Portrait of a Patron: The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744) by Susan Jenkins

Abstract

226 Artists (Zoffany and Turner) and poets (Wordsworth, Goldsmith, and Crabbe) dramatized sensibility, developing a stereotype of the pathetic; they transformed rogues and tricksters into objects of sentiment, ‘‘romanticizing the freedom and independence of the beggar .’’ In this ‘‘history from below,’’ Mr. Hitchcock mixes legal documents, criminal records with illustrations, and the fictions of Gay, Defoe, Swift, Smollett, Fielding, and Grub Street. This complex narrative works because the author shows nuance and facility in an admittedly socially constructed text. Mr. Hitchcock moves easily, and sometimes comically, from court testimonies of drunks, criminals, and petty thieves to the sophisticated and ironic voices of upper-class satirists. Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University SUSAN JENKINS. Portrait of a Patron: The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674– 1744). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xii ⫹ 219. $99.95. For Scriblerians, James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, is the figure behind Timon’s Villa, the epitome of ostentatious false taste. This judgment, not original with Pope’s Epistle to Burlington , has shaped posterity’s verdict of the Duke. An art historian, Ms. Jenkins undertakes to correct this misunderstanding and show Chandos’s cultural importance as an enlightened patron and collector , who had a ‘‘profound and rounded interest in the arts’’ that helped establish his ‘‘position at the centre of the artistic world and support his claim to be the new ‘Apollo of the arts’ of his generation.’’ The dispersal after his death of all Chandos’s possessions and the razing of Cannons, his suburban mansion, insured there is no legacy by which to judge his taste and achievement; his achievements for the most part must be reconstructed from the documents. Using correspondence , architectural plans and drawings, inventories, contemporary accounts, and sale catalogues, Ms. Jenkins follows the twelve-year building of the mansion (completed by June 1725) and the amassing of its contents, and guides us through its rooms, reconstructing their decorative schemes, paintings, and furnishings . The grounds were laid out on an enormous scale in the formal geometric manner with waterworks and statuary. An amateur architect, Chandos took an active role in designing Cannons . At a cost of upwards of £160,000 for construction and furnishing, there was no available surface in the mansion that did not receive the most lavish and costly decoration possible. From marble flooring, tropical hardwood paneling, and gilded furniture to ceiling paintings, the decorative splendor can be gauged by a tradesman’s bill for ‘‘Japanning the seat in ye water closet £9.’’ Ms. Jenkins situates Chandos’s collecting in the prevailing debates about taste, luxury, and conspicuous consumption , as well as the context of the expansion of the art market, British taste for foreign artists, and the rise of public art institutions. Chandos collected during the transition from the seventeenthcentury virtuoso collector (with his taste for the strange and ingenious rarities and natural objects) to the connoisseur of fine art whose sensibility was informed by new canons of polite taste derived from the model of Italian art. Collecting, although a form of conspicuous consumption and display of status, 227 could also be a public-spirited activity. The connoisseur’s civic responsibility was demonstrated by opening his house and collection to the public, as did Chandos. Central to Ms. Jenkins’s brief is the chapter ‘‘The Duke of Chandos as a Collector,’’ which shows how he built his collection, primarily of books and manuscripts, followed closely by Dutch paintings and Italian Old Masters. He desired to get paintings ‘‘of the most celebrated hands,’’ and his negotiations and acquisitions reveal his sophistication . Relying on catalogues and overseas agents, dealers, friends, or relatives, Chandos was buying sight unseen; we see him stating what he is willing to pay and concentrating on the big names of Italian painting (Guido Reni, Domenichino , the Carracci); he was especially wary of false attributions, copies, and fakes. Ms. Jenkins identifies and reproduces many of the paintings once in Chandos’s collection, and in some cases documents how he acquired them. Her argument that in literature and music he was ‘‘a patron of taste and discernment ’’ is less well supported. The treatment of Chandos as literary patron is dominated by the Timon’s Villa scandal . Chandos...