Lord Northwick's Picture Gallery at Thirlestaine House
Date:
between 1846 and 1847
Materials & Techniques:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
32 x 42 3/4 inches (81.3 x 108.6 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.213
Gallery Label:
John Rushout, 2nd Baron Northwick (1769-1859), was one of the greatest connoisseurs of the nineteenth century. In 1838 he purchased Thirlestaine House, a Greek revival mansion in Cheltenham, to house his exceptional collection of over five hundred pictures. Every afternoon between one and three o’clock the doors were opened so that the public could view his collection free of charge. In this view of part of his collection a recently acquired Madonna by Botticelli sits on the mobile easel while portraits attributed to Titian flank the doorway above landscapes by Claude Lorraine and Francis Danby. On the right hand wall hangs a Rubens and a doubtful Giorgione, along with a copy of Reynolds’s Infant Hercules and a Robin Hood scene by Daniel Maclise. The bronze on the console table represents Samson Slaying the Philistines cast from a model by Michelangelo. This blend of modern British and Old Master paintings and sculpture reflected Northwick’s eclectic taste but led some critics to lament that his paintings were all ‘mingled together in the most arbitrary manner.’ Huskisson knew the collection well being a regular house guest and, although he exhibited this picture at the British Institution in 1847 as the Picture Gallery, the interior actually represents the dining room at Thirlestaine House. According to the painter W. P. Frith, Huskisson spent many evenings charming Northwick and his other guests around the dining table despite being, as he put it, ‘a very common young man, entirely uneducated.’ Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2014