John Closterman
(Osnabrück 1660 — London 1711)

Portrait of Edward Radclyffe 2nd Earl of Derwentwater
(1655 — 1705)

oval, oil on canvas

30"×25" (76.25 cm×63.5 cm)

PROVENANCE:
Sir Richard Armitage, Kent, England (according to an old label); Frampton Ellis, Georgia from whom acquired by Private Collection, Maine

The hauteur and entitlement that Closterman captures suit the heir to one of England’s richest and most ambitious Catholic families. The portrait of circa 1695 represents a high-water mark for both painter and sitter. John Closterman was a leader in the race to be London’s leading society portraitist, and Edward Radclyffe, married to a King’s daughter, must have felt he was to sire a lasting dynasty. Within five years both men’s fortunes had turned. Closterman was to paint Queen Anne in 1702 but he had already lost his position by going abroad in 1698; and although Radclyffe died in his bed, the political and religious divisions which would send both of his sons to the block were already deeply felt.

By the 1690s Closterman had fully emerged from the chrysalis of his partnership with John Riley. He was rediscovering earlier influences, especially the extravagant, textural, French manner he learned in Paris under François de Troy. Sir Richard Blackmore (engraved R. Williams) dating to circa 1697, identical to our portrait in execution, displays the same flamboyance and penetrating sense of character. Closterman’s sense of theater and his mastery of colour - the brilliant spun-gold effect of the wig and the sheen of the salmon pink robe — explains his appeal to a broad clientage, from magnates like the Dukes of Somerset and Marlborough to Sir Christopher Wren, and Henry Purcell, the geniuses of the age.

Radclyffe’s father Francis (1625-1697) was created Earl of Derwentwater by James II in 1688 as a reward for his loyalty. He had married his son to Lady Mary Tudor, youngest of King Charles II’s children in 1687, placing his family at the heart of the Court. Lady Mary’s mother was Mary ’Moll’ Davis, a singer who like her rival Nell Gwynn(1) had first caught the King’s eye at the theater,(2) though unlike the famous orange seller she entered more decorously into the life of the Court. The great political and religious schism brought about by the King’s Catholicism, the bond the Radclyffes shared with him, was to ruin them all. Although Radclyffe remained nominally loyal to William and Mary after the Revolution of 1688, he and his Protestant wife disagreed so violently in religion that they had separated by 1700, and their son James — at the request of Queen Mary of Modena — was growing up in exile at St Germain as a playmate to his cousin Prince James, ’the Old Pretender.’ Although Edward died peacefully in his bed in 1705, his sons James 3rd Earl and Charles 5th Earl were to be executed in 1716 and 1746 respectively for siding with their cousin in the Jacobite rebellions, and the Radclyffe family which had seemed poised to reap the greatest rewards by their loyalty to the Stuarts paid the greatest price for it.

After 1746 the Radclyffe family portraits descended to the Radcliffe baronets of Milnebridge, Yorkshire. Eliza-Matilda-Mary Radcliffe married Sir George Armitage Bt of Kirklees, Yorkshire in 1841, and this portrait may have entered the Armitage family at that date.

Dr. Malcolm Rogers has confirmed the work to be by John Closterman and dates it to the 1690s.

(1) Who is said to have tried to sabotage a liaison with the King by feeding Moll sweetmeats laced with laxative (A. Smith, The School of Venus, 1716).

(2) She sang My lodging it is on the Cold Ground ’so Charmingly that not long after it raised her from a Bed on the Cold Ground to a Bed Royal’ (J. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Milhous and Hume, pt. 1, 1965 p. 55).

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