Early Georgian Portraits Catalogue: Smart

Christopher Smart (1722-71)

Poet; educated at Durham School; fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, 1745; published the Hilliard,1753, satirising the quack doctor 'Sir' John Hill; his best known work Song to David,first published 1763; a benefit performance given for him by Garrick, 1759; metrical versions of Phaedrus and the Psalms,1765; twice committed to a madhouse; lived his last years and died in debt within the rules of King's Bench; his collected poems, excepting Song to David, published posthumously 1791.

3780 By an unknown artist
Oil on canvas, 28 ½ x 23 3/8 in. (724 x 594 mm); dark grey eyes, marked pouch below the right, dark brown eyebrows, thin upper lip, dark brown wig; white bands, white lace wrist ruffles, black gown over plain brown coat, black mortar-board with the tassel over his right eyebrow; plain brown background; in a painted oval, lit from the left.

A MS label on the back of the canvas: 'Kitsmart' / This Picture is the property / of / Mrs. H. M. Falkiner and / her daughters.

The identity, while not conclusive, is traditional resting on provenance (seebelow) and a comparison with the portrait, generally accepted as representing Smart, at Pembroke College, Cambridge (seeIconography). NPG 3780 may be dated on appearance to c.1745.Itis crude in quality and possibly the work of an amateur.

Condition:dark and difficult to assess; discoloured retouchings across his left cheek and elsewhere; cleaned, repaired and revarnished, 1951.

Collections:bought, 1950, from Miss Irene K. Falkiner, daughter of C. Litton Falkiner, resident at Upper Merrion Street, Dublin, 1892-1902, known to have owned the portrait by 1897; Smart's sister Mary Anne married, 1750, Richard Falkiner of Mount Falcon, co. Tipperary, where for a time Smart's wife and children took refuge; Mount Falcon was owned, when last in the family, by Richard Falkiner, great-uncle of Miss I.K. Falkiner. [1]

Iconography

The identity of the portrait at Pembroke College is supported by an anonymous engraving in the 1791 edition of the sitter's Poems. An inscription C. Smart looking remarkably like a signature below the table, left, has given rise to the theory that it might be a self-portrait. Smart, however, is not known to have painted and the oil is in a very practised hand near, but probably not by, the Yorkshire artist Henry Pickering (fl.1751-90). The book title Fables in the background, referring presumably to the sitter's A Poetical Translation of the Fables of Phaedrus,suggests a date not earlier than 1765. In 1897 the portrait is known to have been in the possession of Frederick Cowslade of Reading, great-great-grandson of the sitter through his eldest daughter Mary Anne (d.1809) who married Thomas Cowslade, proprietor of The Reading Mercury. [2]

Notes

1. Information from Miss I.K. Falkiner, NPG archives.
2. DNB, XVIII, pp.388-89.