Family resemblances

Two visions of English family life in classic British portraiture.

If you ever go to Wilton House, near Salisbury, seat of the Earls of Pembroke, you will see the huge and magnificent portrait of the Fourth Earl and his family. Painted by Van Dyck, court painter to Charles I, it was executed circa 1635. Author Adam Nicolson describes it as “the greatest painting of a family ever made in England”.

Certainly it exudes power, luxury and aristocratic self-confidence; the Herbert family had made its irresistible rise in Tudor times, acquiring the Earldom of Pembroke and the former Abbey of Wilton, and the Fourth Earl holds his wand of office as Lord Chamberlain. Van Dyck here depicts the romantic Cavalier ideal: the young men of the house, with their flowing silken curls and their brilliant silk and satin costumes, look more beautiful than the womenfolk. Their parents sit as if enthroned on a dais while their sons adopt swaggering poses on the steps below them; cherubs float on the clouds above, blessing the family with quasi-divine status, and the fourth Earl’s armorial bearings hang with magisterial authority in the background. Over 17 feet wide, the painting is designed to impress.

However, in making his sweeping claim Nicolson has forgotten an earlier family portrait, made between 1526-8, by another court painter: Hans Holbein the Younger. The original is lost but painted copies survive, closely based on Holbein’s finely-wrought sketch of the whole composition, now in Basel. The painting shows a household in sober Tudor dress, together with two pet dogs and a monkey. They obviously love flowers (three full vases are visible), music-making and learning: six members of the family are holding books, while a further pile lies on a shelf with musical instruments. The group includes the family’s domestic Fool, Henry Patenson, the only person to gaze directly at the spectator. Vivid colour is provided by an elderly man sitting left of centre, wearing the scarlet judicial robes of the King’s Bench. His son, centre-stage, gazes into the distance with a grave, preoccupied expression while a clock, symbol of the transitory nature of life, ticks above his head. He, like Philip Herbert, wears his emblem of office: the chain of the Lord Chancellor of England. For this, as readers will doubtless have guessed, is the family of Sir Thomas More.

Unlike the Herberts, the More family did not aspire to worldly prestige but to intellectual pursuits and holiness of life. As the Herbert dynasty rose under the Tudors, the More family fell; in July 1535, 100 years before Van Dyck took up his brushes, Sir Thomas More died for his Catholic faith on the scaffold at Tower Hill. Again, in contrast to the Pembroke family portraits, with their air of ineffable superiority, the More family group looks studious, pious and high-minded: Dame Alice, More’s wife, has a cross on her breast and Cecily, sitting beside Margaret, More’s favourite daughter whose husband, William Roper, was to write the Life of his father-in-law, is counting the decades of the Rosary on her fingers (in the original sketch she is holding a Rosary).

In March this year that great actor, Paul Scofield, died, best known for his deeply sympathetic portrayal of Thomas More in the film A Man for All Seasons. It is a safe bet that most people will know of the saint, scholar, humanist, friend of Erasmus (and briefly of Henry VIII) through this fine film. More was also a devoted family man, as the painting suggests: obedient to his father, kindly to his servants, affectionate to his wife (the Herberts were estranged at the time of their portrait and the Countess, who looks stern and disengaged from her surroundings, had to be painted in later) and a loving, watchful parent to his children.

In Holbein’s conception there is a subtle emotional interplay between the members of the family circle that the Van Dyck portrait, with its studied surface polish, quite lacks. Pace Adam Nicolson, Holbein’s is the greater family painting.

Francis Phillips writes from Bucks, in the UK.