 Hi, I'm Mark Hurt and welcome to the sixth and final talk in the Paul Mellon Centre's online public lecture programme for the summer of 2020. My talk is entitled Making an Impact, Thomas Lawrence's Arthur-Atherly. In 1792, the young and prodigiously gifted artist Thomas Lawrence, who was just 23 years old at the time, exhibited a portrait of a similarly youthful Arthur-Atherly at the Royal Academy's annual exhibition of contemporary art held at London's Somerset House. The painting which today hangs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known as LACMA, shows its 19-year-old subject, which graduated from Eaton College the previous year, silhouetted against a lowering grey sky, the heavy clouds of which hover over a dark panoramic landscape. In the distance, the upper reaches of Eaton Chapel reflect by pale rays of sunlight, as are a field and a tree. Arthurly himself, pictured in close-up, looks directly out at the viewer, his face framed by long brown hair. He holds a black hat in his left hand, and rests his glove right hand against his hip, cocking his elbow towards us as he does so. He wears blue trousers, a brightly lit white waistcoat and neck scarf, and a striking red tailcoat, with long distinctively cut lapels. For those of us interested in 18th century British art, Lawrence's portrait of Arthurly is a familiar, even canonical work, which attracted fresh attention in 2016, when a study for the picture was purchased by the Hoban Museum in Bath. In this talk, I will be looking anew at Lawrence's painting, and placing it in what I hope will be some suggestive and even surprising contexts. We will be recovering its relationship to an ancient Narcane school procession, and an extravagantly ambitious painting and print project by a now-forgotten artist. We will discover the links between a picture and earlier exhibitions, portraits by Lawrence's most celebrated predecessors. We will find out more about how the work fitted into the carefully-pupcrafted portfolio of paintings that the artist submitted to the 1792 Academy exhibition. Finally, we will see how it slotted into, but also shone out from, the dense jigsaw pictures that made up that year's display. It's long been recognised that the commissioning of Arthurly's portrait, and all probability by his parents, coincided with his departure from Eden in 1791. But it is also apparent that the picture does not quite fit into the long-standing tradition of the Eden leaving portraits, which were works at the departing pupils or their parents, who donate to the school itself and many of which still hang there today. Rather, as I discovered when carrying out new research for this talk, Arthurly's portrait has a different character, a pictorial key to which lies in the red-tail coat he is shown wearing. In a brief discussion of the picture published in 2009, the artist oring Jean-Patrice Merendal, then Chief Curator of European Art at Lagma, noted that Arthurly's dress signified his membership of what he described as the Admontan Club, an ancient Eden fraternity with roots to medieval times that survived until 1874. Merendal went on to mention that, quote, one of the club's traditions was to take part in a procession during which boys in the fantasy costume, the salt bearers, participated in the maintenance of their captain at university by levying contributions from passers-by. Printed by this intriguing reference, I decided to delve deeper into this old public school ritual, which is here shown being pictured in two 19th century prints. I soon found out that in the late 18th century, the event known as a Monten procession took place every three years on Wiches days. As a contemporary account notes, it began at dawn when a number of the senior boys in the school dressed in, quote, fancy dresses of silks, satins, some richly embroidered, would station themselves along the roads around Windsor and Eden. These boys were known as the salt bearers and would demand money or salt from all passers-by, money which was indeed used to support the school captain, something like a head boy in his later studies at Cambridge. The procession proper then began at noon, led by bands of music and featuring what are described in the same account as all the Atonian boys, two and two, dressed in officers' uniforms. Those are the King's foundation wearing blue. The others, this is the majority of pupils, wearing scarlet uniforms. If this is not already spectacular enough, this procession will be accompanied by members of the royal family, who often included King George III himself, quote, attended by the Prince of Wales and other male braches of the royal family on horseback, and Queen Charlotte and her daughters, who were travelled by coach. The procession would be completed by further bands of music, by what was described as, quote, a great concourse of nobility and gentry in their carriages and on horseback. This grand procession wound its way through the towns of Eaton and Slough towards a mound known as Salt Hill or The Mountain. There, the boys all passed the King and Queen in review before ascending the mountain, where a grand standard would be raised and a narration delivered. One such mountain procession took place on May the 25th, 1790, when, as a contemporary newspaper noted, quote, the Prince of Wales honoured the celebrity with his presence. More importantly for our purposes, the same occasion featured Lawrence's subject Arthur Athely. This is quickly demonstrated by a page from a related publication on the history of the mountain, which lists each and every participant in that year's event and details their position in the procession. In the list, we find Athely with his name in capitals and seemingly playing a role of sergeant in the procession. Seeing Athely's name in this context and recognising the prominence of his scarlet mountain outfit in Lawrence's portrait suggests that our painting is a celebration not only of his graduation from Eaton, but also of his participation in seniority in a court-sanctioned event that had taken place in the year previous to the portrait's execution. This suggestion is given extra weight. We turn to an artistic project that made the 1790 mountain procession the basis for an ambitious, indeed a madly overambitious, exercise and group portraiture. This was the brainchild of a now obscure painter and engraver called Richard Livesey, who, thanks to the influence of his teacher, the court painter Benjamin West, was employed in this period to copy pictures at Windsor Castle and took drawing lessons to the world children. Then as he seems to have settled in Windsor by the late 1780s, in the early 1790, he embarked on a scheme not only to paint two large pictures of that year's mountain procession, which he then planned to engrave, but also to paint modestly-scaled individual portraits of every single one of its Atonian participants. In an advertisement published in June 1791, from which I'd like to quote at some length, Livesey described his project in detail. Mr. Livesey respectfully informs the parents and friends of the young gentlemen at Eaton and the public in general that, during the last 12 months, he has been engaged in a design of painting two large pictures representing the last mountain, where he intends to introduce the portraits of Dr. Davis and Dr. Langford, the masters, the assistant masters, and all the young noblemen and gentlemen who were at that time of the school, amounting to near 400 persons in their respective dresses and characters. The designs for the large pictures are arranged and as many of the portraits have already been taken, as will enable him to prepare one of the large pictures for engraving about Christmas next. Livesey goes on to write that, quote, the largest figures will be about two feet six inches high and the figures in the procession will be the portraits of the young gentlemen in the rank they walked. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the project was never completed. But what does survive of Livesey's doomed enterprise includes one of the paintings he described in his advertisement, which, despite his best efforts, was left unfinished. It today hangs at Eaton. Even in its incomplete state, it offers a vivid and detailed depiction of the procession in which Athalie participated. Furthermore, it shows the majority of the depicted Atonians wearing not only the white neck scarf, but precisely the same kind of scarlet tailcoat he's shown wearing in Lawrence's portrait. Indeed, it is quite likely, I think, that the painting includes, amongst its gallery of modest full-length portraits, a portrait of Athalie himself. Tracking across the diminutive faces that look out at us from the canvas, a number of candidates suggest themselves. Is it the boy who stands behind the leading figure in the procession? Probably not, I would guess. Is it one of these boys standing further back? Again, none seem entirely convincing. But how about the boy who stands above and slightly to the right, the one person of colour included in the procession, and near two of the very few boys shown wearing blue jackets? Looking at his face, and that swirl of hair on his forehead, and comparing them with those found in the portrait painted by Lawrence, suggests that he too might be Arthur Athalie. This is all intriguing enough, but what is especially interesting for us is that, as Livesey notes in his 1791 advertisement, many of the small-scale individual portraits he painted of the Athenian boys, which served both as preparatory materials for this large painting, and as modest works of art in their own right, would be seen hanging at that year's Royal Academy exhibition at Somerset House. Indeed, if we turn to the catalogue for the 1791 display, we find that no less than 43 of these pictures, all but one of which are simply described as portraits of Athenians, were scattered around the main exhibition room, known as the Great Room, at Somerset House. The largest and grandest of Livesey's portraits, which enjoyed the longer title of Portrait of a Nobleman's Son in his dress as Salt Bearer at the late Monten Eaton College, pictured one of the Salt Bearers, George Montague, wearing the ceremonial outfit and standing in the landscape outside Eaton, with a view of the college in the distance. The 42 other paintings on display, however, which measured only some 23 by 20 centimeters in size, which were variously hung individually in pairs, and in two groups of 11, seemed to have followed a very different and far more modest head and shoulders format. I've not had much of an opportunity in lockdown to track down these pictures, but here are what's certain to be two examples depicting younger members of the procession. And here is another pair of such works, currently owned by Eaton, and seemingly of the same boy, Worley Butch, one of which is a more straightforward sketch, and the other of which, again, purportedly by Livesey, though I'm not convinced about this, shows him standing outdoors in his Monten dress with a college picture in the background, however negligible as individual contributions to the 1791 exhibition. Collectively, Livesey's works offered visitors to the academy display an extended and intriguing group portrait. One critic, at least, was impressed, writing that quote, for taking delineations of the young gentleman in the Monten was a very happy thought. Many of the faces, there are more than 30, are very interesting, and each head being undisguised by Marachel Powder, and ornamented with that natural frame which is given by nature, and their hair being in that easy state in which nature has left it, gives them a most wonderful advantage over the well-dressed and well-powdered heads which surround them. Much more remains to be discovered about these pictures and the abortive scheme of which they were apart. What of course is so interesting about them is that they offer us a new context for interpreting Lawrence's portrait of Athaly. It is not simply that Athaly himself may have well have been the subject of one of the Monten portraits exhibited in 1791. It is also that Lawrence's picture, itself, like Livesey's works, listed in the catalogue simply as Portrait of Anatonian, can now be understood to have functioned at the 1792 exhibition as a spectacular sequel to the collective and individual imagery of the Monten boys that have been an offer to the previous years' display. Specifically, it is as if his image takes the basic ingredients of the modest portraits, fashioned by Livesey, the youthful privileged male face, the naturally worn hair, the striking red rail tailcoat, the brown gloves, the distant view of Eden, and the shared allusion to the famous procession and transforms those ingredients into something that is simultaneously very similar and very different in character and, as we can now go on to explore, far more sophisticated. Here we can note that Lawrence, despite his own relative youth, was prodigiously knowledgeable about and technically fluent in the different models of portraiture that have marked the history of the genre and that were available to be recycled and revised by the ambitious contemporary practitioner. His portrait of Athely, even as it follows on from Livesey's more modest pictorial offerings, also sees him adopting and adapting the pictorial templates bequeathed by some of his most famous predecessors. Thus, Athely's confident, even swaggering, hand-on-hit pose, which sees his cocked elbow nudging up against the picture plane, provides, together with his flowing hair, an unmistakable echo of Van Dyke's courtly portraiture from the early 17th century. But even more relevant to his pictorial models, I think, are the kinds of paintings that Lawrence's most celebrated and immediate predecessors, Gainsborough and Reynolds, had submitted to the academy displays in the 1770s and 1780s. An especially pertinent example is a painting that offers a near-perfect bridge between Van Dyke's and Lawrence's portraits, Gainsborough's famous Blue Boy, which was designed in large part to make a spectacular impact at the 1770 World Academy exhibition. The direct gaze out to the viewer on the part of a young, long-haired male adolescent whose fringe falls heavily across his forehead. The bold use of a single colour, blue on Gainsborough's part, scarlet in Lawrence's, to attract visual attention. The confident hand-on-hit pose. The doft hat. The exploitation of an emptied landscape, a low horizon and a dark, booding sky, in order to grant the sitter a bold, light-catching silhouette. All these shared properties suggest how much the prodigy Lawrence had learned in Gainsborough's exhibition pictures and how extensively translated their qualities into such portraits as that of Atherly. Similarly, a glance at some of Reynolds's most radical late exhibition portraits, in which he focused on creating simplified, flattened silhouettes, reveled in the cuts and shapes of modern fashion, and experimented with bold combinations of colour, including the familiar martial formula of red and white, indicates the extent to which Lawrence's picture of Atherly also drew upon the advances in the genre, pioneered by the other great portraitists of the recent past. Significantly, however, these kinds of pictorial borrowings and adaptations are neither obvious nor falling. Rather, as in the case of Lawrence's recycling of Livese's Montemimetry, they're subtly absorbed into Atherly's portraits of formal infrastructure, an overlay with the imprint of the artist's own hand and what we might call his signature style. So, on that, in his male portraits at least, revolved around a dialectic of lushness and restraint. In these works, we typically encounter a smooth, almost slick, painterly handling and a rich, sensuous focus on the luxurious trappings of elite statives. At the same time, we find that these qualities are tied to and, in some manner, controlled by the deployment of flattened and deliberately simplified areas of colour. Look at the blocked out areas of red and white, he deploys in depicting Atherly's waistcoat and jacket, and the use of a bold but exactingly precise line, a line that, in this case, cuts the lapels of the same waistcoat and jacket with a couturious skill and turns them into a rhythmic flashing succession of elegant silhouettes. There's another aspect of Lawrence's signature style that I'd like to mention here, however. For the artist, the exercise is in pictorial borrowing and formal interplay that I've just been describing were extremely hard one. He was someone who typically expended enormous amounts of nervous energy, anxiety, and time on his portraits. In fact, he was later to confess that, quote, I am as much the slave of the picture I am painting as if it had living personal existence and chained me to it. Yet, despite or maybe because of this, one of the most striking qualities of Lawrence's paintings, and one that made them so attractive to an aristocratic clientele, was that they seemed so effortless in their execution. A picture such as his earlier full length of the actress Elizabeth Barron, with its sweeping outlines and flickering highlights, looks as if it has danced off the Peter's easel. And this impression of effortlessness is also conveyed in the artist's portrait of Atherly, which portrays very little in the way of artistic labour or uncertainty, and oozes facility in its composition and handling. The ease and confidence displayed by Lawrence's privileged subject, entirely befitting an individual of his class and education, thus finds its perfect counterpart in the ease and fluency, with which it is so tempting and misleading to imagine his portrait must have been painted. Here it is suggested to turn to the Italian derived term sprezzatura, a word coined by Balthasar Castiglione in the 16th century book on the courtier, in which he defined as quote, a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it. In this instance it is a term that usefully serves to bind both the artist and his sitter together and suggests the ways in which they have both masked the labour that has gone into their performances. I hope we can now agree that Lawrence's portrait in of itself offers a complex combination of different pictorial elements and references and associations. But it was a picture that, for Lawrence at least, was not intended to add standalone, but in company. First of all it formed part of a portfolio of 10 portraits he submitted to the 1792 Academy Exhibition that served to stake his claim even at the age of 23 as Britain's leading portraitist in the aftermath of the death of Reynolds, only a few months beforehand. The major artists of late 18th and early 19th century Britain tended to spend months planning their submissions to the annual Academy display and Lawrence was no exception. In fact he was especially assiduous in putting together selections of works that showcased his talents across varied categories of portrait that flaunted the status and celebrity of his clients and that in a highly competitive artistic environment he designed a steel attention of works of his rivals. The 1792 display offers a good demonstration of the artist's careful orchestration of his academy submissions. That year Lawrence's portrait of athlete shared space in the exhibition with such works as the artist's elaborate state portrait of the king George III in Garter Robes which, intriguingly, once again includes the image of the infant chapel in the pictorial background. Portrait of athlete also shared space with an artist's strange role playing portrait of the celebrated actress and muse Emma Lady Hamilton in the character of Milton's La Pensarosa and with his double portrait of the leading financier John Julius Angerstein and his second wife Eliza. And to give one last example of the artist's portrait of a young naval officer Captain Graham Moore this last picture offers an especially suggested counterpart to the athlete portrait and its male subjects direct outward gaze its depiction of a bright white neck scarf and a boldly silhouetted uniform and its use of a dramatic brooding sky to add atmosphere to the image. Such works I'd like to suggest had a particular role to play within Lawrence's portfolio of submissions. Portraits like those of George III and Lady Hamilton were intended to impress, at least in part, because of their famous subjects their monumental scale and, respectively, their grandeur and theatricality. Those of athlete and Moore had a different function. Though less celebrated than their sitters and far smaller in size they had the capacity to their direct and dramatic visual address to the viewer to make instant eye-catching impact within the exhibition space to reel in passing spectators as it were and thereby encourage them to take a closer look at the artist's handiwork. To get a better sense of how this might have worked in practice and of how Lawrence's portrait of athlete operated within the exhibition room we're fortunate enough to be able to turn to a set of diagrammatic drawings that depict the 1792 display in some detail. These drawings, two examples of which I show here, were produced by the architect Thomas Sandby who, that year, served on the Academy's Hang Committee. This committee had the onerous duty, as it still does today, of arranging the hundreds of successfully submitted pictures across the walls of the Academy exhibition rooms. These rooms were dominated by the famous Great Room which in 1792 featured more than 300 pictures arranged above and below the room's famous line, a wooden molding that, running some eight feet above the ground, helped support the paintings on the upper reaches of the wall which were collectively fixed to a wooden armature and tilted forward to ensure a better view of their contents. In his drawings, Sandby recorded the final layout of the works in the Great Room and introduced into his diagrammatic plan the names of the artists were produced each of the paintings on view. Using Sandby's studies and that year's exhibition catalog which listed the pictures in the order in which they were hung, we can securely identify and place all of Lawrence's contributions to the Great Room at that year's exhibition and put together the beginnings of an illustrated reconstruction of that year's hang. Thus, we find that the artist's painting of Lady Hamilton is by Penserosa and his double portrait of the Angosteans hung on the west wall. In turn, we see that Lawrence's portrait of the king hung on the north wall and derighted its centre. What about his picture of Atherly? Once again, the quirks of history have made it a little tricky to pick out his portrait from the many others on view, thanks to the fact that Sandby's finished drawing of the south wall, where the portrait was to be encountered, has not survived. Luckily, we do have Sandby's preliminary sketch of this part of the display. Though it is incomplete and slightly scrappy and back not entirely accurate, it gives us plenty to work with. It enables us, with the aid of the catalog, to identify the exact location of Lawrence's painting. More specifically, we can say with confidence that the artist's portrait of Arthur Atherly, which in the sketches yet to have Lawrence's name added to it, hung on the right-hand side of the wall, immediately next to the picture that Sandby notes as by she. Let's add it to Sandby's sketch. Significantly, though the painting of Atherly might thus seem to occupy a relatively marginal position in the Great Room, it in fact enjoyed one great benefit, that of standing directly on the famous line, which was understood to be the most privileged position for exhibition works in the period. In this instance indeed, we ensure that Lawrence's picture formed part of a monumental sequence of paintings on the room in the South Wall, running along the line from left to right, dominated at its centre by a huge religious canvas by the leading academician Henry Fusely. Fusely's work, which seems no longer to survive, was itself bracketed by two full-length royal portraits. On the left, contrary to Sandby's jotted reference the name of the established portraitist John Hotner, which probably referred to an earlier idea of the layout, the final display featured a full-length portrait of the Prince of Wales by John Russell. That's included in our reconstruction of the South Wall. On the right of Fusely's painting meanwhile, there hung a grand eloquent image of the Prince's younger brother, the Duke of Flandres, this time correctly noted as having been painted by John Hotner. I've not been able to track down the painting itself, so I illustrated here and put it into our illustrated reconstruction through an engraving after the work. Hotner's painting in turn was hung next to a full-length theatrical portrait of the famous actor William Thomas Lewis, playing the role of a Marcus in a popular play The Midnight Hour. This was painted by a new arrival on a portraiture scene, 22-year-old Martin after she. It can be our final pictorial edition to Sandby's drawing. Atherly we can now see was in Glittering Company. Two years after the Montem, we've become part of a new parade of male figures which once again, intriguingly enough, is graced with a figure with the Prince of Wales. No doubt he and his intimates were suitably impressed. For Lawrence meanwhile, the privileged location of his portrait opened up other benefits and advantages. First of all, it testified to the high regard in which his work was clearly held by the academy. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it offered him one of the many promising opportunities provided by the hang to outshine his rivals. To be more brutal and to use a turn that was deployed by critics and artists in the period, it gave him the chance to quote kill the works that hung immediately next to his own in display. Thus, as they walked into the southwestern corner of the great room, visitors to the show who may already have looked at Lawrence's larger more centrally located canvases were given another chance to directly compare one of his paintings with those of his closest artistic rivals in the field of portraiture. In this instance, a work by a well-established artist, John Hopner, who painted the portrait of the Duke of Plants and a work by a newly emerging figure, Martin Archershee, who painted the picture of the Lewis, the actor. It was a comparison I will end by suggesting that did these artists few favours. Yes, the painting of the Royal Prince and the famous actor and larger, more grand eloquent than Lawrence's picture of a schoolboy, and yes, they featured far better known subjects. But to my eyes at least, his portrait of athlete, like a silent, elegant assassin, kills their works stone dead. No wonder perhaps that for a good number of critics, Lawrence emerged from the 1792 exhibition with his reputation as the leading portraitist of his day and as Reynolds's rightful artistic air, fully intact. Thanks very much and I hope you've enjoyed the series of lectures.