ITP 57: The Montgomery Sisters: Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen, by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Date: 20-05-2001
Owning Institution: Tate Britain, London
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
18th Century
As the wedding season gets under way, this week’s picture is a charmingly theatrical marriage portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Montgomery Sisters: Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen. Under a canopy of foliage, somewhere in the grounds of a verdant country estate, three young ladies are decorating an unusual piece of garden statuary. The stone figure or “term” which they are decking so lavishly with garlands is a representation of Hymen, god of fertility and wedlock. He holds a blazing torch, to signify the igniting of amorous passion. Hymen’s other principal distinguishing characteristic, an erect male member, has been decorously veiled by flowers.
The daring idea of depicting three impeccably well bred sisters enacting a Priapean ritual appears to have been thought up by the artist in collaboration with his patrons. In May 1773 the Right Honourable Luke Gardiner commissioned the painting in a letter, which was handed to Reynolds in person by Gardiner’s fiance:
“Dear Sir Joshua,
This letter will be delivered to you by Miss Elizabeth Montgomery, who intends to sit to you with her two sisters, to compose a picture, of which I am to have the honour of being the possessor. I wish to have their portraits together at full length, representing some emblematical or historical subject; the idea of which, and the attitudes which will best suit their forms, cannot be so well imagined as by one who has so eminently distinguished himself by his genius and poetic invention… you will, I hope, find that these young ladies, from their high opinion of your powers, will not spare their time, in order to render this picture in every particular a most superior production. I shall add the honour you will acquire in conveying to posterity the resemblances of three sisters so distinguished for different species of beauty…”
Reynolds’ reply was written some months later. Gardiner had by then married Elizabeth Montgomery, but the portrait which he desired of her and her sisters was still not complete. The painter apologised for the delay. He had been on holiday, he explained, but now he was back “with a very keen appetite to the work”:
“This picture is the great object of my mind at present. You have been already informed, I have no doubt, of the subject which we have chosen; the adorning of a Term of Hymen with festoons of flowers. This affords sufficient employment to the figures, and gives an opportunity of introducing a variety of graceful historical attitudes. I have every inducement to exert myself on this occasion, both from the confidence you have placed in me, and from the subjects you have presented to me, which are such as I am never likely to meet with again as long as I live, and I flatter myself that, however inferior the picture may be to what I wish it, or what it ought, it will be the best picture I ever painted.”
Members of the Georgian aristocracy enjoyed putting on their own plays. Reynolds’s picture recalls the amateur theatricals which so preoccupy the characters in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, exciting pious revulsion in the breast of that novel’s almost puritanically virtuous heroine, Fanny Price. Reynolds’s so-called “historical portraits” have themselves come in for their fair share of puritanical criticism. The Victorian author and Pre-Raphaelite painter F.G. Stephens was distinctly unamused by The Montgomery Sisters, referring to it as a “singularly whimsical design” in which “the ladies skip with the most absurdly artificial airs” and damning it with the verdict that “they charm no one now”. Reynolds’ own contemporaries sometimes found the high artifice of such works hard to stomach. Contemplating another similarly theatrical portrait, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, one of Lady Sarah’s contemporaries drily commented that she “never did sacrifice to the graces; she used to play cricket and eat beefsteak.”
Such criticism seems misplaced because it is so abundantly clear that the artist and his sitters approached the creation of such works with tongue firmly in cheek. The Montgomery Sisters reminds me of the grand but similarly playful neo-classical charades enacted in the temples and monuments of great Georgian gardens, such as that at Stowe. They exhibit the classical learning so prized in the Augustan age; they declare that the mantle of ancient Roman imperial might and influence has now come to rest on British shoulders; yet they also make it quite plain that the game of classical emulation is, ultimately, no more than a conceit.
Not for a moment did the Montgomery sisters actually mistake themselves for the celebrants of a pagan fertility ritual. The Right Honourable Mr Gardiner would probably have perished at the thought. The mise-en-scene which they devised together with Reynolds was an ingenious adaptation of a classical theme – its overt sexual significance tastefully and tactfully masked by that well-placed garland – in order to symbolise their different stages of life. Ann Montgomery had already married when the portrait was commissioned, so she has been placed at the far right of his composition, having passed the god of wedlock; Elizabeth, whose imminent wedding had suggested the very idea of the picture, is placed in the middle, approaching the altar; while the stage directions require that Barbara, who was not to marry until a year later, should be shown collecting flowers for the ritual.
Gardiner, his bride and her sisters were all keen amateur actors, who must have had a lot of fun planning and playing their part in the production of the painting. The artist also clearly enjoyed himself, so much so that he felt sure that it would be his “best picture” – partly because it was a commission which allowed him, just like his sitters, to indulge in a little bit of playacting. As a young man Reynolds had visited Italy, where he had been smitten by the scale and grandeur of Renaissance and Baroque religious and mythological painting. On his return, he had yearned for the opportunity to try his own hand at such work. But in a Protestant country, where there were next to no religious commissions and where the aristocracy only required pictures of itself and its property, few such opportunities came his way. The “fancy portrait” gave Reynolds a rare chance to treat portraiture as if it were a more elevated genre of art; and to work, for once, with the freedom and imaginative licence allowed to the greatest painters of the past. While the Montgomery sisters played at being characters from history, Reynolds too joined in – fancying himself, if only for a moment, another Raphael, Poussin, or Michelangelo.
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