Item | Waddesdon Manor

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artist or maker

Reynolds, Joshua (b.1723, d.1792)

Date

1777

exhibition date

Place of production

London, England, United Kingdom

Medium

oil on canvas

Type of object

paintings

Accession number

690

Painting of a fortune-teller reading the palm of a girl seated on the lap of a boy. The fortune-teller stands to the left. She is a young woman with dark skin wearing a loose orange top and skirt, with a white ribbon tied over her hair and under her chin. She bends down taking the girl's hand in her left hand and holding her right to her chest with her index finger pointing towards the boy. She smiles slightly.

The boy and girl sit on the right of the painting. The boy wears an orange velvet suit with a matching feathered hat. He leans forward, his mouth slightly open, with a concerned look on his face. He holds onto the wrist of the girl with his right hand, and onto the waist of the girl with his left. The girl sits on his lap. She holds out her right hand to the fortune-teller and turns to face the viewer; her mouth is open in laughter with her teeth visible. She wears a white dress with a striped over-gown tied with a blue ribbon at her chest and a patterned scarf round her waist. Their large wooden chair has a green drape on the back.

Behind, there is a table or window sill with a plate of grapes. To the right, there is a wall; to the left, a grape vine opening out to a view of the sky, fields, trees and distant hills.

Commentary

By 1777, Joshua Reynolds had become a very successful portrait painter but also the first president of the newly-founded Royal Academy. In this painting, he sought to re-invent a subject that had been developed by 16th and 17th-century Italian, French and Dutch masters. The subject matter has not always been easily understood in light of Reynolds's attempts to paint learned and noble subjects.

Reynolds shows the fortune-teller on the left with the characteristic dark skin of a gypsy, contrasting her complexion with the white skin and dress of the innocent, though foolish, girl who laughs at the viewer. She sits on the knee of a young boy, dressed in historical attire, who seems concerned. The girl's lack of control is indicated by the fact that she shows her teeth, against contemporary codes of bodily decorum. Gypsies, believed originally to come from Egypt, had long appeared in popular theatre as well as in folktales. Reynolds probably relied on his audience's knowledge of contemporary masquerades where women often dressed as gypsies and men in 'vandyke' costumes.

Earlier artists such as Caravaggio and Vouet had depicted exotic and beautiful gypsies telling the fortune of fashionably-dressed young men and women who are often robbed of their purse or other valuables whilst distracted. One of Caravaggio's paintings of a fortune-teller was in the collection of Louis XVI of France. It would have been known to the man who bought Reynolds's work, the 3rd Duke of Dorset, as he was British Ambassador in Paris. Reynolds may have seen the Caravaggio painting in the original, or more likely in a copy or in a print. Another patron, the Duke of Marlborough, also owned a painting called 'The Egyptian Fortune-Tellers', thought to be by Caravaggio until 1770 when it was reattributed to Valentino (now Manfredi). At the Royal Academy exhibition of 1775, Reynolds showed a portrait of the Duke of Marlborough's children, Lord Henry and Lady Charlotte Spencer, in the guise of fortune tellers (now Huntington). That painting was engraved with the title ' The Young Fortune-Teller' in 1790.

In the Huntington portrait the children are idealized innocents. In the Waddesdon painting Reynolds brought the erotic connotations of the subject to the fore. He used street children as models for the boy and girl seated on the chair. During the 1770s he painted several works with eroticised street children, three of which were owned by the 3rd Duke of Dorset, who also bought this painting. The Duke of Dorset displayed Reynolds's low-life subjects alongside Dutch and Italian masterpieces in his state drawing room at Knole.

The Waddesdon painting was displayed in the Royal Academy in 1777. Newspaper critics were undecided as to whether it was a more intellectual history painting, or a more lowly genre painting. One described the painting as: 'A Gipsey is telling a young Girl, sitting on her Lover's Knees, her Fortune, and seems to be saying to her that she will soon be married to him, at which she laughs, and is pleased, without knowing well what it means. So I understand the historical part of this Picture'. However, another writer argued that it did not show 'a representation of some particular feat in ancient or modern, real or fabulous, sacred or profane history. But this is a representation of no such fact, and therefore cannot be called an historical piece any more than a picture of Jonah shuffling the cards would be'. The painting was engraved and copied several times attesting to its continued popularity.

An early commentator, Mrs Hester Thrale, who knew Reynolds personally, argued that the painting was a portrait, saying she knew the woman who sat for it. Mrs Thrale may have been thinking however of the earlier portrait of Lord Henry and Lady Charlotte Spencer (now Huntington). Alice de Rothschild, who inherited the painting in 1898, thought that the Waddesdon painting was also a portrait of the Spencer children, but of two girls - she wrongly thought that the boy wearing the velvet orange suit was a lady. She wrote in her notes that 'the lady and the child on her lap' were portraits of the Ladies Spencer Churchill.

A few years after he painted the Waddesdon picture, Reynolds made another version of the work which is now at Kenwood. When the Kenwood painting was sold in 1821, the seated boy was also identified as a girl.

Phillippa Plock, 2012

Physical description

Dimensions (mm) / weight (mg)

1201 x 1406

Signature & date

not signed or dated

Labels

HAB
F71
Label

History

Provenance

Bought from Joshua Reynolds by John Sackville 3rd Duke of Dorset (b.1745, d.1799) as "The Gipsey" for £367.10; by descent to his son George John Frederick Sackville, 4th Duke of Dorset (b.1793, d.1815); inherited by his sister Countess Mary Sackville Amherst (b.1792, d.1864) and her two husbands Other Archer Windsor, 6th Earl of Plymouth (1789–1833) and William Pitt Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst (1773–1857); inherited by her sister Countess Elizabeth Sackville De La Warr (b.1795, d.1870); by descent to her son Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville (b.1827, d.1908); sold privately through Christie's by 2nd Baron Sackville to Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (b.1839, d.1898) in 1890; inherited by his sister Alice de Rothschild (b.1847, d.1922); inherited by her great-nephew James de Rothschild (b.1878, d.1957); bequeathed to Waddesdon (National Trust) in 1957.

Exhibition history

Royal Academy Exhibition, London, 1777, no. 294 as 'A fortune-teller'
British Institute Exhibition, London, 1813, no. 13, lent by 4th Duke of Dorset
British Institute Exhibition, London, 1823, no. 20, lent by Dowager Duchess of Dorset
British Institute Exhibition, London, 1833, no. 22, lent by 6th Earl of Plymouth in right of his wife, Lady Mary Sackville
British Institute Exhibition, London, 1843, no. 17, lent by 1st Earl Amherst (2nd husband of Lady Mary Sackville)
British Institute Exhibition, London, 1851, no. 113, lent by 1st Earl Amherst (2nd husband of Lady Mary Sackville)
National Portrait Gallery, London, 1867, no. 713, lent by Countess De La Warr
Royal Academy Exhibition, London, 1951-1952, no. 76, lent by James A. de Rothschild

Collection

Waddesdon (National Trust)
Bequest of James de Rothschild, 1957

Bibliography

Gustav Friedrich Waagen; Galleries and cabinets of art (a supplemental volume to The Treasures of Art in Great Britain); London; John Murray; 1857; p. 340
E. A. Hamilton; A Catalogue Raisonné of the Engraved Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds; London; Colnaghi, P. & D. & Co. Ltd, P & D Colnaghi & Co. Ltd., Colnaghi, Colnaghi & Co.; 1884; p. 147
Algernon Graves, William Vine Cronin; A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds; 4 vols; London; Henry Graves; 1899-1901; vol. 3 p. 1153, vol. 4, p. 1480
Sir Walter Armstrong; Sir Joshua Reynolds; London; William Heinemann; 1900; p. 239
Ellis Waterhouse; Reynolds; London; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.,; 1941; p. 68
Ellis Waterhouse, Anthony Blunt; Paintings: The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor; Fribourg; Office du Livre, The National Trust; 1967; pp. 90-91, cat. no. 32, ill.
Malcolm Cormack, The Ledgers of Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Walpole Society, 42, 1968-1970, 105-69; p. 150
Martin Postle, Reynolds's Portraits at Waddesdon Manor: Painting for Posterity, Apollo, 139, 1994, 19-33; pp. 23-24, fig. 4
Martin Postle; Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures; Cambridge; Cambridge University Press; 1995; pp. 6-8, 94-95, 98, col. pl. 1
David Mannings, Martin Postle; Sir Joshua Reynolds: a Complete Catalogue of his Paintings; 2 vols; London; Yale University Press; 2000; p. 529, no. 2069, pl. 127, fig. 1622
Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett; British Painting at The Huntington; New Haven; Yale University Press; 2001; pp. 378-379, fig. 154
Julius Bryant; Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest; New Haven; Yale University Press; 2003; p. 332, fig. 1
Lucy Davis, Mark Hallett; Sir Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint; The Wallace Collection, London (12 March - 7 June 2015); London; Wallace Collection, Paul Holberton Publishing; 2015; pp. 94-95, fig. 68.

Other details

Subject person

Lady Caroline Spencer, Previous identification
Lady Elizabeth Spencer, Previous identification

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