Edward Francis Cunningman - called Francesco Calza
(Kelso, Scotland circa 1741 – Berlin 1793 or London 1795) Circa 1770

Portrait of George 1st Lord Lyttleton of Frankley (1709 - 1773)

pastel on canvas

597 mm×470 mm

PROVENANCE:
C.G. Smith, Lockbury Street, London, 1933; Anonymous sale, Phillips, Son & Neale, London, April 26, 1955, lot 116; Anonymous sale, Bonhams, London, June 12, 1969, lot 226 (as Cotes); Private Collection, Dallas, Texas

Literature

John Kerslake, Early Georgian Portraits, London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1977, volume 1, p. 174 (in which the date of the Phillips sale is mistakenly listed as 1855) and volume 2, no. 492, reproduced (as artist and location unknown)

This newly-attributed life portrait of the writer and politician Lord Lyttleton is a significant addition to the oeuvre of one of the eighteenth century’s more remarkable and restless Scottish painters.

Despite his long and august career, portraits of Lord Lyttleton are surprisingly rare. Calza’s rather staid and ‘English’ portrait in peer’s robes (Boconnoc, Cornwall) employs a repetition of this face-mask but the ad vivum source was previously unknown.(1) Our portrait with its light touch, immediacy and powerful sense of character has all the hallmarks of direct observation. Compared with the Boconnoc portrait the artist here has enlivened an otherwise sober subject with a healthy dash of Italianate bravura, no doubt the quality which first recommended him to his patron, Lyttleton’s son Thomas who brought Calza back to Britain in 1770 after a quarter century of exile.

As Edward Cunningham he had fled with his Jacobite father to Bologna after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion in 1745. As Francesco Calza - a fugitive’s alias meaning ‘from Kelso’ - he trained first in Parma, and then in Rome with Anton Rafael Mengs, whose swagger portraits this echoes in its rich, textural drapery and vivid tonality. Naples and Venice added to his experience before he travelled to Paris in 1768 where he painted the King of Denmark, and it was there that his career as a society portraitist took off.

In Italy he had attracted the attention of the Grand Tourist Thomas Lyttleton, who invited him to London. Calza exhibited at the Royal Academy 1770-1773,(2) but his Pall Mall lifestyle bankrupted him and in 1773 he fled abroad again, this time from his creditors. He sailed to Russia with the disreputable but charming bigamist Elizabeth Duchess of Kingston and painted at the Court of Catherine the Great in 1777, but exhibitions by F Calza ‘Il Bolognese’ at the Royal Academy 1777-1781 show he soon returned to London. By 1784, however, he was in Berlin as Court Artist to Frederick the Great of Prussia. This was the highpoint of his career, and his numerous works include the most celebrated icons of the King such as the vast canvas Frederick the Great Returning to Sanssouci with his Generals after Manoeuvres (Neue Palais, Berlin) as well as intimate pastels of courtiers executed in the same elegant, delicate manner as the present portrait. Elusive to the last it is not certain whether he died in Berlin, April 28, 1793, or in poverty in England two years later.

George Lyttleton was born January 17, 1709, son of Sir Thomas Lyttleton 4th Bt of Hagley, Worcestershire. Four months premature he was reputedly mistaken for dead and thrown away by the midwife,(3) supposedly explaining his frail appearance throughout life. After Eton and Christ Church, Oxford he became MP for Okehampton in 1735, leading the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. He was also Secretary and advisor to Frederick Prince of Wales in 1737, in Alexander Pope’s words: the Man so near / His Prince, that writes in verse and has his Ear.(4)

He broke with the Opposition to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1756 - for which he was ennobled - but writing rather than politics was his great love. Observations on the Reign and Character of Queen Elizabeth might be his masterpiece but - especially at the Prince’s enlightened Court - he was a patron as well as a writer and his true monument lies in the friends’ work that he encouraged and assisted: the improvements to his estate at Hagley - where Pope designed the gardens and Sanderson Millar built the Palladian mansion - and Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, dedicated to him in which he appears as Squire Allworthy.

(1) John Kerslake, op. cit., p. I74, judges the Boconnoc portrait ‘probably not from life’.

(2) Calza exhibited fourteen works at the RA 1770 – 1781, of which nine were pastel portraits (Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts Exhibitors 1769 – 1904, Graves, 1905, volume 1, p. 384).

(3) Lord Albermarle, Memoirs of Rockingham, I, 1852, p. 205, quoted Kerslake loc. cit.

(4) Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, 1.(4) 5-6.

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