MASP

Joshua Reynolds

Elisabeth, Sarah, and Edward, Edward Holden Cruttenden’s Children, Circa 1763

  • Author:
    Joshua Reynolds
  • Bio:
    Plympton, Inglaterra, 1723-Richmond, Inglaterra, 1792
  • Title:
    Elisabeth, Sarah, and Edward, Edward Holden Cruttenden’s Children
  • Date:
    Circa 1763
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    179 x 168 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Companhia Nacional de Seguros de Vida, 1952
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00196
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



Edward Holden (1721-1763) was the son of Robert Cruttenden, mentioned in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” of 1763 (p. 314) as accountant of the then famous Penny Post Office, a private postal service set up in 1680 by William Dockwra. In 1737, Edward left for Calcutta as clerk of the East India Company. In India, he married Elizabeth Jedderie, who was 16 years old at the time and with whom he had three children: Elisabeth (1752), Sarah (1754), and Edward Holden Cruttenden II (1756). Despite the loss of his wife in 1756, Edward Holden rapidly amassed a large fortune in India, as executive officer of the East India Company and as shipowner. After his return to England, he commissioned a portrait of his children and the nurse Jubah to Reynolds. The presence of the young Indian nurse who, with sublime melancholy, picks flowers to make garlands for the children, is probably due to the affection the children felt for her, as they were saved by her during the looting of Fort William in Calcutta by the nawab Siraj-ud-Dawlah from Bengal on June 20, 1756, in the massacre known under the name “The Black Hole of Calcutta”. The tale has a romantic undertone and Camesasca points to the rather frequent presence of nurses in British portraiture since Van Dyck and, again, in Reynolds (Portrait of Captain John Foote, City Art Museum, Nv). At any rate, the dating of the painting is not likely to be 1759, as proposed by Graves and Cronin, but c.1763, as determined by Waterhouse. Camesasca’s attempt to delay the dating of the painting, for stylistic reasons, to after 1775 can obviously not be accepted for elementary reasons, among them the apparent age of the children, and can only be explained by the fact that the historian was not familiar with their birthdays. Possibly during the same years of our painting, in other words in 1767-1769, Edward H. Cruttenden himself posed for another portrait by Reynolds, known through a copy. Elisabeth (1752-1816), later Mrs. Charles Purvis, and her sister Sarah will, in 1771, at nineteen and seventeen respectively, be portrayed by Gainsborough during his Bath period. The portrait, whose whereabouts is unknown, remained, as the one at Masp, in the Purvis and Kennedy families, until it was sold by Duveen between 1931 and 1957 (Waterhouse 1958, p. 61). The work on display at Masp belonged to the Collection of Marshall Field, owner of the Chicago Sun and Times Co. The portrait is in an extremely poor state of conservation. It is, nevertheless, a major moment of Reynolds’ portraiture, namely because of the transcendent choreography-like rhythmic freedom of the composition, of the play between the communicative strength of the gazes and the withdrawn attitude of the nurse, and the lunar and faded hues of the palette, whose center of gravity is the pristine white of Jubah’s attire.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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