Lord Lyndhurst

Painting height: 61 cm
Painting width: 50.8 cm
Frame height: 93 cm
Frame width: 81 cm

The son of a distinguished painter of historical subjects and portraits, John Singleton Copley (1772–1863) held the office of Lord Chancellor, one of the highest-ranking offices in Great Britain, three times during his career. Aged 90 when this portrait was painted, Lord Lyndhurst was in poor health and confined to a wheelchair. Although the effects of old age are visible in his face, Lyndhurst’s parliamentary robes consisting of a scarlet wool gown with miniver fur trim lend a commanding presence to the portrait, painted in the year before his death.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1772, John Singleton Copley was still an infant when the Copley family relocated to England as a result of the increasing political turmoil in the lead up to the American War of Independence. After studying at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1790, Copley became a barrister after being called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1804. After a number of successes in high profile trials, Copley came to the attention of the Tory party and was invited to enter the House of Commons in 1818. His political advancement after that was swift and in 1827, he was appointed Lord Chancellor and was raised to the peerage as Baron Lyndhurst of Lyndhurst where he served under the Prime Ministers George Canning, The Viscount Goderich and The Duke of Wellington until 1830. He held the position again briefly between November 1834–April 1835 and for the third and final time between 1841–1846 [1].

Despite two cataract operations, by 1850 Lyndhurst was blind. However, his impairment did not diminish his resolve for speaking passionately in parliament. In his later career Lyndhurst gave his backing to causes as diverse as the state of national defences, the admission of Jews into parliament and the modification of the common law to provide wives divorced from their husband’s access to their children [2].

In his final years, Lyndhurst’s health continued to fail and he became confined to a wheelchair in which he ‘passed much of his time in what had been his father’s “painting room” […] was surrounded by paintings and sketches, the handiwork of his talented father’ [3]. Despite this, Mary contests that Lyndhurst ‘rode out to sit to Mr Watts in his studio of old Little Holland House’ [4].

In this portrait, painted when Lyndhurst was 90 years old, he wears the parliamentary robes of the Lord Chancellor. The scarlet wool gown, with miniver fur trim and gold embroidery appears to overwhelm the frail man, as it fills the lower half of the canvas, as if to disguise Lyndhurst’s reliance on a wheelchair. His head (or suspected toupée) of thick auburn hair is brushed to the side, revealing the hollows of the aged man’s temples and cheeks. His gaze is clouded by the disease which claimed his eyesight, demonstrating ‘a strong human soul burdened with withering flesh’ [5]. In wearing the formal dress of his previous position, this portrait is an unusual example within the Hall of Fame scheme. The majority of the ‘Hall of Fame’ sitters appear in non-descript clothing, so that they all appear as equals, with no indication of their ranks, professions or positions within society.

There are two versions of this portrait of Lyndhurst which survive in public collections today: one owned by the Watts Gallery Trust and a second in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The National Portrait Gallery version, which entered the collection in 1883 alongside those of Lord Lyons and Lorde Stratford de Redcliffe, is less refined in its execution than this version.

In her original catalogue, Mary alludes to three versions with ‘a replica painted for Mr Rickards in 1862 and one for the family’ [6]. In his correspondence to his patron Charles Rickards, we know that Watts was still working on a replica as late as 1870, seven years after Lyndhurst had died. Watts, apologizing for the delay, wrote to Rickards to explain ‘I am sincerely grieved that I cannot send Lord Lyndhurst but at the last moment looking over it […] I am struck by something that seems to me indecipherable in the head & as I shall certainly improve the picture very much I hope you will not be too much disappointed’ [7].

Lyndhurst was no stranger to sitting for his portrait. His father, John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815) painted a family portrait of his young family in 1777, to celebrate their move to England, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy. In that portrait, the future Lord Lyndhurst can be seen as a four-year-old, reaching up to embrace his mother. In later life, as an established politician, Lyndhurst sat for the Royal Academician James Sant. The date of this work, now in the Government Art Collection, is unknown although Lyndhurst appears somewhat younger than he does in the portraits by Watts. Painted in the year before his death, this portrait by was not well received by Lyndhurst’s wife who declared that ‘the portrait represented a much older man’ [8].

Footnotes:

[1] Gareth H. Jones, ‘Copley, John Singleton, Baron Lyndhurst’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 2008.

[2] Gareth H. Jones, ‘Copley, John Singleton, Baron Lyndhurst’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 2008.

[3] Dennis Lee, Lord Lyndhurst: The Flexible Tory (Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1994), p.259.

[4] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Portraits by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., Vol. II, c.1915, p.101.

[5] Letter from C.H. Rickards to G.F. Watts, 4 July 1870, Watts Correspondence, Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, GFW/1/4.

[6] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Portraits by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., Vol. II, c.1915, p.101.

[7] Letter from G.F. Watts to C.H. Rickards, 25 January 1870, Watts Correspondence, Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, GFW/1/2.

[8] Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Portraits by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., Vol. II, c.1915, p.101.

Further Reading:

‘Mr Rickards’s Collection at the Institution’, Manchester Guardian, 10 April 1880, p.8

Barbara Bryant, G.F. Watts: portraits; fame & beauty in Victorian society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004).

Gareth H. Jones, ‘Copley, John Singleton, Baron Lyndhurst’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Jan 2008.

Dennis Lee, Lord Lyndhurst: The Flexible Tory (Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1994).

Richard Ormond, Early Victorian portraits, Part I, National Portrait Gallery (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1973), pp.280-281.

Leonée and Richard Ormond, G.F. Watts: The Hall of Fame: Portraits of his Famous Contemporaries, National Portrait Gallery (Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery, 2012).

Watts Correspondence, Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London, GFW/1/2 and GFW/1/4.

Mary Seton Watts, Catalogue of Portraits by G.F. Watts O.M. R.A., Vol. II, c.1915.

Text by Dr Stacey Clapperton