Lancelot Brown, Preparatory drawing for the Eating Room, Claremont,
Surrey. National Archives, Kew.
Editors’
Note: Today we present
a blog post by Stephen Caffey, assistant professor in the Department of
Architecture at Texas A&M University. One of our goals with Home
Subjects is to explore the range of meanings that attached to displays of art in
the context of the private house, a theme which Dr. Caffey explores below. Dr. Caffey will present a talk on
this topic in the Home Subjects session at the Association of Art
Historians conference in New York this coming February.
Easel
paintings displayed in domestic interiors played an important role in the
forging of modern Anglophone identities in the eighteenth century. The
acquisition scheme and exhibition plan for Robert Lord Clive’s Claremont, near
Esher, in Surrey, provides a case in point. Clive left England for India a man
of little consequence and returned having amassed perhaps the largest fortune
of any commoner in Europe. After having been elevated by George III to Baron
Plassey, Clive undertook an audacious program of self-fashioning through art, architecture
and landscape design. The intent of Clive’s pursuit was clear: to establish him
as worthy of inclusion amongst England’s landed and titled elite.
After
having acquired the Claremont, Clive had the existing house razed and another
constructed on a higher, less damp location on the site. Clive chose landscape architect Lancelot
“Capability” Brown to design both the Palladian house and the surrounding
vistas. Clive’s plans for the interior
of the house included a Great Room, the walls of which would hold paintings
by Claude-Joseph Vernet, Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin, Paolo
Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto—all acquired through two trips to Paris, one two
Brussels, one to Rome and numerous visits to Christie’s London auction house.
In order to mitigate the risks associated with his confessed ignorance of “the
Value and Excellence of Pictures,”
Clive entrusted the process to American-born history painter Benjamin West;
scholar, connoisseur and Grand Tour cicerone William Patoun of Scotland; the
English historian John Symonds; and the English art collector Sir James Wright.
Clive charged the
group with locating, authenticating, negotiating, purchasing and transporting
the finest examples of European painting on the then very active art market and
they in turn charged him, often exorbitantly, for their services.
The installation of the pictures at Claremont was designed
to create the impression that generations of Clives had devoted themselves to
the acquisition of fine European art, a conceit that flagrantly belied the fact
that the entire collection had been amassed in just under five years. Having
traversed the length of Claremont’s Great Room, guests would have passed
through a door on the south wall to enter the Eating Room. With Veronese, Rosa
and Poussin still fresh in their minds, viewers would have come upon Clive’s
triumphal decorative program for the Eating Room, plans for which included four
large-scale modern subject history paintings by Benjamin West, featuring
highlights from Clive’s military and political career in India. Once fully complete, the Eating
Room would allow patron, artist and viewer to fully explore—through easel
paintings—the iconographic terms and conditions through which Clive wished to
characterize his success. The initiative was all for naught, however: Clive may have conquered India, but he could
not conquer English society. Unfortunately, West
completed only one of the paintings, Lord
Clive Receiving from the Great Mogul the Grant of the Duanney, before Clive
committed suicide in November of 1774.
--Stephen Caffey
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