by Paula Byrne
Mary arrived back in London ‘in perfect health and beauty’ the day after Christmas.17 On New Year’s Day 1782 the Morning Herald reported that she had brought with her a silk in a hitherto unknown shade of grey and brown, which was ‘at present kept a profound secret’ but which ‘promises soon to become the rage!’18 She made her first public appearance early in the New Year, taking her place in a prominent box at the opera. The Morning Herald said that she was looking ‘supremely beautiful’ in a headdress that set the ‘standard of taste’ – a cap of white and purple feathers entwined with flowers and fastened with diamond pins. Her gown was of white satin with purple breast bows, but it was the locket that drew most attention: ‘Upon her breast she wore no cross, but the image of a Royal Martyr, over which waved a brilliant plume; and still above, far more refulgent, “two lovely eyes shot forth a lustre that seemed to give animation to the picture”.’ After the end of the performance ‘she remained some time deliberating upon which box she should engage; and kept a considerable part of the audience in the house much beyond the usual time of departure’.19
The public were not disappointed by the clothes that Mary brought back from Paris. The fashionable world, as predicted by the Morning Herald, was indeed set ‘a madding’. Mary now cemented her reputation as a highly prominent fashion icon; the details of her clothes were covered in loving and minute detail in the bon ton sections of the daily and monthly press: ‘Perdita was now the envy of every female heart: her chariot, her phaeton, her dress, her every thing, was equally the subject of censure and imitation; and every new gown set the giddy circle in an uproar.’20 She caused envy among the upper classes, while the lower classes were inspired to emulate her. In the words of one modern commentator, ‘Robinson’s glamorous appearance further initiated a new trend in fashion reporting in English periodicals: her dresses were reproduced with the loving care of a couturier. Every masquerade, party at Ranelagh or the Pantheon, or public occasion saw lengthy descriptions of Robinson’s clothes, often to the exclusion of those of others, who were dismissed with a curt sentence or two.’21
Whereas many courtesans were discussed in terms of their looks alone, Mary was also praised for her brilliant wit. Even the scandalmongering author of the anonymous Memoirs of Perdita acknowledged her good judgement in the art of repartee: ‘You, who doubtless have seen her person, know that her deportment is elegant, and to sprightliness of wit, she joins a share of levity, that attracts, rather than disgusts, because it is not carried to the excess that constitutes the affectation of wantonness.’22 It was her verbal skills that placed her in a league apart from the ‘Cyprian corps’ and gave the opportunity to reinvent herself as a woman of letters after the accident that terminated her career as a fashionable beauty. Her sparkling tongue was matched by her sparkling eye, suggested the author of a Morning Herald article on wit: ‘The wit of the eye. I have seen an eye full of rhetoric and elocution full of invitations and forbiddings. – I have spoken to a woman with an eye of such wit that has struck me dumb with a repartee flash, without the assistance of a single word. – Look at Mrs Robinson’s eyes!’23
Mary continued to intrigue the press in the months after her return from Paris. In February she broke her shin and in March she suffered from the flu. In April her eyes were the talk of the town when her portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy. So it was that, paradoxically, she reached the height of her celebrity and popularity after the affair with the Prince had ended. Far from being abashed and humiliated, she returned from France more resplendent than ever, given new glamour by the latest Paris fashions and renewed confidence as a result of Marie Antoinette’s praises. But she was not the only celebrity in town. She had to share her fame with a dashing young dragoon who had just returned from the American wars.
Mary knew all about Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his reputation as a bold and fearless soldier. Tarleton’s adventures in the American Revolution had been followed avidly by the newspapers. He was born in 1754 into a wealthy Liverpool merchant family who had made their fortune in sugar and slaves. He was intelligent, athletic, educated at Oxford, then trained for the law in the Middle Temple. He suspended his studies when his father died, leaving him an inheritance of £5,000. In less than a year he had spent the money, mostly at the Cocoa Tree, one of London’s most popular gaming houses.
The military offered a way out for young men in such straits, and in April 1775 he persuaded his mother to buy him a commission in the King’s Cavalry. Early the next year, he volunteered for service in America, where he soon attracted the attention of his superiors by his valour and enterprise. He was swiftly promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. His regiment was the newly-formed British Legion, which consisted mainly of American loyalists from New York and Pennsylvania. Their uniform was a dashing green jacket; it signified that they were a Tory regiment. Tarleton was a highly skilled horseman, auburn-haired, and of fiery temperament, stocky, muscular, and rather below middling height. A contemporary described him as ‘a perfect model of manly strength and vigour’: ‘Without a particle of superfluous flesh, his rounded limbs and full broad chest seemed molded from iron, yet, at the same time, displaying all the elasticity which usually accompanies elegance of proportion.’24 He loved to gamble, could tame a wild stallion, and was a well-known womanizer. His family frequently had to help him out of debt. He was a keen playgoer who took part in army theatricals to raise money for war widows.
Despite his arrogance, Tarleton was popular with his men. He believed that attack was the only form of defence, advocating rapid movement of the lines and full-frontal assault on the battlefield. Tactful coalition building with the resident loyalists of the Carolinas was not his strong point. He was the prime mover in the recovery of Charleston from the rebels in the early summer of 1780. He then pursued a regiment of Virginian Continentals to a settlement called the Waxhaws on the border of North and South Carolina. Though outnumbered two to one, Tarleton’s dragoons went in so hard that the Americans soon raised a surrender flag. By Tarleton’s own account, his horse was then shot and he was pinned beneath it. His men, assuming that their commander had been shot after the flag of truce had gone up, took revenge by hacking at the wounded survivors lying on the ground. The Patriot version of events was that Tarleton ordered a massacre because he could not be bothered to take prisoners. This encounter earned him his nicknames ‘Bloody Tarleton’ and ‘Butcher Tarleton’. He became the figure most hated by the American patriots, who would rally to the cry ‘Tarleton’s Quarter’ and use his example as justification for committing atrocities of their own.
His commander, Lord Cornwallis, never questioned his tactics and indeed used him and the British Legion as shock troops to demoralize Patriot resistance. During the ferociously fought Guilford Courthouse battle in March 1781, he lost two of his fingers when he took a bullet in his right hand. He often narrowly escaped death in battle and had serious bouts of malaria or yellow fever. When Cornwallis finally surrendered the entire British Army at Yorktown on 19 October 1781, the day after Mary set off from London for France, the Butcher was snubbed by French and American officers, and not invited to the post-war round of dinner parties. But as far as the British public back home were concerned, Tarleton was the one romantic figure in a drawn-out, dirty, disappointing war. When he returned to his native Liverpool in January 1782, he was given a hero’s welcome. He then went down to London to bask in his glory. He was introduced to the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cumberland, and he embarked on a social whirl, with ladies swooning at the sight of his green tunic and mangled hand. His helmet, adorned with swan’s feathers, took on the same notoriety as Mary Robinson’s Parisian hats.
*So it is claimed in the ‘Continuation’ of the Memoirs, though Mary’s own ‘Anecdotes of the Late Queen of France’, published five months before her death, says more modestly that she was ‘induced by curiosity to attend at one of the public dinners of Versailles’ (Monthly Magazine, August 1800).
CHAPTER 13
A Meeting in the Studio
My Portrait you desire! and why?
Mary Robinson, ‘Stanzas to a
Friend, who desired to have
my Portrait’
Some years ago arose this wondrous man,
From gaming tables, politics to scan …
Thus, in all politics, is he so winning!
An adept too in other modes of sinning;
Indiff’rently he taketh to his bed
Hackney’d Perdita, or old tough A—st—d!
‘The Right Honourable C.J.F**’
by a Moonraker1
In 1760, Joshua Reynolds bought the house in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) where he was to reside for the remainder of his life. Eight years later, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded and Reynolds elected its first President. He was knighted and for twenty years was the arbiter of artistic taste. Reynolds was to become one of Mary’s most devoted and loyal friends. She regarded him as the greatest artist of the age and wrote in praise of him in her first major poem, Ainsi va le Monde:
Reynolds, ’tis thine with magic skill to trace
The perfect semblance of exterior grace;
Thy hand, by Nature guided, marks the line
That stamps perfection on the form divine.
’Tis thine to tint the lip with rosy die,
To paint the softness of the melting eye;
With auburn curls luxuriantly display’d,
The ivory shoulders polish’d fall to shade;
To deck the well-turn’d arm with matchless grace,
To mark the dimpled smile on Beauty’s face:
The task is thine, with cunning hand to throw
The veil transparent on the breast of snow:
The Statesman’s thought, the Infant’s cherub mien,
The Poet’s fire, the Matron’s eye serene,
Alike with animated lustre shine
Beneath thy polish’d pencil’s touch divine.
As Britain’s Genius glories in thy Art,
Adores thy virtues, and reveres thy heart,
Nations unborn shall celebrate thy name,
And waft thy mem’ry on the wings of Fame.2
These lines are shaped by the memory of sitting for Sir Joshua: the tinted lip, melting eye, auburn curls, dimpled smile, and ‘veil transparent on the breast of snow’ are Robinson’s own. Reynolds, who by the time of this poem was almost blind and rarely left his house, responded with a generous letter:
Dear Madam,
I am quite ashamed of not having returned my thanks before this time for the obliging notice which you have taken of me in your truly excellent poem: it was my intention to have done it in person, though I am not much in the habit of going out. I confess I am surprized at the wonderful facility (or handling, as we painters call it), which you have acquired in writing verse, which is generally the result of great practice. Were I to say all I think, even to yourself, it would, I fear, look like flattering; and perhaps to others, as proceeding from the high style in which I have been bribed. I shall comfort myself therefore with saying, that I hope what you intend to publish will not be inferior to this specimen; if so, you will long remain without an antagonist in the field of poesy.
I am, with great respect,
DEAR MADAM,
Your most humble and most obedient servant,
J. Reynolds.
P.S. The picture is ready, whenever Mr Burke calls for it.3
The picture mentioned in the postscript was Reynolds’s second major portrait of Mary, from which Thomas Burke took an engraving that formed the frontispiece to her Poems of 1791, and several subsequent volumes of her work.
For the first portrait, Reynolds’s pocketbook records eleven appointments with Mary, beginning on 25 January 1782. He saw her three times before the end of the month and five times in February, then twice in March, once in April. On three successive appointments – 28 and 30 January, 1 February – another sitter was present in the studio: Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton.
This was a room in which the cream of society mingled. On moving into Leicester Fields Reynolds had built an extension in the form of an octagonal painting room that formed ‘a splendid gallery for the exhibition of his works, and a commodious and elegant room for his sitters’.4 Open house would be held for the viewing of new works and on sitting days three or four subjects were often present simultaneously – Mary also coincided with the chubby-cheeked 4-year-old George Brummell – Beau Brummell, as he was to become known. Perhaps it was his ‘Infant’s cherub mien’ that Mary remembered in her lines on Sir Joshua. The centrepiece of the room, where Mary would have taken her place, was the sitter’s chair or ‘throne’ raised 18 inches above the floor and on casters for ease of movement. Sir Joshua himself never sat when painting, but stood at his favourite mahogany easel. A screen covered in red and yellow reflected light on the sitter’s face, while a mirror was arranged so that the sitter could observe him at work on the canvas. He had an extensive collection of clothes and props for his sitters, including a pet macaw that had the run of the house. Mary and Banastre brought along their own dashing trademark garments. There is always a peculiar intensity in the encounter between portrait painter and sitter. On the day that Mrs Robinson and Colonel Tarleton met, the atmosphere must have been electric.
In the Royal Academy show that April Reynolds exhibited them both: Mary as number 22, Portrait of a Lady, and Tarleton as number 139, Portrait of an Officer. The Colonel is portrayed wearing his trademark boots with overturns, tan trousers, and green coat with white edging, though the feathers in his cap are black instead of the customary white swan’s. The stumps of the two fingers that he had lost in battle are clearly visible. He is posed as if in the midst of battle, coolly adjusting his sword and thereby – in a classical allusion typical of Reynolds – assuming an attitude reminiscent of an antique statue that was believed to represent the Roman warrior Cincinnatus. This may be a subtle gesture of defiance on Reynolds’s part, since Tarleton’s antagonist George Washington had become known as the Cincinnatus of the Americans. The head of the Colonel’s horse is visible at the edge of the painting. The noble beast itself may have sat – or rather stood – for Sir Joshua on 11 April. The painting is now hung in the rotunda of the east wing of the National Gallery in London.
Romney’s Mary Robinson, in her Quaker habit, retained some of the innocence of a girl. Gainsborough’s, with the dog, portrayed a wronged woman. Reynolds for his part offers the Portrait of a Lady. She is in the pose of Rubens’s wife, a prototype often employed by eighteenth-century British artists. Her dress is of dark blue silk with a low-cut neck and a wide embroidered collar. Her sweeping, wide-brimmed hat, with ostrich feathers, is set over powdered curls. Her blue eyes and dimples are prominent, and there is a thin black ribbon round her neck, setting off the whiteness of her neck and bosom.
The painting remained in Reynolds’s studio until his death. This may mean that it was commissioned but not paid for (conceivably by Malden, which would have been ironic given that the meetings in the studio threw Mary into the arms of a new lover). An alternative possibility is that – like the Romney – this portrait was undertaken not as a commission but as a mutual publicity deal, with the intention that it should remain in the studio as a showpiece. Its presence there meant that it could readily be copied: it was engraved several times over and copies in oils were made by other artists, including John Hoppner, George Romney, and an anonymous miniaturist. Mary’s image was a commodity in great demand: the Witt Library in London now holds photographs or descriptions of about seventy paintings of her. She was in all probability the most frequently painted female subject of the age. Her most celebrated sittings were for Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney, but there are also portraits of her by an array of lesser artists including Richard Cosway, John Downman, George Engleheart, and Jeremiah Meyer the miniaturists, in addition to William Grimaldi, Thomas Lawrence, William Owen, and many others.5 Several of these artists we
re pupils of Sir Joshua and there is no doubt that the 1782 portrait that hung in his studio served as a template for many other images of Mary. The original portrait is now in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire.
When the Reynolds portrait was exhibited, a leading newspaper critic found ‘the countenance grave and sensible, the likeness very strong, and the colouring correct’. The critic’s only complaint was that the artist had ‘not done so much on the score of beauty, as the Fair original has a claim to’.6 This viewer was not alone in feeling that, for all the painting’s force and elegance, it does not quite catch Mary’s warmth and beauty. For James Northcote, Sir Joshua’s pupil and first biographer, no artist could do justice to Mrs Robinson, not even his master. Talking to a fellow painter, after Reynolds’s death, Northcote described Sir Joshua’s two portraits of Mary as ‘complete failures’ because ‘the extreme beauty’ of the sitter was ‘quite beyond [his] power[s]’. Northcote recalled Mrs Robinson, late in her life, when she was very ill and had to be borne upstairs by two men. ‘Even then,’ he said, ‘I thought her remarkably beautiful. Now I think no man could have painted her.’7 Northcote was a good friend to Mary in her final years; his own portrait of her is, unfortunately, lost.