In 1900, on the advice of John Singer Sargent, Captain George Sitwell Campbell-Swinton (1859-1937), of Kimmerghame House, near Duns in the Scottish Borders, commissioned the young impoverished William Orpen to paint his family portrait. The painter had left the Slade School of Fine Art in the previous year and had only just begun to exhibit his work in the New English Art Club. That the captain should seek the American painter’s advice can probably be accounted for in the fact that his wife Elizabeth, (née Ebsworth 1874-1966), known as ‘Elsie’, had already been painted by Sargent, some three years before - Mrs George Swinton (1897, Art Institute of Chicago, Wirt D Walker Collection).
Additionally, at that very moment in 1900, and to great acclaim, Sargent had completed a family portrait for Swinton’s cousin, George Sitwell of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. Why Orpen should spring to mind when there were more experienced portraitists in the Sargent entourage, is likely to be further explained by the American painter’s friendships within the Slade circle, particularly with Philip Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks and Orpen’s future brother-in-law, William Rothenstein (see Rothenstein’s Men and Memories, 1932, vol 2, pp. 8-9).
Like the Sitwells, the Swintons were an unusual couple. Married in 1895, not long after George Swinton’s return from six years in India, where he had been aide-de-camp to the Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, they set up home in fashionable Pont Street where the present group portrait was painted. When approached, Orpen was unsure of how much he would charge for the picture, but his estimate of £80 was instantly accepted. He wrote to Swinton on 26 January 1901, indicating that he could not start immediately because he had another commission to complete in Manchester – the portrait of Clara Hughes (Private Collection). By mid-February, when this was complete and he was awaiting payment, he wrote again to Swinton asking for an advance ‘as I am in a bad way the last few weeks’ (Greer, 1997, p. 62).
Six sketchbook studies for the picture are known, one of which (fig. 1) indicates that Orpen’s original idea was to have both adults seated, in a more intimate ensemble (Pyms Gallery, William Orpen 1878-1931, Early Work, 1981, nos 74-79). By the time the picture was painted however, a more formal arrangement had emerged, with Elsie Swinton, standing, and her children, Mary (1899-1984) and Alan (1896-1972), with the family terrier, placed between her and her husband. Alan, grandfather of the Scottish film actress, Tilda Swinton, his head framed by an ancient armorial chest, would eventually inherit the title of sixth Laird of Kimmerghame.
Elsie’s pose, and her isolation within the composition – fingering the green ribbon of her daughter’s hat - may indeed point to her independence of spirit and anticipate her future career as a concert soloist which flourished after the birth of her second daughter, Elizabeth, in 1904. Her early life, spent partly in St Petersburg, meant that she sang Russian songs with a fluency that convinced spectators such as Walter Sickert, that she actually was Russian (fig. 2).
Her tall husband may have presented Orpen with a problem due to his height in comparison to the others. He is therefore posed in side-view almost parallel to the picture plane, his hand resting on a book, emphasising his contemplative nature – and drawing immediate comparison with Orpen’s slightly earlier Whistlerian portraits of fellow-students Augustus John (1900, National Portrait Gallery), and Herbert Everett (1900, National Maritime Museum). Orpen would go on to paint a full-length portrait of Captain Swinton in heraldic regalia as March Pursuivant (Private Collection, see Arnold, 1981, p. 97).
The painting hung in the dining room of the Swinton residence, the room in which it was painted. A reporter for The World in 1908 recorded that Elsie was ‘very proud’ of it and ‘asks us to admire the curious effect of the reflection in the mirror of the painter at his easel, which he has conscientiously painted in.’ Orpen had deployed the motif, borrowed from Van Eyck, to great effect in pictures such as The Mirror (1900, Tate), and it was later adopted by imitators. Balanced on either side by two circular eighteenth century prints, and emphasising the formality of the occasion, the reflection implies that the entire group posed for the artist at the same time – something that is almost certainly not the case.
The World’s feature writer concludes that ‘modern pictures are her hobby, and to discover unrecognized talent her ambition’ (quoted in Greer, 1997, p. 98). Although he did not qualify as ‘unrecognized’, the Swinton circle expanded in 1904 to include Charles Conder who produced a pastel portrait of Mrs Swinton (Greer 1997, p. 61); and during the next couple of years, Sickert, who painted two securely identified portraits (fig. 4). Elsie became a regular visitor to Sickert’s studio at this time and she believed that she must have modelled for several other paintings, c. 1905-6, while the artist took to sending her postcards illustrating his current work (see Wendy Baron, Sickert, Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, pp. 306-8 312-6).
None of these later works however, lives up to the ambition of Orpen’s conception. The depth of the couple’s appreciation of the young artist’s intentions was expressed in their purchase of the splendid A Mere Fracture, in the Newcomes, Fitzroy Street (fig. 4) in the New English spring exhibition in 1901 – a work that complements the palette and compositional strategy of the present portrait. It is clear that Mrs Swinton was proud of the role she and her husband had played in promoting Orpen’s career which, by the time of The World interview, had flourished.
Although at first The Swinton Family may appear strictly formal, the picture is a perfect example of the kind of ‘genteel interior’ that was described as ‘the body and the spirit’ of the New English Art Club at the time. These were characterised as carefully delineated rooms with ‘plain walls, highly polished furniture, a green door or dado … [and] Messrs Orpen and Rothenstein do them very well’, according to ‘FMJ’ in The Speaker (‘The New English Art Club’, 12 April 1902, p. 106). Such was Orpen’s mastery of the form that ‘artistic aspirants’ - younger Slade students - ‘seem bent on tendering them the sincerest form of flattery’. As an acknowledgement of this important new development in painting at the time, and to celebrate the completion of their family portrait, the Swintons’ additional acquisition of Orpen’s great set-piece from a scene in Thackeray’s novel was thoroughly appropriate. As the doctor kneels to examine the fracture, so the dog sits attentively before the smiling infant. A gentle tug on the ribbon or a tap from the captain’s foot may be just enough to restrain their enthusiasm and retain the pose.
Kenneth McConkey