The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty. Ben Macintyre
BY COINCIDENCE, or fate, in 1875 Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was also about to make a triumphant public reappearance in the English capital after long years in hiding. The subject of this painting had died some four decades before Worth was born, but she would play a defining role in his life.
Georgiana Spencer (pronounced George-ayna) was just seventeen in 1774 when she married William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire. The duke, one of the richest and oddest men in England, was also, by popular assent, one of the luckiest, for the eldest daughter of John, first Earl of Spencer, was already considered to be the most beautiful and accomplished woman in the nation. Poets praised her to the heavens, the Prince of Wales fawned on her, and painters vied with one another to reproduce her charms. Her detractors were equally emphatic, portraying her as an aristocratic slattern whose hats were too tall and whose morals were too low. Everyone had an opinion on Georgiana.
Thomas Gainsborough began his most celebrated painting of the duchess around the year 1787, and it was no easy commission, even for the greatest portraitist Britain has ever produced. There was something about the pucker of her lips, the hint of a smirk, playful and suggestive, that defied reproduction. Or perhaps it was simply the captivating presence of the sitter herself, ‘then in the bloom of youth’, that baffled the master. Gainsborough’s frustration mounted as he drew and redrew Georgiana’s mouth, trying to catch that fleeting, flirting expression, ‘but her dazzling beauty, and the sense which he entertained of the charm of her looks, and her conversation, took away that readiness of hand and happiness of touch which belonged to him in ordinary moments’. Finally he lost his temper. ‘Drawing his wet pencil across a mouth which all who saw it considered exquisitely lovely, he said, “Her Grace is too hard for me!”’
Gainsborough painted Georgiana, as far as we know, three times: as a child in 1763, a delightful painting ‘giving promise even then of her remarkable charms’ which now hangs in the collection of Earl Spencer of Althorp, England; and a second time in 1783, for a full-length portrait now in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the latter painting the duchess is draped around a column in classically demure posture, but appears a trifle seedy and ‘greenish’ in Walpole’s words, possibly after a hard night on the town. By the time he came to paint her again both artist and sitter had become yet more celebrated and Gainsborough was plainly determined to capture Georgiana’s allure. Hence his frustration with the duchess’s elusive mouth.
He persevered, and the resulting portrait was a masterpiece, seeming to distil Georgiana’s delectable expression. Her left eyebrow is arched and winning, a tantalizing half-smile plays across her lips and beneath the huge cocked hat her glance is slyly mischievous. In one hand she grasps a blooming rose and in the other, pinched suggestively between thumb and forefinger, a ripe pink rosebud. Georgiana had not proved too hard for him after all, and the finished product was devastating, frankly sexual yet strangely coy.
She had been painted many times before and would be painted again by the greatest artists in the land, including Reynolds, Romney and Rowlandson. As one critic wrote in 1901, ‘More portraits exist of Georgiana than of any other English lady of the eighteenth century.’ Yet for grandeur and cheek, personality and piquancy, none matched Gainsborough’s painting of the duchess in full bloom.
There is no evidence that the portrait ever hung in the ducal home of the Devonshires at Chatsworth, but at around the time that Georgiana became pregnant by her lover, the future prime minister Charles Grey, the lovely Gainsborough painting abruptly and inexplicably vanished. Perhaps the duke, although himself a serial adulterer, found the portrait of his wife with her coquettish smile and arched brow too powerful a reminder of her affair, and banished it from his presence.
In the autumn of 1841, three years before Adam Worth came into the world, the London art dealer John Bentley was making one of his annual forays through England’s Home Counties in search of rare paintings. An astute art connoisseur, Bentley owned a thriving dealership in the metropolis and was much in demand as a valuer of old masters. Over the course of his career, for pleasure and profit, he had made it a rule to spend a few weeks every year wandering through the small villages and towns of England making enquiries as to whether any of the local residents had works of art or other antiques they wished to value or sell. Many a bargain was to be found in this way, and the practice enabled Bentley to shed, for a while, the cares and strains of metropolitan life in a bucolic and nomadic quest for art.
In this particular year, Bentley’s enjoyment of his annual outing had been sharply diminished by a stinking cold which had settled both on his chest, making him cough and sneeze, and on his mind, making him grumpy.
On the morning of 17 September, Bentley’s ill-humour and streaming nose were suddenly forgotten when his researches brought him to the small sitting room of one Anne Maginnis, an elderly English schoolmistress long retired. For there, above Mrs Maginnis’s fireplace, grimy but unmistakable, was the portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Thomas Gainsborough. Quite how the widow Maginnis, who had little money and even less interest in fine art, managed to get her hands on Gainsborough’s famous missing portrait has never been adequately explained. According to one account, the old lady ‘spoke of it as the portrait of a relative of hers, and that it was bought, not as the picture of the beautiful Duchess, but merely as “a Gainsborough”.’ Bentley never enquired too closely into how she had obtained the great picture, partly out of tact, but largely because he had immediately identified the missing duchess, knew a sucker when he saw one, and wanted to buy it, cheap.
No one can be sure quite what had happened to the painting in the intervening years. One biographer quotes the Reverend Henry Bate as referring to two Gainsborough portraits of the duchess, ‘one of which Lady Spencer has, the other, we think, is in Mr Boothby’s possession’. One possibility is Charles Boothby-Skrymshire, also known as ‘Prince’ Boothby, a man of fashion so nicknamed on account of his egregious social climbing and his tendency to ‘abandon friends as soon as he met people of higher social position or rank’. He was believed to be a close friend of the Devonshires, and may have obtained the picture when the duke decided he no longer wanted it. Prince Boothby committed suicide on 27 July 1800, whereupon his effects were ‘dispersed’. Another candidate for the elusive ‘Mr Boothby’ is Sir Brooke Boothby of Ashbourne Hall, just twenty miles from Chatsworth, a scholar, poet, friend of Rousseau and Charles James Fox, satirist and art collector who owned at least one other portrait of the duchess as well as a crayon drawing and was acquainted with his ducal neighbours. Sir Brooke may have sold the Gainsborough in 1792, when he suddenly ran out of money. Whichever Boothby had briefly owned the Duchess, the portrait had completely vanished until it cropped up again in Mrs Maginnis’s tiny cottage under Bentley’s knowing and excited gaze. The elderly woman plainly had no idea what the painting was, or what it was worth, for in a singular act of vandalism some years earlier she had cut off the Duchess’s legs just above the knee, shortening the painting to three-quarters of its original size and consigning Georgiana’s feet to the fire. Henry James would criticize the ‘very wooden legs’ in Gainsborough’s portraits, but that was hardly a reason for burning them, and Mrs Maginnis’s brainless surgery left the portrait out of balance: Georgiana seems almost overpowered by her vast hat. But even in these sadly reduced