Daniel Gardner, A.R.A. (Kendal 1750-1805 London), Andrew Grote (1710-1788) with wife Mary Anne Culverdon (1740-1797) and children, William and Marianne, with their spaniel

Daniel Gardner, A.R.A. (Kendal 1750-1805 London)
Andrew Grote (1710-1788) with wife Mary Anne Culverdon (1740-1797) and children, William and Marianne, with their spaniel
pencil, watercolour, bodycolour and pastel
37 ½ x 33 ¼ in. (95.3 x 84.5 cm.)

Pre-Lot Text
Daniel Gardner and the revival of interest in pastel
by Neil Jeffares
In recent years provenance research has been greatly assisted by the institutions such as the Getty, the National Gallery or the Smithsonian making available the stock-books of the great dealers of the early 1900s – Duveen, Knoedler and Agnew’s come to mind. Trawling through these records is a curious experience: the taste of a different age, nearly as far distant from us today as it then was from the objects themselves. Of course many of the artists are those one might expect: but some now famous are absent, while a few stand out for unexpected frequency – and occasionally astonishing prices.
Daniel Gardner (circa 1750–1805) is one of those names, and one of the few British pastellists to have an instantly recognisable technique and style which sets him apart from everyone else. His origins were humble: born in Kendal around 1750 (too late to have been long a student of Romney, who left for London in 1762), his father and grandfather were shoemakers, and probably Baptists. Initially he was trained as an upholsterer (his uncle’s profession, to whom he was probably apprenticed: this may have extended to carpentry, since Gardner is thought to have designed the distinctive fluted frames in which so many of his pictures are still found). He seems to have become a freeman of Lancaster in 1768 – but almost immediately moved to London. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1770, where he was taught by Zoffany, Dance, Benjamin West, Cipriani and Bartolozzi. At the end of the following year he received a silver medal for drawing. He showed a portrait of an old man at the Academy that year, but never appeared again at the major London exhibitions. Perhaps this was because of the personality described by several contemporaries – James Northcote commented on his reputation for being “very blunt ... and following too much his own inclination, does not enough conform to the customs of the polite world”, while Farington noted that he was “extremely parsimonious” and delighted in arguing.
Gardner is widely said to have worked briefly in Reynolds’s studio in the early 1770s, but the evidence for this is unsatisfactory. He was of course influenced by Reynolds’s compositions, several of which he copied or borrowed for his own portraits – lot 153, the Grote children, is a spectacular example of how he reinterprets a Reynolds painting (Waddesdon, 1777), converting the weight of the master’s subject picture into pure effervescence. But his real competition was from other quarters – notably the Irishman Hugh Douglas Hamilton who had arrived in London in 1764 and, by prolifically exhibiting his small oval heads (a good example is lot 160), developed a wide clientele among the aristocracy. A curious letter in 1776 from another pastellist, John Warren, refers to reports that Hamilton “is gone to Ireland”, implying that he had failed in competition with Gardner – to Warren’s puzzlement, as he thought Hamilton the better artist, while acknowledging that Gardner was “not without taste & Genius.” For him Gardner was “a bad Draughtsman & clumsy in his execution”: but it is perhaps the spontaneity which Warren disliked that gives Gardner his enduring appeal today. Even at this stage, when Gardner was producing small oval heads in direct competition with Hamilton (the delightful lot 157 is a perfect example), they crackle with nervous energy in contrast to the meticulous control that Hamilton applied.
Gardner went on to develop more ambitious compositions – full-length figures, family groups, etc., often in woodland settings, with dazzling, improbable colour schemes that seemed a breath of fresh air to the staid traditions of British portraiture. He was not the first to show children with their pets – but he was the first perhaps to do so with childlike gusto. He worked occasionally in oil, sometimes in pure pastel, but mostly in his own special medium: usually described as gouache, it may involve ground pastel sticks mixed with brandy and applied with a brush. A particular idiosyncrasy is his use of dry pastel for the faces while the rest of the picture is scumbled in this gouache. A single page from his account book, from 1792, has survived; it suggests that his prices ranged from 5 to 23 guineas (although neither medium nor format is indicated).
There is no doubt that this technique enabled him to work very fast (as the extent of the surviving œuvre testifies), and may well have played a role in his ability to forge close relationships with the families who became his best clients: among them the Heathcotes, of whom he painted at least 25 portraits, or the interrelated aristocratic Cornwallis and Townshend families, who are well represented in the present group (lots 157 and 159). These were not on the whole clients that turned naturally to his other great rival, John Russell, whose focus was particularly among Methodists, industrialists and the middle classes.
Despite their distinctive style, Gardner’s pictures are almost never signed, and many were reattributed to other artists throughout the 19th Century (the 1894 Russell exhibition included a number of his works by mistake). Only during the 20th Century was his reputation re-established. That happened not so much through museum acquisitions but rather through the sometimes aleatory processes of the art market: a group portrait of Lady Fawkener sold in these Rooms in 1908 for the sum of 1250 guineas (perhaps £150,000 in today’s money, adjusted for official inflation, but a vast amount then), creating a demand for Gardner that dealers vied with one another to supply. A large group of his works, which had passed to his granddaughter, Mrs Dixon, were sold to Lord Carlingford and in turn to Lady Strachey, whose 63 Gardners were dispersed here in 1911. Ten years later George Williamson published a monograph on the artist which described in detail several dozen works belonging to Viscount Harcourt – which readers would naturally assume had been in the family since Gardner made them. But in fact, many (including lots 157 and 159 here) had been part of this wave, bought up on the market by dealers (Agnew’s most notably) acting for none other than J. Pierpont Morgan’s sister, Mary Lyman Morgan (1844–1919), who married the banker Walter Hayes Burns. They passed to her daughter, Mary Ethel, Viscountess Harcourt (1874–1961), and have later reappeared on the market for another generation to enjoy.
That process of re-evaluation is once again well underway, with saleroom prices returning to, or exceeding, 1908 levels. In 2013 a charming group portrait of Mary Sturt of Crichel and family sold for £133,000, while two years later a single figure of the thirteen-year-old Mary Whitbread (later Lady Grey) reached a record price for the artist of £233,000.
Property from a descendant of the Grote family (lots 152-153)