The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-18 00:00:00

A NOBLE COURT PICTURE.

A Drawing Boom at St. James's Palace.
PAINTED BY JERRY BARRETT. NOW ON VIEW AT
MR. M'LEAN'S, 7, lIAYMARKET.

A similar Picture, illustrating the Court of Queen
Elizabeth let us say, as vividly as this one does the
Court of Queen Victoria, would be, just simply—in
one word—priceless ! If only Mynheer Hans Hol-
bein, for example, had portrayed, collectively, upon
an equally comprehensive scale, any one of the
grand receptions accorded by Bluff King Hal to his
Majesty's leiges en grande tenue according to the
fashion of those days ! If only Sir Peter Lely,
again, could but have done the like by the volup-
tuaries (of both sexes) constituting, a few genera-
tions afterwards, the Court of the Merry Monarch
at Whitehall ! What perfectly novel and far more
vivid impressions we should have had of the noble
dames, and the famous courtiers, and the historical
counsellors of those two earlier Sovereigns ! Hap-
pily, at any rate, for the more curious in after-times,
the keen eye and the skilful hand of Jerry Barrett,
have, in this remarkable picture of his—representing
" A Drawing Room at St. James's Palace in the
Reign of Queen Victoria"—caught the fluctuating
outlines and evanescent hues of one of those sump-
tuous and truly royal spectacles and have there-
upon fixed them in radiant colours upon his can-
vass. Among Court Pictures this painting, we
may say at once, occupies a wholly excep-
tional position. Unlike the generality of these
productions, it is none the less of a genuine work of
art than it is a life-like portraiture of so much
regal magnificence. Its paramount merit lies in
the fact of its being a truthful representation
—at once in the superb general effect and in
the minutest of the costly details of the picture—a
thoroughly truthful representation of the actual
scene thus undertaken to be depicted. A glance
shows us that it is the work not only of an eye-
witness, but of one who has enjoyed opportunities of
rendering himself perfectly familiar with the scene
pourtrayed : and who, moreover, has made the best
possible use of those opportunities, as is evidenced
by his very manner of pourtraying it. Beginning
the picture exactly three years ago, that is in the
spring of 1862, Mr. Barrett appears to have been
busily engaged upon its production during a period
of fully two years altogether, before he could well
satisfy his own mind as to its actual completion.
Completed it has been, however, and with a suc-
cess too that cannot fail to add very considerably
indeed to the reputation already won for himself by
his three earlier pictures, each of them well known
to the public at large—one of them a Prison In-
terior, the other two Hospital Interiors—Mrs. Fry
in Newgate, Her Majesty in the Hospital at Chat-
ham, Miss Nightingale in the Hospital at Scutari.
From the felon's prison and the soldier's hospital,
whether at home in peace or abroad during war-
time, Mr. Barrett has, here, advanced into the
very throne-room of the Palace, and that, more-
over, at a moment when those halls of luxury are
to be seen in their greatest splendour, namely,
in the very midst of the stately throng of a
Drawing-Room Day 1 When, (in spite of the
throng!) there is preserved there—in the Presence—.
the profoundest silence! Insomuch that the mere
sweep of the silken trains of the ladies about t 3 be
presented becomes distinctly audible—the courtly
hush of the audience chamber being otherwise alone
broken by the Lord Chamberlain's voice reading out
the name of each successive datitante, or by the
silvery voice of her Majesty uttering some gracious
word of welcome to the lady then " kissing hands."
At the moment selected by the artist for portrayal,
the present Marchioness of Carmarthen—then first
presented, under her maiden title as the Hon. Miss
Pitt—is depicted as in the very act of kissing the
hand of the Sovereign ! The portraiture of her
Majesty is altogether about the most truthful and
lifelike that has for a long while been produced. It
represents our beloved Queen precisely as she has
looked of late years, nay, for that matter, precisely
as her Majesty still looks, though it should be said
—and for a sufficient reason—nowadays with a
somewhat more saddened expression of counte-
nance. The reason, here,, being almost painfully
appreciable, upon our first momentary glance at
Mr. Barrett's radiant Picture of the Court of
Queen Victoria—as that Court still was but a
very brief while since ! For, there, beside her Ma-
jesty, do we not note, with a pang of regret,
the noble presence and handsome features of her
Royal Consort, as he was, in the very pride and
flower of his life—only three seasons back—imme-
diately before his premature disappearance ? His
Royal Highness, who is portrayed in the full uni-
form of a Field Marshal, has immediately in front
of him the stripling Heir Apparent to the Crown,
H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, then with hardly the.
down of adolescence upon his cheek, looking, in-
deed, far more like sixteen than nineteen. Besides
these three chief personages in the picture, Mr. Bar-
rett's remarkable painting comprises within it some
fifty or sixty, for the most part wonderfully success-
ful, portraitures of eminent individuals. Viscount
Sydney, the Lord Chamberlain, is there conspicu-
ously portrayed, at the left hand of the Sovereign,
reading, card by card, the names of those admitted
to the honour of presentation, the osier basket
at Lord Sidney's feet having a card tossed into it
at each presentation. There, too, is at once dis-
tinguishable the Lord Steward, the Earl of St

Germans, and yet more prominently—immediately
in the foreground to the left of the spectacle—
the present Mistress of the Robes, her Grace the
Duchess of Wellington. The then Mistress of
the Robes, her Grace the Duchess Dowager of
Sutherland, is introduced, as, indeed, but befitted
her office at the time, as much nearer to the person
of the Sovereign, among a fair bevy of maids of
honour and ladies in waiting, including among
them the Lady Jocelyn, the Hon, Flora Macdo-
nald, the Hon. Mrs. Blundell, and the Lady
Churchill. The Royal Secretary, Sir Charles
Phipps, although standing rather in the back-
ground, will be instantly recognised. Towards
the centre of the Picture, beside the
three highest personages in the realm,
are three other well-known members of the
Royal Family, H.R.H. the Duchess of Cambridge,
H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief, and the buxom
Princess Mary. Near to whom is seen an especial
favourite of the Crown, and one who is, in
every sense of the phrase, one of the chief
ornaments of a Drawing Room Day at St. James's,
his Highness the Maharajah Duleep Singh, tawny,
blazing with jewels, altogether, both in person
and in costume, a noble representative of Oriental
magnificence. Ambassadors and Ministers of State
are there in abundance—with many others of the
illustrious. As the French Ambassador of a few
years since, there is the Count de Persigny, not as
nowadays the Prince de la Tour d'Auvergne. The
Austrian and the Turkish Ambassadors being, even
then, as they still continue to be, respectively, Mons.
Musurus and the Count Apponyi. The Viscountess
Palmerston, standing face to face with the spectator,
occupies the very centre of the picture. The Prime
Minister himself, by the way, is to our thinking
one of the least successful likenesses intro-
duced upon his canvas by Mr. Barrett. Far
better as likenesses are several of Lord Palmer-
ston's colleagues in the Government, Cabinet Mi-
nisters many of them instantaneously recognisable
among these—the Duke of Argyle, the Right Hon.
Milner Gibson, the Earl Russell, and the Earl (oddly
misprinted in the programme Viscount) Granville.

Brief though the lapse of time has been since the
picture was commenced, five of the illustrious per-
sonages introduced in it have passed away in the
interval—H.R.H. the- Prince Consort, the Lord
Herbert of Lea, Field Marshal Lord Clyde, Gene-
ral Bruce, and Lord Campbell, the then Lord
Chancellor. One illustrious member of the Oppo-

sition, the most illustiious of all, the Leader of it in

fact, is distinguishable among the throng of actual

Ministers of the Crown. Conspicuously present
there among the great ladies of the Court of

Vitoria, are, among others, the Duchess of
Manchester, the Lady Constance Grosvenor, tho

Countess SpQncer 'and the Countess of Lichfield,
Lady Mary Craven and Lady Constance Villiers,
the Viscountess Sydney and Lady Geraldine
Somerset. Ten feet long, though the picture is
in its dimensions, it admits—in the mere working
Of it up, in the mere minor details and