Portrait of Emily St. Clare 1803, by James Northcote R.A.

Oil on canvas in a good giltwood period frame.

Signed and dated 1803.

Emily St Clare was the mistress of Sir John Leicester (1762-1827), later 1st Lord de Tabley of Tabley Hall, Cheshire (see Image 9). From about 1800 Leicester commissioned fancy pictures of his mistress, Emily St Clare; he was obsessed with her and commissioned at least fourteen portraits of her by John Hoppner, William Owen, Henry Thomson and John Northcote during the first decade of the 19th century. A major patron of British Art, Leicester also commissioned paintings by Turner, Sir Thomas Lawrence and James Ward.

After Leicester's marriage on 9 November 1810, to a grand-daughter of the architect Sir William Chambers, Georgiana Maria Cottin (1794–1859),he hid the portraits of his mistress from his wife and pensioned Emily off with an allowance of £700 p.a.

He died in 1827 and shortly afterwards they were sold as subject paintings.

Northcote painted Miss St Clare no less than seven times, portraying her twice with a falcon. In the earlier canvas she is seated with the bird in profile on her hand, a head and shoulders canvas for which Leicester paid £21.10s in 1801 (see J. Simon, Walpole Society, pp. 73-74, no. 382). The painting has recently been identified in a private collection. The second painting is on a larger canvas and shows the sitter standing on garden steps with the falcon alighting on her hand. This portrait, which appears in the artist's account book in 1803, is the one offered here, although as in Northcote's account book it is described as a full length, it seems the portait was reduced to the present size.

St Clare is shown wearing a white muslin cap, a white dress with a matching cape around her shoulders tied with a blue ribbon around her neck. It rehearses the self-portrait as a falconer Northcote painted of himself in 1823 (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter).

JAMES NORTHCOTE R.A.(1746-1831) was one of the most prolific portrait painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1777, following a period of apprenticeship in the studio of Joshua Reynolds, he journeyed to Paris, Rome and Germany on a prolonged Grand Tour. In Rome he was elected to the Accademia del Forti and, like so many artists before him, took the opportunity to learn from the old masters through sketches and observational studies. On his return to England in 1780, his new found appreciation for the Classical manner increasingly informed his own work.

Northcote had been elected ARA in 1786 and RA in 1787.

His principal talent lay as a portraitist, though forays into the genre of History Painting, notably with 'The Wreck of HMS Centaur' (1784,) helped establish his reputation. Through economic necessity Northcote was compelled to pander to the popular taste for small fancy subjects, 'hack-work' as he called it, illustrating novels from the celebrated authors of the day. An ambitious moral series, entitled Diligence and Dissipation, which was intended to rival Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode (1796) proved a financial failure and Northcote returned to portrait painting in earnest.

Northcote also advised his patron Sir John Fleming Leicester on the formation of his gallery of contemporary British art and painted grandiose scenes from Shakespeare for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery.

SIZE:58.5 x 49 inches inc. frame.

LITERATURE: J. Wilson, ' Hoppner's "tamborine girl' identified', Burlington Magazine, CXXX, October 1988, p. 767, no. 5; J. Simon, 'An Account Book of James Northcote', Walpole Society, LVIII, 1995/6, p. 76, no. 406.

PROVENANCE: Private Collection, Killinghall, Yorkshire.