George Berkeley

Inscriptionback to top

A signature and date on an island of paint without craquelure, above the hand, right, reads: John Smibert.p./1728. The last two figures, according to a past owner J. Winter, [1] 1840, had been rubbed out by his cleaner Heckford and put in again 'in ink' as 25 which date was confirmed by Scharf in the Annual Report of 1882. By 1896, however, and in subsequent NPG catalogues until 1949, the final figure was read as 8, and so remains. It is assumed that at some time between 1888 and 1896 the remains of the original signature were cleaned off and the present one put on. [2] A label, removed from the back of the canvas to the picture dossier, reads: So much understanding, knowledge,/innocence and humility, I should have thought confined to Angels/had I never seen this Gentleman/Bp Atterbury of B/Berkeley./This portrait painted shortly before Berkeley's departure for/the Bermudas, is offered to the/Revd. W. J. Irons D D/in testimony of sincere esteem/and regard by/his affectionate friend/T Bowdler 24 Oct 1856 [only the signature and date is in Bowdler's hand].

1) His letter, NPG archives.
2) Cleaning records for c.1890-1920 not available.

This portraitback to top

The identity of NPG 653 is not in dispute. It rests partly on comparison with authentic portraits and partly on provenance, NPG 653 having descended almost certainly from the sitter. If there were any doubt about likeness, there is the skin defect or wen in the inner corner of the eye, a peculiarity observed, for instance, by Latham in his portrait at Trinity College, Dublin. Inevitably the tampering with the signature and date has aroused suspicion although the form of false signatures commonly found in the USA c.1917-30 is Jo.Smibert Ft. [1] In 1965, it was thought, on consideration of style, to be an authentic example of Smibert's work probably painted in America. [2]
The artist is known to have painted details of actual landscapes in some of his American pictures and the background is perhaps the whale-head promontory on Rhode Island known as Hanging Rock to which the sitter possibly refers in the lines from Alciphron: 'we then withdrew to a hollow glade between two rocks where we seated ourselves' (dialogue II, section i). [3] W. S. Lewis, in September 1949, noted when staying near Whitehall, Newport, R.I., the farm where much of this work was reputedly written, that the headland about two miles away resembled Hanging Rock. The book shown in NPG 653 bears no title and cannot be identified. If one of Berkeley's works, the size points rather to the 2nd edition, 1725, of Hylas and Philonus than to Alciphron, which appeared only on his return to England in 1732. [4] But this consideration does not invalidate the conclusions which may be drawn from the notebook.
Bowdler stated that the portrait was painted 'before Berkeley's departure for the Bermudas'. This is accepted by Foote [5] and more recently by others, [6] the suggestion being that it was painted in London to help promote the college plans. Berkeley, as shown in the artist's notebook recently discovered by Sir David Evans, lodged with Smibert in Covent Garden in 1726. Entries give no day or time for appointments but only the month, indicating perhaps commissions rather than sittings. The letters 'HP' for 'half-payd' on later entries relate to the common practice of requiring part payment when a picture was started. Berkeley's name first appears in the section headed June 1726: 'Mr. Dean Berkeley K c', bracketed with 'Mr Butler Clergyman', also 'K C', together costing ‘25-4-0'. [7] 'K C' must indicate a Kit-cat size canvas, 38 x 26 inches, too small for NPG 653. The other entry, June 1727, is 'Doctor Berkeley Dn. of Dy. Cop O.S.' at '12-12-0'. [8] The price is the same as for Kit-cat size canvases but 'O.S.' suggests, according to Adams, 'odd size', and might be the unattributed portrait sold at Sotheby's, 2 November 1960, lot 70, formerly in the collection of Lt-Col. Giles Vandeleur, now owned by Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, booksellers, Los Angeles. Sotheby's catalogue gave the dimensions as 28 x 25 inches, smaller than Kit-cat size. The face, though younger, is close to that in NPG 653, and the chair is similar.
Smibert set sail from London with Berkeley's little missionary group on 4 September 1728. They put in at York River, Virginia, on 6 January and arrived at Rhode Island, 23 January 1729. [9] The date 1728 would be acceptable only on the hypothesis that Smibert used the style still current in contemporary correspondence, with the year beginning on Lady Day; i.e. 1728 would end 24 March 1729. In his notebook, however, he does not use this convention, referring to his arrival in America, for instance, in the new style. [10] From May 1729 he was working in Boston. Two entries for Berkeley under April 1730 and March 1732 [11] refer to 'lit ½’ at £35 which might mean 'little ½ canvas', i.e. less than the normal half size canvas of approximately 50 x 40 inches and an appropriate description of the 40 x 30 size of NPG 653 and its replica.
A version of the same size as NPG 653 appeared among family portraits sold by Stanley Bligh Monck at Christie's, 19 June 1970, lot 102. [12] Two other portraits, lots 96 and 104, were of John Monck (1734-1809), a cousin of the sitter's wife Sarah from whom the property presumably came by descent through the Moncks of Coley Park, Reading, the vendor being the eldest son of Arthur Stanley Monck, great-great-grandson of John. It is worth noting that the forenames of the Bishop's grandson by his second son George Berkeley, the prebendary of Canterbury, were George Monck (d. 1793, aged 29) while the names of the second son of John Monck were John Berkeley. [13]
An inscription, top left, on the portrait (lot 102) reads Geo. Berkeley S.T.P./Dec Derensis and since the sitter was dean of Derry 1724-34, the picture is likely to have been completed by 1734. The varnish is now yellow but preliminary cleaning seems to indicate that it is in better condition than NPG 653 and despite the provenance of the latter, the Monck version might well prove to be the earlier. The only other notebook entries in the American period are for the well-known group of Berkeley and his colleagues, now at Yale, [14] and the lost portrait with his wife and son, all half length 'in one cloth'. [15] There is thus fairly conclusive evidence that NPG 653 and the version from the Monck family relate to the Boston entries.

Footnotesback to top

1) H. W. Foote, John Smibert, 1950, p 234 ff.
2) J. F. Kerslake, 'The Date and Early Provenance of Smibert's George Berkeley', Art Quarterly, XXVIII, 1965, pp 144-53.
3) Ibid; J. M. Phillips, 'The Smibert Tradition', foreword, Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University, XVII, 1949; A. C. Fraser, The Works of George Berkeley, 1871, IV, p 168.
4) Suggested by Professor Wimsatt, 1969; also by G. de Voe.
5) H. W. Foote, John Smibert, 1950, p 33.
6) By de Voe, also Professor Wimsatt, letter of 29 September 1969; the volume held would then be the 24-page Proposal for the better supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations ... by a College ... Bermuda, 1725, a work perhaps shown in the portrait sold Sotheby's, 2 November 1960.
7) The Notebook of John Smibert, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969, ed. Sir David Evans and others, p 83 (115, 116), i.e. 12 gns each.
8) Ibid, p 84 (147).
9) Ibid, p 86; cf also H. W. Foote, John Smibert, 1950, p 38, Berkeley's letter to Percival dated 7 Feb 1728/9.
10) C. R. Cheyney, Handbook of Dates (Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks, no.4), 1945, p 5.
11) The Notebook of John Smibert, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969, ed. Sir David Evans and others, pp 89, 90 (37, 60). On contemporary practice, see also J .D. Stewart, 'Records of Payment to Sir Godfrey Kneller and his Contemporaries', Burlington Magazine, CXIII, 1971, p 30.
12) Now in the author's possession.
13) Burke, Landed Gentry, 1952, pp 1801-02.
14) The Notebook of John Smibert, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969, ed. Sir David Evans and others, p 89 (48).
15) Ibid, p 90 (49).

Physical descriptionback to top

Thick mid-brown eyebrows, dark grey eyes with a wen above the right, plump round face, cleft chin; black velvet cap, white shirt and bands, black cassock; seated in a wooden chair padded with blue, [1] his left hand on a closed book; brown background suggesting the interior of a room; through an opening, right, low rocky cliffs lined with trees, blue sky with orange horizon, beyond; lit from top left.

1) Berkeley's chair is said to have survived and belonged, c.1871, to a Dr Coit. A chair, reputedly the sitter's but not the one in NPG 653, is reproduced W. Updike, History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, R.I., 1867, p 306; it is conceivably a studio property.

Conservationback to top

Rather rubbed and flattened; some old repairs have discoloured, for example at the outer corner of his right eye, and in the background; lined and cleaned c.1840; restored and varnished, 1882, and supposedly again c.1888-96.

Provenanceback to top

Presented, 1882, by the Rev. William Josiah Irons and received by him, as a gift, from the Rev. Thomas Bowdler (1780-1856), nephew of the editor of Shakespeare, who bought it from J. Winter of Maidstone, Kent, the previous purchaser. [1]
The early history of the portrait is given in a letter dated 21 May 1840 from J. Winter. [2] This states, on the authority of the widow of the Rev John Kennedy (1738-1819), Vicar of Teston in Kent, said to have been curate to the sitter's son George Berkeley (1733-95), Prebendary of Canterbury, that the portrait had been left by the latter to the Rev. Kennedy, together with other portraits of both Berkeleys, father and son. On Kennedy's death they were sold. This does not agree with evidence from wills; the elder Berkeley died in 1753, and his will, signed and dated 31 July 1752, mentions no portraits and leaves all his possessions to his wife Anne. She died at Langley in Kent 27 May 1786, and her will of 22 April 1781 left all the pictures in her house at Peckham, except for two landscapes by Pannini, to the Rev. John Kennedy who, with her son the younger Berkeley, was co-executor. Whichever line is correct, NPG 653 must have belonged to the sitter. The Pannini landscapes, the only named pictures in the will, went to Mrs Moore, wife of the Bishop of Bangor. [3]

1) Mrs Irons, in a letter, confirms the gift to her husband by Bowdler as a memento of friendship, NPG archives.
2) Text, with the writer's initial wrongly as 'I', given by A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley, 1949, pp 241-42. Winter was a distant relative of Kennedy's widow.
3) Principal Probate Registry, Somerset House, xx.

Exhibitionsback to top

'The British Face', Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 1967.


This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: John Kerslake, Early Georgian Portraits, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1977, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.

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