Rediscovering a family portrait

Jane Royds by James Lonsdale, circa 1830

In 1910 the banker Sir Clement Royds published The pedigree of the family of Royds, an extensively researched genealogy of two closely related branches of his family. The Roydses rose from struggling yeoman farmers to great wealth on the back of the wool trade in Rochdale and Halifax during the second half of the 18th century, subsequently moving into banking and land ownership. The book includes a large number of photogravure reproductions of family portraits. My copy came to me as part of my late uncle Kenrick Armitstead's family history archive.

Jane depicted in The pedigree of the family of Royds

Most of the Rochdale branch's portraits followed the line of descent of the landed estate. This was sold shortly after the second world war and in 1988 Jimmy Royds, the heir, sold the Royds portraits, including Lonsdale's magnificent full length one of James Royds, to Roger Royds of Braidwood, New South Wales - a distant cousin. However not all the portraits in Sir Clement's book found their way to Australia. James's daughter-in-law Jane Hudson, who had married his eldest son Clement, had also been painted by Londsale. The picture seemed to have disappeared without trace - until I came across it on e-bay.

The portrait as it appeared on ebay

In 2003 I acquired an oil portrait of the artist Mabel Royds, my Royds great grandmother's first cousin (Jane was my 3xgt grandfather's sister-in-law). That portait was painted in 1911 and too late for Sir Clement's book, but it put me on the look out for others. After trawling fruitlessly through many pages of Google results I came across the above image, which I instantly recognised from the book. Critically the sitter (and artist) had been identified from the label on the frame.

and the crucial label on the frame

The picture had been offered by an American seller a number of times with successively lower retentions until it had sold to a buyer in New York for about $1,500. It seemed clear that the buyer was not a dealer, but I got in touch with him anyway to give him some information about the sitter and ask for a photograph for my collection.

before cleaning

Over the next few weeks as we exchanged correspondance it became clear that he had been taking the picture round the main New York sale rooms and had been disappoitned by the estimates he was given. Eventually I made my move and offered to buy the picture at a price which gave him a comfortable profit. He accepted and the picture was shipped back home.

Detail

The New York e-bayer had been scrupulously honest about the state of the picture. It was in poor shape, as was the frame. There was some loss of paint and the whole canvas had been coated with polyurethane varnish while the gilded frame - probably original - had been covered in cheap gold paint. My restorer Ros Whitehouse, http://www.rosalind-whitehouse.com/, believes the picture must have been kept in a damp place for some years. She lined the canvas then painstakingly removed the polyurethane with a scalpel before taking off the grimy varnish beneath. The frame was an even bigger task, but much of the original gilding was eventually uncovered and retained.

As a family document the picture is invaluable and this is how I had been regarding it. But what about its quality as a work of art? Lonsdale was a famous painter in his lifetime. He had been a pupil of Romney and had a prolific output, depicting most of the leading figures of the day, although today he is little known. Only two of his portraits are on permanent display in at the National portrait gallery. One is of Caroline of Brunswick, wife of Geroge IV, which bears some resemblance to Jane Royds's portrait:

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/largerimage.php?LinkID=mp02794&page=1&role=art&rNo=5

Judging from some of his other work I suspect he was happier painting men than women. Jane's bust seems anatomically implausible and Queen Caroline's portrait has an awkwardness about it. One of the NPL's curators went as far as telling me it was one of her least favourite pictures in the gallery. Even after the inevitable flattery, Jane was clearly no oil painting herself. My wife disliked the picture, and from an aesthetic point of view I can sympathise. I ended up giving it to my mother.

There is another portrait of Jane Royds. Probably painted ten years later, and on a grander scale, it used to hang with that of her husband in the family bank in Rochdale. This eventually became part of RBS and was in the vaults of their archive the last time I enquired after it.

Dark green colour scheme at Alnwick

Alnwick castle, featured in the current edition of Interiors magazine, seems to have been redecorated recently. Its dining room has a dark green colour scheme which I am now studying with interest. They have used silk on the walls, rather than my humble wallpaper.

There is a slight coincidence here. One of my portraits is of the Countess of Northumberland, an ancester of the present Duke. She later married the Earl of Montagu who built Boughton House. She sat several times for Lely. The original version, of which mine is one of many studio copies, is still at Boughton.

Curtains now in place, but how to pull everything together?

Three swags and one tail have now gone up so I am starting to see the effect. I am quite pleased with my efforts, considering it's the first pair of curtains I have made. There are some defects. The fringe is causing some puckering in two of the swags because I pulled the thread too tight.

The bigger issue now is how to pull the whole colour scheme together. The gold of the silk is brighter and yellower than the ochre of the woodwork, cornice and gold of the picture frames, and the current rugs, cushions, furniture table lamps etc are still a bit of a mess. I think I need to reinforce the gold colour of the silk eg by use of cushions and lampshapes. I also need to choose a fabric for a chaise longue I bought at auction and which is at the restorers.

What should this be upholstered in?

Interior decorating is hard to get right.

First Swag Completed

The first swag is finished (only five more to make now):

The fringe came with the ends sealed with cellotape. When I took it off everything started unravelling which was most alarming. I coped with it by oversewing several times. A better solution, which I learned from some helpful people on http://my.decozo.com/index.php, the soft furnishing and curtain making discussion forum, was to use glue. This was confirmed by a quick visit to Henry Newbery's shop just off Oxford Street http://www.henrynewbery.com/contact.html. They recommended using a hot glue gun, then hitting the end down onto a piece of glass to cool it and flatten the end.

The full swag, complete with lining interlining and fringe, behaves a little differently from my mock up in lining fabric. It holds its shape much better, but doesnt come down quite as far even though it was made from the same pattern.

I am quite pleased with the appearance. One purpose of the green and yellow fringe was to tie the curtains into the wallpaper, which is a dark green damask design, from Watts of Westminster (no relation) http://www.wattsofwestminster.com/. The green is a good match with the wallpaper but the yellow in the fringe, which is a cool lemon, doesnt really match the yellow of the silk which is a warm gold. I am not entirely happy with this, but I guess I will need to wait to see the whole thing assembled and in place before really being able to judge.

Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian"

Thanks to the wonders of Bookfinder http://www.bookfinder.com/ I have now manged to track down a copy of Norah Gribble's "Book of Julian". It is a fairly weighty quarto volume, published privately, documenting the all too brief life of Julian Royds Gribble VC. It was assumed that he had died on a first world war battlefield, but it was later discovered that he had been captured and was a PoW. Before he could be released however he succumbed to the flu pandemic.

Norah, his grief stricken mother, seems never to have been able to come to terms with her son's death and in 1923 published this biography, including all the letters he had written to her as a child. It is almost too poignant to read.

Norah, a member of the Royds family and my great grandmother's first cousin, was painted by Singer Sergent when she was younger. The Taubman museum in Roanoke, Virginia now owns the picture and has named their cafe after her. http://www.taubmanmuseum.org/

It is difficult for us now to understand this kind of suffering. My grandmother lost her twin brother in WWI but her way of coping seems to have been the opposite of Norah's. According to my mother she never spoke about him.

Updating to digital photography

Starting this blog prompted me into upgrading to a half decent digital camera. The one I have bought seems fiercesomely complicated however. I have counted at least 22 different buttons and switches as well as a menu screen offering scores of barely comprehensibe options.

For my 21st birthday my father bought me my first proper camera, a Pentax K1000. Over the years I have added various lenses and bought another body, a Pentax MX - a very sweet little thing - all second-hand.

Rather than abandon this kit I thought I would look for a digital camera which would take my old lenses. A friendly chap in a shop in Tottenham Court Road pulled out a K20 model added an old lens clicked a few buttons and said "this is what you need - it's as easy as that". Costing more than I had budgeted for I said I would think about it, but I was back two hours later and bought it. I have always been a sucker for good salesmanship.

That was Thursday afternoon. After many fruitless hours with the manual I was still none the wiser about how to get it to work with my old lenses. Finally on Sunday evening I abandoned the manual and turned to Google. Sure enough, the solution was out there on the net.

When I bought a digital camera for my son, who was then 12, I handed him the manual and said "its important you read this first". "Don't be ridiculous Dad" was his reply as he flung it across the room. He switched it on, fiddled with the menu buttons and was away within a minute.

I dont doubt that I have bought a good camera, and with a degree in engineering I should be capable of mastering it, but the road ahead doesn't look like an easy one. Maybe I should just hand it over to my sons.

Is this Shakespeare's granddaughter?

In March 2007 this painting came up for sale at Sotheby's Olympia. It was catalogued as Circle of Willem Wissing: Portrait of Alice Countess of Drogheda (1625-c.1696). I put in an absentee bid but it sold for much more than my limit. It is now in a private collection in Ireland.

My interest in the picture was a family historical one. Alice was one of the daughters of the second Baron Spencer and his wife Penelope Wriothesley, daughter of Shakespeare's patron the 3rd Earl of Sounthampton. Alice's sister Anne married Sir Robert Townshend whose descendants settled in Denbighshire and Cheshire. It is the history of this branch which I have been studying.

Penelope Wriothesley - was Shakespeare her real father?

I sent a copy of the image of Alice to Professor Hildergard Hammerschmitt-Hummel, an expert on the known images of Shakespeare, who published a theory in 1999 that Penelope's mother Elizabeth Vernon had an affair with Shakespeare and that Penelope was his daughter, not Southampton's. The book unfortuantely has never been translated into English. http://www.hammerschmidt-hummel.de/translation/5dseptember2000.htm . The professor had not seen Alice's image before. We both agreed that she bears an uncanny resemblance to the bard and she very kindly sent me a copy of her most recent book.

Elizabeth Vernon, Countess of Southampton

If the professor's theories are correct then the number people who can claim descent from Shakespeare must number many thousands, including Winston Churchill and Prince William.

So little seems to be known for certain about Shakespeare's life but Bill Bryson's slim volume on the subject is well worth reading.

John Fowler and his exquisite curtains

As part of my research into curtain styles for my living room I came across Martin Wood's book John Fowler; Prince of Decorators. Fowler's curtains are so good that it is rather discourging to look at them before embarking on my own. He did of course have the advantage of working on a large scale with matching budgets. Here is an example of the real thing:

What I particularly like about these is the way they echo the carved detail in the chimneypiece and other architectural details. It is as if they had been carved by Bernini - fabric imitating marble imitating fabric.

I wont let it deter me however. I have acquired some patterns for swags and tails from Merrick and Day http://www.merrick-day.com/acatalog/The_Swag_and_Tail_Design_and_Pattern_Book.html and have done a mock up in lining fabric (see pic below). They need to look graceful and spontaneous, yet I fear this requires much judgement, planning and artistry. The risk is that they will look mechanical and feeble. In the finished version there will be tails on both sides and the swags will have fringes so will look bigger. I havn't yet decided about tie backs.

I was surprised to learn that John Fowler and I attended the same school. It seems he was not happy there. Felsted was not a great choice for a sensitive boy with homosexual leanings in the early 1970s, let alone the 1920s when he would have been there. My grandfather was a master at the school and may have taught him.

Family history and collecting antique silver

An interest in family history and the urge to collect things is a combination which can seriously damage your wallet. The internet makes it especially so.

Thanks to a diligent piece of cataloguing by Bonham's in Bath a couple of years ago and a chance Google search I am now the proud owner of an elegent late 18th century silver hot water jug made by William Chawner. It is engraved with the arms of John Stanislaus Townshend of Trevallyn, Denbighshire who is a first cousin several times removed.

More silver from the same family and their cousins from Wincham Hall in Cheshire has appeared on the market over the last few years. The most spectacular was a pair of cake baskets by Paul de Lamerie given as a gift to Lee Porcher Townshend - another first cousin - in recognition of his services on the bench. These came up for sale first at Christies in New York and then were with Marks Antiques in Mayfair. No price mentioned but I dont suppose one would have got much change out of half a million quid. Lee's father Edward Venables Townshend has the dubious distinction of having led the Cheshire Yeomanry in one of the cavalry charges at the Peterloo Massacre. These Townshends' Wincham Hall estate sat right on top of the Cheshire salt deposits, which must have been a significant souce of income for them. Only a fragment of the Hall remains and is now a hotel.

Earlier this year a rococco revival silver soup tureen engraved with the Townshend crest and motto came up at Christie's in London. It was catalogued as being from the Trevallyn branch but my hunch is that it would have been from Wincham where it would have sat alongside the de Lamerie baskets. The picture in Christie's catalogue was not very interesting but in the flesh it was so spectacularly vulgar I was very tempted to put in a bid. Unlike the de Lameries I could have afforded this but for the equivalent of a whole term's worth of school fees I resisted.

My tracking down of family related pieces of silver has been a rather ad-hoc affair. A nice pair of waiters engraved with the arms of Brooke Townshend, a closely related family, came up twice at Christies and I missed them on both occasions, in spite of browsing the catalogue before the second sale. Of course I dont need a pair of waiters like this, but that's not the point if you are a collector.

Some help may be at hand however. I notice that there is now a website which claims to be able to track down family items for you. http://www.myfamilysilver.com/ links a number of dealers and auction house catalogues to an online version of Fairbairn's crests and allows you to register an interest in particular families. Some quite grand dealers appear to have signed up to this including Koopmans and SJ Phillips. I have registered my interests and wait to see what happens.

Making my first set of curtains

My wife won't sew. I am pretty good with my hands and like interior design. Why shouldn't I make them myself I thought?

I like a challenge so I am not starting with simple ones. My living room has two windows, one facing North and one South requiring curtains some eight feet tall by eight feet wide. The period is early Victorian but the style still quite classical.

My chosen design is in gold silk, lined and interlined, with french pleat headings. These are to be hung from a brass pole. Above this is to be a three inch reeded oak pole with swags and tails, edged with a yellow and green bullion fringe and tails lined in olive green silk.

I have made the first pair of curtains and am now starting on the swags.

I dont know much about blogging, or whether I will have anything to say which will be of interest to anyone else, but here goes.