Research update: Dr William Dick and the art world in Regency London
A visit to a country house has ignited a little explosion of research into the life of Eliza Ogilvy’s grandfather, Dr William Dick, and his position in the London art world during the Regency.
Every once in a while and less often than I’d like, a small chink of light appears in a darkly unpromising avenue of research, before revealing an unimagined world. We walked into that world, not quite literally but by finding the right place at the wrong time, which was Belmont House in August 2024.
Belmont is a neo-classical mansion with a country park and a ha-ha to keep out the deer (without spoiling the view). The design by the architect Samual Wyatt includes a triple height saloon below a glass cupola, and clerestory windows above pepperpot turrets. There is much Georgian innovation: an exterior clad in mathematical tiles, flushing loos downstairs and an early mode of central heating. In 1801 — this was the right time — it was purchased by General George Harris with part of the £143,000 prize money he received from the East India Company after defeating the Tiger of Mysore, the scourge of the British, Tipu Sultan, at Seringapatam in 1799.
Many times postponed, the visit was to see a portrait by an unknown artist of Dr William Dick’s daughter, Eliza Serena Dick. She had married George Harris’ son, William George Harris (2nd Bt), at St George’s Church in Hanover Square in October 1809. So many Georges, and more: King George was reigning at the time, going mad - he features in this story; his son George was soon to become Regent — he too. Here we were at Belmont where the first, second, third, fourth and fifth baronets were all named George. They are from now on given their baronial name (George 1st Bt etc.).
Seeing the portrait in the flesh was a surprise; it is full length and life size, and it has suffered. Eliza Harris’ face is scored by pale lines where paint has disappeared around the mouth, nose and eyes, as if tear-stained make-up. The next few days unearthed the history of the painting, how it had been commissioned, her father’s relationship with the artist and others in the art world, and why the portrait was once so uncared for. And there was more. I will try to tell this story in the order in which the many small discoveries revealed themselves.
Soon after the visit I learned from Julie Keith, a guide at Belmont, that the painter of Eliza’s portrait was known to be Martin Archer Shee; later in his career Shee was President of the Royal Academy and is probably best known for his magnificent power-portraits of royalty including the Duke of Clarence (William IV), George IV (formerly the Prince Regent) and the young Queen Victoria. Shee was the inspiration for Thackaray’s thinly disguised ‘Smee’ in Vanity Fair, and this was not the only East India connection: Shee’s cousin, George Shee, was an East India Company official and a Calcutta contemporary of Dr William Dick, the Company’s Chief Examining Surgeon who also practiced physic privately in Mayfair. The name Shee set a few thoughts running for this was not the only family portrait to be painted by the artist. At the Royal Academy in 1819 Shee’s full length portrait of James Munro MacNabb, William Dick’s nephew and Eliza Harris’ cousin, had ‘attracted universal attention’ and favourable comparisons with Henry Raeburn’s famous ‘MacNab’. These two works are the subject of Chapter 2: Beauty lies in the lap of terror, a story of how art was used to legitimise wealth and status for the East India Company's little aristocracy.
The other piece of news from Belmont was the presence in the dining room of a portrait of Dr Dick himself, described as ‘after Hoppner’, and another above a door in a gloomy corridor of his eldest son (and Eliza Ogilvy’s guardian) Colonel Robert Dick. I hadn’t seen either of these on the trip. The John Hoppner connection was interesting. Rooting around Thomas Heneage’s bookshop in St James’s turned up a Hoppner Catalogue Raisonné published by Colnaghi in 1909, in which there is reference (without illustration) to a portrait of ‘Dick, Dr.’, described as ‘Hoppner’s medical attendant’; it went on: “Presumably, William Robert Dick who for many years resided at 8, Hertford Street, Mayfair’. Apart from the previously unknown middle name, this is the very same Dr William Dick. There is a note, recording a letter from Hoppner to Sir George Beaumont, who had recommended Dick as physician to the artist. Hoppner was suffering from dropsy caused by liver failure: he reported: ‘Dr. Dick bid me unpack and be of good cheer, since he entertained no doubt of restoring me, in six weeks or two months, to health again….I have delivered myself over to his judgement with as thorough conviction of its infallibility as if he were the Pope.’1
This confident manner made Dick’s reputation. Eliza Harris wrote from Hertford Street to her brother in Patna, two months before her marriage in October 1809,
‘Papa is continuing to practice. He is attending to [the] Marquis of Lansdowne just now & his Lordship's Illness, with Papa's attendance, Character etc. were all discussed a few days ago, at the King's Table at Windsor, when His Majesty asked some of the nobility present if they knew Papa.
When Lord St Helens replied that he did very well & spoke very handsomely, the King [George III] said he had heard a great deal of Papa.’2
Lansdowne was an avid collector and once owner of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, now in the National Gallery; St Helens was a trustee of the British Museum; however Beaumont seems to be the central node in the network that’s emerging here: an art patron, landscape painter and collector, friend of Wordsworth and Walter Scott, he was co-founder and benefactor of the National Gallery. Scott kindly and delightfully considered Beaumont 'by far the most sensible and pleasing man I ever knew. Kind, too, in his nature, and generous,—gentle in society, and of those mild manners which tend to soften the causticity of the general London tone of persiflage and personal satire’.3 There is a detail of Dr, Dick’s successful treatment of Sir George: ‘He has no objection to His patient drinking wine, if He finds it agrees with Him—Sir George, today drank a pint of Claret’.4
Beaumont recommended Dick to Hoppner and probably also to Shee (who was close to Hoppner, and likewise ill in 1809) and subsequently to Sir Walter Scott who suffered violent stomach pains caused by gall stones. Payment was often made by gifts in kind and evidently Dr Dick loved a painting.
Dick came to be celebrated as the saviour of Sir Walter Scott’s life, not least by Scott himself, as evidenced by the complete set of Scott’s poetical works once to be found at Dick’s country house at Tullymet, in Atholl, ‘A Highly Valued Present from the Author to Doctor Dick therefore not to be lent. January 1820’.5 Dick had a reputation as a specialist in liver disease which of course was rife in the heavy drinking culture of Calcutta in the 1790s, where he learned his trade. What is remarkable was Dick’s ability to instil confidence in a process that was more likely to kill his patients than the disease they suffered from; this was treatment with Calomel, a form of Mercury Chloride and a violent purgative that washed out black bile and, when used alongside bloodletting, was regarded as a universal cure but one particularly efficacious for liver and stomach complaints - and syphilis. The resulting mercury poisoning could be enough to kill the patient before symptoms became evident, and so the real cause of death was often undetected and allocated instead to the disease being treated. Dick’s speciality was an early form of micro-dosing: very small quantities of calomel dispensed at frequent intervals. This, apparently, was the secret of his success and helped his patients eke out a little more of life.
In Hoppner’s case, the dropsy was at least temporarily cured and he lived to paint for one more year, until January 1810. And so Hoppner’s portrait of William Dick, undated in the Catalogue Raisonné, would have been painted sometime in 1809 and one of the very last that Hoppner made. It seems fair to assume that the Belmont painting is mis-attributed and is by — not after — Hoppner. The use of colour and in particular the red-tint in the background is typical of the artist. Dick is hardly flattered by Hoppner, who had a reputation as a truthful painter; the painting is free but (albeit seen only from a photograph taken in poor light) appears to be unfinished. In 1823 at Christie’s Hoppner’s family sold a number of painted preparatory sketches including one of Dr Dick. This is unlikely to be the Belmont portrait though, for Eliza Harris died in 1817 and there would have been little reason for the Harris family to purchase it after that date. The Belmont portrait of Dick is much more likely the real thing, commissioned or given to Eliza around the time of her marriage to William George Harris (2nd) in 1809.
Two more pieces of information came to light which challenged my own assumptions about the origins of the Harris and MacNabb portraits. The first was an examination of Algernon Graves’ index of exhibits at the Royal Academy, which recorded two previously unknown portraits by Shee of Dick family members: one of ‘Captain Dick’ exhibited in 1808, two years before the portrait of ‘Mrs G. Harris’; the other of ‘John Dick, Esq.’, exhibited in 1818, the year before the portrait of ‘James MacNabb, Esq.’ Then I revisited William Dick’s will and found a codicil, previously unseen and written after Eliza’s death, that bequeathed the portrait of Eliza to her son, George 3rd Bt, but only to be given after the death of Eliza’s mother Charlotte, which as it happened was not until 1829 (Dr Dick died in 1821).
There are some simple conclusions to draw from this (apologies if too much detail): William Dick commissioned at least one portrait from John Hoppner and three family portraits from Shee, and possibly four; the first of these was of his eldest son Robert, on leave after being wounded at Rosetta, Egypt in 1807, and shortly before his promotion to Major in April 1808 and departure to Portugal to fight in the Peninsular War; second was the portrait of Eliza Harris which was not, as I had expected, commissioned by her husband but by her father William Dick, around the time of her wedding and therefore kept at Hertford Street in Mayfair, then Tullymet until at least 1829; it’s arrival at Belmont long after Eliza’s death in 1817 would have been unwelcome to Isabella Handcock, the new wife of William George (2nd Bt) — she was barely 6 years older than her new stepson, to whom the painting had been bequeathed; third, a portrait of Dick’s youngest son John to mark his departure for Calcutta as an East India Company civil servant in 1817; and fourth, the celebrated portrait of James Munro MacNabb, which may have been commissioned as part of the campaign by his uncle Dr William Dick and his father James MacNabb to obtain the MacNabb clan chiefdom and a baronetcy for the younger James - and so raise him into the Highland aristocracy.6 The jury is out on that, for the dates don’t quite match up. Meanwhile, after 1829 the portrait of Eliza was locked up in the attic at Belmont — the painting store — where its condition deteriorated over 120 years until it was disinterred by Lady Dorothy Harris (wife of Geo. 5th) in the 1950s, to become part of a group in the dining room that represented the extended family of the 3rd Baronet: Eliza Harris, his mother; William Dick, his grandfather; the 3rd Bt himself and his daughter Frances; and his half brother Temple Harris-Temple, who was with him when he died.
Where does this leave us? With the knowledge that for a surgeon physician William Dick was spending an outrageous sum on artworks. The head-and-shoulder portraits would have cost at least 30 guineas. The full length, life size ‘Mrs G. Harris’ and the MacNabb, painted in 1808 and 1818 respectively, would have cost 200 guineas each. (The artist Henry Thomson told Joseph Farington in 1819 that “[William] Owen, Shee, & Himself had 50 guineas for a three quarter portrait, & 200 guineas for a whole length”). This sum approximates to the annual salary of a senior clerk, a relatively highly skilled job for an educated gentleman unable to live from his own means; let’s compare him to a software architect today, so an equivalent income value in the region of £100,000, a surprising sum for a doctor to part with two or three times over.7
Context is everything. For three years from 1805 to 1807 Dick had been posted to Prince of Wales Island (today Penang) with Stamford Raffles and Philip Dundas, the nephew of Dick’s old benefactor Henry Dundas. Their task was to establish a new East India Presidency, including medical services, in the former Dutch colonies of Java lying on the opium route to China. Dick was paid 10,720 Spanish silver dollars — about 2,230 guineas — per annum, a huge sum, but only by London standards, not those of the Company for its senior personnel in Asia. In 1818 when he wrote his will, Dick left £6000 of East India Company stock and £10,000 in Bengal Government Bonds. In this context, the pictures are a mere trifle. And Dick was not alone in heating up the London art market. Graves’ Index and the catalogues of work by Hoppner, Shee, Phillips, Raeburn and Romney are peppered with evidence of the activity of East India Company officers either commissioning portraits for family members, or sitting themselves,
The economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz posed the question: did the beneficiaries of colonial exploitation use their financial gains to invest in capital goods, or in purchasing status-defining luxuries: “titles, tulips or Titians”, as he put it.8 In Regency London the choice for the East India Company’s little nabobs was more likely Constables, carriages and country houses and Dick’s generation invested heavily in these, a choice that stimulated the economy of London and the South East, but less so the industrial north. Their sons and grandsons, however, with status more secure, made a remarkable shift to capital investment in the new industrial technologies of manufacture and transportation.
In the case of Dr Dick, a uniquely close contact with artists and their patrons and the probability of receiving artworks as payment in kind, not cash, must explain how unusually prolific he was as a buyer. Whether this was only Hoppner and Shee, or whether there were other artists, poets and collectors amongst his clientele, we don’t know yet know but deeper research into Dick’s client list might be a rewarding exercise.
After Dick’s death in 1821, his family continued the tradition he had established. William’s daughter-in-law Lousia Dick was painted wearing many ounces of Scottish gold by Thomas Phillips; Eliza Ogilvy was painted by Thorburn, Robert Dick by E.H. Green (and this, not the Shee, appears to be the painting hanging at Belmont). There was also an eager enlistment of engravers and lithographers to make printed copies of these and other portraits for family members, some of which survive; then a rush to adopt the new technology of photography from as early as the 1840s, not only to photograph individuals, but also prints and paintings.
Absence and distance made pictorial memories immensely valuable, and in the case of Eliza Harris especially so because she was evidently such a vital part of her family, combining beauty and wit with great affection for her parents and brothers. After her death in 1817 a tablet was placed in the family cemetery at Tullymet (Eliza was buried at Belmont): ‘A finer spirit never inhabited human form and no human form was ever more lovely. Erected by her disconsolate parents on the site of her favourite bower.’
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE
A second visit to Belmont on 10 September gave me a chance to see for the first time portraits of Dr William Dick and his son Robert Dick. The latter, in the saloon, is the original by E. H. Green painted probably in 1832, with Robert in the uniform of a Lt. Colonel with KCH, marked by the star of the Guelphic (Hanoverian) Order. This is a very ordinary piece of work. There is a another version, an etching by Henry Haig after a revised painting which I’ve seen, almost identical to the Green but I suspect by a different artist. In this Robert is shown as a Major General and KCB with the badge of the Order of the Bath.
The portrait of William Dick by John Hoppner (I now believe) is difficult to see against the glare of two windows on either side, and could do with a clean, but I could tell that this is the finished work, not a sketch, so almost certainly the original by Hoppner himself. I took photographs of the Shee portrait of Dick’s daughter Eliza Harris, one straight on in terrible light, the other from an awkward angle to suppress masses of glare, which gives an idea of the scale, the neo-classical setting and dress — and Shee’s skill with a chiffon shawl. I hope that good photographs will follow.
Acknowledgement: My thanks to Simon Joy and Julie Keith of Belmont House for help in providing insight, images, Eliza Harris’ correspondence, Harris family stories and time sequences.
Afterword: Chapter 2 now requires revision of course, but this won’t be before Chapters 7-10 are published. Chapter 7 covers Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s and Eliza Ogilvy’s very different views on the Sikh War, and Chapter 8 the Dick family’s involvement in the great uprising of 1857 and the second opium war. These are in the process of revision, as is Chapter 9, on the Bengal Renaissance, its suppression, and influence on industrial growth in Britain in the 1840s and ‘50s. Chapter 10 will be a podcast, the story of William Prinsep’s trip to Canton in 1838. The complex co-evolution of painting, engraving, lithography and photographic portraiture will be the subject of a future chapter, possibly the first in the second part of the book - the European part.
McKay W. and Roberts W.: John Hoppner R.A., Colnaghi & Co London 1909
Unpublished letter, Serena Dick to William Fleming Dick, 9 August 1809, Belmont archive. After Lansdowne’s death the Virgin of the Rocks was sold. Hill, a picture dealer ‘bought a picture by Leonardo da Vinci at the sale of the late Marquess of Lansdowne for 389 guineas, which, having taken off some paint which had been injudiciously painted upon it, He sold a month afterwards to Lord Suffolk for 2000 guineas.’ Farington Diary, Vol. VIII, 9th December 1816
Woodberry, George Edward: Studies in letters and life
Grieg, James Ed.: The Farington Diary Vol. V 1808-9
The edition of Scott’s complete poetical works was sold at Bonhams in December 2020
See extract from William Dick’s letters to James Munro MacNabb in Beauty lies in the lap of terror op cit
Farington, December 13 1818
Pomreanz, K.: The Great Diverence, Princeton University 2021 Ed.