The Grecian Marriage

Arguably the most ambitious work of Richard Westall’s career, this striking panel was unquestionably the most important commission he received from Richard Payne Knight, one of the leading connoisseurs, collectors, and scholars of his generation. As recorded by Joseph Farington in 1811, Knight offered Westall the colossal sum of 1000 guineas - rightly described by the artist as ‘a most liberal commission’ - for this imposing panel, an upscaled oil of a drawing he had made for William Chamberlayne (op. cit., 1927). This astonishing fee was more than double what Lawrence, then the pre-eminent portrait painter of the day, asked for a full-length, or Turner commanded for a ‘six footer’ landscape. On 1 November 1812 Farington noted that ‘Westall had been in London the whole of the autumn chiefly employed on the picture of ‘the Grecian Marriage’ ordered by Mr Richard Payne Knight’ (op. cit.).

With the encouragement of Payne Knight, who commissioned no fewer than nine pictures from the artist, Westall staged a one-man exhibition at the New Gallery in 1814, where this panel was evidently one of the star attractions (loc. cit.). The following lines from Pope's translation of The Iliad (Book 18) were included beneath the entry in the catalogue:

'Along the street the new made brides are led,
With torches flaming to the nuptial bed:
The youthful dancers in a circle bound
To the soft flute, and cittern's silver sound:
Thro' the fair streets, the matrons in a row
Stand in their porches, and enjoy the show.'

Knight's pride in seeing the finished work at the New Gallery exhibition was unconstrained. That year he wrote, ‘We observed too, with equal satisfaction, in late exhibitions, instances of the utmost purity and dignity of heroic character and composition, embellished and not impaired by the most rich and splendid colouring, in Mr Westall’s Grecian Marriage.’

Born in Reepham near Norwich, Westall was apprenticed to a heraldic silver engraver in London in 1779 before joining the Royal Academy Schools in 1785. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1794 and served as drawing master to Princess Victoria, later Queen Victoria, for eight years before his death in 1836. Westall participated regularly in exhibitions, showing over three hundred works at the Royal Academy and seventy at the British Institution. Although he painted Queen Victoria, Westall is arguably best known for his portraits of the poet Lord Byron, a great admirer of the artist who famously declared ‘the brush has beat the poetry’. Westall was a highly accomplished and much in demand draughtsman; he was commissioned to provide illustrations to John Boydell’s editions of Shakespeare and John Milton, as well as for the works of Sir Walter Scott, Oliver Goldsmith and William Cowper. In addition to Payne Knight, Westall's patrons included Thomas Hope, Samuel Rogers and The Prince Regent.

From 1790-1795 Westall lived at 57 Greek Street with Thomas Lawrence, another artist who benefited early on in his career from the patronage of Payne Knight. It was presumably through Lawrence that Westall was introduced to Knight, who sat to Lawrence on three occasions, including the memorable three-quarter-length at Manchester (1794; fig. 1). The influence the precociously gifted Lawrence exerted on Westall is evident in the latter’s brooding self-portrait of circa 1793 (London, Royal Academy; fig. 2). A drawing of Westall (mid-1790s; private collection; fig. 3), inscribed by both him and Lawrence, further attests to their artistic intimacy during this period together at Greek Street.

Having travelled widely in Italy during his youth, when he befriended the celebrated archaeologist and diplomat William Hamilton, Payne Knight became, upon his return to England, a keen Classics scholar and a leading authority on ancient art, although his reputation was tarnished towards the end of his life by his vociferous criticism of the Elgin marbles. In 1786, he published his notorious Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, in which he sought to recover the importance of ancient phallic cults. Knight's most influential book, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, was published in 1805. He served as a prominent member of the Society of Dilettanti and was a keen collector. On his death in 1824, he bequeathed to the British Museum a magnificent collection of antique coins, medals and bronzes, and a vast ensemble of 1,144 Old Master drawings, which transformed the museum’s holdings.

Less well-known was the heterogeneous group of paintings he amassed at his estate of Downton, Shropshire, which included works of remarkable quality and variety, notably Rembrandt’s late masterpiece of Saint Bartholomew (1661; Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum), Mantegna’s Adoration of the Shepherds (c.1450; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Adam Elsheimer’s copper, Il Contento (c.1607; Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland); a work that bears some conspicuous parallels - if not in terms of scale - with the present panel, notably for its composition, theatrical lighting and highly polished surface. When Knight acquired the Elsheimer is unclear, but it is tempting to imagine that either Westall was introduced to the German master’s picture by his patron or, alternatively, the latter acquired the copper because it recalled this much-prized commission from Westall. Payne Knight was also a leading exponent of the Picturesque movement in country house architecture and landscaping. Following picturesque principles, at Downton he oversaw the construction in 1773-4 of a castle with an asymmetrical plan. His design of surrounding gardens was inspired by the work of Claude, Gaspard Dughet and the great Dutch masters Meindert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael.