Richard Cosway, Portrait of Sir Robert Adair, 1792

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Richard Cosway, Portrait of Sir Robert Adair, 1792,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1330.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Richard Cosway, Portrait of Sir Robert Adair, 1792,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 2, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1330.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The previously unknown sitter in this miniature by Richard Cosway has been identified through archival research as Sir Robert Adair (1763–1855).¹ Adair’s parents’ love story was reputedly immortalized in a folk song, “Robin Adair.” It was said to have been written by the sitter’s mother, Lady Caroline Keppel (English, 1737–1769), a daughter of the Earl of Albemarle, in response to her family’s rejection of her suitor, Robert “Robin” Adair (1711–1791), an impoverished Irish doctor who later became sergeant-surgeon to King George III.²

By the time Cosway painted this portrait of their son Robert Adair in 1792, the latter was beginning a distinguished career as a diplomat. He was also of sufficient means to commission portraits by leading artists, including the painter Thomas Gainsborough (English, 1727–1788) and Cosway, Principal Painter to George IV, then Prince of Wales, as this miniature’s inscription proudly proclaims. Adair sat for Cosway in England after returning from his first covert mission to Russia, where he charmed Catherine the Great.³ Adair likely met Cosway through their mutual association with the Prince of Wales.⁴ With his usual flattery and verve, Cosway depicts Adair as a smartly dressed man of action before a cloud-swept azure sky. His features and attire correspond closely to those of Gainsborough’s portrait of Adair, painted around 1785.⁵

Adair wears the latest fashions, including a blue coat with a soaring collar secured with oversized gold buttons and an equally high-collared white waistcoat. His cropped, frizzled hairstyle was popularized by the Prince of Wales and their mutual friend, the eminent Whig politician Charles James Fox.⁶ Cosway used short strokes to render rapidly the curling wisps of Adair’s soon-to-be-unfashionable powdered hair.⁷ The faintest indication of lines and shading creates a sense of softness and volume in the white stock knotted at Adair’s neck, in contrast to the more solidly executed blue coat. As an ardent member of the Whig party, Adair chose to wear a bright blue coat for this portrait, and that along with his hairstyle proclaims his close affiliation not only with the Whigs but also with Fox, his second cousin. Fox was so frequently seen and depicted wearing a gold-buttoned blue coat in support of the American revolutionaries, particularly George Washington, that the color became intimately associated, through him, with the Whig party more broadly. This miniature is further evidence that fashions adopted by Whigs were closely intertwined with their liberal, quasi-revolutionary ideals.⁸

In 1799, seven years after this portrait was painted, Adair was elected Member of Parliament for Appleby (1799–1802) and later Camelford (1802–1812), but international diplomacy remained his primary focus.⁹ He played an essential role on missions to Vienna, Belgium, and Constantinople but nearly toppled his career in 1805 upon marrying Angélique Gabrielle de l’Escuyer (French, 1765–1832)—the daughter of Charles Joseph de l’Escuyer, marquis d’Hagnicourt (French, 1741–1793)—who was reportedly a spy for Napoleon’s foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.¹⁰ Perhaps Adair had learned from his parents the value of an audacious love-match—fitting for the subject of this romantic portrait miniature.

Notes

1. This miniature was advertised for sale by S. J. Phillips, London, as “Miniature of Sir Robert Adair (Robin Adair)” in Art News 29 (April 18, 1931): 29.

2. Jane Austen featured the popular song as a hint to the secret love affair between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, whose union was considered similarly unsuitable, in her 1815 novel, Emma. Interestingly, the Prince of Wales was a passionate admirer of Austen’s work and kept a set of her novels at each of his residences, leading her to dedicate Emma to him. Peter Sabor, The Cambridge Companion to “Emma” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 145.

3. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger’s envoy William Augustus Fawkener reported to him on July 1, 1792, that the Empress had received Adair “with infinitely more civility than [usual]. She spoke to him of Lord Keppel and Mr. Fox and treated him the whole day with the greatest attention.” British diplomats were concerned that Adair had been sent by the Whig opposition’s leadership to impede Fawkener’s negotiations with Russia. R. G. Thorne, “ADAIR, Robert (1763–1855), of 24 Great Marlborough Street, Mdx.,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1790–1820, ed. R. Thorne (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1986), https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/adair-robert-1763-1855.

4. Cosway not only served as the prince’s chief painter and confidant, but he also lived a stone’s throw away from the Prince of Wales’s London residence, Carlton House, and advised the prince on its collections and likely the decor as well. Stephen Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1995), 74–75.

5. Gainsborough’s portrait of Robert Adair, ca. 1785, oil on canvas, 25 x 29 3/4 in. (63.5 x 75.6 cm), is at the Baltimore Museum of Art, BMA 1951.109, https://collection.artbma.org/objects/37666/robert-adair.

6. They shared a great-grandparent in Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond, the illegitimate son of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. Adair’s links to the Keppel and Fox families, both prominent in the Whig party, were highly advantageous to his political career. Thorne, “ADAIR, Robert.”

7. After the 1795 Duty on Hair Powder Act, the wearing of hair powder was almost entirely abandoned. Adair and his cousin, fellow Whig John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford, began to wear their hair unpowdered and cut quite short in a politically motivated style that became known as the “Bedford crop.” The crop was not only a protest against the powder tax but was also regarded as an emblem of the Whig party’s support of the revolutionaries in France, with which Britain was then waging war. The anti-Whig satirical poem, “A Bit of an Ode to Mr. Fox,” directly connects the hairstyle of Adair, a subject of the ode along with Fox, to his political activities. Adair, in the midst of transforming into a goose, exclaims “My cropp’d head waves with sudden plumes, / Which erst (like Bedford’s, or his groom’s) / Unpowder’d, braved the weather.” Charles Edmonds, ed., Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin: Comprising the Celebrated Political and Satirical Poems, Parodies and Jeux-d’Esprit of the Right Hon. George Canning, the Earl of Carlisle, Marquis Wellesley, the Right Hon. J. H. Frere, W. Gifford, Esq., the Rt. Hon. W. Pitt, G. Ellis, Esq. and Others (London: G. Willis, Great Piazza, Covent Garden, 1854), 71–72.

8. According to Philip Mansel, the association with Fox’s blue coat, especially when paired with buff trousers, also worn by Lord Holland, the Prince of Wales, and other Whigs, was tantamount “for some [to a] treasonable, political message.” The prince regularly wore blue and buff as a kind of uniform, in opposition to the blue and red “Windsor uniform” traditionally worn by male members of the British royal family and prominent Tory politicians like Prime Minister Pitt the Younger. Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 58.

9. W. P. Courtney, revised by H. C. G. Matthew, “Adair, Sir Robert (1763–1855), politician and diplomatist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/84.

10. According to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was vigorously engaged in Whig politics, Adair told her—upon realizing that his ill-considered marriage to the woman called “Talleyrand’s spy” may have been the reason he did not receive a position with Fox in Grenville’s new administration—that “if it is my accursed marriage that had done this I will blow out my brains: I have educated myself for the place—I knew [Fox] always intended me for it, and I care for nothing else. Money is no object to me.” James Barnett Adair, Adair History and Genealogy (Los Angeles: J. B. Adair, M.D., 1924), 42.

Probably Sir Robert Adair (1763–1855), London, 1792;

With S. J. Phillips, London, by 1931 [1];

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Notes

[1] The Nelson-Atkins miniature is illustrated in an advertisement for “S.J. Phillips, London” as “Miniature of Sir Robert Adair (Robin Adair)” in Art News 29 (April 18, 1931): 3.

Thomas Gainsborough, Robert Adair, ca. 1785, oil on canvas, 25 x 29 3/4 in. (63.5 x 75.6 cm), Baltimore Museum of Art.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 68, as Unknown Man.

Art News 29 (April 18, 1931): 3 (repro.).

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 68, p. 26, (repro.), as Unknown Man.