FROM MEDICI TO BOURBON - Newport Mansions

hung in Alva’s boudoir. More problematic to hang was Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Les
Oeufs Cassés (1756), 144 an allusion to lost virginity, it somehow found its way to the
breakfast room. Since the house had no picture gallery, the full length Royal
Academy portraits supplied by Wertheimer of Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1778), 145
by Thomas Gainsborough, and Captain George Coussmaker (1782), 146 by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, were hung beneath the musician’s gallery in the Gothic dining hall. The
independent courtesan life of Mrs. Elliott in London and Paris must have provided
Mrs. Vanderbilt with a historical narrative quite different from that of her father-in-
law’s Reception of Condé. Both portraits feature very attractive and elegant subjects
that set the tone in the profile of Royal Academy portraiture to be collected in the
ensuing decades by Americans, a trend remarked in the ‘pretty’ pictures passing
through Wertheimer and Duveen’s showrooms. 147 As if reluctantly following suit,
Cornelius Vanderbilt II arranged to buy from Samson Wertheimer’s son Asher a pair
of Sir Peter Lely portraits from the ex-Robert Walpole collection at Houghton. 148
Depicting Anne of Ditchly and Jenny Deering (both circa 1680), the portraits hung in
the common parlour of Houghton as overdoors. Their status as such limited their
appeal to Catherine the Great and they were omitted from the 1779 sale to Catherine,
remaining in place until sold at Christie’s by the fourth marquess of Cholmondeley. 149
Not unlike his sister-in-law, Cornelius II found it appropriate to hang his English
portraits in his New York dining room (Fig. 14.). There the ‘Walpole pictures’ were
144 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 20.155.8.
145 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 20.155.1.
146 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 20.155.3.
147 Meryle Secrest, Duveen, A Life in Art, New York, 2004, p. 201.
148 Larissa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (eds.), A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the
Hermitage, London, 2002, pp. 318-19.
149 Christie’s, 10 July, 1886, lot no. 211.
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