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| See Also: Hon. Emma (Crewe) Cunliffe, later Emma Cunliffe-Offley |
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| | Hon. Emma (Crewe) Cunliffe, later Emma Cunliffe-Offley
ca.1809-1830
| Sitter: Hon. Emma (Crewe) Cunliffe, later Emma Cunliffe-Offley
British, 1780 - 1850
| Maker: Thomas Lawrence
British, 1769-1830
| 50 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (128.3 x 102.9 cm.)
| oil on canvas
| The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
| | Elizabeth Emma Crewe was born February 15, 1780, the only surviving daughter of John Crewe (1742-1829) of Crewe Hall, Cheshire, and his wife Frances Anne Greville Crewe (1744-1818). Her father was created 1st Baron Crewe in 1806 in recognition of loyal service to the Whig party during forty-eight years as a member of parliament. But it was her mother's legendary beauty, intelligence, and political zeal that attracted a galaxy of political and cultural luminaries to the family circle. As a young girl, Emma Crewe garnered high praise from Fanny Burney, who found her "extremely well bred, sensible, attentive, & intelligent" and "promising to resemble mentally her charming Mother." She delighted in music and often performed as a singer at social gatherings. Numerous contemporary accounts attest to her considerable ability. On March 16, 1809 the painter Thomas Lawrence reported to a friend that Emma Crewe had refused a marriage proposal from Sir W.W. Wynne. One month later, on April 21, 1809, she married Foster Cunliffe (1782-1832) of Acton Park, Wrexham, elder son of Sir Foster Cunliffe (1755-1834), 3rd Baronet, and his wife Harriet. Having no children of their own, she and her husband later assumed responsibility for raising their young niece, the Hon. Annabella Crewe (1814-1874), daughter of Emma's elder brother John, 2nd Baron Crewe (1772-1835). In 1829, on inheriting the property of Madeley, Staffordshire, her husband adopted the surname Offley, by which her own family had been known prior to the early eighteenth century. Following her husband's death on April 19, 1832, Emma Cunliffe-Offley spent several years traveling with her niece in Germany, Austria, and Italy. She returned briefly to England on the death of her mother in December 1835, when it was observed that she would have perished from grief, had it not been for the affectionate support of her niece. It was to Annabella that Emma Cunliffe-Offley left the present painting (together with furnishings at Madeley and at her house in Upper Brook Street) when she died on February 15, 1850.
In this atmospheric portrait, Lawrence revisited a mode of presentation that had recurred in English portraiture since the seventeenth century. Setting his solitary female subject in the gloom of a densely wooded landscape with the fading light of an evening sky beyond, he illuminated her face and voluptuous figure with a suffused beam of warm light. The twilit backdrop creates a mood of poetic stillness, conferring an air of mystery on the figure, who seems perfectly at home in the dark wood. The portrait recalls a type favored particularly by Peter Lely (1618-80), who employed it as a means of investing his female subjects with a poetic and aggrandizing sense of timelessness. Reinforcing their detachment from mundane reality, Lely draped his sitters in vaguely classical garments, revealing their bare arms and breasts in a way that contemporary fashions did not allow. In this way, he imbued his portraits with a ripe sensuousness as well as a beguiling element of fantasy.
In the present portrait, Lawrence drew on the body-conscious neo-classical stylings of contemporary fashion to invest Emma Cunliffe's portrait with an analogous air of timelessness and sensuality. The high waist and form-revealing fit of her gown are loosely modeled on antique sculpture, with abbreviated short sleeves revealing a good deal of her bare arms and a low, draw-string neckline exposing her neck and chest. Beneath the clinging neo-classical drapery, she wears a corset designed to lift and separate the breasts, thereby accentuating their shape and prominence. A tawny-brown mantel has slipped from her shoulders and fallen in a luxurious mass about her, where its deep color and voluminousness provide foils to her pale, lightly clothed body. Her casual act of self-exposure, together with the openness of her pose and the directness of her gaze heighten the portrait's air of sensuality and intimacy. These characteristics are appropriate to the occasion of the portrait, commissioned by the sitter's husband at the time of their marriage.
In conjunction with Emma Cunliffe's outdoor setting and neo-classical dress, the dog seated beside her may be intended to lend the painting a slightly pastoral air, subtly likening the sitter to an Arcadian shepherdess. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, artists such as Lely had adopted this fanciful literary conceit, drawing on the pastoral themes of court masques and contemporary poetry in which shepherds and shepherdesses stood, in part, for the rejection of artificiality and the embracing of a simpler, more "natural" state. By the late eighteenth century, pastoral allusions had been diluted to a more generic form, merely intended to add a charming note of whimsy, and almost exclusively limited to paintings of women. Joshua Reynolds had drawn on these conventions in 1772, with his portrait of Emma Cunliffe's mother, Frances Crewe, whom he represented as an elegant shepherdess, with her dozing lapdog filling in for a sheep dog.
Painted thirty years later, Lawrence's portrait forges a more elemental link between his sitter and her natural setting. Nestled seamlessly within the landscape, the rising curve of her body mirrors the contour of the silhouetted mountain behind her. She appears almost to be part of nature, rather than an artificial insertion into it. Lawrence reinforced the connection between figure and setting through his dramatic use of light and shade, allowing the extremities of the figure to melt into the darkness, and repeating the light that falls on her body in the streaks of the setting sun. His suggestion of an essential unity between Emma Cunliffe and her environment reflects the Romantic notion of connection between man--and especially woman--and the natural world. This sentiment had informed Lawrence's portraiture since the beginning of his career and accounts for the emotional power of portraits such as Pinkie. Weighed down somewhat by heavier atmospherics and more fulsome sentiment, the present portrait lacks the fresh vitality and directness of those earlier essays.
The mountainous terrain that forms the backdrop of this painting alludes to the Cheshire countryside surrounding the estate of Emma Cunliffe's parents, Crewe Hall, where Lawrence was a frequent guest during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The Crewe family connection with Lawrence would certainly have been a factor in Foster Cunliffe's choice of the artist as his wife's portraitist. Indeed, Lawrence was painting Lord and Lady Crewe while carrying out the present portrait of their daughter. By that time, however, he had become a victim of his own success. In a letter of May 10, 1803, he complained that the steady stream of four or five new sitters a day left no time to finish the paintings he had already begun. His clients complained bitterly of his neglect of pictures long since paid for. The same difficulties plagued the present portrait. Commenced with a partial payment of fifty guineas in 1809, it remained unfinished in Lawrence's studio at the time of his death in 1830. Foster Cunliffe-Offley wrote three letters to Lawrence's executors before finally receiving his wife's portrait on April 17, 1830, when it was described as only three-quarters finished.
It is unknown by whom or at what date the remainder of the picture was completed. The artist must have been intimately acquainted with Lawrence's methods and style, as microscopic analysis has revealed no clear evidence of more than one hand. In any case, by 1850 the finished portrait of Emma Cunliffe hung in the dining room of her London house in Upper Brook Street, where it remained during the tenure of her niece, Annabella, and her husband Richard Monckton Milnes. The casualness with which subsequent owners sometimes altered historic portraits to suit their own requirements is suggested by a comment made by Milnes's father, who upon seeing the painting in 1852, suggested that the couple hire an artist "to reconstruct the dress," because "it omits the charmingest portion of the female form, making the lower limbs join the bosom." Fortunately, the portrait escaped defacement and remains in remarkably good condition to this day.
|  | | | Accession No. 17.29
| Provenance:
Paid for by the sitter's husband, the Hon. Foster Cunliffe; to the sitter, 1832; to her niece, Annabella Crewe, wife of Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Lord Houghton; by descent to their only son, Robert Offley Crewe-Milnes, Marquess of Crewe, Crewe Hall, Cheshire; sold to Duveen; acquired by Henry E. Huntington, 1917
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