The Rivals

In this section of the avenue the trees on either side of the path stretch a little further to form a woodland that Lord Dufferin named ‘The Rivals’ after the 1775 play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, his great grandfather, and an important influence on his own lifestyle. ‘The Rivals’ was Sheridan’s first play, and the opening night was a complete flop, so he re-wrote parts of it and returned a week later with a box office hit, with the part of Mrs Malaprop causing great mirth. The now rather derelict clump of trees on the skyline to the East is named after her.

His wife, Elizabeth, may have had much to do with the play’s eventual success. Her beauty and exceptional soprano voice had brought her fame, and portraits of her were painted by Reynolds and Gainsborough. However, on marrying Sheridan in 1773, she left her career to support him in his expensive political and artistic lifestyle, which they hoped ‘The Rivals’ would subsidise.

Gainsborough’s portrait has a most remarkable biography. “The Sheridans were living next door to Lady Spencer, Squire Bouverie's mother, when a seizure was made by the Sheriff. Sheridan's servant knew the value his master set on this picture of his beautiful wife, and he managed to detach it hurriedly from the frame (a very large one) and to get it over the wall into Lady Spencer's garden. Poor Sheridan was glad to save the picture from his creditors, and leave it in his fiend's hands, from whom he got advances of money until he should redeem it. That redemption never occurred, and so it became Bouverie property.”[1] The Bouverie country seat was at Delapré, which is where we take up the story in 1862 with a letter from Joseph Hogarth to Lord Dufferin:

“On my arrival at Northampton on Thursday I sought Mr Rimer at his residence but had to retrace my steps and seek him at the house of General Bouverie, where he was said to be copying a picture for your Lordship…. As the additional labour is to a certain extent a new reading of the original I ought to see the pictures again before they are separated for, beautiful as the picture is, containing a landscape possessing all the largeness of Turner combined with that intermingling of golden colour upon silver lines so peculiar to Gainsborough…... It was only by a single stroke of the brush at the last moment he prevented the picture sinking into one of the pretty nonsensical shepherdesses of the Lely and Kneller school….”[2]

Whilst the copy still graces the gallery at Clandeboye, the original was sold to Baron Rothschild in 1872, for £3,000. In 1937 it was purchased by the Mellon Trust and donated to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, where it remains to this day.

[1] Diary of Mrs. Caulfield, wife of the second son of the first Earl of Charlemont (12 March 1872 [2] PRONI MIC22/16 (14 July 1862)