FRANCESCO RENALDI (BRITISH CIRCA 1755-1799) PORTRAIT OF MRS. WILLIAM DOUGLAS, NÉE JANE BELL, AND HER SON, PHILIP, IN AN INDIAN INTERIOR Oil on canvas Signed and dated '1789' (centre right) 110 x 92cm (43¼ x 36 in.) In its original carved and gilded 'Carlo Maratta' Provenance: By family descent, until sold, Christie's, London, 26 April 1912, lot 48 (50 gns. to Schuster) Private collection, U.K. Described by Mildred Archer as 'one of the most sensitive portrait painters to work in India during the late eighteenth century' (1), Francesco Renaldi (c.1755-1799) was an English-born painter of Italian heritage about whose life relatively little is known. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1776, aged twenty-one. For two years after 1781, Renaldi traveled in Italy, initially with Thomas Jones, the Welsh landscape painter and pupil of Richard Wilson.Evidently on at least one occasion, Jones exploited Renaldi's name to pass himself off as an Irish catholic in order to gain access to the prior of a monastery at Caserta near Naples - which would normally have been inaccessible to him on sectarian grounds - but Renaldi seems to have accepted this with good grace, even affability. While Jones left behind a now celebrated group of oil sketches on paper of the environs of Naples and other Grand Tour sites, no works executed by Renaldi in Italy are currently known. Years later, in 1798, Renaldi painted a group portrait of Thomas Jones and his family (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) which may also contain a discreet but cheerful self-portrait. Upon returning to London in 1783, Renaldi attempted without success to establish himself as a portrait painter at 2 Portugal Street, a modest house located near Lincoln's Inn Fields. On November 3 of that year, Jones was pleasantly surprised to bump into Renaldi in Fleet Street and the two dined together not long afterwards. In 1785, perhaps frustrated by commercial sluggishness, even sensing the prospect of professional failure in a highly competitive metropolitan market for portraits, Renaldi applied to the East India Company for permission to travel to Bengal. He supplied the names and addresses of two references - Mr. Job Hart Price of Aldershot House and Robert Codd of the 59th Regiment of Foot. These guarantors were evidently acceptable to the company, because the following February Renaldi was given formal approval to travel. He sailed aboard the East India Company ship, the Hillsborough, and arrived at Calcutta in August 1786. For the next ten years Renaldi lived and worked in Calcutta, Lucknow and Dacca (now the capital city of Bangladesh). He was therefore one of only a relatively small number of European painters - among them William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, Tilly Kettle and Ozias Humphrey - who spent extended periods painting portraits of and for the nabobs - English, Scottish and Anglo-Irish gentleman of the East India Company - as well as local rulers such as Asaf ud-Daulah, the Nawab Wazir of Oudh. He painted a group portrait of Major William Palmer and his family at Calcutta in 1786. In 1789 Renaldi relocated from Calcutta to Dacca, a large town in eastern Bengal possibly in the hope of finding fresh patronage. He returned to Calcutta and in 1790 embarked on a leisurely tour up-country, reaching Lucknow in 1792 or 1793, where he seems to have remained for several years. In total only around a dozen works - including the present, recently rediscovered portrait of Mrs. William Douglas and her son - painted by Renaldi in India are currently known but amongst them are a group of three individual portraits of Indian women which rank amongst the most intriguing and emotive images produced in British 18th century painting. They have traditionally been identified as bibis,the term for an upper-class Indian woman who became a mistress or unofficial wife to a European resident. The first, known in two versions, both dated 1787, depicts a Mughal lady sitting cross legged, wearing gold-striped green pajamas and a white gauzed shift looking straight ahead (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; sold Sotheby's, London, 6 December 2023, lot 23, £825,000) and the second depicts the same sitter but with the addition of a hookah pipe (Private collection). The third, a sensuous portrait of An Unknown Woman was painted two years later in 1789 at Dacca and depicts a Mughal lady reclining on a rug and cushion in a small room with green painted shutters and the door of British type - perhaps in a bibi khana, a small house or quarters which was frequently built behind the main house for ensuring privacy from visitors. The girl is holding a hookah and gazing at a piece of jewellery in her hand. As Mildred Archer wrote: 'It is her air of reverie and quiet calm, her ruffled dress with its soft texture, and above all the darting highlights on the hookah, silver pan tray, slippers and jewels that catch the eye and endow the painting with flashing brilliance' (2). The reemergence of this double portrait of Mrs. William Douglas and her son, Philip may provide the key to help identify the subject of the painting at Yale. The young Mrs. Douglas, née Jane Bell, is depicted at full length wearing a white dress with a blue sash, seated in armchair with her right foot resting on a stool and working on a piece of needlework in her lap. Her son, Philip, is seated at a high chair playing with a glass vial of scent from his mother's jewelry box, which sits on top of a circular side table which has a pair of sewing clamps with thread attached. Behind them is an Anglo-Indian daybed draped in red fabric. Natural light is diffused from the left-hand side through a window shaded by green painted shutters of the same type and design as found in the portrait of the Unknown Lady at Yale suggesting that they are situated in a different but related part of the same house. This raises the strong possibility that the present portrait and the Yale portrait were painted closely together, in the same residence, as part of the same commission. The likely explanation is that the Douglases and their young son, newly arrived in India as a family, were staying in the Dacca household of Jane's half-brother, Suetonius Grant Heatly. According to Suetonius Grant's nephew, Henry Green (son of William and Temperance Green) nephew, Heatly 'never married but formed a connection with a native of the Country, a thing of frequent occurrence at that time in India by whom he had several children whom he educated well and provided for -a daughter of his Mary was sent to England for her education' (Green/Heatly family historical archive, Cornell University Library). Suetonius Grant Heatly appears to be the clear candidate to commission portraits of his half-sister and her son, as well as an intimate portrait of his bibi at the same moment from Renaldi at Dacca in 1789. Indeed, Suetonius Grant had a history of patronizing the European artists working in India. He was painted by Arthur William Devis in a group portrait with his sister Temperance and his Indian servants in Calcutta, c. 1786 (3). His brother, Patrick Healty (1753-1834), who also served in the administration of the East India Company was painted by Zoffany in India (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven)... Click here to read more.
