Caption

The elegantly-dressed couple is depicted in what may be an idealised view of the landscape around Kedleston, with Derby in the distance, in the year in which the future 5th Baronet took over the house and running of the estates from his father. His wife plucks a mandolin. Nathaniel Curzon is shown as an ordinary country squire, before his taste was transformed and his horizons were enlarged by the architects of his new house, 'Athenian Stuart' and Robert Adam.

Summary

Oil painting on canvas, Sir Nathaniel (1726 - 1804) and Lady Caroline Curzon (1733 - 1812) by Arthur Devis (Preston 1712 – London 1787), signed and dated (now very faint) bottom left: Art: Devis/ fec. 1754. Two full-length portraits of the the subsequent first Lord and Lady Scarsdale in a landsape, she is seated holding a mandolin, he is standing resting on a tree branch. For this, one of the earliest ventures in partonage, the Curzons went to a Lancashire painter of the Tory squirearchy. Probably in the same year, Nathaniel's younger brother Assheton was painted by Devis indoors, with his tutor.

Full description

The contrast in scale and character between this double portrait of Sir Nathaniel Curzon with his wife and the lifesize one painted a bare seven years later by Nathaniel Hone (State Dressing Room, Kedleston), is remarkable. It reflects the revolution in Curzon's taste and horizons progressively effected by his consultation and employment of a succession of architects and virtuosi in the transformation of the house, grounds, and collections of Kedleston over the period even before 1758, when he inherited estates and title from his father, the 4th Baronet, and 1765, when he had an inscription put up to signify that the house was essentially (albeit, in the event, only provisionally) completed, for - in a Latin translation of a squire's traditional hospitality - AMICIS ET SIBI . In the present picture he and his wife are simple country gentlefolk, painted by an artist much favoured at this epoch by their kind, elegantly dressed but in a garden setting, the husband gazing dotingly at his wife as she demonstrates her ladylike accomplishments on the mandoline. In the Hone, by contrast, although the setting and activity are similarly out-of-doors - the couple is seen taking a walk (a quarter of a century before Gainsborough's more famous use of this motif in the Morning Walk, National Gallery) - the idea seems to have been taken from a watercolour by 'Athenian' Stuart of an unrealised idea for the pioneering neo-classical decoration and picture-hang of a Great Room, whilst the execution is by a future foundation-member of the Royal Academy; one who had begun at the same level of itinerant portrait-painting as Devis himself, but had entirely outstripped him in both aspiration and performance. By 1754 Devis had been based in London for a dozen years, and his clientele covered the country. Nevertheless, the core of his commissions came from an interrelated group of High Tory gentry families, many with estates or connections in his native Lancashire, and often with a Jacobite history or leanings . Nathaniel Curzon and his younger brother, Assheton, who was also painted by Devis, but to all appearances a little earlier, with his tutor Robert Mather , were just such figures. Belonging through their father to the leading Tory family in Derbyshire (albeit one that had declared for George III in the critical moment of the '45, when Bonnie Prince Charlie virtually reached Kedleston), they were connected through their mother, Mary Assheton of Middleton, with most of the leading Lancashire Tory gentry. Through their maternal family's influence they also succeeded one another as M.P.s for Clitheroe, in 1748-54, and in 1754-80 and again in 1792-94, respectively. By his marriage to Lady Catherine Colyear in 1750, Curzon had linked himself with a family with both Williamite and Jacobite connections: his wife's grandfather, General Sir David Colyear, 1st Earl of Portmore, was a Scotch-Dutch born soldier of fortune, who had come over the England in the train of William III; but her grandmother was Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, the most influential mistress of James (II), Duke of York. The marriage of Nathaniel and Lady Caroline was evidently an affectionate one, for them to have been painted twice together - although single portraits of him by and of her by Hone also exist. It seems likely that the occasion for the present picture was the relinquishment by Nathaniel's father to him in 1754 of his Derbyshire seat as MP, and of some of the responsibility for running the family estates , which will also have put greater resources in his hands. It is perhaps symptomatic of Curzon's horizons around the time that this portrait was painted that, although there is evidence that he had gone abroad in 1749, the year before his marriage, he only made a brief tour of a month, of Northern France, Belgium and Holland, and spent only £300 there, including purchases . There is no evidence whatsoever for his having gone to Italy. He had already begun buying pictures from John Barnard in 1751, and at the London auction rooms in 1753, but it seems to have been around 1756/57 that a sea-change in his taste occurred. In April 1756 he commissioned a large-scale picture of Venus ushering Paris to Helen (now at the top of the main staircase at Kedleston) from the pioneering Scottish neo-classical painter in Rome, Gavin Hamilton, who was returning there from London. In February 1757 he purchased three huge Italian pictures at a sale (evidently of pictures recently brought over from Italy) held by the dealer (no relation of the architect), William Kent: Luca Giordano's Bacchus and Ariadne (Music Room, Kedleston), and Benedetto Luti's Cain and Abel and Christ in the House of Simon Levi (Drawing Room). Such pictures could not have been bought without potential locations for them in mind - and indeed, all three appear as watercolours in the designs for a Great Room that 'Athenian' Stuart must have drawn up immediately after their purchase (since in December 1758 Robert Adam was claiming, with what would only have been a little exaggeration, that "the proud Grecian has not seen Sir Nathaniel these two years", and would not surrender the drawings) . Stuart had been a friend in Rome of Gavin Hamilton: he had walked to Naples and back in 1748 with him, with his archaeological collaborator, Nicholas Revett, and with the architect who was to supply casts of Antique sculpture to Kedleston, Matthew Brettingham the Younger. All four were originally to have gone to Athens together in 1750. It therefore seems highly likely that it was Stuart who began to give a new, classical and italianate, turn to Curzon's taste - though the expected rewards of this were to elude him and his associates. For Hamilton received neither commission for another picture, nor to buy any Old Masters in Rome, as he did for Lord Leicester at Kedleston's great paragon, Holkham. Instead, Curzon sent William Kent on a picture-buying expedition to Italy, in 1758-59, which resulted in a somewhat mixed bag of paintings, primarily from the collection of the Marchese Arnaldi in Florence (previously that of the Marchese Pallavicini in Rome). Brettingham had to share the supply of casts of Antique sculpture to Kedleston with John Cheere and Joseph Wilton; whilst his father had been displaced in the building of Kedleston by James Paine, who was in turn displaced by Robert Adam by July 1760. Meanwhile, 'Athenian' Stuart, having been consistently mocked and calumnied to Curzon by this last, was also frozen out of any work on the interiors by both Paine and Adam, so that the latter finally had in his grasp - and not just for the gardens and garden-buildings: "a man resolved to spare no Expence, with £10,000 a Year, Good-Temper'd, & having taste himself for the Arts and little for Game" . A very different figure from the one that we see represented here; and at least part of the credit for that transformation must be ascribable to Stuart. (i) See The Connoisseur, July 1978, with articles by John Hardy on "Robert Adam and the furnishing of Kedleston Hall", pp.196-207; and Leslie Harris, "The Picture Collection at Kedleston Hall", pp.208-17, and also exh. cat. Robert Adam and Keldeston, by Leslie Harris & Gervase Jackson-Stops, The National Trust, 1987. (ii) Cf. Ellen G. D'Oench, The Conversation-Piece: Arthur Devis & His Contemporaries, New Haven, 1980, esp. pp.21-22. (iii) D'Oench, 1980, cat.30, p.59 & pl.30 (dating the picture rather too late for the sitter's age and representation in statu pupilari). (iv) Leslie Harris, 1978, op.cit., p.208. (v) Exh.cat.cit., p. 9. (vi) David Watkin, Athenian Stuart: Pioneer of the Greek Revival, 1982, p.34. (vii) Exh.cat.cit., p.74. (adapted from the author's prepublicatin/unedited exhibition catalogue, Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, 1995)