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Lot Essay
John Wootton was the pre-eminent artist specialising in sporting and landscape subjects for most of the first half of the eighteenth century. His equestrian portraits were hugely popular amongst royal and aristocratic patrons, elevating the genre of animal portraiture to new heights and establishing precedents for equine subjects which were to be widely imitated. The present work reveals all the qualities of John Wootton’s most successful and majestic horse portraits, and also stands as a touching record of an animal which was clearly held in particularly close affection by its owner.
John Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and Orrery (1707-1762), was a writer who counted some of the greatest intellectuals of his day as friends, including Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift. These relationships are recorded in Boyle’s extensive letters, but a less well-known character who receives frequent mention, is Nobby. Writing to his friend, the playwright Thomas Southerne (1660-1746), Nobby is variously described by Boyle as ‘my little favourite King Nobby’, ‘the charming King Nobby’ and ‘the great King Nobby’ (The Countess of Cork and Orrery, Ed., The Orrery Papers, London, 1903, I, pp. 123, 127-8 and 149). Two years after this portrait was completed, Nobby died, after almost 28 years with Boyle. In memory of his noble companion, Boyle built a grand funerary monument for the horse in the gardens of his seat, Marston House, Frome. The epitaph read:
‘[Here] are interred the bones of KING NOBBY; a Horse, who was superlatively beautiful in his kind. He loved his master with an affection far exceeding the love of brutes. He had sense, courage, strength, majesty, spirit, and obedience. He never started, he never tript, he never stumbled. He lived to an uncommon age, and till within two years of his death retained all his natural excellences and vigour. His limbs were sound to his last moments, he having enjoyed the peculiar felicity of scarce ever having been lame or sick during the long course of his life.’ (M. Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship, Pennsylvania, 2017, p. 1).
The painting stayed in the collection at Marston until 1905, when the house and its contents were sold after the death of the 9th Earl of Cork and Orrery. Ellis Waterhouse described this painting as ‘larger and grander’ than most of Wootton’s equestrian portraits with a groom of this type (E. Waterhouse, op. cit., p. 423). It is reminiscent of scenes from the large-scale schemes Wootton completed at Badminton, Althorp and Longleat. The grandeur and detail of the classical architectural setting and soft landscape recall the work of seventeenth century Italianate landscape artists whose work Wootton’s patrons also coveted. Indeed, Horace Walpole wrote that as a landscapist Wootton's works 'approached towards Gaspar Poussin and sometimes imitated happily the glow of Claude Lorrain' (H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, London, 1771, IV, p. 59). The diffused light in the sky and the highlights picked out in details of the architecture, including the Corinthian capitals, are particularly redolent of Claude’s work.
In the background a groom leads another horse through a doorway. Above the pediment is the coat-of-arms representing the marital arms of the Earl and his first wife, Lady Henrietta Hamilton (d. 1732), daughter of the 1st Earl of Orkney. John and Henrietta married in 1728, but this coat of arms would only have been used after John succeeded to the Earldom in 1731 and until his second marriage in 1738, to Margaret Hamilton, 15 years before the present work was completed. It is therefore likely that Wootton recorded, at least elements of, an extant building on the estate at Marston, probably the stables.