NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  The painting had a galvanic effect on the English public, providing a small historical window into the Victorian soul. Gainsborough was all the rage, following an exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy earlier in the year which had drawn thousands of visitors, including Henry James, who lauded the painter’s “natural refinement,” “charm of facility,” and “softness of style.” Just as the Georgians had once expatiated, breathlessly, on Georgiana’s looks and character, so the Victorians now lavished praise on the Gainsborough portrait that had so perfectly encapsulated those qualities, while they looked back on the details of her extraordinary life. Georgiana was a towering figure of her time; her charms, her behavior, and even her failings might have been tailor-made for Victorian tastes. Considerable energy was expended on a discussion of whether the duchess was, or was not, the most perfect of the Georgian belles, and numerous worthy judges from the past were cited one way or the other.

  Exactly one century earlier, in 1776, The Morning Post had held a competition to find the most attractive female of the age: Georgiana was awarded “15/20 for Beauty, 17/20 for Figure, 13/20 for Elegance, 11/20 for Wit, 5/20 for Grace, 3/20 for Expression, 10/20 for Sense, 9/20 for Sensibility and 16/20 for Principles.” Fanny Burney thought her “very handsome”; Horace Walpole celebrated “her youth, figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty.” The actress and royal mistress Mary Robinson, being an expert in such matters, noted her “early disposition to coquetry.” Georgiana’s mother called her “one of the most showy girls I ever saw.”

  The usually mordant satirist Peter Pindar was positively sweaty when offering his “Petition to Time in Favour of the Duchess of Devonshire,” possibly the worst of many very bad poems dedicated to the fair duchess:

  Hurt not the form that all admire—

  Oh, never with white hairs her temple sprinkle—

  Oh, sacred be her cheek, her lip, her bloom

  And do not, in a lovely dimple’s room,

  Place a hard mortifying wrinkle.

  This goes on for several more ghastly verses.

  Her allure is more pithily described by an Irish drunk who, after an encounter with the duchess, remarked wistfully, “I could light my pipe at her eyes.”

  Some Victorian commentators recalled the more scandalous aspects of Georgiana’s reputation, for which there was equally ample evidence. Like her great-great-great-grandniece, Diana, Princess of Wales, the duchess had been idolized into an emblem of her time, a symbol of fashion, beauty, and sexuality.

  Like Princess Diana’s, Georgiana’s sartorial tastes had set the trend for her peers. Enormous hats festooned with ostrich feathers were in, for example, and her every characteristic, whether intended or otherwise, was aped or criticized by society. She could hardly blow her nose before it was turned into a fashion statement. “The slaves of fashion, rather than not resemble her in something, would gnaw their fans and imitate tricks for which a boarding school girl would have been reproved, stick out their chins and affect to be short-breathed,” an observer from the older generation noted. To add to her accomplishments, the duchess wrote reasonable fiction, better letters, and poetry that was translated into several languages. No less a judge than Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired her verses, rather to his own surprise:

  Oh Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure,

  Whence learned you this heroic measure?

  Even by the louche standards of the day, Georgiana’s social life was raunchy in the extreme. The hard-living duchess, a determined but hopelessly inexpert gambler, was addicted to the card game faro (at which she lost several fortunes) and thought nothing of drinking and carousing with her companions until dawn, night after night. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who captured the antics of the Devonshire House set in his School for Scandal, recalled one particularly unsuccessful evening at the card table when “he had handed the Duchess into her carriage when she was literally sobbing at her losses.” Her “early disposition to coquetry,” meanwhile, gradually developed into a full-fledged, if only partially deserved, reputation for sexual immorality.

  The whiff of scandal sprang from two sources. The first was Georgiana’s somewhat overenergetic canvassing on behalf of her friend, the Whig politician Charles James Fox, during the bitterly contested Westminster election of 1784. She at once became infamous for trading kisses for votes among the London electorate, behavior which outraged her more straitlaced contemporaries, who regarded kissing common butchers as clear evidence of nymphomania. “When people of rank descend below themselves and mingle with the vulgar for mean and dirty purposes, they give up their claim to respect,” sniffed one critic. Another account claimed she was spending up to £600 a day in the Whig interest and getting fairly plastered in the process by “drinking daily since the poll commenced, two pots of purl, a pint of Geneva and a gallon of porter.”

  Georgiana’s sex life was a matter of consuming public interest and avid speculation. She was the “irresistible queen of ton” and “the most brilliant of the gay throng.” The Duke of Devonshire, however, seems to have been one of the few people not wholly smitten by his wife’s charms, and his philandering was legendary. His mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, eventually moved in with the duke and duchess at Chatsworth, the vast ducal seat in Derbyshire. In an odd foreshadowing of Adam Worth’s unorthodox domestic arrangements with Kitty Flynn and Piano Charley, Georgiana and the woman who shared her husband’s bed remained the best of friends.

  The Devonshires’ ménage à trois with Lady Elizabeth Foster was a notorious scandal. The women took turns bearing the duke’s children: Georgiana had three, including an heir, while Lady Elizabeth produced two and, after Georgiana’s death, became Duchess of Devonshire. Perhaps to show that adultery was a two-way street, but more likely out of boredom and depression, Georgiana also took a lover, the prickly Charles Grey, later Prime Minister. She seems to have felt a deep passion for Grey, but the affair ended in disaster. She became pregnant and the duke, in a towering, hypocritical rage, banished her from Chatsworth. She gave birth to Grey’s son in Europe, at about the same time that Gainsborough’s great portrait of her vanished, to reappear decades later, as legless as she had often been in life, above Mrs. Maginnis’s fireplace.

  By the end of her remarkable life, Georgiana had lost most of her hair, all her money, her girlish figure, and the sight of one eye, but her pride was intact. In a sharp note she warned posterity: “Before you condemn me, remember that at seventeen I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess.” She died of an abscess on the liver on March 30, 1806, at the age of forty-eight, in Devonshire House, Piccadilly, the scene of her greatest social and political triumphs. When the Prince of Wales heard of her death, he observed sadly: “Then the best-natured and best-bred woman in England is gone.” The “empress of fashion,” who had electrified every red-blooded man in Georgian England, and sent the scuttlebutt hurtling around the nation like no other, now had a similar effect on their Victorian descendants thanks to the reappearance of the Gainsborough portrait which came nearest to capturing her singular élan.

  The Victorians’ rediscovered enthusiasm for Georgiana was principally, if covertly, sexual: the chocolate-box coquetry of Gainsborough’s portrait, when considered in conjunction with her racy reputation, was just the thing to send a delicious testosterone jolt through the average buttoned-down Victorian male. While they might appear repressed in sexual matters, a function of the fashion for strict outward probity, the Victorians were anything but frigid and knew a sex goddess when they saw one. “The beauty of the subject created a furor,” reported one observer, and in several instances the Duchess provided an opportunity for some distinctly torrid praise, neatly disguised as art criticism. “Her protean beauty becomes a reality to us,” one wrote. “We see the mercurial temperament that made her, in truth, the beauty of a hundred moods.” Over the next half century, Gainsborough’s Duchess would become an icon of femininity, a sex symbol, a fashion statement, and one of the most instantly r
ecognizable images in the world. Reproduced time after time on cheap biscuit tins and expensive china, in parlor prints, cigarette cards, books, and marble busts, she could be admired, read, smoked, nibbled, or simply swallowed whole.

  When Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire was displayed at Christie’s early in May 1876, it prompted, in almost equal measure, genuinely artistic admiration, titillation, and blistering controversy. Some claimed it was a fake. The painter John Millais insisted that Gainsborough had never laid eyes on it, let alone painted it. “Artists and connoisseurs who should be entitled to a hearing, boldly impugned its genuineness.” Some argued that “the handling appeared to be less light and airy than is usual with the painter.” Others found that “in the voluptuousness of the figure and the extreme redness of the lips Gainsborough’s characteristic refinement seemed to be wanting.” Another critic suggested that it was “originally a sketch by Romney … made into a finished picture by a man whom Wynn Ellis kept to look after his pictures”—possibly a veiled reference to Bentley, who was also a restorer and minor artist. Yet another faction insisted that “the head was painted by [Sir Thomas] Lawrence, and the accessories of dress etc. filled in by an artist of forgotten name.”

  The identity of the sitter was disputed as vehemently as the question of who had painted it; some contended that this was indeed a Duchess of Devonshire, but not that Duchess of Devonshire. One Mrs. Ramsden, “who had known both of these ladies personally, expressed her opinion most strongly … that the portrait was not that of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but of Elizabeth Foster, who afterwards became Duchess of Devonshire.” The painted Duchess, in other words, was the other corner of that strange aristocratic love triangle.

  “There thus arose constantly the most lively discussions before the picture,” The Times reported. When the auction house put it on display in the weeks before the sale, “to convince those who were disposed to be sceptical as to the right naming of the portrait, there were placed in the room two small engravings from portraits of the same personage, one of which bore the name plainly engraved on it, and was taken from a small whole-length sketch or study in grisaille by Gainsborough which had been in the possession of Lady Clifden for a great length of time. This corresponded precisely with the picture.”

  The grisaille in question, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has been convincingly attributed to Dupont, Gainsborough’s son-in-law. Measuring some two feet by just under sixteen inches, the monochrome shows the Gainsborough portrait before it was cut down and gives a tantalizing glimpse of the full, balanced portrait before the vandal Mrs. Maginnis got to work with her scissors. It belonged to the First Baron Dover, who was married to Lady Georgiana Howard, granddaughter of our own Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Perhaps the most convincing proof that it does, indeed, depict Georgiana is the fact that the family in whose possession it remained until 1922 (when it was sold to the great collector Andrew Mellon) were never in any doubt that it represented their famous ancestor.

  In a magisterial vein, The Times summed up the dispute: “So much interest has arisen over this remarkable picture that we may endeavour to state something of the various opinions that have been expressed upon it during its exhibition. There were the two opposite opinions which divided the numerous admirers of the picture, and in which more than one distinguished academician agreed, either that it is the work of Gainsborough’s highest quality, and entirely authentic, or that it is not by his hand at all.” The debate over the painting’s authenticity continued for many years, and it continues still. Some rightly insist that the face in this painting is rather different from other portraits of Georgiana, not merely by other artists, but by Gainsborough himself. Those who disliked the painting claimed it lacked the artist’s characteristic subtlety of expression, and maintained that “the solid surface of flesh could not have been painted by the master.” Defenders of the portrait, however, have responded that “this is simply one of the many instances in which two portraits of one individual, painted by the same artist after a lapse of a decade, may be made, quite unconsciously, to appear as two totally distinct personages. The change is not so much in the sitter, as in the artist, who may have effected a revolution in his style, or whose views may have undergone a very considerable change.” Certainly it is true that in the years between the first full-length portrait executed by Gainsborough and the second, the duchess’s reputation had evolved from dutiful ducal wife to society’s premier coquette. Perhaps Gainsborough was merely reflecting this, by painting Georgiana as the sex symbol she had become.

  One writer claimed: “The answer is that it is an experiment in solid painting: but look 1) at the delicate cracks; 2) at the eyes; 3) at the marks of the sable brush (not hog’s bristle) at the end of the nose and at the turn of the chin, and you see the unmistakable handling of Gainsborough.” The Times, after discussing the pros and cons, hedged. “The Doctors, though they differ as to authorship, agree as to the high merits of the picture.” That was probably the view taken by all but the most adamant nay-sayers; even if the portrait was not by Gainsborough, or had been completed by another hand, or even if it depicted not the famous duchess but someone else entirely, it was still a very remarkable painting. “The majority,” in any event, “were captivated by its beauty,” and the Duchess “well nigh monopolized the conversation of the day.”

  The auction began to take on the appearance of a public courtship, and as the day of the sale dawned amid intense speculation, at least three very wealthy men had decided that, authentic or no, they wanted the Duchess; these were the Earl of Dudley, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, and William Agnew, art dealer, who thought that Georgiana would be just the personage to grace his new gallery at 39, Old Bond Street.

  The sale itself, on Saturday, May 6, 1876, “created such a sensation as has never been experienced in the picture world of London,” The Times reported.

  Throughout the week the pictures had attracted considerable numbers of visitors, but on the day preceding the sale the interest came to a climax, and crowds filled the rooms of Messrs Christie, Manson and Woods all day.

  By the standards of the day, the newspaper’s account of the occasion verges on the hysterical:

  Any one passing the neighbourhood of St James’s Square might well have supposed that some great lady was holding a reception, and this, in fact, was pretty much what was going on within the gallery in King Street. All the world had come to see the beautiful Duchess, created by Gainsborough, and, so far as we could observe, they all came, saw and were conquered by her fascinating beauty.

  The sale was a public spectacle, the social event of the season, attended by every follower of fashion, including various doyennes of the chattering classes clad in replica Duchess of Devonshire outfits.

  When the portrait was placed before the crowded audience, a burst of applause showed the universal admiration of the picture.

  Like a master of ceremonies introducing his leading lady, the auctioneer, Mr. Woods, offered a short history of the painting, and the battle was joined.

  The biddings then commenced at 1,000 guineas, which was immediately met with one of 3,000 guineas from Mr Agnew and, amid a silence of quite breathless anticipation, the bids flowed in quick succession, at first by defiant shots across the room of a thousand guineas then, as if the pace was too severe, the bids were only 500 up to 6,000 guineas, when again another thousand-pounder was fired by Mr Agnew, making it 7,000 guineas. Still the fight went on briskly with 500’s, till there was a shout of applause at 10,000 guineas, and then a serious pause for breath between the combatants, when Mr Agnew was the first to challenge “any further advance” with his 10,000 guineas and won the battle in this extraordinary contest. The whole affair was, of its kind, one of the most exciting ever witnessed; the audience, densely packed on raised seats around the room and on the “floor of the house,” stamped, clapped and bravoed.

  Uncertainties about the painting’s authenticity would linger on
, but for the time being, with such a vast price-tag attached to the portrait, “the doubters were put to the rout.”

  The Wynn Ellis collection was sold for a total of £56,098 2 shillings, and eightpence, but the price of the Gainsborough alone—the equivalent of some $600,000 at today’s prices—set a record that would stand unchallenged until 1893. The underbidder was Lord Dudley, who was traveling abroad at the time of the sale and had left an agent with orders to bid up to 10,000 guineas. Dudley had assumed that such a massive sum would be more than sufficient to see off any rivals, and went into a three-day rage when informed otherwise.

  Exhausted by his own eloquence, the Times writer concluded:

  The sale will long be remembered as much for the extraordinary price of the Gainsborough portrait … as for the very interesting questions [of authenticity] which have arisen in connexion with it, and which we imagine must for some time afford matter for discussion.

  These were prophetic words. As William Agnew bore the painting back to his gallery in triumph, the duchess’s travels were about to begin again, this time in the company of a man who knew more about counterfeiting than any other in London.

  ELEVEN

  A Courtship and a Kidnapping

  Worth read about the sale but did not attend it. When not moping around London lamenting the departure of his beloved Kitty, he was preoccupied by a series of pressing considerations. With an expensive life-style to maintain and a gang of crooks dependent on him, Worth was rapidly running out of money. According to one account, he “lived at the rate of £20,000 a year for many years,” and since the Turkish debacle, precious little money had been coming into the crook’s coffers but a great deal had been going out.