Covent Garden.