SP 4924

 

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, PRA

Plympton 1723 – 1792 London

 

Portrait of Miss Ridge (c.1758-c.1839)

 

Canvas: 18 ½ x 15 ¼ in / 47 x 38.7 cm

Frame size: 24 x 21 in / 61 x 53.3 cm

 

Painted circa 1773

 

Provenance:

EF Haworth, 1846 (inscription on the stretcher)

Frederick Haworth, by 1883;

Christie’s London, 20^th June 1891, lot 130 (stock number 38E on the reverse; consigned by F Haworth, 80 Cornwall Gardens; withdrawn)

Henry Campbell Bruce, 2^nd Baron Aberdare (1851-1929), 83 Eaton Square, London, by 1911[1];

The Trustees of the late Lord Aberdare, from whom purchased in September 1929 by

M Knoedler, New York (their inv. no.A954 on the stretcher);

by whom sold in April 1940 to Lucy T Aldrich (1869-1955), Providence, Rhode Island;

Louis Joseph Auction Galleries, Boston, MA;

from whom bought in the late 1960s or early 1970s by Linda Bennett, Kensington, New Hampshire

 

Exhibited:

London, Grosvenor Gallery, Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, PRA, 1883, no.95 (lent by Frederick Haworth)

 

Literature:

Algernon Graves and William Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, London 1899, vol. II, p.825 (with incorrect provenance)

Sir Walter Armstrong, Sir Joshua Reynolds, London 1900, p.227

 

 

This delicate, lively portrait has a simplicity and directness which captures the youthful charm of the fifteen-year-old sitter, Catherine Ridge. Fresh from Loughrea, Co. Galway, on her first visit to London, she sat to Reynolds on 9^th, 11^th and 16^th December 1773[2]. Her perfect, oval face, wide eyes and neat features were the kind of beauty that appealed to Reynolds. He used the same full-face pose for the alluring Mrs Abington as Miss Prue in ‘Love for Love’, 1771 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT)[3]. Miss Ridge, as well as Mrs Abington, makes a virtue of the fashion of the early 1770s for softly upswept hair which frames the face. The tones of Miss Ridge’s hair and the pale blue ribbon which adorns it are painted with a dancing fluidity and grace. 

 

Though renowned for painting the great and good in a manner ‘striking, resistless and grand’[4], Reynolds painted some of his most sympathetic portraits when the sitter had some personal connection with him. Catherine Ridge was the eldest daughter of John Ridge (c.1728-1776), an Irish lawyer and close friend of one of Reynolds’s closest associates, the Whig politician and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797). Reynolds was prone to relax in the company of writers and wits rather than fellow artists; he was a founder member of the Literary Club which met in St James’s Street and part of the Thrale circle which included Burke, the actor David Garrick, Dr Johnson and the playwright and poet Oliver Goldsmith.

 

John Ridge, lawyer for Lord Clanricarde and for Burke’s Irish affairs, ‘a gentleman of great probity and eminence at the Bar in Ireland’[5], brought Catherine to London in the winter of 1773. Attending a dinner of the Literary Club, he was immortalized in Goldsmith’s poem The Retaliation (1774), in which the poet whimsically conceives that each guest brings his own personality as part of the feast:

 

‘Our Garrick’s a salad, for in him we see

Oil, vinegar, sugar and saltness agree:

To make out the dinner, full certain I am,

That Ridge is an anchovy, and Reynolds is lamb;

That Hickey’s a capon, and by the same rule,

Magnanimous Goldsmith, a gooseberry fool’ (ll.10-15).

 

Burke was one of Ridge’s oldest friends and a witness to his marriage in 1757[6]. Ridge brought Catherine to London partly with the aim of interesting the Burkes in her welfare. As Burke later commented: ‘He appeared indeed to Idolize her. He brought her over to England with him at not a little inconvenience and Expence, that we might be induced to adopt his Sentiments, and to regard her as a Daughter of ours. Without any hint on our part he was at the Charge of leaving us a Memorial of his affections to her in giving us her Picture painted by the first Master in Europe [Reynolds][7]. The campaign worked: Mrs Burke ‘took a great affection’ to Catherine’[8].

 

This visit was the last time that Burke and Ridge met. Ridge died in March 1776 and, despite earning £400 a year from Lord Clanricarde in addition to his other legal practice, left his family penniless. Burke’s eloquence – his silver lawyer’s tongue and one of the finest prose styles of the eighteenth century – secured for Catherine a pension of £100 a year from the Irish government, through the good offices of Sir John Blaquiere, Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. The grant was intended to make Catherine more attractive on the marriage market, as no young lady in those days was marriageable without a ‘portion’. No good deed goes unpunished, however, and in 1784 Burke was embroiled in a family squabble in which Catherine’s younger sisters Sarah and Ann claimed a share of the pension. Much of our knowledge of Catherine derives from the letters which flew between Burke and Blaquiere. The latter was touched by the plight of the younger sisters, who had been egged on to parade through Dublin ‘with elegant deportment, but tattered rags, seeking almost for bread’[9]. Burke stressed that Catherine was ‘a poor sickly creature, in her nature very helpless’[10] (though she lived to more than eighty) and that her sisters had an inheritance from their uncle. In the event, the government divided the pension, each of the three sisters receiving £33 6s 8d per annum for the rest of her life. Catherine Ridge married a Dublin gentleman, Jonathan Bagnall, in 1791.

 

Reynolds painted several versions of his portrait of Miss Ridge. The present painting is the only one in which she is wearing a plain blue dress, reflecting everyday fashion. In the ‘three-quarter’ format paintings in Cincinnati Art Museum (Mannings cat. no.1524) and in a private collection (Mannings cat. no.1525)[11], she is wearing a white dress trimmed with gold and a gold sash in the ‘Turkish’ manner popular in portraits of the 1770s (see for example Reynolds’s Portrait of Mary Wordsworth, Lady Kent, 1777; private collection[12]). Copies by other hands, such as that which appeared at Phillips on 14^th December 1993, lot 11, also depict the white and gold dress. It is possible that the present painting, with its fresh directness, is the first study that Reynolds made from life during Miss Ridge’s sittings in December 1773. John Ridge made a payment to Reynolds of 20 gns before 18^th July 1774 and a further payment of 15 gns in July 1774[13], making 35 gns, Reynolds’s charge for a ‘three quarter’ (2ft 6in by 2ft 1in) portrait.

 

It is something of a puzzle why there are so many portraits of Catherine Ridge. She was not famous or socially prominent, but she was a very pretty girl, and Ridge may have ordered more than one portrait for family or friends, in addition to his gift to Burke. His open-handedness may have exceeded his means: two portraits remained in Reynolds’s studio and were in the estate sale of the artist’s niece and heir Mary, Marchioness of Thomond, at Christie’s on 26^th May 1821. Lot 22, described as a ‘Sketch for the portrait of Miss Ridge’ (Mannings cat. no.1525), was acquired by L Wansey and descended to his son-in-law Dr Edward Hamilton; it last appeared on the market at Sotheby’s on 27^th November 1974, lot 53. Lot 38, ‘A beautiful Portrait of Miss Ridge – the head finished’, sold for £32.11 to Trist. David Mannings associates this with the painting in Cincinnati Art Museum, his cat. no.1524.  

 

The present painting was recorded in the collection of FA Haworth in 1846 and remained in the Haworth family until at least 1891. By 1911 it was owned by Henry Bruce, 2^nd Baron Aberdare (1851-1929). After his death, like so many paintings by Reynolds in that golden age of British portrait collecting, it was sold to Knoedler in New York. In 1940 Miss Ridge was purchased from Knoedler by Lucy T Aldrich (1869-1955), daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich and sister-in-law of the philanthropist John D Rockefeller Jr. Miss Aldrich amassed very fine art collections, particularly of porcelain and Asian textiles, much of which she donated to the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art. The Reynolds was acquired in a sale after her death by Miss Linda Bennett.

 

 

We are grateful to Professor David Mannings for his information about this portrait, which he has confirmed as an autograph work by Reynolds.

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, PRA

Plympton 1723 – 1792 London

 

Joshua Reynolds was the most influential British painter of the eighteenth century, both in his career as a portraitist and his tireless work to raise the status of artists. Born in Plympton, Devon in 1723, the son of the master of the Grammar School, he was intended by his father as an apothecary but instead apprenticed himself to the London portrait painter Thomas Hudson from 1740-43. In 1749 Reynolds sailed to Italy with his friend Commodore Augustus Keppel. He spent two years in Rome with visits to Naples, Florence and Bologna, studying Renaissance and Mannerist painters and building up a repertoire of motifs, poses and classical learning which he would apply to his portraits back in England.

 

Reynolds established himself in St Martin’s Lane in 1753 and attracted attention with his portrait of Commodore Keppel, c.1753-4 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich), who is shown striding along the seashore in the pose of the Apollo Belvedere. In 1760 he moved to Leicester Fields and showed four portraits at the Society of Artists, the first public exhibition of paintings in England. Reynolds’s versatility as a portraitist ranged from intimate portrayals of intellectuals such as Lawrence Sterne, 1760 (National Portrait Gallery, London), to aristocrats cast as Roman ladies, to witty allegories like Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, 1762 (private collection). His lively group portraits and tender mother and child portraits made him the most prominent and expensive society painter of his age. He also painted ‘fancy pictures’, a small number of religious works and history paintings, beginning with Ugolino (Knole House, Kent) in 1773: the latter genre he considered to be the most prestigious type of painting.

 

Joshua Reynolds was the leading spirit behind the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768 and became its first President. The RA, with its royal patronage, emulated long-established European academies and raised the status of British artists. The following year Reynolds delivered the first of his fifteen Discourses, setting forth his theories on art, and was knighted by George III. He became Principal Painter to the King, who strongly disliked him, in 1784. By 1790 failing eyesight had caused Reynolds to cease painting and he died in London in 1792, leaving a magnificent collection of Old Master paintings and drawings.