Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson

Inscriptionback to top

Signed lower left: ‘SPY’.

This portraitback to top

This is a relatively ‘straight’ depiction of Forbes-Robertson by the celebrated caricaturist Leslie Ward, drawn for Vanity Fair. It shows the actor in morning dress, displaying his elegant profile, slim figure and dapper dress style.

At the time of its publication in May 1895, Forbes-Robertson was well known for his performances in middle-ranking parts in London theatres, but he had not yet achieved the renown that began at the end of the year with the role of Romeo and flourished in 1897 with Hamlet. He had just begun to operate as an actor-manager or theatrical producer, and the portrait seems to have marked this departure.

The text accompanying the caricature gives a fair summary of his career to date:

He is lineally descended from the Forbses of Tolquhon, Thanes of Formartin; he is grandson of John Robertson, merchant, of Aberdeen; he is eldest son of John Forbes-Robertson, well known as an art critic and journalist; and he was born two-and-forty years ago. He inherited ideas of Art and having laid the foundation of his learning at Charterhouse he became a Royal Academy student, and presently won for himself recognition as a painter. The late Mr Phelps, believing in him as an artist of another kind, attracted him stagewards; and, playing with Mrs Rousby in ‘Marie Stuart’, he justified Mr Phelps more than twenty years ago. Then the Bancrofts perceived his virtue, and for long he knew the old stage in Tottenham Court Road. [1] Painstaking, full of artistic conception, handsome and an admirable elocutionist, he has steadily made his way to the very front of his profession, identifying himself with many parts […] he is now nightly to be seen in ‘The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith’, and he is so great and so conscientious an artist that in this thankless part he plays as lifelike and weak-minded an ass as one may find off the stage; doing it so well that country folk who see him for the first time regard him as a most contemptible fellow: and thereby pay very high tribute to a real actor.

He is about to manage; and in the first week of September he will produce at the Lyceum a new play by Henry Arthur Jones. After that it is to be hoped that he will revive ‘Romeo and Juliet’; for to Modjeska he played altogether the best Romeo of our time. As a picture maker he was hung at Burlington House for years; [2] and he has painted portraits of Phelps, of Mrs Kendal and of Ellen Terry [see NPG 3789]; while in the Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum hangs that picture of the Church scene in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ which he painted for Mr Irving. [3] He can fence: having learned the art when under priestly charge at Rouen; he has a morbid horror of portraits in costume; and he believes that scene-setting can be overdone in the way of splendour.

Though he is an actor yet he is a modest fellow. He is also a gentleman who will make a good actor-manager; and many will wish him well. [4]

The article was either prescient or persuasive, for in December Forbes-Robertson revived Romeo and Juliet, playing opposite Mrs Patrick Campbell; see ‘All known portraits, In stage character, Romeo and Juliet, Photographs, c.1895’.

Sitter and artist had been fellow-students at the Royal Academy Schools. Ward recalled Forbes-Robertson one day rejoicing at having met his hero, Henry Irving, for the first time, [5] while Forbes-Robertson described Ward’s father, Edward Matthew Ward RA, as ‘the best teacher of them all’, adding that, later, ‘everybody was only too pleased to be caricatured’ by ‘Spy’. [6] Although, as an habitué of the Prince of Wales’s Theatre in the 1870s, Ward will have regularly seen Forbes-Robertson onstage, the rather anodyne quality of these references does not suggest great intimacy and Forbes-Robertson’s male friendships seem characterized by courteous reserve rather than great warmth. The sub-title ‘Forbie’ attached to the publication of the present image indicates how he was informally known in the theatres and clubs. [7]

Unusually for Vanity Fair, a second image of Forbes-Robertson, drawn by Alexander ‘Alick’ Penrose Forbes Ritchie, was published eighteen years later, when he retired from the stage, although it appeared before he received his knighthood: see NPG D9740.

Dr Jan Marsh

Footnotesback to top

1) The Prince of Wales’s Theatre, run by Marie and Squire Bancroft until 1880.
2) I.e. the Royal Academy summer show.
3) See ‘All known portraits, In stage character, Much Ado about Nothing, Self-portraits, 1882–3’.
4) ‘Jehu Junior’, ‘Men of the Day no.619’, Vanity Fair, 2 May 1895, p.287.
5) Ward 1915, p.86.
6) Forbes-Robertson 1925, p.58.
7) Burton 1938, p.122.

Physical descriptionback to top

Whole-length standing, profile to left, with hands on hips (left arm only shown).

Provenanceback to top

Purchased 1938.

Exhibitionsback to top

Society of Portrait Painters 1896 (236).

Reproductionsback to top

Chromolithograph by Vincent Brooks, Day & Co. Ltd, Vanity Fair, 2 July 1895, captioned ‘Forbie’; print NPG D44749. This is itself repr. Whyte 1898, p.186b.

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