Richard Cumberland

This portraitback to top

Cumberland had initially regarded Romney as ‘a second Corregio’, believing he would rank ‘with the first masters of the highest province and best age of painting’. [1] Romney ‘was uniformly kind and affectionate to me’, he wrote, ‘and certainly I was zealous in my services to him’. [2] Their friendship latterly may have cooled, but Cumberland was to write Romney’s obituary for the European Magazine. He sat to Romney several times for his portrait, NPG 19 being the most formal, showing the writer in search of inspiration. Cumberland’s wife and children also appeared in a series of Romney half-lengths of c.1772 and 1776-81. [3]
The dating of NPG 19 is difficult, as Kidson has demonstrated. [4] There are related compositional studies dateable 1770-71 in three Romney sketchbooks; [5] some years later, after Romney’s Italian sojourn of 1773-75, John Romney listed a ‘half length' [i.e. 127 x 101] of Cumberland in 1776 [6] (though no sittings are recorded that year). In NPG 19 the head and left hand are relatively tightly executed, while the right hand and the upper left area have been vigorously reworked in a broad, loose manner. This disparity suggests the picture evolved over a period of time; it may have been the portrait exhibited in 1771, reworked after the Italian visit. [7]
In 1859, as they considered NPG 19 in the newly-opened National Portrait Gallery, Lord Lansdowne told Sir William Stirling Maxwell how Cumberland was known to have clapped and hissed at the same time while watching a new play by a rival; his professional jealousy was well known (as befitted a man who furnished Sheridan with the character of Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic). [8]

Footnotesback to top

1) Northcote, Reynolds, 1813, p 145; Rev. John Romney, Memoirs of the Life and Works of George Romney ... also some particulars of the life of Peter Romney, his Brother, 1830, p 313.
2) Cumberland, Memoirs, 1807, II, p 214. Odes to Romney by Cumberland of 1776 are printed in part in Romney 1830, pp 313-19, and H. Ward & W. Roberts, Romney, A Biographical and Critical Essay with a Catalogue Rainsonné of his Works, II, pp 37-38. Romney is said to have given Cumberland portraits and in 1781 was able to lend him money (A. B. Chamberlain, George Romney, 1910, pp 52-53).
3) Five listed in H. Ward & W. Roberts, Romney, A Biographical and Critical Essay with a Catalogue Rainsonné of his Works, 1904, II, pp 38-39, of which Mrs Cumberland and her Son and George Cumberland are now in the Tate Gallery. Another of The Misses Cumberland exhibited George Romney, Liverpool, NPG, San Marino, 2002 (38).
4) A. Kidson, George Romney, exhibition catalogue, Liverpool, NPG, San Marino, 2002, pp 91-93.
5) Two in the Royal Academy, 781a & 781b; NPG archive sketchbook, p 35; see A. Kidson, George Romney, exhibition catalogue, Liverpool, NPG, San Marino, 2002, pp 92, 93n13.
6) H. Ward & W. Roberts, Romney, A Biographical and Critical Essay with a Catalogue Rainsonné of his Works, 1904, II, p 37.
7) NPG 19 has been variously dated in the past, e.g. H. Ward & W. Roberts, Romney, A Biographical and Critical Essay with a Catalogue Rainsonné of his Works, 1904, II, p 37 as probably 1776; A. B. Chamberlain, George Romney, 1910, p 332 as ‘shortly after his return from Italy’; Romney, Kenwood, 1961 (17) as c.1768; D. A. Cross, A Striking Likeness, The Life of George Romney, 2000, p 39, as c.1772.
8) Note by Stirling Maxwell attached to the back of a portrait, said to be of Cumberland, still at Pollok House (see Doubtful Portraits); the play in question was perhaps The Will by Frederick Reynolds (see S. T. Williams, Richard Cumberland, 1917, p 258).

Physical descriptionback to top

Grey eyes, grey powdered hair, wearing a crimson coat edged with brown fur and a pale yellow waistcoat with a green and gold trim; his chair is covered with an ochre cloth; on the table, covered by a turkey rug, a light-blue book and a bronze group.<sup>1

1</sup> Ill-defined, but possibly a casual reference to the Ludovisi Mars. R. Asleson (in A. Kidson ed., Essays on Romney, 2002, p 164) believes it to be from ‘the central figure in the ... Laocoön’.

Provenanceback to top

By descent to the sitter’s daughter-in-law, Lady Albinia Cumberland (d. 1850);¹ her son, Captain Richard Cumberland, from whom purchased 1857.

¹ According to her son (letter of 28 February 1856; NPG archive), she had kept the portrait ‘for about sixty years in the apartments in Hampton Court Palace’.

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