HENRI BENNER (FRENCH, 1776-1829)

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THE LONDONDERRYS The Londonderry name will be familiar to many as that of one of Britain’s most prominent aristocratic dynasties and is synonymous with the important art collection they assembled. Londonderry House, Mayfair was amongst the grandest of London’s townhouses, occupying a position at the heart of the capital’s social and political life for almost 150 years; it is from Londonderry House and the family’s grandest country house, the palatial Wynyard Park, that this collection of works of art come. The historic importance of the family as politicians, industrialists, collectors and patrons, is evident throughout this fascinating group, which gives a rare glimpse into both the public and private lives of this illustrious family and a long vanished world of political salons and grand aristocratic house parties. AHS. THE VANE-TEMPEST-STEWARTS – MARQUESSES OF LONDONDERRY By Peter Lauritzen The Stewarts of Northern Ireland were of Scottish origin and part of James I’s Protestant Plantation in Ireland. They added the surname Vane, and subsequently Tempest, after the marriage in 1819 of Charles, then Lord Stewart, a distinguished soldier and diplomatist in the Napoleonic Wars, to the Durham coal-mining heiress Frances Anne Vane-Tempest. Alexander Stewart, grandson of a Colonel William Stewart (who had been present at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690), married Mary Cowan, the heiress to a governor of Bombay. She brought a vast nabob fortune to the family along with the ‘Down Diamonds’ conventionally described as coming from the legendary Golconda mines and today part of the famous Londonderry Jewels now on loan from the Marquess of Londonderry to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mary’s fortune allowed Alexander Stewart in 1748 to purchase an estate on the Ards peninsula between the Irish Sea and a vast sea inlet, Strangford Lough, which would become Mount Stewart. Stewart wealth financed not only a political career in the Dublin Parliament for Alexander’s son, Robert, but a climb up the social ladder which was extraordinary by any standards. He married first a daughter of the Marquess of Hertford, who died in 1770. He then contracted a politically even more important alliance by marrying the daughter of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden. By 1789 he was raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Londonderry; then in 1795, the year when his brother-in-law became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he was made the Earl of Londonderry, which enabled his eldest son by his first marriage, also called Robert, to be styled Viscount Castlereagh. It was in recognition of Castlereagh’s political services at Westminster, after creating the Union, that his father was advanced to be anIrish Marquess in 1819. Robert Castlereagh was one of the most brilliant political figures of his day. As Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822, he dominated the negotiations leading up to and following the defeat of Napoleon. His most significant political and diplomatic legacy was associated with The Congress of Vienna at the close of the Napoleonic wars. Castlereagh achieved recognition as primus inter pares at the Vienna meetings attended by the absolute monarchs who formed the coalition that defeated Napoleon. He so distinguished himself that in 1821 the King George IV offered to make him Prime Minister, however the strain put on him during his time as Foreign Secretary was beginning to take its toll and he turned the offer down. Ultimately his work in Vienna produced a peace so that Britain did not go to war on the European continent again for one hundred years. On the death of his father in 1821, Castlereagh became the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, only to die by his own hand a year later. In his own day Castlereagh was often vilified by his fellow countrymen for bindingIreland to British government and for his perceived ruthlessness in the suppression of disorder. But Castlereagh’s role in creating the ‘special relationship’ with the United States of America is often overlooked. Following the Anglo-American conflict of 1812, the American negotiator in the peace talks, John Quincy Adams, although virulently anti-British, came to respect and admire Castlereagh’s integrity and dignity, qualities recognized even by his political opponents and enemies. Their mutual respect approached friendship, which resulted in the Treaty of Ghent and an end to he armed hostility between the United States and the United Kingdom. Charles William Stewart (later Vane), the 3rd Marquess, was often referred to as ‘Fighting Charlie’ or ‘The Soldier Marquess’, for his distinguished military career during the Napoleonic wars, where he served in the Peninsula under Wellington. So devoted to ‘The Iron Duke’ was he, that he built a 127 ft. obelisk in the park at Wynyard to commemorate his visit in 1827, as well as renaming the suite of rooms where he stayed ‘The Duke’s Gallery’, and it was from Stewart that Wellington acquired the famed Arab racehorse, Copenhagen. Wellington’s qualified opinion of him as a soldier was later offset by the his claim that the 3rd Marquess ‘was an excellent ambassador, procured more information and obtained more insight into the affairs of a foreign court than anybody’. It was for these qualities that his half-brother Castlereagh used him, at first in the Peninsular War, where his reports on Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) led to a partnership between the Foreign Secretary and the General that would bring Napoleon to his knees. Remarkably for a serving general officer, he wrote an account of the Peninsular War, and his description of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October of 1813 (which he witnessed in his role as British Minister to Berlin) was read into the official Parliamentary record of the war. The same was true of his accounts of the triumphal entry into Paris after the Battle of Montmartre and of his rich and varied life, with travels with his wife back to Vienna, the scene of his longest embassy and on to Athens, Istanbul and Italy. It was during his embassy in Vienna, that in 1819 he married the heiress Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, allowing him to rebuild her ancestral Wynyard Park, County Durham, on a monumental scale and to purchase and remodel Londonderry House (then named Holdernesse House) on Park Lane, creating the palatial interiors for which it became famous with the assistance of his friend, the Duke of Wellington’s, architects Benjamin Dean and Philip Wyatt. Later her immense wealth also allowed him to develop her Durham mining interests with the construction of a harbour and a railway at Seaham, where they purchased Seaham Hall, the manor house in which Lord Byron had been married to Augusta Millbanke. The reconstruction of Wynyard taxed his wife’s Vane-Tempest inheritance so heavily, that the Marquess was obliged to sell the magnificent Old Master paintings he had purchased from Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, the deposed Queen of Naples. With thirteen paintings (including works by Titian and Domenichino) being sold at Christie’s in 1823 and later the two Correggios being sold to the newly-created National Gallery. While in Italy in 1841 the Londonderrys learned that Wynyard, had been gutted by fire. His wife took to her bed for a fortnight in despair, but the Marquess was undeterred and ordered the immediate rebuilding of the house and the result is widely regarded as one of the finest 19th century houses in England. The Stewarts, beginning with Castlereagh, had patronised the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence from early in his career. The Prince Regent disliked Lawrence because of his links with the Princess of Wales, later Queen Caroline. However, the 3rd Marquess commissioned a wonderfully romantic profile head of the Prince Regent from Lawrence, which the Prince admired, and which led him to commission the artist to paint the portraits of all of the sovereigns, their generals and foreign ministers involved in the defeat of Napoleon to adorn the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle. Lawrence’s much earlier portrait of Charles Stewart in hussar’s uniform, now on loan to the National Gallery, is considered to be one of his masterpieces. Frederick, the 4th Marquess, son of the 3rd Marquess by his first wife Lady Catherine Bligh, succeeded to none of the English, and only a portion of the Irish estates. He preferred to live at his wife’s house, Powerscourt, in the south of Ireland. His half-brother, the eldest son of the 3rd Marquess by his marriage to Frances Anne rejoiced in a separate viscountcy earldom created in his favour as Earl Vane and Viscount Seaham. He lived at Plas Mchynlleth on his wife’s extensive estates in Wales. Lord Seaham became the 5th Marquess of Londonderry in 1875, when his son, Charles, then became the 3rd to use the courtesy title of Viscount Castlereagh. The young Castlereagh married the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lady Theresa Chetwynd-Talbot, who would become one of the greatest political hostesses of her generation. On his father’s death in 1884, Castlereagh became the 6th Marquess, taking up his considerable duties as one of England’s largest coal owners and in 1886 he was appointed as Lord Lieutenant or Viceroy of Ireland (the first from an Irish family to hold the post). In gratitude for his service he was created a Knight of the Garter. Together with his first cousin, Randolph Churchill, he opposed Irish Home Rule (by contrast, Lord Randolph’s son, Winston Churchill, supported it), the position of the Londonderrys at the centre of political life was confirmed when Edward VII held a meeting of the Privy Council at Wynyard in 1903. In the death of the 6th Marquess in 1915, it was the turn of Charles, 7th Marquess to add lustre to the family reputation with the aid of his extraordinary wife, Edith Chaplin. They led a sumptuous life divided between Londonderry House, with its legendary Eve of Parliament receptions, Wynyard and Mount Stewart, which they embellished with one hundred acres of gardens. As Secretary for Air he promoted the development of the Spitfire aircraft and the use of radar in the period before the Second World War, he also piloted an open cockpit bi-plane on a 16,000 mile long inspection of British air bases in the Middle East. Subsequently in his retirement, after the war, he took up gliding, which led to an accident that contributed to his death in 1949. As early as 1937 the 7th Marquess had foreseen the end of the grand life that he and his wife had lived with such gusto and generosity. He predicted that the age of the great London townhouses was at an end. The nationalisation of the coal industry crippled the revenues that had supported Wynyard and Londonderry House, and the latter was eventually demolished in 1962. Despite great efforts by the 9th Marquess to maintain Wynyard, the house was eventually sold in 1987. It was through the efforts of the 7th Marquess and his youngest daughter that Mount Stewart has been preserved by the National Trust of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to commemorate the extraordinary contribution made by seven generations of Marquesses of Londonderry to the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Peter Lauritzen Mount Stewart 2014 Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (later 2nd Marquess of Londonderry), KG, GCH, PC, (1769 –1822) Viscount Castlereagh was a gifted politician and diplomat, serving first in the Irish parliament and subsequently at Westminster. He was the driving force behind the Irish Act of Union of 1800, which inextricably linked his native Ireland to British Parliamentary rule. As a result he was widely vilified by his countrymen, although his primary motivation, to protect Ireland (and by extension Great Britain) from annexation by Napoleon’s Empire is often overlooked. His diplomatic contribution to the defeat of Napoleon, whilst serving as British Foreign Secretary, was his greatest achievement and it is for this that he is best known. He was widely credited for the successful coalitions brought about between the allied European Sovereign states from 1813 to 1815, including the Treaties of Chaumont (1814), Paris (1814 and 1815), Vienna (1815) and the Quadruple Alliance (1815), which ultimately led to a lasting peace. Castlereagh received at least twenty-one gold portrait snuff boxes as diplomatic gifts from European sovereigns in gratitude for his invaluable contribution and statesmanship during the talks, which culminated in the 1815 Congress. On 21 July 1817 Castlereagh commissioned the Royal goldsmiths, Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, to use the gold from these boxes to create what would become the ‘Castlereagh Inkstand’. The inkstand was not completed until at least the 29 May 1819, and bears the mark of Paul Storr, Rundell, Bridge & Rundell’s premier goldsmith, as well as the inscription, ‘This inkstand is composed of the gold taken from the portrait snuff boxes which were presented by the sovereigns whose arms are engraven hereon to Viscount Castlereagh upon the signature of the several treaties concluded in the Years 1813, 1814, and 1815’. The portrait miniatures, which were removed from the boxes before they were melted down, were subsequently returned to the family, and it is from that group that the following six miniatures almost certainly come. The portrait of Alexander I, Emperor of Russia (lot 401) is probably from a snuff box noted in Rundell, Bridge & Rundell’s accounts as having yielded £450 worth of diamonds. These diamonds, and the others which came from the boxes, were set into the Londonderry Garter sword, and subsequently into the Londonderry stomacher, both of which are on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the Castlereagh inkstand now forms part of the permanent collection.

Details

HENRI BENNER (FRENCH, 1776-1829)
Alexander I (1777-1825), Emperor of Russia 1801-1825, in black uniform with red and gold collar and gold epaulettes, wearing the blue sash and breast-star of the Imperial Russian Order of St. Andrew, the badges of the Order of St. George, the Swedish Order of the Sword, the Austrian Order of Maria-Theresa, the Order of the Iron Cross, and the Russian Medal for the 1812 War
on ivory
rectangular, 2½ in. (63 mm.) high, in gilt-metal frame surmounted by a crown, engraved on reverse, 'Emperor of Russia'

Provenance

Almost certainly given by Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, to Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769 –1822), mounted to the cover of a gold snuff box, following the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and by descent.

Literature

Photographed in situ in the library at Wynyard Park, County Durham, circa 1890.
Wynyard Park, inventory, 1956, p. 113.

Special notice

Prospective purchasers are advised that several countries prohibit the importation of property containing materials from endangered species, including but not limited to coral, ivory and tortoiseshell. Accordingly, prospective purchasers should familiarize themselves with relevant customs regulations prior to bidding if they intend to import this lot into another country.

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