Sir John Fielding by Nathaniel Hone. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

What was it like to be disabled in the 18th century? Chief Curator Jacob Simon takes us on a virtual tour of the National Portrait Gallery in search of some answers.

Disability is no respecter of person. Those represented on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery and in its collections are among the most celebrated members of British society but among them are many with disabilities. Some are celebrated in literature: Richard III was famously depicted by Shakespeare as ‘Crookback’, while the poet Byron who had a foot disability, or ‘club-foot’, has been vilified as having ‘the face of an angel on a devil’s body’.

As time progresses, the way we describe disability changes as knowledge and sensitivities develop. As the stories in this tour show, it is often not the disability which disempowers the disabled person, but society's attitudes and structures, both physical and ideological.

Horatio, Lord Nelson by Guy Head. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

The 18th century is sometimes described as an age of decorum. How far is disability revealed in portraiture of the period? Guy Head’s full-length portrait of Nelson receiving the French colours after the battle of the Nile, 1798, painted in Naples soon after the battle, shows Nelson’s earlier loss of an arm.

Otherwise the artist has avoided reality: he shows Nelson unscathed from the battle, though in truth he was bloodstained from a wound above his right eye, and he sets the scene in broad daylight despite the French colours not being struck until after midnight.

William Wilberforce by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

In contrast, slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce is more realistically portrayed. There are two portraits of Wilberforce in the Gallery: one by Sir Thomas Lawrence of 1828, another by George Richmond of 1833.

Both artists have given their portraits an extra liveliness by catching his awkward pose, which seems to have been the result of a disability brought about by an illness. Wilberforce himself said that he was obliged to wear ‘a steel girdle cased in leather and an additional part to support the arms’.

Sir John Fielding (detail) by Nathaniel Hone. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Blind magistrate Sir John Fielding was painted by Nathaniel Hone in 1762. He wears a dark blue or black band above his eyes. This appears to be purely symbolic and is found in some other images of the blind in the late 18th century. Fielding was a social reformer and the half brother of the novelist Henry Fielding. He promoted the idea of a police force and was a pioneer of child welfare.

Towards the end of his life he was described by one contemporary, Samuel Curwen, as ‘a venerable elderly gentlemen with hoary locks and blind (as Justice is represented to be), having a black fillet over his eyes, of a mild deportment, ready apprehension and great penetration, as his queries to the prisoners manifest’.

George Whitefield, by John Wollaston. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

This is Methodist evangelist George Whitefield painted by John Wollaston, in about 1742. What really strikes us about the picture is that Whitefield, arms outstretched, is preaching to a congregation from the pulpit. But when we look more closely we can see that he has a vision impairment, or squint, the result of measles in childhood. In one caricature he was unkindly satirised as ‘Dr Squintum’.

Rules Of Decorum

The 18th century was a period when there were clear rules of decorum, or behaviour, as to how people in society were to pose and be represented. A handbook published in 1737 described ‘the method of attaining a Graceful Attitude, …an easy air and a genteel behaviour’, the purpose being to ‘distinguish the polite gentleman from the rude Rustick’. Without some idea of what was the norm in depiction, we cannot detect when disability leads artist or sitter to choose to depart from the norm.

Two portraits painted in 1756 are examples of contrasting approaches. One is a portrait of Handel by Thomas Hudson, the other of Dr Samuel Johnson by Hudson’s pupil, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Handel by Thomas Hudson. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

This image shows composer George Frideric Handel seated with the score of Messiah. Hudson was very skilled at meeting the requirements of decorum in portrait painting. He often showed his male sitters with one hand tucked inside the waistcoat, for example.

Looking at Hudson’s very conventional picture it is difficult to detect that the seventy-year-old Handel is in fact blind. His contemporaries were very struck by his misfortune, and one acquaintance recalled a performance of his Samson during the first year of his blindness. Tenor John Beard sang, with great feeling of Samson's blindness,

Total eclipse – no sun, no moon,
All dark, amid the blaze of noon.

The acquaintance wrote: ‘The recollection that Handel had set this air to Music, with the view of the blind Composer then sitting by the Organ, affected the audience so forcibly, that many persons present were moved even to tears.’

Dr Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of 1756 of Dr Samuel Johnson, author of the famous Dictionary, is, by contrast, hardly conventional in pose. But then Reynolds took a different attitude to his master, Thomas Hudson. He is said to have spoken ‘with contempt of those who supposed grace to consist in erect position, turned out toes, or the frippery of modern dress’.

The Rev. William Dodd described Dr Johnson in complimentary terms in 1750, but also said he was ‘the oddest and most peculiar fellow I ever saw. He is six feet high, has a violent convulsion in his head, and his eyes are distorted’, while Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell wrote in 1791 of how ‘the scrophula, or king’s evil … disfigured a countenance naturally well formed, and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one of his eyes’.

Massive, ungainly, plagued with nervous tics, Johnson was the victim of melancholia and could not bear solitude. Reynolds’s hunched depiction contains something of this.

Reynolds himself, of course was no stranger to disability. He became progressively deaf in later life. In one celebrated self-portrait, now at the Tate Gallery, he depicts himself with his hand cupped to his ear.

Controversy

It seems that in the 18th century, people in society treated those with disabilities with kindness within their own terms of reference, though we have little firm evidence. But this was not always the case, as can be seen from the controversy surrounding two very public figures: satirical poet Alexander Pope and radical politician, John Wilkes. Both men lived by the pen and in return were subject to vituperative attacks, singling out their conspicuous disabilities.

A sketch of Alexander Pope by William Hoare. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Alexander Pope was a poet of wit and polish, best known for his Rape of the Lock and his Dunciad. He is one of the giants of 18th century English literature. Pope was permanently deformed by tuberculosis of the bone (Pott’s disease) at the age of 12 and he became very sensitive about his appearance.

He was described in Joshua Reynolds’s account of his one encounter with Pope in 1742 as, ‘about four feet six high; very humpbacked and deformed; he wore a black coat; and according to the fashion of that time, had on a little sword; … he had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which always are found in the mouths of crooked persons; and the muscles which ran across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords … an extraordinary face, not an everyday countenance, -- a pallidly studious look; not merely a sharp, keen countenance, but something grand, like Cicero’s.’

The red chalk drawing by portrait painter William Hoare shows Pope at full-length in about 1740. Someone, perhaps Hoare’s son, has written on the back: ‘This is the only portrait that was ever drawn of Mr Pope at full-length. It was done without his knowledge…. Pope would never have forgiven the painter had he known it. He was too sensible of the deformity of his person to allow the whole of it to be represented. This drawing is therefore exceedingly valuable, as it is an unique of this celebrated poet.’

A bust of Pope by John Michael Rysbrack. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

A better-known image of Pope was the marble bust by John Michael Rysbrack. It shows him as a handsome man with shoulder-length hair. Whilst the bust was being carved, a poem attacked the sculpture and described Pope as ‘Half Man, half Monkey, own’d by neither Race’. Why this vicious attack? Pope was much loathed for his own vicious verbal attacks on some of his contemporaries, especially in the Dunciad. Trading insults had been part of Pope’s life for many years. Nevertheless, the criticism seems to have wounded him, and his response (also in verse), sounds sad:

Tis granted Sir; the Busto’s a damn’d head
Pope is a little Elf
All he can say for’t, is, He neither made
The Busto, nor himself.

John Wilkes with his daughter by Johan Zoffany. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Politician John Wilkes was another controversial figure. There are two images of him in the Gallery, the one a commission to Wilkes's order, the other outside his control.

This portrait of Wilkes with his daughter, Mary, both seated in a landscape, was painted by Johan Zoffany for Wilkes and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782. It was seen by Horace Walpole in Zoffany’s studio in 1779 when he commented that Wilkes was ‘squinting tenderly at his daughter’. Walpole also thought the image to be ‘horridly like’.

John Wilkes by William Hogarth. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1763 William Hogarth had published a celebrated etching of Wilkes. At the time Wilkes was in prison for publishing an attack on the King’s speech to Parliament in his newspaper, the North Briton. In Hogarth’s etching, it has been said that Wilkes ‘leers and squints as if in mockery of his own pretences to patriotism’. There was a prior history of antipathy between the men: Wilkes had attacked Hogarth in the North Briton the previous year.

Wilkes had a charismatic personality which made him attractive to women despite his appearance, as he himself was very aware. When later asked to sit for Sir Joshua Reynolds, he replied: ‘No! they shall never have a delineation of my face, that will carry to posterity so damning a proof of what it was.’

He goes on to lament ‘the numerous squinting portraits on tobacco papers, and half penny ballads, inscribed with the name of John Wilkes’, describing them as ‘a weak invention of the enemy’. ‘I was not only unlike them’, he says, ‘but, if any inference can be drawn from the general partiality of the fair sex, the handsomest man of the age I lived in’.