Jacobitism and Art after 1745: Katherine Read in Rome

M A R G E R Y MORGAN

Andrew Lumisden, the newest member of the Pretender’s small secretariat at the Palazzo Muti,’ wrote to his brother-in-law, Robert Strange, on 3 August 1751: ‘Miss Read from Uundee, who was sometime at Paris with La Tour, has been here these 9 months: she has made great advances in her business: she paints in both oyl and pastille, and has done some portraits that are thought little inferior to Vandyke himself.’’ A collection of letters still in private possession includes several written from Italy by Katherine Read (1723-1 778) to her eldest brother, Captain Alexander Read ofLogie and Turlbeg, and others from the Abbe Peter Grant to the same recipient. These remain unpublished, though they were first quoted in print by A. F. Steuart in 1905.3 Considered together with references scattered through Lumisden’s official Letter Book for 1751 to 1755. they are not only a valuable source of information on the life of a woman working as a professional portrait painter abroad in the mid-eighteenth century. They also shed light, fitfully but clearly, on a policy towards art and artists being practised by the Stuart court-in-exile.

The initiative may have preceded Lumisden’s appointment. Cosmo Alexander had been recommended to James Edgar in July 1747 and, in consequence, was commissioncd to paint various members of the Stuart royal family.4 Lumisden’s family connection with artist-engraver Robert Strange made it appropriate for him to lalie over and develop the business of performing useful introductions and arranging patronage for visiting British artists of Jacobite sympathies. There was nothing casual about his allusion to Vandyke: not the first artist likely to be in the minds of those coming to Rome to study painting, but identified with the foundation of a royal collection, balancing overt power with the graces of civilisation. The first picture Katherine Read mentions copying after her arrival in Rome is Van Dyck’s Three Childreii of Kirig Clinrles 1, and at the same time she refers to another treatment of the same subject at Kensington. The original from which she worked must have been the version owned by the Chevalier de St George, which Strange would see at the Palazzo Muti when he made his first visit to Rome in 1760.’ (He had published his own engraving of the picture in 1758, having held it over for several years, perhaps since receiving testimony of Read’s skill and malting use of it.) A Van Dyck portrait of Charles I, said to have been in the possession of James Edgar, was bought for him by Lumisden in 1762, when Edgar had died and his former assistant had succeeded him as

British Journalfor Einhtcenth-Cui~tirr!l Stirdics 27 (2004), p.233-244 o I~SLC‘S ~ I J I - X ~ ~ Y

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the Pretender's secretary.6 This may be the same as Katherine Read copied in

When Read and Lumisden first met remains uncertain. (The 1745 date given by later members of the Strange family to portraits of Andrew and his sister Isabella by 'Miss Reid' cannot simply be accepted since John Steegman catalogued them at Eriviat Hall.') Her family had been tragically involved in the '45. Her maternal uncle, Sir John Wedderburn, fifth baronet ofBlackness, had been executed (as a mere baronet, hanged, drawn and quartered) on Kennington Common, on 28 November I 746.' His teenaged sons went to the West Indies. His brother, Robert Wedderburn of Pearsie, who had raised a company for Lord Ogilvy's Forfarshire regiment, forfeited his estate and found employment as steward to Alexander Read at Logie. At the time of the execution, Sir John's young daughters had been with Kate Read.9 This connection with a Jacobite martyr, in conjunction with an artistic talent, shaped her future.

Robie Strang,'" as a youth from Kirkwall in Orkney, had gone to Edinburgh and begun to study law, meeting Andrew Lumisden as a fellow student; but art had proved a stronger attraction. He attended the Winter Academy, which seems to have been a residual survival of the Edinburgh Academy of St Luke founded by Allan Ramsay senior and others. The story runs that he was recruited for the Jacobite cause by Isabella Lumisden before she would agree to their (clandestine) marriage: and certainly it seems to have been her fierce and lasting loyalty to the Prince which gave a political direction to the life of a man whose own first concern was always art. His identity as originator of a 1745 portrait of Prince Charlie, copies of which were eagerly sought." was concealed, and his engraving of plates for a Stuart currency, and devising of an apparatus for printing the notes. had gone for nothing when military defeat came. So he had the luck to escape attainder.

Yet Strange was hunted after Culloden and, thinking at first of making his way to Rome (old master painting was always his chief concern), was persuaded by Lumisden to join him in Rouen, where he could continue his studies in a new Academie de Dessein. In 1748 he moved to Paris in order to pursue his engraver's art as a pupil of J. P. Le Bas. The following year saw young William Chambers, son of a Scottish merchant settled in Gothenburg, join the Paris Ecole des Arts founded by J. S. Blondel in 1742 specifically for the training of architects. (He had already sailed to India and China with the Swedish East India Company, largely run by expatriate Scots.'2) It may well have been now that both Read and Strange first made his acquaintance.

A considerable Jacobite presence in and around Paris had been building up ever since 1689: the first influx from Ireland. large numbers of Scots and some English after 1715. Their number at its highest point has been put at around 40,000, including 42 per cent women; and their influence on French culture has been reckoned greater than the Huguenots' influence exercised in England.'3 The exiles had a court theatre and a flourishing musical culture. Art was collected on a grand scale, and painters found generous patrons.

1750-1 751.

lacohitisrii und Art after I 745 2 35

Some were employed in the systematic production of portraits of the Stuart royal family: over fifty originals have been identified, multiplied in copies by other hands, many reproduced as miniatures, some circulated as engravings. (The trade ranged between high quality work for connoisseurs and cheap, propagandist trinkets for the market place.) There could hardly have been a more secure and auspicious environment for the young woman from Scotland enjoying the great good fortune to be a pupil of Maurice Quentin de La Tour. principal court painter to Louis XV and as interested in the use of pastel as in oil painting. But the expulsion ofthe Young Pretender from France, following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. led in turn to the departure of other loyal adherents from France. Strange joined his wife in London; Lumisden went to Rome where James Stuart was recognised by the Papacy as legitimate King of Great Britain, and so, in November-December I 750, did Read - and William Chambers. Apart from La Tour, the only other contact Read had made in this period who can definitely be narncd is Lord Ogilvy. She called on him shortly before leaving, perhaps malcing a farewell visit.’4

Lumisden had arrived in Rome as Prince Charlie’s man, however unofficially. He had been appointed secretary to the Prince at Edinburgh in 1745. He and the old tutor, Thomas Sheridan, had been entrusted jointly with ‘the sinews of war’ and the royal seal, which went with him when he escaped to Kouen: an attainted man with no future but exile unless another attempt a t a Stuart Restoration should succeed. He was first taken to Rome in the later part of 1749, expenses of the journey paid.” but seems to have returned to Paris in the period when the Young Pretender was appealing to his father to renew his grant of Regency and received what he asked. An intelligence report sent from Paris in October 1750 to the British government lists the known places of refuge the Prince was dodging between. Tt begins: ‘It is supposed that the Pretender’s Son liceps at Montl’hery, six leagues from Paris, at Mr. Lumisden’s . . . ’ I ” This was very shortly after Prince Charlie’s secret visit to London, when he was formally received into the Anglican Church and the Elibank Plot started to take shape.” Lumisden took up his appointment lo the Chevalier de St George at the start of 1751.

In hindsight the Jacobite risings of r715 and T745 were never very hopeful enterprises. and the defeat at Culloden. or the earlier failure to press on from Derby to London, marlis the end of any serious threat to the Hanoverian succession in Britain. Contemporaries read events, and the general situation, differently. Charles was not alone in thinking that another attempt might be made wilh a real chance of success. It was a view his opponents and supporters shared. Lessons had been learned: this lime there must be a coup d’e‘tat in London (a plan emerged to lake the Tower and St James’s Palace - with some of Ogilvy’s officers in the lead - and to kidnap GeorgeII): this would give the signal for a rising in Scotland. As ever, effective support from a continental power was necessary, perhaps from more than one. (Prussia and Sweden currently seemed more promising than France.) So secret diplomacy flourished and, without modern means of communication, intelligence was as

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valuable a commodity as it is today. Charles’s wanderings incognito through the lands of the Jacobite diaspora did not lack purpose.

The absence of any mention of Andrew Lumisden or anyone else at the Pretender’s court, in Katherine Read’s letters home, must be significant: politic. indeed, as his Letter Book reveals how well informed he was of her activities, associates and intentions. Her presence at the Palazzo Muti, sharing the goose pie on Christmas Day 1752 (Lumisden to Captain John Edgar, serving in the French army at Paris, 26 December I 752). places her firmly in the inner circle of the Jacobites in Rome. It is usually Robert Strange, or Isabella, who receives Andrew’s news of her. It may be just a passing on of greetings, Katherine’s name often being coupled with that of her fellow Scots artist, George Chalmers (also unmentioned in her, or Abbe Grant’s, letters to Alexander Read). Yet, gathered together, the references suggest information being passed along a network.

Kate’s first surviving letter from Rome identifies her new teacher: ‘at present I am sitting to a very famous Frenchman, one Blanchet, for my picture, who visits me often and is my present master’. (Nothing else is known of his portrait of Read.) Louis-Gabriel Blanchet had originally been sent to the French Academy in Rome by the King of France, in 1727, and stayed there for the rest of his life. Blanchet, who was not a pastellist, had painted remarliable portraits of the exiled Stuart family. His imprisonment for debt within weeks of Read’s first letter home may have curtailed the period when she worked under his instruction. (There had been time for him to compliment her on her use of colour.) She had already acquired a patron of the first order in that prince of connoisseurs, Cardinal Albani. The Abbe Peter Grant would explain to Alexander Read (17 June ~ 7 5 2 ) what a politically significant personage Albani was: ’Protector of the Empire [Austria] and Ambassador here to his imperial majesty.’

The Cardinal visited her, opened his collection to her and invited her to choose pictures to be taken to her lodging so that she could copy them in private: four heads by Rosalba were her first selection. He brought along, first, ‘Princess Gigia’ “and later the Princess Cheroffini to sit for her portrait: eventually, in Grant’s words again, Read ‘had the honour of rendering immortal’ Albani himself ‘by a very excellent likeness’. Where Albani led, other members of the Italian nobility followed. The Prince and Princess Viani went to Read’s studio while the Marchesa Massimo (‘Maximy’) was sitting for her portrait. (She had two painted, ‘one a large half-length and the other a whole length’.) The Prince opened his palace to Miss Read and he also sent pictures for her to copy at home. (She specifies a Madonna by Guido Reni.) She produced a head of Count Porto in pastel, and he put his carriage at her disposal. Her brother is told of unnamed princesses, a monsignor and ‘the brother of Prince Cesarini’ sitting for her. It all served to justify her boast to him, ‘I have the honour to be the first from our Island that ever painted an Italian above the rank of priest or abbe, whereas I have painted the very first Princes in Rome ...’ There is no evidence that the Chevalier de St George or

lricobitisiti trriil Art n/trr T 745 2 37

the Cardinal of York sat in person for Read: apart from the fact that she was a woman, she may still have been regarded as a pupil in training. However, copies of portraits of Prince Charles Edward and the Cardinal of York, the former after Maurice Quentin de La Tour and the second after Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, survive today which are attributed to Katherine Read.’Y

The commission to paint Rome’s greatest beauty, the Marchesa Gabrielli, fell into another category. Katherine was working at the request of the Irishman, Lord Charlemont, and the undertaking had to be kept secret. This was only one of a number of commissions she received from him and others supporting him in the foundation of an Academy for British Artists in Rome.’”Abbe Grant mentions her portrait of Lord Bruce and individual portraits of Lord and Lady Kilmorey - as well as her painting of Lord Fortrose and his bear- leader, Ur Macltenzie (her Jacobitc compatriots) on the same canvas.” The shrewdness of her merchant stock is evident in her pleasure that a young lady, ‘a twenty thousand pounder’. is among various other, unnamed English ladies and gentlemen who are to sit for her.

Though Charlemont’s academy survived for only three years, it was a sign of awakened realisation of the importance of the cultivation of the arts in validating a state. It could not help Read directly. As Abbe Grant stresses (11 January 1752), females could not be admitted to public academies, ‘or even design or draw from nature’, and so were precluded from the practice of history painting, except for single. female figures: he remarked ‘the strong strain of genius she has for this sort of painting [...I angels. saints, Magdalens. Cleopatras etc.’ Katherine also discovered the limitations of access some Catholic institutions in Italy could put in the way of her even viewing pictures in their care.

The impropriety of a woman studying anatomy alongside men certainly rested on the assumption that women were unable to grasp general ideas and were out of place in the public realm. Though this remained a dominant (not universal) Enlightenment view, there was significant Jacobite dissent, evident in the help given to Katherine Bead as it had been evident in the participation of women in Scotland in the events of 1745. The tone of Kate’s letters to her eldest brother is frank and easy, assuming an equality and basic sympathy between them, suggesting that they may have been educated together. As regards their financial arrangement, Kate acknowledges her dependence on Sandy’s provision for her. lets him know how responsibly she is managing, and is pleased when the money she earns helps pay her way. She teases him about his plans for improving the gardens at Logie, quoting Alexander Pope on ‘Timon’s Villa’. Discussing news of the broken health and troubled prospects of another brother, she can be forthright: ‘I have had opportunities of knowing more of Tom than any of you, and am persuaded he has more of the philosopher in him than any brother or sister he has [...I I don’t know that I shou’d except myself ...’ ( 6 January 1752).

David Fordyce ( I 711-1751). Professor of Moral Philosophy from Marischal College, Aberdeen, was one contemporary who argued for the mutually

2-38 MARGERY M O R G A N

beneficial effect of educating boys and girls together: the female might acquire the traditionally male virtues of ‘vigour and resolution’ while ‘She in her turn softens, refines and polishes him’.’l He had been visiting Rome when Read arrived there, and the news of his drowning ofTHolland, on his way home, shocked fellow Scots in the city. Both Read and the Abbe Grant wrote to Logie about the calamity. Kate had gathered further details of the event from William Chambers - apparently in a letter he had sent her after leaving Rome himself. Chambers was making his way to Scotland to visit friends, prior to another voyage he then thought of making to India.” and he was to visit Kate’s family. She proposed to Sandy that he should show the young architect his plans for the garden and take advantage of his taste and judgment. The impression is given that Kate Read and Chambers knew each other quite well, and this is confirmed by Lumisden’s suggestion to Robert Strange, in 1753, that he should question Read for further particulars concerning Chambers’ marriage soon after his return to Rome and shortly before Kate’s own departure.’4

Although he is not mentioned in Kate’s earliest surviving letter to Sandy, it is probable that she had already been introduced to the Abbe Peter Grant, a Jesuit who had studied at Scots College in Rome from the age of eighteen and was wonderfully at home in the city until his death in 1784. Officially appointed as Agent in Rome to the Scottish Catholic Mission, he interpreted his function in a broadly secular manner. Highly sociable, a bon viveur, and a natural meddler, he would be uniquely serviceable to Grand Tourists from Britain, irrespective of their political allegiances; and he performed numerous useful introductions between artists and potential patrons and collectors. Andrew Lumisden was amused by him: Cardinal Albani would warn Horace Mann (the British Resident in Florence) that Englishmen of Hanoverian loyalties needed to be wary ofhim. It was whispered that he was the Jacobites’ secret leader in Rome: it has also been suggested that the genial Abbe may have been a double agent.li Jt seems more likely that the key figure was the discreet, discriminating Lumisden, ultimately responsible for supplying Katherine Read with a teacher, a patron and a cicerone, while the Abbe was the more visible agent. In his letters about her, Grant seems concerned solely with her progress as an artist and the propriety of her life in Rome. She would declare to Sandy: ’... whatever success1 have had here I owe it all to him.’ Then she adds, ‘There’s no part of my history unknown to him but my reluctance at going loo soon home’ (6 January 1752). Grant’s love of gossip made him less than entirely trustworthy. The matter on which Katherine was so careful may have been more important than it seems.

Lumisden was certainly among the better informed on current plans for a new rising in Britain, and in regular, coded communication with the equally dedicated Isabella and Robie Strange in London. Katherine Read’s awareness of the progress of the Elibank plot may have beenless complete, but she undoubtedly knew in a general way what was afoot: and her decision not to leave Rome prematurely is as likely to have been based on her anticipation of events in which she might have a part to play, as on a simple wish to prolong

Irrcobitisni and Art qfter I 745 239

her period of study. Kate insists to Sandy, I . . . as I have staid one year in Rome for Improvement, I must certainly stay in it another for Name, and then you’ll see I’ll top it with the best of them’. She knowingly appropriates the language ofthe traditionally dominant sex to state what she wants: ‘... besides profit [to] have for reward Eternal fame’. Andrew Lumisden was party to her intention of staying a further year and passed the information to Strange.

Certain facts have emerged with the passage of time (much from Hanoverian sources) that she is liliely to have known. For instance, a group of the prince’s friends, including Murray of Elibank, gathered at Paris in March 1752 to discuss the plan of action. (William Chambers had arrived back there in February, and it is hardly credible that some kind of report from Scotland would not have been sought from him.) The date settled on for the coup in London was 10 November 1752: Archibald Cameron was to lead the rising in Scotland, aided by a Swedish troop under the command of General Keith. An awareness in January of some great action in store would have motivated Read’s decision to stay longer in Rome.

Also at the March gathering were Sir John Astley and his son-in-law, Anthony Langley Swymmer, MP for Southampton. Swymmer and his beautiful wife subsequently made their way to Rome, arriving there by September L752, when ‘James 111’ conferred on him a military commission.26 Hanoverian intelligence was certain of the MP’s purpose: ‘The pretence of Mr. Swem-rs, Mem.‘ of Pt. travelling abroad with his lady, was to settle the English Scheme.’L’ An uneasy sense that their opponents knew too much combined with the realisation that no-one was ready to bring about a postponement of the rising to a date closer to Easter 1753. Meanwhile, Raphael Mengs, twenty-six-year-old court painter from Dresden, was taken up by Lumisden and set to painting Mrs Swymmer’s portrait in her Carnival dress with her mask in her hand. The result (now at Dalmeny House) is iconic. A major weakness of the Stuart cause at this time was the lack of any acceptable female consort. Mengs gave potential followers an image to entrance them; and Lumisden’s admiration of the lady he escorted at the Carnival was generally noted. Read’s portrait of Mrs Swymmer seems to have been painted when they were back in England,28 and a portrait of, or for, Anthony Swymmer was sent for framing by Robert Tull, who did a good deal of work for the artist.lY

On 22 January 1753, Lumisden wrote to Robert Strange about a portrait of himself that he wished to send to London: there were two by Katherine Read, and he eventually decided, after taking advice from ‘the connoisseurs’, to send the profile with his own hair; Chalmers had not finished his portrait of Andrew. One wonders if Lumisden anticipated needing to be recognised by friends in England. On 2oMarch he wrote separate letters to his sister and brother-in-law. To Isabella he sent the curious message, ‘If I do not send you the measure of my neck & wrist with Miss Read, I shall do it with a small thread inclosed in my next‘. (In the context of their history of secret messages - initially using invisible inks and, latterly, code names - it might

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well be a pledge to put his life at risk by taking up his sword.) Informing Robie that Miss Read would be leaving Rome after Easter and arriving in Paris at the end of June for a few weeks’ stay, he asked his brother-in-law if he could be in Paris in July so that she ‘might enjoy your company to London: she has so much worth and merit that one cannot show her too great civilities’. Rome cannot have known for several weeks that, on the date of these letters, Archibald Cameron was arrested in Scotland: confirmation from the other side that rebellion had been imminent.

In the event, it was Alexander Read who met Katherine in Paris, but she did carry a package to Strange from his brother-in-law. Andrew notified Isabella on 29 May r753 that both Read and George Chalmers had left Rome and were proceeding by different routes back to Britain. They had gone to Florence together. (While Read was there, Lumisden sent greetings to her via Anthony Swymmer.) He added. ‘Miss Read goes from Florence to Bologna, Venice, Turin Ct will be at Paris I reckon by mid-July’. In going to Venice she was able to satisfy her long-cherished desire to meet Rosalba Carriera. Writing to Lumisden from there, she told him that she had made a portrait of the famous, but now-blind pastellist, had been given advice on artistic matters and made a present of several of Rosalba’s works. He, in turn, alerted Captain Edgar in Paris that she had ‘by this time’ (12 June) left Venice.

On 10 July Andrew wrote to Kobie, ’To save postage I send this to Paris to Miss Read who will be so good as to deliver it to you’. Politically sensitive items needed to escape censorship: and the trustworthy escort required to take Kate from Paris to London may have been arranged as much for the safety of the packet as to protect her from the risk of carrying it. Two papers the package contained were passed from Strange to William Lumisden in Edinburgh (mentioned A. L. to W. L., 23 October I 753). the father from whom Andrew and Isabella had inherited their Jacobite fervour. (It was an episcopalian family: their grandfather had been Bishop of Edinburgh: and William had been ‘out’ in 171 5 . )

The Jacobites in Rome would undoubtedly have known of Cameron’s arrest, and the consequent further postponement of their plans, by 29 May. Glengarry’s letter to James Edgar about the collapse of the conspiracy, which contained the words ‘Thank God the Prince did not venture himself in London’, was written on 5 April. They may not yet have realised how completely the plot had been betrayed. Archibald Cameron had been executed on 8 June, ostensibly for his part in the ’45. (The British government might be judged peculiarly vengeful, but thereby avoided publicising the much more recent threat of disorder.) Lumisden and his friends may still have thought in terms of a further postponement like that of the year before.

The terms of the letters of introduction Read was given for presentation in England are arresting. One was written by Andrew to his sister, who already knew much about the woman painter, but had apparently never yet met her. He was offering Isabella the opportunity to make ‘a friend endowed with all the virtue and delicacy of her own sex. & with the knowledge and understanding

lacohitisiii mid Art after I 745 241

that men vainly ascribe to theirs . . . I (29 April 1753). This was the language of cultural androgyny, and, writing to Read herself, he compliments her on qualities that serve a public end: ’... superior merit and good sense [...I a character that nothing can destroy I... 1 an ornament to her sex in general and to her country in particular’ (my italics. A. L. to K. R., 20 August 1754).

Cardinal Albani gave her a letter of recommendation to Bubb Dodington, the wealthy MP (later Lord Melcornbe) who in his younger days, as George Bubb, had been British Ambassador in Madrid, when Spain was endeavouring to keep on terms with both sides until the outcome of the 1715 rebellion was certain. He was a Lord of the Treasury when he arrived in Rome in 1732. Subsequently, Albani had co-operated with him in building up the art collection of Frederick, Prince of Wales (d. 1751): a relationship that had set him politically at odds with CeorgeII. Albani sent Miss Read’s portrait of himself to his friend as a demonstration of her artistic talent. He promised, ‘The other qualities with which she was gifted [...I His Excellency would soon perceive if he had the goodness to receive her’. 3‘’ The inference is that she is a reliable, well-informed and discreet person worth questioning on politically sensitive matters, in a time of fluid alliances when alertness to shifts of circumstance and view was of great importance.

Andrew was glad to know that she was to lodge near to Robert and Isabella. Evidence that it was a lasting connection comes from Fanny Burney, who recorded meeting Robert Strange among others visiting Read’s studio in 7774 and dramatised the scene in her early diary. Lumisden also stayed in touch, and it is possible that he had a hand in arranging for her to paint Queen Charlotte’s portrait in the days between her arrival in England and her coronation?’ - a move in the reconciliation process. Writing to Katherine on 2 July 1755, he included a description of the lavish entertainment provided at Frascati (the Italian see of the Cardinal of York) by the Princess Borghese. What he says of the ‘architecture of the machines for the fireworks’ is a message to the faithful - as the enactment must have been: ‘a [...I bridge of 5 arches [...I thrown over a branch of the sea [...I: on the middle arch was raised a noble lodge which was terminated with a statue of Herculcs killing the Hydra’ allusive (he uses the word) to the Jacobite topos of Prince Charles Edward as a Christian Hercules, ‘battling against the monsters of an impious age’ in Paul Monod’s words.” Lumisden continues: ‘on the front was the inscription “to Charles K[ing] of the two Sicilies, the improver of the fine arts, for the discovery of Herculaneum“ ’.

It is a commonplace that later Georgian artistic culture, including the transformation of cities and great houses across England, Scotland and Ireland, was largely a result of the Grand Tour: that finishing school for young noblemen designed to give them a cosmopolitanism to inform their future exercise of power and a quality of civilisation that would drive out the image of provincial and Hanoverian boorishness. The Stuart interest in Europe failed in its bid to reclaim sovereignty in Britain; the influence it exerted through the arts is part of a different story.

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Joshua Reynolds was in Rome at the same time as Read and satirised the Charlemont set in his ‘School of Athens’ parody and other caricatures. The fact that he was registered at Capua on I April 1752 in the company of a Mr Edgar suggests that the Palazzo Muti sounded him out. Allan Ramsay, on his second Italian visit in I 7 5 5 , entertained Lumisden with a wary reserve, but was much more companionable with Abbe Grant. Robert Adam, accompanied by Charles Hope (whose family would give future commissions to Read), slipped easily into the network of connoisseurs that had welcomed her, though he affected boredom at the prospect of prolonged association with ‘the Borghese. the Gabrielli. the Viani and the Cherofini’, despite the carnival excitements they provided.33 In 1760 Katherine Kead would send George Willison to Lumisden, who persuaded Mengs to take him as a pupil; and five other young Scots benefitted in the same way. 34 Other women painters - Angelica Kauffman (from Switzerland) in 1763 and Anne Forbes, consciously emulating Read’s example, were lo be taken under Abbe Grant’s wing (though Forbes arrived when the Vatican had refused to recognise Charles Edward’s claim, after his father’s death, and Grant was in disgrace for overstepping the political mark).

Gavin Hamilton, who had visited Italy before and left close to the time of Read’s arrival, returned in 1756 to make it his home for life, building his reputation on the rediscovery and pictorial recreation of classical antiquity, while Winltelmann was at his post in Cardinal Albani’s library. Hamilton was an active helper, loo, in the new sack of Rome by the rnilordi. Read’s awareness of this cultural tendency had surfaced when she visited the tomb of Virgil (prophet of imperialism) shortly before going home. She had been horrified by the medieval religious imagery spilling into the streets of Naples: ‘I never before Sunday last had seen a figure as big as life of the Virgin Mary carried about the streets in a wide hoop’d petticoat with a full-bottom wigg and a great high crownlilce lantern on its head’: and she had escaped from this, only to be confronted by an open-air preacher, using the symbols of crucifix, sltull and picture of the holy family to enforce his message. Her own choice of emblem was the branch she broke from the laurel growing over Virgil’s tomb. Rejecting it for use as a painting stick, she offered it with a certain sceptical carelessness to her brother: ‘for the handle of a punch spoon, or any other use’ (6 April I 75 3). Her own guiding spirit was more pragmatic than pious.

NOTES

I . Jarnes I)ennistoun. Meinoirs 0.T Sir Kobrrt S f r m g ( ’ I...] mid [...I Atidww LmisdPi t . 2 vols (London 185 j), names the l i tu lx Lord I,isrnoi-e as principal secretary and James Edgar as under-secretary.

2 . Lumisden Letter Kook. I 750-1755, National Library ofScotland. Accession J I 328. 3. ‘Catherine Kead: Court Paintress’. Smltisl i Historical K e v i w 2 ( I yoi ) . The present article

is indebted to D. R. Torrance for his transcript of the currently inaccessible originals and his photocopies of Kead’s first, long letter from Rome.

3. I). and F. Irwin. Scottish P l i i t i t m at H o i i ~ c ~ and Abrod I 7oo-I 900 (London I C ) T ~ ) , p.46, citing notes by B. Skinner. This source (p.76) confuses La Tour and Rlanchet as Read’s teachers (sce below).

Jacobitism and Art after r 745 243

5. Dennistoun. Mmioirs , i.259. It was then that Horace Walpole described him to Horace Mann in Florence as ‘a very first-rate artist. and by far our best’ - though Mann would not approve his politics.

6. John lngamells, Dictionary of British arid lrisli Tnrvellers in Italy. compiled from the Brinsley Ford archive (New Haven and London i 997). p.906.

7. John Steegman, Portraits i n Wr,lsli Ho~rsc~s. 2 vols (Cardiff 1957). i.roo. assigns a date c, I 745 to the portrait of Andrew (never reproduced). but c.1760 to Isabella’s. The 1745 date is given by Steuart and others. but Steegman’s description of Andrew’s portrait sounds like the one he sent from Rome in 1753 (see belom7). The present location of the originals is unknown.

8. The wrong date was given in the present author’s article. ‘Katherine Read: A Woman Painter in Romney’s London’. l’rmstictioris q/t/w Rorfirieg Society 4 (1999). p.12-I 7.

9. Alexander D. O.Wedderburn, 1‘Iic Wr~ldrrf~irrri Rook, 2 vols (Edinburgh 1898). i.281. TO. The anglicisalion or his name is surprising in view of his wife’s fierce loyalty to the Stuart

cause. though it may have been prudent: but ‘Strange’ was also one ofthe code names used in covert reference to Prince Charles Edward.

I I . Bishop Kobert Forbes. The Lyor i i i i Mourr~ifiq. ed. H. Paton. .3 vols (Edinburgh 1895- I 896). i i . 3 2 0 , andLouisaMure, Recollvctioiisc~f’H~~gone D q p . privately prinled (1883). p. I 88. ‘The present writer is grateful to Helen Smailes for a photocopy of the ms. Notes by Mrs Edmund Ffoulkes (original in Library of Scottish National I’ortrait Gallery) on the subsequently scattered Strange Family Portrait Collection.

12. Daniel Szcchi. l’/ie]ncobitrs (Manchestcr I 994), p.37. 13. Tlia Stuart Court in E r i k m i d t lw ]ncobitc% ed. Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp

(1,ondon 1995). esp. p.xv-xvi and the contribution by Nathalie Genet-Rouftiac. ‘Jacobiles in Paris and Saint-C;ermain-en-l,aye’. p.15-32. On the export of trinkets to London. see Andrew Lang. Pickk tlir Spy. 3rd edn (London 1897). p. ioc ) - io .

r4. I). R. Torrance. The Rends. privately printed and circulated (Edinburgh I 9851. p.74. I assume that February I 751 is the date oTOgilvy’s letter cited there.

1 5 . By a Captain John Daniel who had been in Lord Elcho’s Life Guards and Ralmerino‘s. (Ingamells. DBIT. p.276).

16. 1,ang. Pickle the S~J;], p.ioo. quotes the report in full. I 7. In addition to Lang’s examination ol the documents. I am indebted to accounts of the

Plot in Sir Charles Petrie. Tli(~]acobite M o i w ~ i r ~ i t ; The last Plinse (London 19 50: new edn 1959): Paul K . Monod. Jacohitisrn arid tlir Etlglislr Pc~oplc, I 688-1 7 X X (Cambridge 1989): Murray G . H. Pittock. Jacohitisrn (Basingstoke. London and New York 1998): Hugh Douglas. Jacobitc, S p g Micirs (Stroud 1999). 18. His ‘niece’, which suggests Cecca. daughter of his mistress. Princess Cheroffini. rather

than a member ofthe Chigi family. 19. Items r89 and T90 (both illustrated) in Christie’s (Glasgow) Sale Catalogue. ‘/‘lit. Incobit?s

and tlicir Arlifersories, TZ June 1996. ’They arc said to have been given by Frederick. Prince of Wales. to Henry Uawney, his Lord of the Bedchamber. Dawney’s faiher was a noted lacobite. His brother visited Rome during Keaci’s lime there.

20. See the forthcoming article by the present author. ’Was British Corrnoisstwrs in Konie painted by Katherine Read?’

21. This description corresponds to a painting attributed to Nathaniel Hone when sold at Sotheby’s. 16 November 1988.

22. See John Barrell. Tliv Political Tl i twy ojl’air~tir~gfrorr~ Kcynokfs to Hnzlitt (New llaven and 1,ondon I 986). esp. p.65-66.79. I 24. Read and her family knew David Fordyce’s brothers, James. the presbyterian divine, and William, the distinguished physician (mentioned in Katherine’s will).

23. He did not make it; but Katherine‘s reference to his intention confirms his identity. Her letters fill a gap in the established chronology of his life. See John IIarris. Sir William Climf/~ers. Knight oftlir Northrrn Star (London 1970). p.6.

24. Abbe Grant and James Murray (senior physician to the Pretender) were witnesses at the ceremony.

25. Lesley Lewis. Connoissew’s and S‘wrot Agriits in liiy/rlacvilh Criitiirg KorJic (London 1961 ). p.222.

26. Monod. Incobitism, p.218. 27. Quoted Lang. Pickle tlir Spg. p . iy ) . 28. Luniisden Letter Book. A. I , . to K. R. . L ]uly 1755.

244 M A R G E R Y M O R G A N

29, 1 a m indebted to Jacob Simon for particulars of the work for Read that is recorded in Tull's ledger. See Simon, Tlic. Art qftht. Pic'tnr-r F r r n w (London 1997). p. 143: other references to Read, p.117. 1-32,

30. Lcwis, Comoissrur-s, p.160. citing a letter in the Vienna State Archives and suggesting that the portrait might be somewhere in England.

31, Wedderburii Book, i.263n. 32. Monod, Jacobitisrn. p.67. 3 3 ~ John Fleming, Robert Admi aridhis Circle (Cambridge. MA r y h r ) . p.149, 158-59. 3 53. 34. B. Skinner. Scots in Italg i r i [ l i t I 8th Cerrturg (Edinburgh 1966). p.19.