John Seymour Lucas, 1849 - 1923 Portrait of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), First Earl Balfour

John Seymour Lucas, 1849 - 1923

Portrait of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), First Earl Balfour

Signed/Inscribed:

signed lower left and inscribed "Drawn from life at Carlton Gardens, July 10th, 1907",

charcoal and sanguine drawing

38.50 x 30 cm. (15.1/4 x 11.3/4 in.)

Arthur James Balfour, first earl of Balfour(1848–1930), prime minister and philosopher, was born on 25 July 1848 at Whittingehame House, East Lothian, the third of eight children and eldest son of James Maitland Balfour (1820–1856), landowner (and MP, 1841–7), and his wife, Lady Blanche Mary Harriet (d. 1872, aged forty-seven), second daughter of the second marquess of Salisbury and sister of Robert Cecil, later third marquess of Salisbury and prime minister. Arthur had four brothers and three sisters. The intellectual vigour of Lady Blanche was markedly imparted not only to Arthur but also to her eldest child, Eleanor Mildred (Nora; 1845–1936) [see Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred], who became a leader in women's education; also to her sixth child, Francis Maitland (Frank) Balfour (1851–1882), who was already, at thirty, professor of animal morphology at Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Society when he died in a mountaineering accident; and to her seventh child, Gerald William Balfour (1853–1945), fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1878, and a cabinet minister from 1895 to 1905. Arthur Balfour was deeply but not simplistically influenced by his mother's religious certainties; she was the chief influence in his upbringing after his father's death from tuberculosis when he was eight.

Education

In 1859, aged ten, Balfour went to the Revd C. G. Chittenden's Hoddesdon Grange preparatory school in Hertfordshire, where his short-sightedness and apparently delicate health proved a handicap. However, like his brothers, he would grow to stand 6 feet tall, and as an adult he acquired an enduring love of tennis and golf, and gave proof of considerable physical stamina. Yet his first headmaster noted enduring characteristics when he found the boy lacking in 'vital energy' and 'always pondering' (Dugdale, 1.21).

From 1861 until 1866 Balfour coasted imperturbably through Eton College, where he was in Mr Birch's house (succeeded in 1864 by Mr Thackeray). There he was, in the name of manliness, denied the spectacles that could have corrected his myopia. He made no great impact at Eton, but impressed William Johnson Cory. At Trinity College, Cambridge (1866–9), he soon adopted spectacles and became addicted to court tennis. Otherwise his intense interest in the philosophical basis of scientific knowledge led him to Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) as his tutor. In view of his later reputation as a philosopher it occasions surprise to find that Balfour achieved only a second class in his final moral sciences tripos. However, a Cambridge friend later explained to his youngest sister, Alice (1850–1936), that her brother 'was considered in those days very indolent, as indolent in fact as clever'. He was not thought 'to be a great reader, but to have a wonderful capacity for picking the brains of other people' (Mackay, Balfour, 6). According to Sidgwick, at the time, his examination answers were somewhat lacking in weight. For this the likely explanation is Balfour's lifelong antipathy to the physical process of handwriting. He may also have spent too much time cogitating about his projected philosophical book. He had, his friend and contemporary John Strutt recalled, 'a mind which could ill submit to the bondage of following a prescribed course of study' (Rayleigh, 11).

Balfour's aversion to driving a pen led him to develop a remarkable ability to dictate lucid memoranda on complicated subjects. These required little subsequent amendment. Once the typewriter came into use, he would read over the double-spaced product and use a pen to insert or su