 What we are here to do today, as John said, is to celebrate the acceptance of our painting to the society, gifted to the society, previously unknown to scholarly discussion. In a sense, I'm very much aware that what I'm doing here is assembling the information towards a catalogue entry, is that perhaps we have joined as a supplement our great picture catalogue that we published a few years ago. It takes us into the worlds of 18th century biography of the attribution of pictures and the histories of place concerned with where the sitter of this portrait Charles Marsh lived and contemporary debates about antiquities and in particular one very famous object the Barbarini Port d'un Vox. Yn chi'n Chael's Marsh, ydych chi'n gweithio? Fy oedd yn 1735-1812. Fy oedd yn ymddi'r llwyaf o'r oesodd y Dynch yn ymddiadau yng Nghaerion Gweithreifol yn ymddiadau i'r llwyffydd o'r llwyffydd yn ymddiadau ymddiadau ymddiadau ymddiadau ymddiadau. Fy oeddwn i'n chael's Marsh yw'r llwyffydd yn Llywodraeth yn Llywodraeth yn 1748, oedd yn 13 oed. Rwy'n meddwl i'r Llywodraeth Cymru yn 1757, ac yn Llywodraeth Cymru yn 1758. Rwy'n meddwl i'r Llywodraeth yn Llywodraeth yn Llywodraeth, yn ddau'r Llywodraeth yn ddim yn ddau'r ddigon, a dyma'r ddigon, ddim yn ddangos y ddydd gondol, ddyn nhw'n ddim yn ddegon i'r ddweud. Rwy'n meddwl i'r Llywodraeth yn ddegon, yn ddegon i ddegon i ddiweddol, wedi bod i'r ddegon i'r ddefnyddio'r haws argynnu i twycanol. Charles Marsh never married, and the thing that interests me, there are many ways of interpreting and thinking about that conagra, particularly with this great group of 18th century scholars. But what interests me about that fact is that when we look at portraits and the things people collected, we're constantly thinking about how they wish to be seen by others, what was in the world that originated in Renaissance history, what was their self-fashioning by these things, and what was their impression of legacy. It's clear that people in that situation are not leaving large sums of money, therefore to their immediate heirs, sons and daughters, and therefore they have maybe a freedom to buy, to collect, to assemble things that other people do not. We don't know a lot about Charles Marsh's scholarship and where he got his keenness for classical antiquities from. But in January 1784, he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. At the time when the society of course was resident at Somerset House, and for those of you who don't realise this one, you go into Somerset House and look at the door into the shop on the left, and there over the entrance is the insignia of the society because upstairs from there were rooms created for us in those apartments which the Courtauld Gallery had just recently vacated the picture collection whilst the institute is refurbished. It's interesting that in his election to the fellowship he had four major sponsors. It's very interesting when we look at the history of our fellows as who knew who because it's by those ways that we know scholarship was passed around and objects discussed. Two of those four also went to Westminster School, two went to Trinity Cambridge. One of them was the Scotsman William Roy, who was the surveyor and founder of the Ormond Survey project. Following his election in 1776, Roy's book The Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain was published by the Society in 1793. So this may be a particular moment in the history of the Antiquities and I'm moving therefore very much away as you'll see by this lecture from an idea of this being a portrait of the 1790s towards perhaps the 1780s equally possible. Because at the moment Marsh was elected in January 1784, it was just a month later that Dean Mills died and you've seen him in that drawing by Romans on the right. Welcome in when you fell out of the society. Marsh may have been one of the last people that Dean Mills actually admitted to our group. We've not a lot of evidence that Marsh is involved with the society thereafter except that he got involved in perhaps the most famous and passionate debate of the 1790s among the society. And that was over the election of the architect, James Wyatt, who was rejected in a ballot of 1796 because so many people objected to the way we treated the restoration of our great cathedrals including Sonsbury and most famously at Durham. And then when he was put up for a re-election in 1797, he didn't actually get through, but in his diary Joseph Farrington says that on the 6th of July Marsh said in a low voice it was their business to elect persons who would preserve Antiquities and not such as destroy them. But we know that Marsh later withdrew his motion to blackball Wyatt's candidature for the second time, but that's a meclater that Wyatt gets as Wyatt the destroyer in some aspects of architectural history. Marsh is clearly either reflecting that or may be one of the originators of that name. And of course the evidence of the painting itself refers to something very specific because of its inclusion of the Barbarini Portman vase. In May 1784, just four months after his election, Marsh gave a paper to the society on the elegant ornamental cameos of the Barbarini vase, which had a preface in English, but the paper itself was in Latin. And this was printed in volume eight of our journal Archaeologia in 1787. And I'll come back to some of the aspects of that article and what it says about the vase later on. So I wonder if portraiture, as I have said so many times in teaching, think of portraiture as the art of occasion. Just to get people thinking about why do you have your portraits painted in early modern times. If portraiture is an art of occasion, then it's possible that Marsh commissioned this portrait in the mid 1780s at the time he published this article because it very much reflects that particular publication. We know that at the end of his life in 1811 Marsh published a translation into Latin of Milton's Lallegro, and a copy was lodged with the society just after his death, the two years after his death in 1814. In his book, The Memorials of Twytonham, parochial and topographical, published in 1872, so that's a full 60 years after Marsh's death. Richard Cobbett, the local historian of the area who was a junior curate at St Mary's Twytonham, described Marsh as a man of literary tastes who possess a valuable library containing many rare texts. And so we might suppose that the book collecting which Marsh undertook may have started with his father's role as bookseller and clearly continued through his life. We need to find out more about that library, and that brings us of course, since we've mentioned Twytonham to where he lived. Well, we know of two places where he lived. He lived some of his time and certainly died in his apartment here in Piccadilly, so Marsh is in a sense coming home by coming into this building. But we also know that in 1799, so bear in mind by this time in his mid-60s, and more than a decade since perhaps the publication and the making of the portrait, he bought Radnor House at Twytonham a large property on the river. And hence the comments by the later local historian that I mentioned just now, Cobbett in 1872. And Marsh owned this house until his death in 1812, so he lived there for 13 years. The house is recorded in this print after a drawing by the German artist Augustine Heckel. Heckel came to Britain in a very interesting career. He was from Augsburg, and he came to England in 1746 in his retirement and lived at Richmond, and in 1747 he made a print of the Battle of Culloden. So very much plunges into the immediate world of British politics and of topographical views. And in this print after Heckel's Watercolour, we see a battlemented 18th century Gothic style house. So it's very interesting that Radnor House, at mid-18th century, just think of and come up with obviously the building of Strawberry Hill and Horace Warpole's work there. That this Gothic style house is by the river as early as 1750, and we think that's due to the work of John Roberts, the Earl of Radnor, who owned the property from 1722 through to the 1750s. That view of Radnor House really has a very long life, and what I think is interesting about it is that we have to situate it in this enormous quantity and great richness of drawings, paintings, prints of this stretch of the river between Richmond and Pickenham which became such a keynote of British topographical history in the 18th and early 19th centuries. So there it is in a print of the 1840s, and I found alongside it a ground plan of the house, also from the 1840s, just before the moment in the mid-19th century when the house was given a refit. There after looked very much like a mixture of Gothic house and rather Italian at Villa, and I've begun to wonder whether the building of Osborne in these very years is somehow influential on how Radnor House later appeared. After several 19th centuries owners of the property, the house passed to Pickenham Council, but sadly was obliterated by bombing during the Second World War. Here we are on the site today, and on site what remains are though repositioned obviously and changed considerably in the meantime, are two of the small summer houses by the river that we have just seen in those early prints and we'll see them again later on. Otherwise the site today has a flood level marking from the 18th century, some fragments of brick walls but nothing otherwise remains of the house. Fortunately, and really because of a programme of conservation of a bigger grander sort and adventure than the one we're launching today to do with the Great House, in the 1930s Pickenham Council were really not doing anything with the property, and Queen Mary wrote a letter to the mayor saying that she would lend her support and patronage to any ambitions to restore this great house. So this prompted a full article by Country Life in 1937, so fortunately because Country Life went there we have these photographs at a time of great pressure for conservation. So what we've seen and we've seen in these pictures are elaborate interiors from the era of Raddwell's time from the mid 18th century, including there on the right, a painted ceiling in an upstairs long room by the French artist Jean-François Clermont. Now there's no evidence from these photographs to get back to Marsh to say anything that suggests that Marsh did anything major with the house, we know he did practically nothing with the exterior because of those plans and drawings from the mid 19th century that essentially shows the 18th century house before the refit. So very little evidence that much happened to the house after the Raddwell's time until that refit a century later. So Marsh, by, is a very grand house and lives there, presumably, you know, with his collection. Now the Gothic appearance of Raddwell's house and its proximity to Strawberry Hill inevitably begs the question and introduces the appearance of Horace Walpole into this lecture. Here's the 1784, very relevant to the things we're looking at today, Map of Twypenham by Samuel Lewis and what we see here where it's flagged as Mr Bassett's house, which is just there. And Strawberry Hill is just here, so they're very close, bringing all sorts of questions about the possible influence of this house upon Walpole's designs for his much more celebrated mansion. And we know that Sir Francis Bassett, Baron de Gunstanville on Bassett, was the most significant owner of Raddwell's house between the Earl's time and Marsh's time. And we know that he visited Strawberry Hill because we have the tickets of, you went as tourists to Strawberry Hill, Walpole didn't necessarily greet you there, however, high and mighty you were. The tickets survived his visits to the house, including some visitors that he took along several times during the late 1780s. There's no evidence, however, that he actually encountered Walpole himself, or that Walpole was a visitor to Raddwell's house. And similarly with Marsh, the only reference we find in Walpole's correspondence is the rather disparaging comment about the Arthurian archaeologia. In a letter from Richard French of February 1790, where he contests Marsh's interpretation of the Portland vase. And of course, by the time Marsh bought the house in 1799, Walpole had been dead for three years. There is no one link between Walpole and Raddner House that's interesting and worth further exploration. In the mid-1750s, the Swiss artist Johann Friedrich Muntz spent seven years in England. I happened to have an opportunity to look at his work quite closely some years ago, and I was working on the vine because John Shoot, the patron of the vine in the mid-18th century, also employed Muntz because he was a close friend of Horace Walpole. He stayed for some years with Walpole in the 1750s until Muntz happened to fall out really with the entire Walpole circle of friends. And it's Muntz who recorded the Riverside of Raddner House, and here are those pavilions, as I showed you in the pictures on site today. Now this one is closest to the original, that one is much older. On the river frontage, the house up here would have been back there, and there they are in this view from the print I showed in 1750. So that business, if you're looking into the history of the house, of the connection through Muntz of its representation is quite an interesting one. I suppose that Charles Marsh hung his portrait at his great house at Raddner, because following his death the painting has an unbroken provenance through a series of owners who all lived in Twickenham houses. It's absolutely down for the name changes because the portrait would have passed through the female line several times, and it stayed along the river at Twickenham until it was gifted to the society last year. At Marsh's death in 1812, his heir was his nephew, the Reverend Thomas Viles. As a king scholar and captain at Westminster School, Marsh was entitled to burial in the Abbey, and here we find the memorial to both himself and his nephew in the East Cloister. So let's turn now to the artist, Neymur Francis Abbott, and it's initially from the label on the back of the picture that we get the first hint that Abbott's authorship, and it says, most of the Charles is obliterated, that the S is there, S Marshesquire by LF Abbott, celebrated portraitist, an admirable likeness and much prized by his nephew, the Reverend Thomas Viles. I don't know, that may be too, maybe historic, but suggesting that this may have been appended to the back of this picture between 1812 and 1831 when Viles died. That's the date of this label, the date of his death. So we have some clue there, but also stylistically and by attribution down through this family line over the years, this picture has always been attributed to LF Abbott. And why, one wonders, this particular artist, why did Marsh give him the patronage? Abbott painted different sitters, sometimes interesting groups of patrons over many years, both military and naval figures, most famously his portrait of Nelson, which survives in many different versions. And of course, Marsh, working in the War Office, would have known some of those people in military and naval life. And he also painted scholars and scientists. And in particular, and some of you may well be an important enabler in this scenario, is Sir William Musgrove, who Abbott certainly painted, that's the version on there on the right, in the British Museum, in the British Library. And of course, Musgrove is very important in our history because he, through his extraordinary manuscripts and manuscript collection, which are now in the British Library, he enabled James Granger in 1769-74 and later Henry Bromley in 1793, published their great compendiums of engravings expressing the history of British portraiture. And of course, this is something which is referred to in the print, under his elbow, much like Marsh has his elbow on, or very close to the Portman vase in his picture. And what's also important here is that Musgrove was a vice president of this society in the mid 1780s, just at the time when Marsh's articles were published and when he would have been familiar in the society's premises. So there may be a connection there. It seems to me, when I look at the works of Elef Abbott, that he paints in rather different ways and in different means of production, and of course we'll find out a lot more when we get the picture restored as to what category this falls into, as he turns from different sitters, as he turns to different groups of patrons, as well as through the time span of his life. It did seem to me, just looking a couple of weeks ago, one more time, at the five pictures by Abbott currently on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, that the pottery manufacturer, Thomas Turner there on the left, has a kind of, when I looked at it, I thought that has a kind of brightness, if I may say a blondness of the skin tone and everything, that maybe the sort of thing we're going to get when Abbott, sorry, when the Abbott portrait of Marsh is restored. That portrait dates from about 1790. But one commission in particular by Abbott links the painter's life, his illness and his death, Abbott's illness and death, with his practice. Because there on the right is his portrait in the MPG of the sculptor Joseph Nolkins, painted about 1797. In 1798, Abbott was certified as insane four years before his death in 1802. But he makes his will in 1800, refers to his dear wife, not necessarily committed to an asylum one was that maybe kept with his family until that day. And then on the 18th of August, 1803, the year after Abbott has died, Joseph Farrenman is in the sculptor Nolkins studio and he writes, A boy near 16 years of age was drawing up on slate from a plaster figure. Nolkins told me he was the only son of the late Mr Abbott portrait painter. His mother is a Roman Catholic and a bigot. So that's the dear wife from another family perspective, wherever Nolkins and Farrenman heard this from. She insists upon her son making a Roman priest which he refuses and she will in consequence scarcely see him. He lives with her father and mother who allow him to pursue his inclination for the art. Just an interesting example that somebody writes like that, we're exactly halfway between the Gordon Riots and the Catholic Emancipation Act. So it's quite interesting that somebody makes that comment at that time. What about the style of the painter and just some general and more specific comments that I would make about this. Marsha Shone, as the scholar in his coat, often said that people wore these, from the quite early times on, wore these coats, often lined with fur in the mornings when they're at their scholarly and thinking. I certainly think, because I'm obviously making a push here for the presence and the power of this portrait that we are accepting and that we want to conserve with the presence in some of the great subjects of the Renaissance. That sense in the Lotto and Titian portraits of the sitter showing you, to go back to self-fashion in a sense of where he wants to belong, what he's interested in, in the two on the right by the collections that they have with Marsha, his scholarship around the Barbarini Portland vines. That interesting use of fur, and I was asking one or two of our scholars here today what they thought it was, and we concluded it's probably Fox that is the lining to Marsha's coat. Sometimes the wear of fur in the 18th century was a sign of having travelled, particularly foreign fur is unused, though the most common lining for these coats was Fox, or sometimes squirrel fur. I put up three Batonies here to remind us of how common this kind of dress was, three of Batonies, portrait painted in Rome of English sitters. One thinks too of the use in two other ways of caps, whether it's the extremity in terms of portrait type of Russo in our so-called Armenian costume, where hat and dressings of the coat are of fur, or of course the lining to Hogarth's cap in his self-portrait. The 1780s was a particularly apparently great fashion for fur ruffs. This is Stitans by Gainsborough in the National Gallery, and Prince George himself had muffs in the 1780s made of sable. So, expensive things, and just looking again today, I think something has got that turning back of the sleeve. It's almost as if Marsha in his portrait has the makings of a muff there into which he's put his hands. While I'm almost engaging with Batonies' images of this kind, they're on the right is of Thomas Kerrich, and I can't but mention him in this particular room. Painting in Rome as a young man, because of course Thomas Kerrich was the donor of 28 paintings to the Society of Antiquies through his will in 1828, and many of them are in this room today. Our arch-top portrait, some of which are on their way back from the Past and Treasure Exhibition in America at Norwich, but two are back up there, Edwin IV and Richard III. The portrait by Anthony Samore of Yann Van Skorro, his master on the back wall, and of course, most importantly, our great portrait by Hans Heweth of Queen Mary I over the fireplace. So it's very interesting that we see this connection through fur between these fellows of the Society between their giving and commenting on things that were here. What's then about the painting's content, and here we enter this mind of information and an enormous amount of scholarship which I've only just begun to delve into. The vase in this picture, a very well-known history, and as you can see by showing the detail of the marge portrait and the vase itself, and of course it's in reverse, and I'll come back to the issues around that in a moment. But to recap, because the possibility of when-march might have seen this vase, how he knew it is very interesting in this recorded history. The Barbarini Portman vase is first recorded about 1600. It's owned by the Barbarini family for 150 years until it was sold to the Scottish dealer James Byers. And somewhere on its way home between Italy and London, it was purchased by Sir William Hamilton. And when he comes on leave to London in 1783, he begins his negotiation with the Duchess of Portland for her purchase of the vase and other items. So it's always been supposed that Sir William Hamilton purchased the vase really for Honour Wood's sale. The Duchess of Portland was described by Horace Warpole in the usual waspish nanna as a simple woman, but perfectly sober and intoxicated only by empty vases. The sale of the vase from Hamilton to the Duchess of Portland took place in January 1784, the very month that Marge was elected. And two months after Marge's election, as fellow in March 1784, Sir William Hamilton brought the vase to the Society of Antiquities in Somerffet House to show it. So the presentation of the vase on public shows it worked with fellows at the Society is exactly midway between Marge's election and the point where he gives the paper to the Society in Manning. So one says, surely therefore, Marge must have seen the original, and there we go back to the page of the entry in archaeology on the article and the vase itself. Marge must have seen the original. In the painting, Marge positions himself among the scholars who have debated and contested over the content of this vase and the meaning of its figures. Throughout the 18th century, the vase was believed to have originated in Rome on the Montedagorano from the tomb of the mid-3rd century emperor Alexander Severus, and it's tomb of Alexander Severus and his mother, Julia Mamaya. Sorry, it's illustrated as such by Pietro Sancto Barcelli in his liantiki Sipolcri of 1697, and here a couple of plates from that, both of the tomb and of the vase itself. It was later, of course, put into print also by Piranesi in his antiquity Romana of 1756, but it's particularly with the great scholar Bernard de Malfocon that Marge wishes to contest. Marge de Malfocon is, as we all know, a great scholar, a great person who lived between the 17th and the early 18th century, his liantiki explique there, which you've seen in the fifth volume, is a tremendously valuable and powerful work of the compendium of relics of antiquity. But, of course, it is that that Marge de Malfocon seems to contest with here three details of the painting, and I put, as you see it at the bottom there on the right, face on, and I turned it round up there. Malfocon's volume five, that I've shown the title page just then, Le Funenbain de Nassion ddagbar, de Lump, de Sompis, that's what he chooses to put in the picture. Malfocon, we never saw the vase, believed that the vase was made of agate, and that's a very obvious thing to contest and to prove that it's not a blast when the vase finally comes to England. Much of the debate through history has been about whether the content of this vase is something to do with the story of Peleus and Thetis. And Frank Marsh's summary of what he believes this vase is about doesn't have a tight iconographic programme at all. He describes it as scattered features of well-known history, satirically sketched out. So, he is the only person, for example, who identifies one of the figures on the vase as the adopted father of Alexander Severus, the Emperor Heliogabalus. Nobody else agrees with that. So, it's quite interesting that there is this huge speculation around what all these figures actually mean. Of course, all the representations of the vase show the figures in the printed, the common printed form, you make the drawing and then the print is in reverse. This must have been the currency of the knowledge of this vase throughout the 18th century, meaning that up until 1784, when it arrives, or 1783 to 4, when it arrives in Hamilton's possession. What's very interesting is that it is in Hamilton's own engravings of the vase that we've seen for the first time in engraving the right way round, where he's actually representing the vase itself rather than simply its figures. But Marsh seems to take his cue from Bartley in showing this image in reverse from the print culture, as we see when we go back to comparing the detail of the vase and the painting of Marsh there on the left. Finally, let me turn to the condition of the painting and what we know about it from its physical appearance. I'm very much indebted here and I'm just briefly resonating the work of our picture conservators who have looked at this and done a preview of what might happen to it. The picture is very obvious when you go and look closely and I hope you all will at the end of the lecture is unlined. It's over a four-membered pine structure. It's very stiff and undulating and there are patches to hold the tears or hold at the top left and the bottom left, which you can see on the back. The paint is inadequate in good condition, we're assured, but it's very discoloured by the varnish and there's quite a lot of surface dirt. But of course when you throw the good camera at these things and the light brings them up, you can see how splendid this could look and there is something there because that looks brighter than the face you'll see it in the picture as you will see later on. But when I talk about that brightness and blondness in the picture in the MPG, something of that I think may come up in the keenies of this work and there are some further details of the fur and this train of paint across the top of the surface to get highlights and to get the characteristics of the different colourations of this material. And the frame. The frame profile is in pine, its surface decoration is created with gesso and the face of the frame is oil and water gilded and we're advised that that is not the original decorative scheme, it's been tampered with and what we see today is probably a campaign of the 1860s to restore it. What did the original scheme of this frame look like? One very interesting thing emerges though that brings us back to Charles Marsh and the origins perhaps of this frame and its making. Charles Marsh's sister Anne married Amos Viles and they are the parents of the Reverend Thomas Viles whom we saw is commemorated with Charles in Westminster Abbey and to whom Marsh leaves his estate. Amos Viles' elder brother was the frame maker Thomas Viles and it was his workshop that was responsible for the frames around the two portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir William Chambers in the Royal Academy next door. Thomas Viles the frame maker died in 1781 leaving his business to his niece Sarah. So I'm not sure yet whether that Sarah is the Reverend Thomas Viles buried with Charles Marsh's sister or maybe the daughter of some other brother of Amos and the elder Thomas. But what's quite intriguing, what I'd like to follow and think about is did Sarah, because we know she then managed her uncle's business, did she manage the making of this frame for her uncle or certainly close relative Charles Marsh when his portrait was made during the 1780s, the first decade of her managing this business. So an interesting place there to begin to think about the making of this frame, only the technical analysis when the frame is removed, the picture is removed, and we examine the frame very carefully. And compare it with other Viles' work and of course some of you in this room will know we're very much in debt to Jacob Simon's work on frame maker's wonderful database there on the National Portrait Gathering website is that we can start to do some technical analysis and indeed comparison. To end I just want to say that I think this portrait will have a tremendously significant place in our collection of 18th century portraits that we've already expected about various places where it could hang in its splendour when it is restored. I think it will, I think it outshines though their very important members of the society before portrait on our stairs are not as good in terms of quality as this portrait. I think it's a greater work as it were even than our wonderful portrait of Martin Folx, the last purchase of a historical portrait by the society in the early 90s here just to the right of the screen. It sits alongside the portrait of Humphrey Wanley I think in terms of its interest and how interesting there that we almost see a kind of difference through the 18th century of someone, a portrait painted with a man surrounded by a rather complex narrative on his interest in the translation of text and his involvement with classism. Whereas the portrait of Marsh is done by a very straightforward but very integrated reference by just one of it into what the man knew and believed in. And on the other side of course our games of wisdom, I just put up Mr Minette there, Mr and Mrs Menette which hang up in our library. We'll be able to I think judge and see the quality of that when the picture is restored. So this is the beginning of our fundraising campaign for this. We already have some funds behind us so we are fully confident we can get there. I want to thank many people for the help I've had so far in doing some examination of this portrait to all the staff at the Antiquers but particularly to Heather Rowland and Dominic Wothers for their help in making this occasion possible. I want to thank the local historians and particularly the librarians of Twickenham and Richmond who were very helpful to me. I want to thank the local historian of Twickenham, Mike Cherry for his recent book on Radnor House and the scholars Michael Snowden and Lucy Pelts in particular who have not seen the picture in recent times and given good advice on what to start looking for. But finally I want to thank the donor of this portrait, Sheila Lockhart who's with us here today and to say that this portrait will finally hang on the walls in memory of her brother Simon who died a couple of years ago who was the last owner of this portrait and who I think had he lived would have been a great scholar and certainly a fellow of this society. Sadly that did not happen. So it's to them that I want to make the greatest vote of thanks today and also to thank all of you for coming in to listen to what I have to say. Thank you.