Legacy 17- Zoffany

Undoubted Zoffanys

Jun 18, '12 11:45 AM for everyone

“I can tell undoubted Raphaels from  Gerrit Dous and Zoffanys”- just one of the bewildering list of skills which W S Gilbert credited Major General Stanley with in “The Pirates of Penzance” in order to back up his claim that “in matters animal, vegetable and mineral/He (was) the very model of a modern Major General”.   Like most of Stanley’s claims, this had nothing at all to do with military knowledge.   Like many, it’s an odd mix of the utterly banal (you wouldn’t really need to know much about art to tell the works of Raphael from those of a mid 17th century Dutch master or an 18^th century Anglo-German portrait specialist) and the intriguing (Raphael would probably have had universal name recognition amongst Gilbert’s audience, Dou and Zoffany were in a reputational slump which probably meant that a fair number of the audience would have wondered who he was talking about- no doubt adding to the humour for those in the know; did the Major General really know anything about that pair or was he bluffing?).

Dou’s reputation recovered a bit in the 20^th century.  Zoffany has remained rather marginalised in the history of British art.  The reasons for this are in part technical; his approach to portrait painting did not conform to the “grand tradition” articulated by his contemporary and grand panjandrum of British art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and then lost out as the whole portraitist tradition fell out of favour with the avant garde in late 19^th century art appreciation.   More disturbingly, he also appears to have been a victim of barely veiled xenophobia (because of his German origins) and even anti-Semitism (by Victorian times he was widely, though wrongly, believed to have been of Jewish descent) in the art historical establishment.   Until the recent Royal Academy show (now finished- I’m afraid I’m a bit late writing this due to holidays and other distractions) he hadn’t had a proper retrospective for decades.   He emerged from the show as a fascinating figure- an inveterate traveller and a keen observer of his times, a larger than life character with a quirky sense of humour but also a somewhat worrying relish for scenes of violence.

He was born in 1733 near Frankfurt-am-Main and baptised Johannes Zauffaly (his name was subject to a wide variety of spellings thereafter), the child of a family of court artists and architects in the service of the Thurn and Taxis dynasty.   He shuttled between Rome and Germany for his artistic training and initially entered the service of the Prince Elector of Trier, which he left rather suddenly in 1760 to go to London.  It’s not clear why he left- he may have been passed over for a permanent appointment, though I suspect the fact that the Seven Years War was in full swing and presumably making inroads into artistic patronage in Germany may have played a role.   I didn’t find his early works that interesting on the whole- lots of rather standard issue scenes from classical mythology and allegories- until one hits upon the picture of David with the head of Goliath (see below).  This is riddled with sexual innuendo of a distinctly homoerotic nature- hints of oral sex as well as a David who looks as if he’s trying out his best smouldering seductive look under his sexiest new hat and wishing he had had time to get his make up right.   It’s hard to work out what’s going on here.  As far as one can tell, Zoffany’s own tastes were decidedly heterosexual- he had a reputation as a womaniser, fathered children on two continents and was probably a bigamist.   The painting is sometimes taken to be a self-portrait but this is disputed as it doesn’t look very like Zoffany; it might also be a portrait of his teacher Mengs but even that isn’t clear.  It’s not known who it was painted for- indeed it was only securely attributed to Zoffany some thirty years ago.   Given Zoffany’s later problems over “unnatural vice” (I’ll explain in due course- it wasn’t him committing it!) I wonder if he was rather more tolerant of “unorthodox” sexual proclivities of others than the 18^th century average.

In England Zoffany (for whom English was always a third language) initially struggled before finding a long term patron- the actor/manager David Garrick- who could open doors in the British establishment.   Garrick was the superstar of Georgian theatre, a profession struggling with growing success to assert its patriotism, respectability and centrality to British life and identity (the increasing willingness to grant Shakespeare quasi-divine status- a cause Garrick was keen to promote, not least through the “Temple to Shakespeare” which he built in the grounds of his suburban mansion- no doubt helped).   Unlike most continental capitals, opera was relatively marginal to London cultural life, especially since the death of Handel.  The two theatres with what amounted to a legal monopoly over dramatic productions in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, worked flat out staging something like ten productions a week between them.  King George III and Queen Charlotte were theatre fans and, unlike their continental counterparts, did not run a separate court theatre company of their own (the Civil List voted by Parliament didn’t stretch that far) so they had to go to the public theatres.   It was a good entry point for an ambitious outsider.  

Zoffany’s theatre paintings are a bit more complex than they look. Garrick was very keen to ensure that his starring parts were immortalised in ways which transcended “mere” portraiture.  Zoffany’s paintings may look like reproductions of actual performances but in a lot of cases they can’t be- the “scenery” which the players are performing in front of is simply too complex ever to have been used in a real theatre of the day and at times the way the characters are depicted actually contradicts the stage directions in the play concerned.   They are perhaps best seen as an attempt to extend the high cultural status of history painting to depictions of stage productions- as if the play itself was a surrogate for depicting great historical events or indeed the performance was itself an event on a par with the battles and grand political events of traditional history painting.   This isn’t always the case- Zoffany did paintings of comic plays and players too, though even these often had subtle links to contemporary politics- but it was clearly a factor in how he depicted the staging of “classics” like Shakespeare or Ben Jonson.   It wasn’t always easy.   Garrick was a brilliant actor (especially in comedy) but he had height issues which made him problematic in roles like Macbeth and Zoffany had to use some ingenuity to minimise this problem.  

Zoffany appears to have been a highly clubbable and sociable man and a talented musician (though he also had a violent temper). He slotted easily into a London scene in which male clubs were key to making contacts and amateur music making a major cultural practice.    He began picking up commissions from a wide range of patrons, from the royal family downwards- and was careful not to tie himself too closely to any one noble patron in a period of political division.   The work he did for Garrick stood him in good stead- or perhaps brought out a natural tendency towards the theatrical and stagey in his art.   His favoured portrait style was the “conversation piece” in which the patron, his family and associates were depicted as a group, perhaps engaged in group activities like making music or even having breakfast.   There are probably a number of in-jokes in these works- and every so often Zoffany would insert himself into scenes when he could not possibly have been present in real life which further complicates interpretation.   One could see these as the family videos of the day- children are frequently depicted doing mildly naughty things like trying to swipe an extra slice of toast and pets sometimes misbehave.   This appealed to an ideology which tended to stress companionate marriage and the importance of family life per se rather than a focus on lineage.    It was one which even the very highest bought into.   King George and Queen Charlotte were very keen to project an image of family stability. This did not entail a flagrant distortion of the truth as George was notoriously faithful to his wife and in the 1760’s their children were too young to have started posing problems.  The image of harmony in the family group below was multiplied by engravings and even china figurines (the “Van Dyck”, pseudo-17^th century costume worn was fashionable across Europe at the time and probably doesn’t have any deeper meaning); Zoffany was one of the inventors of the modern idealised image of “the Royal Family”.   He was certainly in enough favour for George III to appoint him to the newly minted Royal Academy, avoiding the need for him to face election.

Then in 1772 he went off to Italy.   Admittedly this was a royal commission; Queen Charlotte was funding him to make a painting which depicted the top items in the collections of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, housed in the Uffizi Gallery, as a surrogate for going to Florence herself and look at them (not an uncommon way of appreciating art in a world without photography and plagued by slow communications).   Nevertheless it was a slightly odd move for a man becoming established on the London scene.  It seems to have been somewhat forced.   Zoffany had expensive tastes and appears to have struggled to balance his books.  He had invested a lot of effort in pulling strings with Joseph Banks to get appointed as official artist to Captain Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific.   Then Cook objected to the scale of Banks’ entourage (he may also have resented the way in which Banks had cashed in on his involvement on Cook’s first voyage), Banks (who was not at that point in good health) had second thoughts about going and Zoffany found himself bumped off the expedition at a point where he had gone into some debt to kit himself out.   Going to Italy with a royal introductions and a retainer for his services possibly looked a good way out.

He was to be away for some seven years.   This alone began to strain relations with the Queen, who began to tire of his expenses claims (she was not personally wealthy and her Civil List payments were not particularly generous given that she had a large and growing family to maintain).  Her irritation was all the more understandable as Zoffany made ample use of the doors which her recommendation opened to cultivate the ruling families of the various north Italian states as potential patrons, even managing to ingratiate himself with the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna through his links with her son, Pietro Leopardo of Tuscany (later Emperor Leopold II).  He was evidently a good deal better than  any north Italian competitor available in the portrait painting line.   He did a certain amount of self-promotion, getting himself elected to various local art academies (and, in fairness, getting some of his colleagues in London elected too).   Perhaps news began to filter back to London that Zoffany was living in considerable state in Italy, dressing like a lord in a pink velvet coat, giving himself airs and suggesting to British nobility and gentry passing through Florence on the Grand Tour that the king had personally requested that they should figure in his masterpiece.   It probably didn’t help that he was living with a woman whom he was apt to call his wife even though his first, German, wife was still very much alive and no divorce had ever been obtained (even as a very nominal Catholic there wasn’t any chance of one being forthcoming either). 

For all the “official” work he did in Italy, there are a number of enigmatic canvasses as well- like the one below.  This depicts peasant musicians at celebration of the maize harvest in the countryside round Parma (and I would love to be able to hear the music they’re playing…).  On the surface all seems well, even if the nominal boss is a bit squeezed in on the far left.   In fact this could be seen as a commentary on one of the biggest French Enlightenment fiascos of the age.  The man on the left, a French architect called Petitot, has just been sacked from his post in charge of ducal buildings.   He, and a number of other Frenchmen, had been brought to Parma by the previous Duke, Filippo of Bourbon Parma (a cadet branch of the French royal family).  Their job was to turn Parma into a model Enlightenment principality- and the Duke’s son Ferdinando into the perfect Enlightenment prince.   Unfortunately Ferdinando had other ideas.   Instead of imbibing the principles of Montesquieu and other such luminaries, he preferred to hang out with the peasantry, speaking dialectal Italian, revelling in the kind of traditional culture which Enlightenment elites viewed as hopelessly barbarous- and sleeping with peasant girls.   He embraced the most reactionary styles of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.  His wife, an Austrian archduchess, was rather more interested in the practicalities of government but shared his taste for humbly born lovers.   Between them they made a clean sweep of the French “experts” who had been modernising the state administration- to the wild enthusiasm of the population.   It would have been quite in character for Duke Ferdinando to order Petitot to hold the harvest festival and attend in person- indeed he may well have been there himself.   Quite what Zoffany made of the broader context is hard to say, though there is coded visual language in the picture which suggests he rather revelled in Petitot’s discomfiture and he was certainly a political conservative by the 1790’s so perhaps he was on the Duke’s side.

When he eventually displayed the great Uffizi painting he had been paid for (see top), the result was a disaster.   King George hated it, Queen Charlotte took it as a personal affront.  Why?  The problem wasn’t with the “paintings within the painting”; it was with the crowd of Grand Tourists shown in the Tribuna looking at them.   A good number seem to be more motivated by lechery than art appreciation- heterosexual in the case of the group on the right drooling over a nude classical statue, implicitly homoerotic in the lower right and in the centre.   The sin was compounded by Zoffany choosing to depict in prominent positions a number of individuals who had notoriously had to quit King George’s realms in a hurry for the more welcoming climes of Florence because of allegations of “unnatural vice”.   If this was a joke, it backfired dramatically.  Zoffany was (perhaps surprisingly) paid the last instalment for his efforts but the picture was banished to a storeroom not to be seen for decades.

This was not the end of Zoffany’s career.  He kept on getting commissions, though perhaps he wasn’t quite as popular as he had been and David Garrick was dead, removing one reliable patron.   Then things took a rather unexpected turn.    In 1783 he went to India.    His motivation seems to have been financial (again); contemporaries report him as saying he intended to roll in gold.   He wouldn’t have been unusual as India was a bit of a magnet for people of slightly marginal status on the make.  Indeed going to India would have marked him as morally dubious in some quarters; there was much heartburn amongst the cultural elites over the “demoralising” effect of fortunes made in India on those who made them and a degree of outright hysteria in certain Whiggish political quarters over the supposed scope that cash flows from India might give the Crown to “subvert the Constitution” through bribery and offices of profit for MPs.   It’s no coincidence that this was the period in which Warren Hastings (whose portrait Zoffany painted) faced impeachment for supposed corruption there (it tends to be forgotten that he was actually acquitted….).

The India Zoffany went to was a rather complex and fluid place from a British perspective.   Government in London was just beginning to take on board the implications of the huge expansion of the East India Company’s role in the previous thirty years or so, moving from being a pure trading company confined to a few coastal forts to a substantial landholder in Bengal nominally under the suzerainty of the Mughal Emperor in Delhi while also operating as tax gatherer on behalf of that Empire even further afield in India.   It was a long way away from the Raj immortalised by Kipling; a world in which Europeans flitted to and fro across borders, frequently took local women as more or less temporary partners (Zoffany, predictably, conformed to this stereotype) and often adopted life styles a lot closer to those of the local elites than many social commentators were comfortable with.   The other side of this was that there was a good deal more genuine interchange between Europeans and their various Indian interlocutors than would be the case later.  Western academic study of Indian languages and literatures sprang from the efforts of an admittedly limited intellectual elite to make sense of the culture they had found themselves ruling and the first generation were rarely as racist in their presuppositions as their heirs would be.

This was even true in Calcutta, the most Europeanised city in India and capital of the East India Company’s dominions, where the chief justice’s wife took a lively interest in collecting Indian music.  Zoffany painted one of her daughters in a hybrid Indian-influenced costume dancing to a native band with the family looking on in approval; it’s hard to imagine that scene even fifty years later.  It was even more the case in Lucknow, where he spent much of his time.   Lucknow was not under “British” rule (whatever that meant in the 1780’s) ; it was the capital of Awadh, ruled by its own nawab Asaf-ud-Doula, a nominally tributary state of the Moghul Empire but for all practical purposes independent.   Asaf was a great patron of the arts, from architecture to calligraphy, though perhaps with special attention to the culinary arts (he appears to have been too overweight even to ride an elephant).  He was highly cultured- and much given to spending money he did not have, building up loan arrears to British financiers on top of various sums which he owed the EIC under treaty arrangements made after his father had been defeated in conflict with the British.   He was a substantial employer of Europeans to try to train up his army to Western standards and generally bring in useful technologies and skills.  As a result his court was a magnet for misfits and ne’er do wells and not-quite-British British like Colonel Polier (a Swiss-born soldier who switched to Awadh service when he hit a glass ceiling in   EIC employment which blocked promotion of non-British born officers) or Claude Martin (a French military engineer who had served the French and British in turn before going to Lucknow and making a massive fortune trading alongside his formal role as controller of the Arsenal).  Zoffany fitted well into this world.  A sense of the cross-cultural hurly-burly can be gained from his painting of Colonel Mordaunt’s cock fight – animal fighting and blood sports were a taste which united European and Indian elites.   Mordaunt, captain of Asaf’s bodyguard, is engaged in some rather aggressive banter with his employer (recognisable from his distinctive side whiskers) as a mixed European and Indian crowd gathers round, no doubt betting furiously on the outcome  of the next fight.  However brutal the environment, there is also a sense of shared masculine community.   Asaf was so impressed with the painting that he wanted his own version; since he was notoriously slow in paying artists, the version which Zoffany began was never finished but was eventually completed by Indian artists in a very different way (ironically with far fewer Indian participants).

Zoffany may have made his money in India- if the nawab was not a good payer, men like Polier and Martin were more reliable- but his health appears to have been permanently affected by the five years he spent there.  On return to England he was never quite the same man and the RA show has very few paintings from his last years.   He had trouble finishing commissions and appears to have become very deaf and increasingly short sighted- there are even suggestions that he eventually suffered from a form of dementia.   His intellectual curiosity was not quenched- he is recorded as going to visit a gypsy encampment in Surrey in 1798 and discussing comparisons between the Romany language and the Bengali which he had picked up in India.  There was a reconciliation of sorts with King George in one of his lucid spells; Zoffany’s staunchly conservative opposition to the French Revolution which eventually killed his friend Polier would have been a link.   Zoffany appears to have been genuinely horrified by events in France and poured out his horror in the chaotic canvas depicting the looting of the royal wine cellars below.   He had always had a taste for depicting violence but this is extreme and almost shades into a kind of relish, coupled with a radical dehumanisation of the revolutionary crowds.   The picture seems to have shocked even viewers those who shared his conservative sentiments and a sequel depicting the massacre of the Swiss Guards on the Champ de Mars was never completed.  He died in 1810, finally marrying his long suffering “second wife” legally in 1805.

It would be pushing things to claim that Zoffany was one of the greats of western art but he was an acute observer of the societies in which he lived and left some wonderfully memorable images.   One hopes that the RA exhibition will ensure that he never gets completely forgotten again.