John Singer Sargent, Lord Ribblesdale

This full-length portrait is of Thomas Lister, who became the 4th (and last) Lord Ribblesdale in 1876, when he was just 22. He was a Liberal peer, a lord-in-waiting at court and a Trustee of both the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery. At the time he painted it, John Singer Sargent was a highly regarded society portraitist. This portrait was not a commission, but was instigated by Sargent himself after he had seen Lord Ribblesdale give a speech in 1894 (although he did not begin work on it for another five years).

A dedicated sportsman, Ribblesdale had been Master of the Queen’s Buckhounds between 1892 and 1895. Plans to paint him in full hunting livery were abandoned. Instead, Ribblesdale wears his own informal ‘ratcatcher’ hunting clothes, their practicality revealing something of his character. Holding a riding whip, he wears a pale yellow waistcoat, dark brown jacket, box-cloth breeches, grey kid gloves and polished black leather butcher boots. His outfit is completed by a large unbuttoned Chesterfield overcoat. His face is framed by a black silk muffler, worn to one side when hunting, and a top hat, which he also wore while hunting. A thin line of red paint at the end of the whip’s coiled cord (the ‘popper’) is the only touch of bright colour in a picture almost entirely composed in muted tones of black, yellow-ochre and greenish grey.

In a preliminary oil sketch Lord Ribblesdale is standing on steps, with one leg raised, in front of a large column. In the final portrait he poses against the more neutral panelling of Sargent’s studio at Tite Street, London. With one hand on his hip, his pose is casual yet confident, with just a hint of swagger. His top hat, set at a slight angle, also introduces a note of rakishness. Sargent has deliberately elongated Ribblesdale’s tall, lean body, its vertical line reinforced by the perpendicular of the fluted pilaster behind him. His compact silhouette and the taut outlines of his long coat, particularly below the waist, further enhance his stature.

It is likely that Sargent chose the coat himself. He had previously painted W. Graham Robertson (Tate, London) wearing an identical Chesterfield overcoat (Robertson’s own) with a black velvet collar, and also posing with a hand on his hip. In that portrait, Sargent had included a vertical backdrop (a doorframe) and props (a walking cane) to create the same effect of elongating the figure – a technique used also by his contemporary, James McNeil Whistler. But while Robertson appears as a typical late nineteenth-century aesthete, Lord Ribblesdale, as the epitome of Edwardian patrician authority, represents a very different social type.

The portrait was highly praised when first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902 and came to define the public perception of Ribblesdale. When it was exhibited in Paris the following year, Lord Ribblesdale revealed how it ‘forced greatness upon me … wherever I go, I am recognised‘. On seeing him some 15 years later, the novelist Virginia Woolf noted that Ribblesdale was ‘the very image of his picture – only obviously seedy and dissolute’. Upon Lord Ribblesdale’s death in 1925, it was the portrait that was reproduced in his obituary, despite having been painted over 20 years earlier.