Thomas Gainsborough ra 1727–1788
NG 6209 
Mr and Mrs William Hallett 
(‘The Morning Walk’)

Judy Egerton, 2000

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

1785

Oil on canvas, 236 × 179 cm (93 × 70½ in.)

Provenance

Commissioned by William Hallett (who paid Gainsborough £126 on 4 March 1786¹); presumably it was he who, after his wife’s death in 1833, sent the picture for sale at Foster’s, 9 August 1834 (unnumbered),² bt in; bequeathed by William Hallett (d.1842) to the eldest daughter of the marriage, Lettice Elizabeth, who had married Nash Crosier Hilliard in 1819; either before or after her death in 1859, in the hands of her son‐in‐law and cousin, Major William E. Hilliard, solicitor, by whom (whether acting on his own initiative or as agent for the Hilliard family is uncertain) sold to Agnew’s³ 15 April 1884; purchased from Agnew’s eight days later by Sir Nathan Mayer Rothschild (cr. 1st Baron Rothschild 1885), d.1915; then by descent to Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild, from whom purchased by the National Gallery with Grant‐in‐Aid, the Temple‐West Fund and the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund (Sir Robert Witt Fund) 1954.⁴

Exhibited

BI 1859 (83, lent by W.E. Hilliard); International Exhibition 1862 (7, lent by W.E. Hilliard); RA Winter 1885 (195); London, 45 Park Lane, 1936 (11); on loan from Lord Rothschild to Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1936 , 1947–8 , and to Birmingham City Art Gallery 1948–54 ; Paris, Louvre, 1938 (52, as ‘La Promenade Matinale’); Tate Gallery 1953 (50); V&A , Saved for the Nation: the achievement of the National Art Collections Fund 1930–1973, 1973 (57); Tate Gallery 1980–1 (130); NPG , The Portrait in British Art: Masterpieces bought with the help of the National Art Collections Fund, 1991 (41); Tate Gallery 1992–3 (43).

At the Tate Gallery 1960–1, and on long loan during 1992 .

Literature

Fulcher 1856, p. 229; Armstrong 1898, p. 202 (as ‘The Morning Walk’, seemingly the first use of this title); Whitley 1930, p. 287; NACF Report 1954, London 1955, pp. 12, 15; Brockwell papers, NG Library (see note 3); Waterhouse 1958, cat. no. 335, plate 274; Davies 1959, pp. 44–5; John Hayes, ‘A Note on Gainsborough’s “The Morning Walk”’, Burlington Magazine, CV, 1963, p. 370; Ellis Waterhouse, The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor: Paintings, Fribourg 1967, p. 48; Hayes 1975, p. 227, plate 157, with detail plate 160; Ribeiro 1983, p. 121; Shawe‐Taylor 1990, pp. 131–3.

Copies

(1) ? same size, made for W.E. Hilliard when he sold the original in 1884, later bt by G.H. Hilliard at Cowley House sale 1925, but so large as to necessitate sale when he moved house 1930–2, and now untraced; (2) 25 × 19 in., owned by Wynn Ellis, sold with his British pictures Christie’s 6 May 1877 (57), bt Pearmain; perhaps the picture (25 × 19½ in.), sold Sotheby’s 10 June 1965 (169), £42, now untraced; (3) 23 × 18 in., oil on paper on panel, Leggatt Bros., sold to Capt. Briscoe, by whom given to his nephew Michael Bevan, now private collection; (4) 20 × 13¾ in., red crayon and wash, coll. Henry J. Pfungst when repr. Lord R.S. Gower, Life of Gainsborough, London 1903, following p. 114 (as by Gainsborough, but evidently not by him), sold Christie’s 15 June 1917 (14), now untraced.

Technical Notes

When the picture was shown in the Gainsborough exhibition at 45 Park Lane in 1936, Martin Davies described its condition as ‘far from good’. He detected ‘a good deal of bitumen’, general flattening as a result of relining and ‘considerable damage to the two heads by a very coarse restorer’.⁵

On its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1954, cleaning of the picture showed it to be in much better condition than Davies had thought.⁶ There is no evidence of bituminous cracking, though there is a characteristic shrinkage craquelure over much of the painting. The darks are worst affected by this, particularly the shadows of the dress, William Hallett’s coat, the dark foliage on the right and the dark brushstrokes of the dog’s coat.

Mrs Hallett’s face has been abraded, perhaps by being burnt during relining, and is also damaged in the right eyelid, left temple and cheek. There is an irregular tear approximately 10 × 35 cm in the foliage above the plumes of her hat.

The canvas was prepared with an off‐white ground consisting of lead white, chalk and a small amount of yellow earth. Mrs Hallett’s greyish‐blue dress is painted with a mixture of lead white, Prussian blue and black. A paint sample from a dull green area of foliage was found to contain Prussian blue and yellow earth. A darker brown area also contains an earth pigment: the manganese content detected by analysis suggests that it is an umber.

Discussion

The sitters are William Hallett (1764–1842) and Elizabeth Stephen (1764–1833). They sat to Gainsborough shortly before their marriage on 30 July 1785.⁷ The picture was evidently on view in Gainsborough’s studio by late 1785 or early 1786; the Morning Herald for 30 March 1786 reported that ‘the portraits of Mr and Mrs Hallett which were painted a few months since by Mr Gainsborough, arm‐in‐arm, in a nouvelle stile, appear to have promenaded from his gallery; as they are no longer to be observed there!’ On 4 March 1786 William Hallett made a payment to Gainsborough of £126, presumably for the finished picture.⁸ Gainsborough’s standard fee for a full‐length single portrait from 1770 to 1787 was 100 guineas (£105); if the portrait included a horse, he charged 120 guineas (£126). Hayes reasonably concludes that £126 for the Halletts’ picture must also have been his usual fee for a double portrait;⁹ Gainsborough evidently made no extra charge for dogs.

William Hallett (third in his family line of that name) was born on 24 June 1764 in Soho Square,¹⁰ the son of William Hallett II (1730–67) and his wife Hannah Hopkins, daughter and heiress of the successful financier and South Sea Stock speculator, John ‘Vulture’ Hopkins. Three years old when his father died, he was largely brought up by his grandfather, William Hallett I (?1707–81), who, having made a fortune as a highly fashionable cabinet‐maker,¹¹ in 1748 bought the newly cleared site of the 1st Duke of Chandos’s once princely mansion at Canons in Middlesex, with much of the estate, and in due course built himself a villa there.¹² In Francis Hayman’s group portrait of The Hallett Family, 1756,¹³ William Hallett I is portrayed holding a plan for the house. On his grandfather’s death in 1782, William Hallett III (Gainsborough’s sitter)¹⁴ inherited his house and the estate of Canons,¹⁵ with a considerable fortune; his sister’s portion was £70,000, but his own much larger one is unrecorded. He was then still a minor. After spending two years abroad on the Grand Tour,¹⁶ he recorded: ‘I returned home, and was married on 30th day of July 1785 to Miss Elizabeth Stephen with a fortune of nearly 20,000 [pounds].’¹⁷

Elizabeth Stephen’s background is so far comparatively sketchy. The marriage certificate of 1785 describes her as ‘spinster, of the Parish of St James’s, Westminster’. She is believed to be the child born to James and Elizabeth Stephen on 8 February 1764, and baptised in St James’s, Westminster, on 5 March 1764;¹⁸ if so, both bride and bridegroom were aged 21 when they married, though Elizabeth Stephen was the elder by four months. Reporting the marriage, the Gentleman’s Magazine described her as ‘only daughter of the late Mr S., surgeon, with a handsome fortune’; but neither his professional qualifications, his will nor any further information about either of her parents has been traced. At the time of her marriage, she was described as ‘of Breakspears, Co. Middlesex’. Breakspears, an ancient house not far from Canons, was then owned by the Partridge family; John Partridge was a witness of the marriage,¹⁹ and the Partridges may have been friends or relatives with whom she was staying.

Elizabeth Stephen and William Hallett were married in the richly decorated church of St Lawrence, Little Stanmore, which the 1st Duke of Chandos had rebuilt in 1715 in the style of a private chapel and which he commissioned Louis Laguerre and Bellucci to decorate; it was for this church that Handel composed the Chandos Anthems. Mr and Mrs Hallett may have sat to Gainsborough in their wedding garments. Mrs Hallett’s dress is of fine ivory silk, caught at the waist with a black silk band; a frilled muslin kerchief covers her breast, with a knot of pale grape‐green ribbon under it, and this delicate colour is repeated in the extravagant bow beneath the ostrich feathers on her hat. Ribeiro, whose observations are largely drawn on here, notes that the filmy gauze silk stole over Elizabeth Hallett’s arms echoes the ‘contrived carelessness’ of her hair and dress, and makes it seemingly easy for Gainsborough to merge gauze into foliage. William Hallett wears a black silk velvet frock‐suit;²⁰ his hair is powdered, and he carries a black round hat.

Without the dog, the mood might have seemed a little solemn. The dog appears to be a Pomeranian sheepdog. A similar dog belonged to Gainsborough’s friend Carl Friedrich Abel, the composer and viola da gamba player, and is depicted lying at his master’s feet in Gainsborough’s full‐length portrait of him, exhibited in 1777; for Abel, Gainsborough also painted the Pomeranian Bitch and Puppy now in the Tate Gallery.²¹ Gainsborough’s pleasure in suggesting the thick, soft creamy coat of this breed through what are in fact sparse, light brushstrokes is also evident in the dog in his portrait of Mrs Robinson in the Wallace Collection.²²

Waterhouse 1967 singles out ‘a small group of late Gainsborough portraits which show the sitter walking forward towards the spectator’ – first exemplified by the small‐scale figures taking the air in The Mall in St James’s Park of 1783–4,²³ studied ‘from a home‐made doll’ – as ‘among the most original and poetic inventions of English eighteenth century portraiture’,²⁴ though owing something to both Watteau and Van Dyck. Gainsborough’s enchanting studies for a projected picture known as ‘The Richmond Water‐Walk' (see fig. 1) are close in spirit to the figures in The Mall, and in turn infuse the mood in which he portrays (on a large scale) Mr and Mrs Hallett and Lady Sheffield (also of 1785). Their portraits, Waterhouse suggests, are closer to Gainsborough’s ‘fancy pictures’ of the 1780s than to portraiture: ‘their portrait content is no more positive than a lingering fragrance.’²⁵ Richard Graves’s poem On Gainsborough’s Landskips with Portraits; full length Figures less than life, drawn in pairs walking thro’ woods, etc.²⁶ includes the pleasing fancy that Gainsborough subverts Paradise Lost: without specifying the image he has in mind, he writes:
[in] that blest pair, by Gainsborough’s pencil drawn…
We find the pleasing cheat so well sustained
Each landskip seems ‘a Paradise regain’d’. Waterhouse called Mr and Mrs Hallett ‘an incomparable picture of young love’;²⁷ later writers try variations on the same theme, one deeming it to be ‘as much a portrait of the romance of young love as it is a likeness of the two individuals’,²⁸ another that it is ‘a universal statement about wedded bliss’.²⁹

William Hallett may in fact be preoccupied less with thoughts of wedded bliss than with speculation about which horse was likely to win the next race. Racing was his great passion; betting and gambling were to be his downfall. The chief source of information about William Hallett is contained in his own will, which he drew up himself in an extraordinarily informal autobiographical style shortly before his death.³⁰ From this it is clear that even before his marriage, racing was his chief interest. Living in the country bored him, and Canons, the property he had inherited from his grandfather, held no charms for him: ‘I was fond of sporting, and it was situated too near London.’ He and his wife never lived at Canons, and Gainsborough’s portrait never hung there; Hallett had let the estate to the racehorse owner and breeder Colonel Dennis O’Kelly in 1783,³¹ two years before his marriage, and sold it in 1786.³² William Hallett is listed among [page 123]subscribers to the Racing Calendar from at least 1794 to 1825. His racing colours are given as ‘orange, with black sleeves’.³³

It is not clear where the Halletts (or the Gainsborough) were housed immediately after the marriage. In 1788 Hallett purchased the estate of Little Wittenham, near Wallingford, Berkshire, where he built ‘a small house’; but soon afterwards they moved to Faringdon House, where they lived for twenty years. In 1807 he made two disastrous property deals, at Denford Park and ‘the Townhill property’, losing heavily on both, and in the process quarrelling irrevocably with his eldest son, William Hallett (IV). Finally the Halletts settled in a newly built house known as Candys, in South Stoneham, near Southampton.³⁴

By 1830 nothing was left of William Hallett’s fortune. His will records that he lived with his wife Elizabeth ‘most happily for nearly 48 years, as it was impossible to do otherwise with such a woman’. Nothing is known of the life she led after she was painted by Gainsborough, sauntering in filmy stuffs through a glade; but it may be surmised that it was not an easy one. The couple had two sons and four daughters.³⁵ Elizabeth Hallett died on 16 April 1833,³⁶ aged 69, and was buried in the Hallett family vault in St Lawrence, Whitchurch.

Having remarried in 1834,³⁷ William Hallett consigned Gainsborough’s portrait of himself and his first wife to Foster’s saleroom in August of that year (see note 2); but it did not sell. In December 1834 he made his will.³⁸ It is a curious document, drawn up by himself and more like an informal, almost Shandean narrative of his life than any conventional will and testament (but, having been signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses, it was legally accepted as such). He lamented that he had no riches to bestow on his children, but added that ‘they will enjoy all my late wife’s fortune’ (presumably it had been tied up in trust funds). He was in debt, and had little to leave. He left ‘my picture of my late wife to my dearest daughter Lettice Eliz^th Hilliard which was painted before I married July 30th 1785’:³⁹ and although ‘my picture of my late wife’ does not immediately suggest a double portrait of himself and his wife, presumably this self‐effacing reference does indeed refer to Gainsborough’s double portrait. He left a miniature (unidentified) of his late wife to his daughter Charlotte, his religious books to his clerical son‐in‐law, Revd Fulwar Fowle, his law books to his son‐in‐law Nash Crosier Hilliard, five guineas for a ring to his friend William Crowdy and the ‘rest and residue’ to his second wife Mary Jane, ‘hoping sincerely that it may turn out better than expected’. As for his funeral, it should be simple. ‘I should like to be taken in a concealed manner (for the sake of cheapness) to the Crane Inn at Edgeware and from thence by ten poor labourers such as the clergymen of the Parish of Little Stan‐more may name … to be buried in my family vault near my late wife’ (adding ‘where my present wife may like to join the party if not better engaged’).⁴⁰ William Hallett died on 21 November 1842, aged 78. He was duly buried beside his first wife in the Hallett vault in St Lawrence, Whitchurch, where they had been married 57 years earlier.

When the double portrait was shown in the British Institution’s Gainsborough exhibition of 1859, The Times reviewer commented that ‘Mr Hallett is only known to fame as a patron of the Turf. As he is here presented it would be difficult to conceive a more perfect realisation of youthful elegance and high breeding. He is worthy of the sweet young woman who wears the budding honours of wifehood with such pretty pride, her hand resting with a fond and confiding pressure on the new husband’s arm. Happy young couple to be handed down to posterity, before the world had withered the young wife’s roses, – before the turf and the bottle has soured the husband’s brow, and reddened his nose, or the gout stiffened and swelled those shapely legs of his.’⁴¹

The popular title ‘The Morning Walk’ appears to have been invented for the picture almost a century after it was painted, probably around 1884, when it changed hands (via Agnew’s) from family ownership to that of the Rothschilds who, having no connection with the sitters, may have preferred an impersonal title. ‘The Morning Walk’ had already been conjured up by Christie’s in 1859 as a title for Gainsborough’s portrait of Miss Elizabeth Haverfield.⁴² The phrase ‘the morning walk’ is recollected from Thomson’s The Seasons (Part III: ‘Summer’), which had long been a useful mine of quotations for artists.⁴³ John Linnell quoted the lines ‘…when every Muse/ And every blooming pleasure wait without,/ To bless the wildly‐devious [page 124]morning‐walk’ to accompany a painting which he titled The Morning Walk and showed at the Royal Academy in 1847 (265);⁴⁴ it may have been Linnell who made the title popular. The exuberance of the lines is more suited to Miss Haverfield (a child in an outsize hat among foxgloves) than to the more reticent mood of Mr and Mrs Hallett. Fancy names are perhaps most commonly bestowed on portraits which seem to express an elusive mood, as well as attempting to catch a likeness. By a process of association, Romney’s double portrait of Sir Christopher and Lady Sykes (and a dog), painted the year after Mr and Mrs Hallett and on much the same scale, was known earlier this century as ‘The Evening Walk’.⁴⁵

In the course of reviewing some of the British pictures in the International Exhibition of 1862, the poet and critic Théophile Gautier wrote:On éprouve, en face du portrait de sir William Hallet et de sa femme, une sensation rétrospective bizarre, tant l’esprit du siècle dernier y vit avec une illusion intense. On croit voir en réalité ces jeunes époux qui marchent en se donnant le bras dans l’allée d’un jardin. La femme, romanesquement jolie, est habillée d’une robe de mousseline à l’Angelica Kauffmann, et d’une écharpe de gaze dont sa main délicate chiffonne distraitement le bout. Un chapeau à la Pamela cerclé d’un ruban blanc pose sur ses beaux cheveux bleu‐cendré qui se rendent à la mode du temps en un énorme chignon. Le mari porte l’habit à la française et la culotte courte de la façon la plus gracieuse du monde et jette un regard amoureuse à sa femme; un chien blanc, ennuyé de ce tête‐à‐tête, court en jappant après le couple comme pour réclamer sa part habituelle de caresses.⁴⁶Beatrix Potter’s judgement was sterner. In February 1885 (then aged nineteen, and already a regular exhibition visitor), she saw the exhibition of works by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery. ‘The papers have praised them up in an extraordinary manner’, she noted: but she was unimpressed. On this occasion she barely mentions the Hallett double portrait, remarking in general that compared with Reynolds’s portraiture ‘all Gainsborough’s faces’ are too composed, ‘the more expressive ones melancholy, there is scarcely a laughing face here’. She proceeds to compare Gainsborough with Reynolds: whereas ‘Reynolds presents to us a cheerful, pleasant race, the men refined, kindly and thoughtful, the women fresh, gay, natural and clothed in rich colour’, Gainsborough’s men look ‘careworn instead of cheerful’, and his ladies ‘long faced and depressed’. She considered that ‘Neither Reynolds nor Gainsborough were great draughtsmen, but the former’s deficiencies were generally concealed by the force and movement of his figures’.⁴⁷ Curiously, Beatrix Potter’s opinions in some sense anticipate the profounder judgements of Ellis Waterhouse, who observed that whereas Reynolds had excelled in the portraiture of ‘the solid British male’, Gainsborough in his latest years was ‘supremely fitted to paint the portraits of creatures who were all heart and sensibility’.⁴⁸

Notes