John Singer Sargent RA 1856–1925
NG 3044 
Lord Ribblesdale

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

1902

Oil on canvas, 258.4 × 143.5 cm (101¾ × 56½ in.)

Inscribed John S. Sargent. 1902 in brown bottom right

Provenance

Painted for Lord Ribblesdale; presented by him ‘as a memorial of Lady Ribblesdale and his sons, Capt. the Hon. Thomas Lister DSO, 10th Hussars, killed at Jidballi, Somaliland [1904], and Lieut, the Hon. Charles Lister (HM Diplomatic Service), Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division, who fell in Gallipoli, 1915’ to the National Gallery 1915.¹

Exhibited

RA 1902 (175); Paris, Société Nationale des Beaux‐Arts, 1904 (1134, repr. p. 103); Venice, Biennale, English Pavilion (24); Berlin, Königliche Akademie der Künste, Zweite Ausstellung, 1907–8 (18, repr. p. 17); London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, John Singer Sargent, 1908 (366); Tate Gallery, Opening Exhibition of the Sargent Gallery, 1926 (loans unnumbered).

Remained at the Tate Gallery until 1986 .

Literature

Art Journal, 1904, p. 212, repr. facing p. 213; Sir Evan Charteris, John Singer Sargent, London 1927, p. 269; Lord Ribblesdale, Impressions and Memories, London 1927: Preface by his daughter, Lady Wilson, pp. xvi–xvii, xxviii–xxix, repr. as frontispiece; David McKibbin, Sargent’s Boston, Boston 1956, p. 118; Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, Tate Gallery Catalogues, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, II, London 1964, pp. 590–1; Ormond 1970 (cited under References), pp. 56, 58, 65, plate 87.

Technical Notes

Unlined, and in very good condition. The paint is freely applied, often in long and vigorous brushstrokes, over the light grey ground. There are some drying cracks in the browns and blacks, but only small areas are affected. No restoration has been done except for the repair of a line of tack holes along the bottom edge; these may indicate that the canvas was tacked through the front to the bottom member of the stretcher during painting.

Discussion

The sitter is Thomas Lister, 4th Baron Ribblesdale of Gisburne Park, near Skipton, Yorkshire, and Green Street, Grosvenor Square. Born at Fontainebleau on 29 October 1854, he was the eldest son of the 3rd Baron Ribblesdale and the great‐grandson of Thomas Lister, 1st Baron Ribblesdale, whom Reynolds had portrayed in 1764 as a boy in brown satin (the so‐called ‘Brown Boy’).² He grew up in France, his father’s gambling debts having compelled his father to mortgage the Gisburne estate and let the house to tenants; he was sent home to school at Harrow, then served in the Army from 1873 to 1886.³

Having succeeded his father (a suicide) in 1876, at the age of 22, the 4th Lord Ribblesdale took his seat the following year in the House of Lords, where he was an active member, and a consistent Liberal. In 1877 he married Charlotte,⁴ one of the sixteen children of the rich Glasgow industrialist Sir Charles Tennant; but Ribblesdale himself was never wealthy. In order to help to free Gisburne Park from its mortgage and its tenants, he had to sell the Reynolds to a richer Lister relation (‘We have sold the boy!’, wrote his wife in 1889⁵); and it was only with help from his father‐in‐law (on many of whose City boards he now sat) that he also acquired a town house in Green Street, Mayfair. Both Lord Ribblesdale (‘Tommy’) and his wife (‘Charty’) became members of the well‐bred coterie known as the Souls, ‘that unconventional, highbrow and alarming set of Edwardian kindred spirits’⁶ formed around Lord Curzon, and including Arthur Balfour and ‘Charty’ Ribblesdale’s sister, Margot Asquith. Ribblesdale seems effortlessly to have fulfilled an uncommon variety of roles; Lord‐in‐Waiting to Queen Victoria 1880–5 and 1886, Master of the Royal Buckhounds 1892–5,⁷ Liberal Whip in the House of Lords 1896–1907, Alderman of London County Council 1898–1904, Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery 1895–1923 and Trustee of the National Gallery 1909–23. But he was happiest when hunting in the Ribble valley with his own pack of hounds or with the Craven and Pendle Forest harriers.

Ribblesdale’s daughter Lady Wilson records that ‘it was when he was making an after‐dinner speech for the Artists’ Benevolent Fund that Sargent first saw him and determined to paint him’. That was in 1894,⁸ but the portrait was not begun until about five years later. Sargent, near the peak of his fame in the mid‐1890s, had an abundance of work on hand, and from 1898 was particularly burdened by the commissions for nine family portraits heaped upon him by the picture dealer Asher Wertheimer: he described himself in 1898 as in a state of ‘chronic Wertheimerism’.⁹ In the late summer of 1899, after visiting the Sitwells at Renishaw,¹⁰ Sargent went on to stay with Lord Ribblesdale at Gisburne Park. There the projected portrait was discussed. In particular, Sargent wanted to decide on the dress in which he was to portray Lord Ribblesdale: Ormond notes that Sargent ‘regarded the choice of costume as entirely his prerogative’.¹¹

If seeing Ribblesdale in London in evening‐dress had initially made Sargent determined to paint him, seeing him at Gisburne in hunting‐dress was enough to convince him that that was how he must portray this lean attenuated figure. Sargent first considered painting Ribblesdale in his livery as Master of the Queen’s Buckhounds – dark green coat, green and gold embroidered shoulder‐belt, white leather breeches and black boots with champagne tops. Photographs of Ribblesdale thus attired were produced; from one of them (fig. 1)¹² Sargent made a preliminary oil sketch,¹³ then discarded the idea, for it was abundantly clear that the livery, however prestigious, was aesthetically hideous: in particular, the contrast between the green coat and white breeches interrupted the long line of his sitter’s body.

Whether it was Sargent’s decision or his own, happily Ribblesdale sat to Sargent in the idiosyncratic hunting garb he had evolved for himself. Although the portrait is frequently described as ‘dandified’,¹⁴ it might rather be described [page 237]as a portrait of a man in ‘ratcatcher’, the Edwardian slang term for unconventional hunting‐dress. Ribblesdale himself uses the term elsewhere, averring that he had no objection to the Queen’s field riding ‘in ratcatcher’,¹⁵ and his daughter noted that Ribblesdale ‘always wore mufti when hunting’.¹⁶ Never a man for swagger, he disliked scarlet coats, buckskin breeches and boots with ‘champagne tops’ in the hunting‐field. Ribblesdale was a fastidious man, but never a dandy. He dressed habitually in clothes which suited him, disdaining changes in fashion. Efforts to find orders from Lord Ribblesdale to fashionable London tailors, hatters and bootmakers have failed. His preference for his own style of unfashionably plain dress became so well‐known that a Vanity Fair portrait of him by ‘Spy’ published 11 June 1881, needed only the caption ‘Mufti’ to identify him. In the last year of the Boer War, when his elder son Thomas was serving in South Africa with 10th Hussars, Lord Ribblesdale was permitted to visit him and to trek with the regiment over the veldt, ‘having no other uniform than a veteran covert‐coat, and no other weapon than an umbrella’.¹⁷

Ribblesdale particularly disliked red coats in the hunting‐field, for the aesthetic reason that they brought an unnaturally gaudy note into the beauty of the countryside. When he sat to Sargent, it was in his own habitual style of hunting‐dress,¹⁸ which Sargent had quickly recognised as individual to him: pale yellow waistcoat, drab jacket (almost invisible in the portrait), box‐cloth breeches, possibly inherited from his father, and well‐cleaned butcher boots, all set off by the hat and its angle.¹⁹ He was, in his own phrase, ‘a stickler for the tall hat’ (‘It looks the best, and in every way is the best for riding of all kinds, which includes falling’²⁰). The black silk muffler, which one might have supposed to be Sargent’s flamboyant addition, was the one Lord Ribblesdale habitually knotted over his riding‐tie; at Gisburne he kept it on a hall table, with a covert coat and a riding‐whip or two.²¹ The black velvet‐collared top coat casually thrown over his hunting attire, almost certainly part of his London wardrobe, is likely to have been donned at Sargent’s request; Sargent had already proved himself a master of the painted overcoat in his portrait of the young W. Graham Robertson (fig. 2).²² The austere colours of Ribblesdale’s ensemble enabled Sargent to suggest the aesthete within the hunting‐dress.²³

Sittings, probably during 1901 (dates unrecorded), were almost certainly in Sargent’s studio in Tite Street (Sir George Sitwell had observed that Sargent ‘will only paint in his own studio in London’²⁴). The two men, of much the same age – in 1902, when the portrait was exhibited, Ribblesdale was 47, and Sargent 45 – got on well together. Lady Ribblesdale attended one or two early sittings, but had to be asked to stay away since her ‘passionate keenness for the success of the portrait’ made progress difficult.²⁵ Sargent first thought of setting the figure against stonework columns of the daunting kind he favoured for backgrounds at this time; he and Lady Ribblesdale ‘clambered … over the roofs and terraces of Somerset House, searching for grey pilasters that might come in well’.²⁶ In the preliminary oil sketch noted above, the figure is posed on stone steps between massive columns, but Sargent eventually decided to paint the background from the panelling of his own studio:²⁷ wisely, in Ormond’s opinion, since that panelling provides ‘no more than a decorative pattern, a geometrical grid, against which Sargent’s characterisation is projected with uninterrupted force’.²⁸

That characterisation was evidently true to life. As his contemporaries observed, Lord Ribblesdale had a faintly archaic air. Edward VII nicknamed him ‘The Ancestor’;²⁹ the sobriquet catches the flavour of this portrait. L.E. Jones wrote of Ribblesdale that ‘for patrician good looks, expressing intelligence and sensibility, I have never seen his equal’. Another friend considered that ‘the famous portrait… hardly exaggerates his individuality’.³⁰ Sargent seems almost to con‐[page 238]vey the manner in which Ribblesdale, ‘a master of light and quizzical table‐talk’,³¹ will converse when the sitting is over, ‘rolling his rrrs and betraying the barest suggestion of a lisp’.³² His three books of memoirs are elegantly written, but reticent.³³ Perhaps surprisingly, he had a gift for drawing caricatures;³⁴ less surprisingly, he is the subject of several caricatures by Max Beerbohm, including a sketch of the ‘Annual Meeting of Mr Stirling Stuart‐Crawford, Mr Augustus John and Lord Ribblesdale, to protest against the fashions for the coming spring’, 1909.³⁵ By temperament he was hardy and stoical. His daughter notes his frugality, and ‘a great simplicity in his possessions’: with no appetite for luxury, he preferred ‘pot‐au‐feu life – poached eggs and a cup of strong tea for dinner, a pair of bedroom slippers on his feet, and an open book on his lap’.³⁶

Sargent exhibited the portrait at the Royal Academy in 1902, with seven other portraits or portrait‐groups.³⁷ The Magazine of Art observed that Ribblesdale’s portrait was ‘infused with that quaint old‐world spirit in dress and manners which informs the noble lord’.³⁸ The Academy reviewer (‘C.L.H.’) found his eye straying from the grandeur of Sargent’s huge Reynolds‐like group The Acheson Sisters (89) to ‘the quiet power and unaffected humility of the Ribblesdale portrait. This has character. It makes no effort to be impressive. It is content to be itself. It waits, ready to give, when you are ready.’³⁹ The Art Journal gave the most positive verdict, pronouncing that ‘Sargent’s most masterly portrait of the year is Lord Ribblesdale… As a pictorial presence, firmly and sympathetically knit, complete and unmannered, he dominates the central gallery.’⁴⁰ But as The Times noted, Lord Ribblesdale was so badly hung that the head was ‘practically invisible’.⁴¹

The portrait was shown to better advantage two years later in Paris, at the ‘New Salon’. The Art Journal redoubled its praise, declaring that ‘there is nothing in either Salon to compare for a moment with the magnificent Sargent, “Portrait of Lord Ribblesdale”… [which] dominates the whole exhibition by its superb dignity and individuality’.⁴² Ribblesdale himself visited the Salon exhibition, where he was instantly recognised; he wrote to his mother that Sargent’s portrait ‘has forced a greatness on me which is quite embarrassing … wherever I go, I am recognised, and much chuchotement and pointing out to friends goes on… Sargent will be gratified, and I am writing him a line’.⁴³ His daughter later recalled that ‘people were nudging each other as they recognised the subject of the picture and whispering, “Ce grand diable de milord anglais” ’.⁴⁴

Lord Ribblesdale’s first wife died in 1911. Both their sons were killed in action, the elder in Somaliland 1904 and the younger at Gallipoli 1915. The 4th and now inevitably last Lord Ribblesdale commented stoically that ‘the span of life must be measured, not by its length, but by its excellence’;⁴⁵ but his old life was shattered. In 1915 he presented his portrait by Sargent to the National Gallery, in memory of his wife and his sons. He then sold his London house and most of his furniture, and moved into the Cavendish Hotel for several years, becoming (with no impropriety) the star paying guest of its Cockney proprietress, Rosa Lewis.⁴⁶ His manner with people of all classes had always been easy and unaffected, and he was now happy to open the annual servants’ ball at the Cavendish by leading out the head cook. Rosa Lewis was displeased when Lord Ribblesdale left the Cavendish in 1919 to marry (secondly) Ava Willing, widow of John Jacob Astor. Before he left, he is said to have given Rosa a large coloured photograph of the Sargent portrait: this (or a replica) hangs still above the staircase in the Cavendish.

Lord Ribblesdale remained a Trustee of the National Gallery until the end of 1923.⁴⁷ He died on 21 October 1925, six months after Sargent. Such was the lasting impact of Sargent’s image of him that The Times the next day reproduced Sargent’s portrait of 1902 rather than a recent photograph, and discussed the portrait before recounting the career of its sitter. It concluded that the portrait of Lord Ribblesdale reflected ‘the traditions of a time and of manners that are not of today, and were not wholly of 1902’, and it added ‘He looked an Old Master’.⁴⁸

Notes

The compiler is particularly grateful to the Rt Hon. James Ramsden PC for advice on hunting and hunting‐dress.