The Pattern in the Carpet
Page 14
It was Lady Charlotte who ordered the fancy-dress outfits for the little princes, as she recorded on 6 September 1764. Dressing children in historical costume was popular at this period, as Reynolds’ child portraits bear witness; little boys were immortalized in the garb of Jupiter, Hannibal, Bacchus and Henry VIII, images that curiously combine playfulness with pathos and an ominous sense of destiny. Zoffany’s little princes and Reynolds’ heroic children provide a striking contrast with Hoare’s painting of the Quicke brothers, who are shown fair and square, without parody, as themselves, engaged in a proper children’s activity, not aping the aspirations of adults or providing a sly moral for the superior viewer. The Quicke portrait, like Chardin’s portraits of children playing the goose game or solemnly absorbed with knucklebones, or shuttlecocks, or toy drums, or windmills, shows respect.
The geographical allusions of Zoffany’s work remind us that geography and dissected maps were of more than academic interest to kings and princes. George III was to see the maps of the Americas redrawn, and his lavish embassy to China under Lord Macartney in 1792–4 was rebuffed. It was important for heirs to the throne to be able to locate their plantations, their colonies and the empires of their rivals.
Lady Charlotte’s equipment for teaching geography included, as well as the more usual globes, two elegant mahogany cabinets, one with thirteen shallow drawers, the other with three deeper drawers, furnished with brass locks and handles, perhaps designed for travelling between the royal residences in and around London. They contained several maps, two by Spilsbury, and one of North America from a printed plate from the Atlas méthodique of Jean Palairet. Across a vast tract of the north-west of the map of America are inscribed the words ‘Partie Inconnue’. Jill Shefrin has written a monograph on these cabinets, their contents and Lady Charlotte’s teaching methods, engagingly titled Such Constant Affectionate Care, which gives due prominence to Spilsbury’s invention. These cabinets are the first though not the last example of royal patronage of the puzzle, but it is not known (or not yet known) whether they were commissioned directly from Spilsbury by Lady Charlotte. In 2000 they were offered for sale by a private owner and spent some years in limbo with a dealer awaiting an export licence before a successful appeal was made through the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to save them for the nation. This appeal, as reported by the press, slightly overstated Lady Charlotte’s accomplishments, for it claimed that she herself was the inventor of dissected maps, an attribution that has long been dismissed as false. But the value of the cabinets (they sold for £120,000) certainly bears witness to a growing interest in Spilsbury and other early jigsaws both from scholars and from collectors. In 2007 they were put on display at Kew Palace, and I am told they will travel between Kew and the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green.
Kew Palace is an appropriate home for the puzzles, for the royal family used Kew as a retreat for many years, and here in various houses, palaces, lodgings and gardens the princes and princesses enjoyed fresh air, picnics, games and botanizing. Flora Fraser, in her tragicomic royal saga Princesses (2004), described Kew as ‘a full-blown royal campus, which the royal children rarely left during the summer months, where servants intrigued against each other, and where tradesmen in the village that had grown up around the church on the Green vied for preferment’. Queen Charlotte’s cottage ornée survives today as a tourist attraction, and Kew Palace (originally built as a merchant’s residence in 1631) has been renovated to give a sense of the family life of George III, the queen and their many children. Other items on display include a ‘baby house’ complete with furnishings embroidered by the princesses, cut-paper silhouettes, a silver rattle and a silver inkstand, globes, musical and scientific instruments, and examples of George III’s accomplished architectural drawings. The message of Kew Palace is mixed; it was a place of domesticity and safety, but it was also a place of suffering and frustration, eventually contaminated for the king by memories of bouts of illness, confusion and constraint.
The baby house has an unusual wallpaper. Its colour is what I call turquoise, and what the experts call verditer green, and it shows a pattern of irregular amoeba-like blobs outlined in white floating against a turquoise background dotted with tiny spots in a darker shade of green. (I was complimented by the Deputy House Manager on my visit to Kew for wearing a colour-coded turquoise T-shirt, which we took to be a happy omen.) The baby house colour scheme has been picked up in the house itself. In the queen’s boudoir, on the first floor, the walls are a strong clear verditer, with a Greek-key border of black and green, re-created from an early nineteenth-century fragment uncovered during restoration. The curtains are black and yellow chintz, and there are two little tables, one a green-baize card table, the other a sewing table with a work-basket, at which the queen and the princesses would spend hours on their knotting and netting. It is not a room of excessive grandeur.
Today, the ghosts of frustration and illness have been banished to the unrestored attics, and a more positive spirit of years of domesticity, artistic endeavour and earnest education prevails. Flora Fraser’s account of the childhood of the princesses gives a vivid portrait of the texture of their lives – the music, dancing and drawing lessons with a succession of governesses, the elaborately dressed theatrical tableaux, the promenades, picnics and birthdays, the conscientious acquiring of foreign languages. In the evenings they sewed, while listening to renderings of the works of Walter Scott; sewing was euphemistically known as ‘working’, although the objects made were mainly ornamental gifts. (Auntie Phyl and I used to say that we ‘worked’ at a jigsaw, and women of her generation kept their sewing things, as did the queen, in a ‘work-basket’.) The poor Princess Royal, unlike the rest of her family, was not at all musical, hated the endless evenings of Handel (‘I think that my dislike for music rather increases’) and was keenly conscious of her poor ear, which restricted her skill in dancing. (My sister Helen said to me the other day that we would not have done well as princesses, as none of us had a good ear. She is right.)
The claim that Lady Charlotte invented dissected maps and puzzles rests largely on a misleading note to this effect, of a later date, which was found with the cabinets. Nor, as it now appears, was John Spilsbury himself necessarily the inventor. He was probably the first commercial bookseller to market them, but Jill Shefrin has put forward the name of an earlier originator, Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711–1780), a writer, teacher and well-known reteller of fairy stories, who entered ‘cartes de géographie en bois’ in the prospectus for her exclusive and expensive school in Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, London, in an advertisement of c.1755–60. (This, alas for patriotism, would make the jigsaw in part a French invention.)
There are several references of the period to Madame de Beaumont’s ‘wooden maps’, including one by the well-connected court favourite Mary Delany (1700–1788), who refers to them specifically, and as early as December 1759, in a letter to her sister Anne Dewes. Mary Delany spent many evenings with the royal family and children, and was well acquainted with Lady Charlotte; the paths of Lady Charlotte and Madame de Beaumont also, according to Shefrin, ‘crossed over a period of years’, the former putting into practice the educational theories of the latter. Caroline Lennox, Lady Holland, also referred to these maps; writing in 1762 to her sister Emily about her son Harry, who was being educated à la Rousseau, she notes that ‘he works very hard all day out of doors, which is very wholesome…He eats quantities of fish and is so happy and pleased all day. At night we depart a little from Monsr. Rousseau’s plan, for he reads fairy-tales, and learns geography on the Beaumont wooden maps; he is vastly quick at learning that or anything else.’ This sounds a very pleasant regime.
So who is to know who first thought up the notion of the dissected puzzle? Maybe Spilsbury was no more than the clever exploiter of another’s idea. Maybe a private commission from Lady Charlotte for the royal nursery set him on his path to brief prosperity and a small, posthumous fam
e. Maybe Mary Delany was the go-between.
XXI
Mary Delany, born Mary Granville, was an inventive woman. Through ingenuity and resourcefulness she made the best of a poor start in life and a dismal, semi-forced first marriage to an elderly husband, Alexander Pendarves, who died leaving her less well off than her relatives had expected. She and her friend Lady Charlotte Finch were both acquainted with marital distress. Finch’s marriage to the Honourable William Finch produced four children and had at first been companionable, but shortly after her appointment as royal governess in 1762 he became mentally unstable (he died in 1766) and is said to have been violent towards her. So she left him for a life shared between Kew and an apartment at St James’s, and a career caring for two families of growing children, her own and the queen’s. A historian might hesitate before connecting her husband’s illness with her demanding employment at court, but a novelist need not be so circumspect.
Mary Delany, who remained childless, remarried happily some twenty years after her first husband’s death, but by this time she had developed her own skills and interests, as well as a distinctively independent attitude to the social whirl. She had a keen (and often satiric) eye for fashion and display, which she loved to describe in vivid detail; fabrics, trimmings, patterns and colours (‘scarlet damask, gold tabby, pale lemon lutestring, silver frosted tissue, mouse-colour velvet’) glow and sparkle and flutter under her pen, and she was full of advice to country cousins about ribbons and gloves. (She would certainly have advised Alison Uttley and Auntie Phyl that ribbons for the elderly were not a good idea. She had strong opinions about ribbons.)
Mary Delany first came to the notice of the royal eye at Queen Caroline’s birthday celebrations in 1728, where she made (in her own words) a ‘tearing show’, like a jay in borrowed feathers, in jewels borrowed from Lady Sunderland and a gown she had designed herself. ‘The Queen thanked [Lady Carteret] for bringing me forward, and she told me she was obliged to me for my pretty clothes, and admired my Lady Carteret’s extremely; she told the Queen they were my fancy, and that I drew the pattern.’ But Delany, much as she loved clothes, was also a true mistress of the half-arts. She took up the crafts of japanning, shell-work and cut-paper-work, creating from simple and largely inexpensive materials objects of great and sometimes lasting beauty.
These pursuits were popular with many aristocratic women, some of whose skills went well beyond the conventional needlework, bag-making and knotting that helped to kill time. Charlotte Boyle, credited with ‘real genius’ by Horace Walpole, ambitiously covered the wall panels of a room at Boyle Farm, Thames Ditton, with black Japan-work (verre eglomisé) using lampblack and gold-leaf applied to glass with isinglass. Elizabeth Vesey at Lucan House in Ireland decorated her dressing room with ‘Indian figures and flowers cut out and oiled, to be transparent, and pasted on her dressing-room window in imitation of painting on glass’. Delany, who helped her friend Mrs Vesey with this task, thought it had ‘a very good effect’.
Delany herself was, however, the most innovative of all. Germaine Greer in The Obstacle Race (1979) generously described her as ‘the most civilised person in the most civilised era of English culture’, and listed with admiration her prodigious activities, which included ‘the making and sticking of pincushions, Japan-works, pastel portraits, copies of great masters, designs in shell-work, lustres, candelabra, cornices and friezes in cut-paper on wood, chenille work, cornices made of shells painted over like fine carving, upholstery, quilt-making, embroidery, cross-stitched carpets, miniature playing-card painting’. Delany worried that her mind was ‘too much filled with amusements of no real estimation’, a characteristically self-deprecating view that women tended to take (and still take) of crafts that cannot be dignified with the name of art. Late in life, she wrote to her niece Mary:
Now I know you smile and say what can take up so much of A.D.’s [Aunt Delany’s] time? No children to teach or play with; no house matters to torment her; no books to publish; no politicks to work her brains? All this is true but idleness never grew in my soil, tho’ I can’t boast of any useful employments, only such as keep me from being a burthen to my friends, and banish the spleen.
(Greer, in a not uncharacteristic volte-face, seems somewhat capriciously to have turned against Delany since she wrote The Obstacle Race, complaining in the Guardian in 2007 that she ought to have learned how to paint instead of wasting her time in cutting up paper. This article provoked predictable indignation in twenty-first-century women artists who work in patchwork, needlework and the soft arts, a spat that reminded me of that large, American, feminist, mixed-media artwork, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, collaboratively created in 1974–9. I saw it in a warehouse in Islington. It was interesting but ugly. The delicacy of its needlework was not its distinguishing feature, whereas the delicacy of Delany’s work is undisputed.)
Delany was modest about her achievements but, while it is true that her name is not registered in the ranks of the great masters that she copied, her creativity and originality were fully recognized in her lifetime. It is agreed that her finest works were the paper collages of her old age, made after the death of her second husband Dr Delany in 1768. She began this extraordinary composite work in 1773 or 1774, when she was in her seventies, producing over nearly ten years a ‘Flora Delanica’, consisting of a series of nearly a thousand exquisite, delicate and botanically accurate, closely observed series of cut-paper mosaic flowers. These remarkable artefacts, which are as beautiful, fresh and natural as they are ingenious, were made by a process of her own devising, which portrays each flower as though it were alive upon its stem. They are, it must be admitted, in a different league from Auntie Phyl’s gummed elves.
Her flowers were admired for their artistry by Reynolds, and for their accuracy by Joseph Banks and Erasmus Darwin. Queen Charlotte (who loved Delany and signed herself in letters to her as ‘your very affectionate queen’) plied her with rare specimens and praise, and presented her with a beautiful, gold-spangled, satin pocket case containing, as Delany’s waiting-woman put it, ‘a knife, sizsars, pencle, rule, compass, bodkin’. Her mosaics were miracles of craftsmanship. Her ‘Burnet Rose’ (Rosa spinosissima), with its delicate white and cream flowers, has a stem showing sixty-five thorns, cut in one piece with the stem, and her ‘White Flowering Acacia’ has literally hundreds of leaves cut in different shades of green. The simpler flowers – the Chinese lantern, the marsh vetch, the corn poppy – are also very beautiful. She wielded her scissors with genius. Occasionally she would incorporate a part of a real plant – a leaf, a floret, a seed pod – in a collage. All this creative activity can hardly be dismissed as time-wasting, although it was certainly time-consuming.
It seems far from impossible that Mary Delany might have hit spontaneously upon the puzzle principle, so adept was she at the arts of dissection and reassembly, of combining and re-creating, of making something from almost nothing. Maybe she and Lady Charlotte Finch discussed these matters as they watched the royal children play at Kew. Maybe, as Shefrin suggests, ‘future research will reveal yet another, earlier inventor’. Dates are set to be challenged. Historians love to bowl them over, one by one: 1760, 1759, 1758… How far back in time may the dissected puzzle be traced? And how far, and how quickly, did it travel?
XXII
It’s a pity that we don’t have any paintings or drawings of George III’s children playing with their Finch/Spilsbury cabinet. But we have recently been introduced to a puzzle-playing child from another royal family, portrayed by Goya with a piece of a dissected map in his hand. This portrait, of the six-year-old Spanish prince Don Luis María de Borbón y Vallabriga (1777–1823), was painted in 1783, when Goya was beginning to make himself known as a supremely successful (yet supremely uncompromising) portraitist of Spanish royalty and aristocracy. It shows the little boy formally dressed in blue breeches and tailcoat standing in front of a large map, holding a piece of a puzzle in one hand and a pair of compasses in the other. This chi
ld was the nephew of King Carlos III of Spain, and son of the king’s semi-exiled younger brother, also Don Luis, and it was painted at his father’s palace not far from Madrid.
During the same visit and in the same year, 1783, Goya painted one of his most famous and expressive groups, The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, which shows the Infante Don Luis, his wife, their three children, and a beautifully differentiated retinue of attendants, in an informal and intimate late-night setting. To me, this scene seems intended to demonstrate domestic happiness and solidarity, although art historian Xavier Bray points out that the darkness and the composition also suggest isolation and exile, and perhaps foreshadow the imminent death of the ageing Infante. The Infante plays a game of solitaire (with cards identified as the powerful Ace of Coins, the Horse of Clubs and the Two of Clubs) on a candle-lit, green-baize card table, watched by his much younger wife Teresa, who is dressed in a loose white gown. Her long hair is being braided by a hairdresser, and other members of the household gather round, one or two staring inquisitively out of the frame at the viewer, others watching the play of the cards. Little Don Luis, in profile, follows the game; his younger sister Maria Teresa gazes at the figure of Goya (who has included himself and his easel in the corner of the foreground of the composition) while a round-eyed infant is held aloft in a governess’s arms. It is an Enlightenment scene with a curiously free egalitarian spirit, giving interest and dignity to all its subjects, young and old, master and servant, and perhaps defiantly illustrating the family’s triumph over the disapproval of the king and the difficulties encountered by progressive thought in a Catholic country still dominated by the Inquisition.