Margaret Cocks, later Margaret Smith

Maker Richard Cosway (British, 1742-1821)

SitterSitter: Margaret Cocks, later Margaret Smith (British, 1773 - 1822)

Collections

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Date1787

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensions36 x 27 3/4 in. (91.4 x 70.5 cm.)

SignedSigned and dated lower right: 1787

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Clifford E. Clinton

Label TextMargaret Cocks was born May 23, 1773, the second daughter of Joseph Cocks of London (1732-1775), a barrister-at-law, and his wife Margaret, daughter of John Thorniloe. Her father died before her second birthday and she and her elder sister became co-heiresses to his estate. Contemporary reports estimated her fortune at £100,000. Margaret Cocks was evidently raised by one or more of her father's numerous siblings, the eldest being Charles Cocks (1725-1806) of Castleditch (now Eastnor Castle) who was created 1st Lord Somers, Baron of Evesham, in 1784. By the late 1790s she was living with her unmarried aunt, Elizabeth Cocks. She remained close to her sister Mary following the latter's marriage to William Russell, and in 1789 sat to Joshua Reynolds for a double portrait of herself and her young niece, Mary (Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood). In 1798 at the age of twenty-five, Margaret Cocks became the second wife of Joseph Smith (1757-1822) of Shortgrove, County Essex, who was sixteen years her senior. Smith was the secretary and intimate friend of the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and held numerous public offices. When in London the couple lived in Hereford Street, and their country residence was Shortgrove Hall, a seventeenth-century house with 700 acres near Newport, Essex, purchased by Joseph Smith from the Wyndham family. They had five sons and one daughter, and many grandchildren. Joseph Smith died on April 15, 1812, leaving the London house and its contents to his wife, and Shortgrove in trust to his eldest son, William Charles Smith. Margaret Smith subsequently moved to Devonshire Place and died there on June 29, 1847. She was buried at Newport Church, where she had arranged for a family vault in 1822.

Although Richard Cosway produced many full-scale portraits, he was best known for his miniature work. In the present portrait, the framed oval miniature suspended by a chain from the sitter's neck alludes to his more characteristic mode. The miniature also provides one of a number of clues indicating that the painting's thematic subtext is the longing of young Margaret Cocks for an absent loved one, presumably the person represented in the miniature. Fortunately, Cosway has delineated the miniature so precisely that it is possible to identify its subject as Margaret's elder sister, Mary (Cocks) Russell, as represented by John Smart in a miniature signed and dated 1781.
Cosway set the emotional tone of the portrait by modeling Margaret Cocks's pose on the ancient iconography of Melancholy, which had been widely disseminated in modern Europe by sixteenth-century Northern European engravings. The pose became a cliché of female portraiture in late eighteenth-century Britain, valued as a fashionably neo-classical embodiment of refined sensibilities. George Romney painted the sitter's aunt in a similar pose in 1776. In the present portrait, the girl's wistful gaze and abstracted expression, together with the inclination of her body away from the viewer and toward the rustic pastoral landscape behind her, indicate that her thoughts are far away. Her raised right arm physically connects the look of melancholic reverie with its source: a long letter which she has just finished reading, lying unfolded beneath her elbow. A similar linkage is created by the girl's hands, one supporting her drooping head, the other, directly below, resting beside the miniature portrait of her sister. The letter, we must assume, also came from Mary Russell, and it was possibly she who commissioned Cosway to execute this sentimental double portrait, perhaps during a period of separation from her sister.
The painting documents two of the principal means by which friendships were sustained in Britain prior to the twentieth century. While frequent social visits were the norm for those living in London and other cities, residents in the country and travelers abroad relied on the exchange of lengthy letters and journals to keep abreast of daily events in each other's lives. Portraiture played an equally vital role in these social relations, providing illusionistic surrogates for missing friends and family. The memorializing functions and consoling power of such portraits was often quite complex. In 1781 Margaret Cocks's uncle, Lord Somers, commissioned Romney to paint a portrait of his eldest son, John Somers Cocks, on the occasion of his twentieth birthday. But the painting was subsequently altered to make it commemorate the drowning death of a younger brother which occurred two days after the last sitting. Romney represented the heir leaning on a stone pillar, holding a lock of hair in his left hand, with an envelope at his feet inscribed "Edward Charles Cocks's hair/ August 6th 1781."
The exchange of portraits was itself an important rite of friendship. On some occasions it demonstrated political alliances and loyalties, as when Margaret Cocks's husband commissioned a copy of Gainsborough's portrait of William Pitt shortly after becoming his secretary. Miniatures generally functioned more intimately. Displayed on the body rather than the wall, they allowed men and women almost literally to wear their hearts on their sleeves. As represented in full-scale portraits, such sentimental adornments often attest to romantic love between a man and a woman, but they as frequently demonstrate affection between female friends and family members. A year before Margaret Cocks sat to Cosway, for example, Angelica Kauffman painted Elizabeth Foster with a prominently displayed miniature of her intimate friend Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (National Trust).
Aged thirteen or fourteen, Margaret Cocks reveals her youth and modernity by dressing well in advance of the fashions of her day. The relaxed arrangement of her hair in long, loose ringlets anticipates styles of the 1790s, as does her white robe à l'Anglaise, ornamented by a long muslin scarf draped around her neck and arms and ornately looped over her bosom. Another piece of muslin is fashioned into a vaguely oriental turban with a long trailing veil. Emma Hamilton wears a similar headdress in a portrait by Romney in The Huntington's collection, which may also show the sitter prominently displaying a miniature. The plain white drapery veiling her head and body underscore the virginal purity and innocence of the sitter, as well as the new taste for classical simplicity in dress. Apart from the miniature, the only piece of jewelry worn by Margaret Cocks is the large octagonally shaped ring on her left hand, inspired by classical intaglios. The prominent display of the ring alongside the miniature raises the possibility that it, too, has a private meaning, perhaps another memento of Margaret's absent sister.

Status

On view

Object number60.8