Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, Royal Academy

Johannes Josephus Zauffaly was born near Frankfurt in 1733, the son of a court cabinet maker and architect (this pairing of professions is instructive) to the eminent Prince of Thurn und Taxis. Apprenticed to a local painter and engraver, Martin Speer, at 17 he left for Rome, Naples and Venice, as had Speer before him, walking all the way; in these cities he absorbed contemporary Italian influences, hobnobbed with other German painters and studied the profitable business of portraiture. At 20, in 1753, he returned to Germany but Rome and its pleasures — the easily procured company of willing women (of whom he never tired) — drew him back to study under Mengs, the most significant of German painters in Italy, though only five years older than himself. It was during this second Italian period that he began to call himself Zoffany, the name by which he is known in England almost as an Englishman and certainly as a major English painter much favoured by King George III and his Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Did they, and particularly Charlotte, who was slow to learn English and never lost her German accent, find him compatible because he was German? Possibly; he too had no English when he reached London in 1760 and later surviving letters are an indication of his accent — “I have Gust sent a portrait of the Grand Duck’s to Wiena and am ordert to du a Famely pictur … as pick as Leiff … wen til Fenischt I schal du noting more …”; and one of George’s small pleasures was taking carriage rides with Zoffany and gossiping for an hour or two. That they acquired so many of his paintings may be a reason for his obscurity, compared with the posthumous reputations of Gainsborough and Reynolds, his near contemporaries, for not until Anthony Blunt began, in 1946, to open the Royal Collection to the public, was there much awareness of him; indeed it could be argued that no one cared tuppence about Zoffany after his death in 1810, and that it was not until an exhibition of his work was mounted by the National Portrait Gallery in 1976, its curator Mary Webster, that any of my generation had an informed or coherent view of his work. Building on that exhibition for nearly 40 years, she has now published the be-all and end-all of a book (Johan Zoffany, Yale £75) weaving his life into his art and both into the several societies in which he moved: and at the Royal Academy, of which Zoffany was a founder member nominated by the King himself, we have another exhibition, intended to re-evaluate “the extraordinary life and career of this briliant and enigmatic artist”.

Alas, it is too small and, crowded and cramped, will be uncomfortable for visitors. With Hockney hogging the main floor of the Academy, poor Zoffany is hidden away in an attic that is as gloomy as a cellar, the number of paintings exhibited far fewer than the number in the catalogue, their impact weakened by a plethora of negligible prints, drawings and even knick-knacks. Nevertheless, even if only an hors d’oeuvres riches rather than a banquet, it is a sound introduction to a painter with a very wide range of experience and patronage.

We see him first as a young European, finding his way into an international grand style of history painting, the subjects classical and biblical, allegorical and decently erotic, at a level of skill that now seems improbably precocious, the compositions competently complex, the references antique and contemporary, the mannerisms residually baroque and incipiently rococo. Is there a first-year student downstairs in the Academy’s Schools who could paint himself as mischievously as did Zoffany at 23, as David with the Head of Goliath (though the penis joke is a preposterous 21st-century perception), or a last-year student who could match The Triumph of Venus, an erotic bedroom picture perhaps painted for the Archbishop of Trier in the last months before Zoffany left for London?

Did Zoffany imagine that in England, the land of jobbing portraiture, he would find a market for such things? Collectors bought such images second-hand and respectable through age from dealers and auctioneers — indeed, extravagant public bidding for masterpieces was as much the done thing in the 18th century as it is now (that is why James Christie set up his auction house in 1766); but among painters working in London the subject picture was very much second fiddle to the portrait. Hogarth told picaresque tales in paint but his income came from their reproduction as engravings; when he sold the six original paintings of Marriage à la Mode in 1751 he had two offers — £120 and 120 guineas for the lot.

Zoffany did what he could to establish himself in London, where there was a sizeable German community, intellectual, commercial and in the service of the Hanoverian monarchy — he turned to conventional portraiture and the less conventional genre of portraying actors on the stage in character. His patrons were the substantial middle class, the gentry, the aristocracy, the royal family and David Garrick, wealthy actor-manager and deft self-publicist. He developed a formula of genteel gatherings in the open air that share something of the scale and slow rhythms of his contemporary, George Stubbs — 1769 was a great year for both men. He contained families in their domestic interiors and described their furnishings and paintings with an eye for detail as scrupulous as Hogarth’s but without his pointed meanings — had he seen the old man’s Marriage à la Mode? As for his paintings of the theatre, here again Hogarth, Garrick’s close friend, perhaps set the pattern for him with his Beggar’s Opera. He could be brilliant with dogs.

Within the limitations of these genres, Zoffany achieved some of the best paintings of his day, sublime in workmanship if not in spirit; consider, for example, Sir Lawrence Dundas With His Grandson, sitting amid his collection of old Dutch pictures, fake Pompeian bronzes on the mantelpiece, his rich carpet, male nude figure lurking in the shadows, and light flooding through his silk curtains; and consider too Queen Charlotte With Her Two Eldest Sons, a complex construction on a dual perspective that gives her absolute dominance of the composition, flattering her looks so that “the bloom of her ugliness” (as her Chamberlain put it) is scarcely apparent. The painting that is unarguably his masterpiece, The Tribune of the Uffizi, commissioned by the Queen, is, as I have written before, “the most encyclopedic and precise record of the Grand Tour, packed with narrative and information and yet a happening of pure invention … a rugger scrum of connoisseurs, earls, knights and homosexuals among the greatest masterpieces … a picture that deserves the feasting look, fine painting of the finest kind in unrelenting detail”. But how can any visitor to the Academy be allowed time enough to stand and study it?

“What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?” Staring reveals how very English Zoffany became, yet how easily he could revert to a central European idiom when required to paint a Hapsburg stripling (the Grand Duck of the quoted letter), the viewpoint of which requires it to be hung just above the viewer’s sightline (to see how effective Zoffany’s perspective is, one must in the Academy sink to one’s knees before it — a wryly suitable genuflexion); and when tempted to paint peasants, he perhaps turned to Giacomo Francesco Cipper, prolific in the genre, a German of the previous generation whose paintings were to be found in Hampton Court (though he more probably encountered them at home in Germany, or in Italy). From the feasting look we learn how subtly Zoffany could observe Academicians, surgeons and students gathered about the male nude and adapt them to his formal recording purposes; from his painted actors we learn more of the player and the played than from a hundred biographies and histories; and from his records of the English in India in the 1780s we see exactly what Warren Hastings saw when he complained of a “Sink of Iniquity … the School of Rapacity [where] … beardless boys and Clerks in Office” gratified their greedy wants.

There were failures — his George III of 1771, “as pick as Leiff”, suffers a terrible spinal disjunction at pelvis level, his left arm hideously elongated, and there is something of Quasimodo about the Self Portrait that Zoffany presented to the Grand Duke of Tuscany but with half-a-dozen canvases he is established as one of the great painters of his century. With Stubbs’s Whistlejacket and Wright’s Experiment with an Air Pump, his Tribuna of the Uffizi is one of the greatest paintings of the Enlightenment. Stand long enough to catch the eye of Pietro Bastianelli, custodian of the Uffizi supporting the unframed Venus of Urbino, young Titian’s erotic masterpiece, and you will stand for ever, locked into this company. This locking of gazes is a trick he uses elsewhere — with Lawrence Dundas, particularly — but nowhere is it more effective than in The Tribuna. The Tribuna must also be the greatest painting of the Grand Tour, a phenomenon on which our cultural heritage and customs are still based.

Zoffany deserves a longer review to match a more comprehensive exhibition; from the Academy’s there are absentees beyond understanding — those from the National Gallery, the Tate and Greenwich peculiarly irritating; there are more examples in the Royal Collection, and I would like to have seen again the small full-length portraits of Mrs Salusbury in widow’s weeds (black is such a test of a painter’s ability) and Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal, indulging in dramatic oratory. And we should have been able to see Zoffany’s paintings in the daylight that floods the great rooms below, currently occupied by Hockney.