Alexander POPE

As the scholar R. R. M. See has noted of this fine portrait drawing by Alexander Pope, in an article published in 1919, in which it was reproduced as a full-page illustration, ‘There is a wistful charm, as well as great vitality, in the…drawing reproduced in these pages, by permission of Messrs. Agnew, signed and dated 1805. The lady represented in the midst of the landscape is very possibly [Pope’s] friend, Mrs. Raikes.’ The sitter has been tentatively identified as Mrs. Thomas Raikes, née Sophia Maria Bayly (1771-1822), the daughter of Jamaican plantation owner Nathaniel Bayly. In May 1802, three years before the date of this sheet, Sophia had married the merchant banker and diarist Thomas Raikes the Younger (1777-1848). Raikes is mostly remembered as a dandy and as one of the most prominent social figures of the time. (He was apparently known as ‘Apollo’ by his friends and fellow socialites, because he ‘rose with the East and set with the West.’) Raikes’s journal, edited and published after his death, is an interesting account of London in those years, and a testimony to his famous friendships, including with the 2nd Duke of Wellington, Beau Brummell and the Duc de Talleyrand. Thomas and Sophia Raikes had four children before her death at the age of thirty-nine, at Berkeley Square in London, in April 1810.

The present sheet is very similar in pose and composition, with its depiction of a woman standing against a column, to a full-length watercolour portrait by Pope of Lady Frances Herbert Ducie, wife of the 1st Earl of Ducie. Another stylistically comparable watercolour of the same year is a Portrait of a Mother and Child, signed and dated 1805, which recently appeared at auction in London, while also similar in pose and setting is an 1806 portrait drawing of the businessman and corn merchant William Gillies, which was sold at auction in 2007. As See has pointed out, ‘Alexander Pope’s chief qualities lie in his delicacy of colour, his exact and pretty drawing, his elegant and refined composition. With his perfect understanding as to the handling or [sic] pencil and water-colour brush, he combined a keen perception of the surest method of pleasing his sitters and their friends, for it is obvious that he sets out not so much to convey an unflattering likeness as to give a pleasing picture, an end which he achieves to perfection...he undoubtedly occupies a very prominent position among the draughtsmen and portrait painters of his day.’