Portraits in medical biography: Alexander Pope (1688–1744),poet,patient,celebrity

Introduction

This paper examines portraits of Alexander Pope. It argues that they offer a window – not always transparent – on to the medical life of this famous figure. Pope was the preeminent poet of the first half of the 18th century – most celebrated for his translations of Homer’s epics, his own mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock (1717) and the satirical epic The Dunciad (1728, 1743). His classical learning and sharp wit earned him wide renown, but his Catholicism denied him the Poet Laureateship. He knew several of the most glittering figures of his age. Some of them bade Pope to write their epitaphs, including Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727).

For all his fame and success, Pope was an ill man. In childhood, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone – later called Pott’s disease – from his wet nurse. It stunted his growth, weakened his limbs and gave him a hunch that he carried all his life. The literary giant was a physical dwarf. He could not ride without pain nor walk far without help. Pope also suffered from sundry complaints including asthma, headaches and pains of the eye. Indeed, he was to die from a severe ‘dropsical’ bout of asthma. His lifelong illnesses dogged and frustrated him so much that he once referred to his life as ‘this long disease’. His friend William Wycherley (1641–1715) put it aptly when he said of Pope that ‘the sword gleamed bright in [its] decaying scabbard’. ¹

As well as being ill, Pope was also very widely portrayed. ² The point of this piece is to analyse the connections between Pope’s illness(es) and his portraiture. It argues that looking at Pope’s portraits in different ways can generate a deeper understanding of his medical life as well as of how portraits might be integrated into medical biography without losing sight of them as works of ‘art’.

Portraits have often been considered as valuable biographical evidence. Scholars wanting details about Pope the writer have often turned to his portraits. ³ Yet no one has seen fit to think about health and portraits in the same frame. This essay frames these two domains in a number of ways. Doing so, I argue, offers insights into medical biography. Specifically, I shall argue (1) that portraits ‘showed’ signs of Pope’s ill-health, which people also recognised, (2) that portraits could imply or rebut associations to diseases that affected how Pope’s character was thought of and (3) that portraits evince what was medical about his relationships with other people (including doctors and friends).

Portraiture in Pope’s time

Before these framings will make sense, however, it is helpful to paint some general picture of early-to-mid-18th-century portraiture. As well as being tokens of noble lineage, portraits were also materially valuable objects of wider significance. They commemorated socio-cultural worth, for instance, in the monumental sculpture of Westminster Abbey. They promoted aesthetic trends, including interior decoration and the wearing of jewellery. They exemplified moral virtues, especially politeness. Most importantly, they signified the sitter’s identity; all the negotiated choices about what to depict were fundamentally aimed at conveying a good sense of the sitter’s individual person-hood.

Portraits were bought, sold, shared, copied, cut and pasted, donated, hung and re-hung on an ever-increasing scale. They became objects of general cultural consumption par excellence. They were consumed – looked at, criticised and bought – by large sections of visually educated society. People used art-theory primers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, sale catalogues and country-house guidebooks to increase its awareness of portraiture and sharpen its critical acumen. In March 1751, for instance, the portraitist Joseph Highmore (1692–1780) wrote on portraiture in the popular Gentleman’s Magazine.

Portraits occupied all sorts of settings from homes and hospitals to clubs and churches; it was often allied to broader cultural practices including philanthropy, as at Captain Coram’s Foundling Hospital in London. Portraits were produced in all sorts of form: the commissioned oil, the print of the engraved copperplate, the reproduction copy, the marble bust, the coin or medal and so on down to skewed ‘portrait’ caricatures. These all betokened different values and emulated different cultural traditions. The business of making portraits buoyed at least two professions: artists and engravers competed furiously for commissions. Some artists, for example Arthur Pond (1701–1758), made their money by being jacks of several artistic trades. ⁴ The age of Pope, then, was awash with portraits. Indeed, as William Combe (1742–1823) would put it a generation after Pope, it was ‘a Portrait-Painting Age!’. ⁵

Depicting and seeing signs of Pope’s ill-health

Pope’s many illnesses affected the material production and reception of his portraits. To show, or not to show, or how to show, the signs of an illness required decisions to be taken: ethical ones, emotional ones and – at the level of representation – aesthetic and mechanical ones. Seeing a portrait as one showing illness, meanwhile, implies that 18th-century society could see the signs of illness when they were shown.

Many of his portraits show Pope as a sufferer. For instance, Louis-François Roubiliac (1702–1762) made four original marble busts of Pope. Roubiliac was acclaimed as the master portrait-sculptor of the mid-18th century (but whether this status gave him a greater licence to sculpt as he saw fit is perhaps moot). One of the four busts stands out for being rougher around the forehead than the others. The marble – conventionally smoothed – is choppier. This is because Roubiliac thought that the muscles and the veins of Pope’s forehead were tense. He sculpted the physical symptoms of Pope’s headaches. Joshua Reynolds later recalled that

Roubilac the statuary … observed that his [Pope’s] countenance was that of a person who had been much afflicted with headaches and that he should have known the fact from the contracted appearance of the skin above the eyebrows, though he had not been otherwise apprised of it. ⁶

A second example of visibly rendered illness is melancholy. The year 1722 saw Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) paint Pope for a third time. He depicted Pope as a gaunt, weary-looking man who sits resting his head on his hand. In fact, Pope was posed in the (entirely contrived) melancholic manner made famous by such authorities as Albrecht Dürer and Robert Burton. Pope had spoken of his melancholy as early as 1714 and continued to do so in later life. But it is only having achieved celebrity and renown for his intellect that Pope claimed the illness in his portraiture. It signalled his (own sense of his) apogee as a thinker. The representation of melancholy allowed Pope to draw on its rich associations of learning and creativity in order to make a statement about his work and therefore to express something about his mind and self. The association to melancholy was confirmed in the way this likeness was reproduced. It was reproduced in 1732 by George White in a brown ink mezzotint. The whole engraved surface shows just the head and the hand resting on it. White zoomed in on Kneller’s rendition, which not only magnified the pose, but also the head as the site of Pope’s intellect, too.

As it is in the production of portraits, so it can be in their reception. Many people spotted Pope’s ill looks. On Pope’s ‘visible’ headaches, Thomas Birch (1705–1766) noted that Pope suffered from pains in the head in his commentary on Jacob Houbraken’s (1698–1780) engraving for Birch’s own Illustrious Heads. ⁷ Commenting on a sketch of Pope at Button’s coffeehouse, Samuel Ireland reflected that ‘there is a peevishness and anxiety in the lineaments of the face, that we find in most of his finished portraits, and which are so strongly characteristic of the man, as to leave no doubt of his identity’. ⁸ For Ireland, the marks made the man. Thus did people notice the signs of Pope’s ill-health.

Portraits and ideas about health

In characterising a sitter’s identity, portraits were testimonies of character. Indeed, character was inferable from and judged on appearance. In a ‘curious’ society fascinated by bodies and bodily difference and capable of spotting signs of illness, portraits could be particularly effective ‘fronts’ to affect character perceptions. They channelled ideas and social discourses about health and illness. Having seen how portraits associated Pope to melancholy, I shall consider how they dissociated him from deformity, a condition that implied a warped and malformed character.

Pope was known as man of poor health. Maynard Mack has ventured to say that by the time he made his name as a poet, he was already firmly entrenched in society’s mindset as a man with bodily deformities. One possible explanation for this is the number of caricatures of him. Caricaturists and satirists presented Pope’s deformed back mercilessly. ⁹ In one caricature, the diminutive Pope is carried like a naughty child by a taller laughing man. Pope’s legs kick out awkwardly. He appears bent over, which exaggerates his hump. Another entitled Fronti Fides opted for an animal theme. A half-rat, half-monkey-like body of Pope stands on a pedestal. The head is taken from Kneller’s 1722 likeness. It is crudely attached to the body, yet it maintains the contemplative head-on-hand pose of the original, making the impression all the more absurd. Indeed, one dual-purpose of satires was to send up the conventions of portraiture and thereby to offer alternative views of the body. If satires referred to Pope’s portraits, did the portraits likewise respond to satires?

We know Pope was bothered by such satires. ¹⁰ His response to the pressure satires put on his ‘image’ may be best seen in the context of his whole iconography. Pope permitted no full-length standing portraits to be made in his lifetime, i.e. none that might capture his hunch or awkward stance. (William Hoare once made a sketch literally behind his back which he admitted was made ‘without … [Pope's] knowledge’. ¹¹ ) When Pope was shown in full length, he was seated, often crossing his legs and musing, as in Jervas’ portrait of Pope with Martha Blount (1690–1762), a pose that naturally contorts the back (Figure 1). Otherwise, we know Pope exerted himself to prevent his portraits from showing his wonky physique. Joseph Farington (1747–1821) recalled that when Pope sat to William Hoare (Figure 2),

he showed an anxiety to conceal the deformity of his Person, & had a cloak thrown over his shoulders, & while Mr Hoare was painting that part of the picture, He came behind Him & said ‘He need not be very particular about the shoulders’. ¹² OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

W Hoare, Alexander Pope, pastel, n.d., 602 mm × 449 mm.

A second way in which Pope used portraiture to overturn any perception of his housing a deformed mind or soul within his warped body was by associating himself to virtue. Francis Bacon, the major theorist of early-modern deformity, had explained that deformity could be compensated for by virtue. A head-piece to Pope’s Essay on Criticism, designed by William Kent (1685–1748) and engraved by Paul Foudrinier (1698–1758), was inscribed with the motto ‘UNI AEQUUS VIRTUTI ATQ. EIUS AMICIS’ or ‘To virtue only and her friends a friend’ – pulled from Pope’s oeuvre as a mark of the man. An etching after Jean-Baptiste van Loo (1684–1745) came presented with exactly the same motto; and some of Jonathan Richardson’s (1665–1745) engravings put the same point.

According to more contemporary theoreticians after Bacon, deformity was simply a want of beautiful uniformity. Even Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defined deformity as a comic bodily ‘imperfection’ – an aberration from perfect beauty. While symmetry and uniformity were regarded as important indicators of beauty, the category and the implications for one’s character were not stable. William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) and Characters and Caricaturas (1743), for instance, dissented from this position. Perhaps, Pope’s portraitists and engravers were subtly undermining and received classical definitions when they decorated their Popes with busts of Apollo. Apollo was the poet’s muse for sure, but also a locus classicus of beautiful uniformity. Were Pope’s publishers trying to question what Pope’s figure meant for ideals of male beauty by allying their subject with the archetype of the beautiful male form? No other poet’s portraits are adorned with the motif – not Shakespeare, nor Prior, nor Gray nor any of John Simon’s (1675–1751) undated Poets and Philosophers of England. Yet, Apollo’s bust appears on Jacques – Antoine Dassier’s (1715–1759) bronze Pope of 1743, literally opposite Pope’s bust as though they ought to be compared and found similar. Apollo is also shown on the line engraving by Stow after Pond that featured in Bowyer’s Historic Gallery in 1794. Others appear with Apollo in George Thornbury’s extra-illustrated Life of Turner (1862). Indeed, the portrait after Richardson in Thornbury’s Life also features a laureate profile of Apollo in a round frame; perhaps Pope was the new Apollo both poetically and physically.

Medical portrait transactions

As we have seen a few times now, both artist and sitter influence the making of a portrait. Each will jostle to have his interests best embedded in the final look and feel of a portrait. The artist will be shaped by generic conventions, his own aesthetic instruction, his own ‘style’, his own life and social milieu, and the need to make a living (basically to be thought of as good). The sitter, on the other hand, will have a ‘look’ that he envisages being able to see in a portrait. It can be helpful to consider portraiture production in terms of a ‘negotiation’ or ‘transaction’, even if there were no formal bargaining process.

This interaction could be affected by medical experiences. I shall explain how Pope’s portraits related to a relationship of medical care. The fact that this brings Pope’s friends and confidants into the story – crucial players in his medical biography – shows how helpful the evidence of portraits can be.

Ill throughout his life, Pope discussed his health with all comers. Health was a deep concern for Pope and his friends. Importantly, Pope considered himself the patient of his friends, while his friends thought themselves Pope’s physicians. ¹³ The concepts and categories of professional medical practice permeated and partly defined their friendship. One example of just how busily involved his friends could get in Pope’s medical life is shown by an amusing vignette of a visit he paid in 1728 to his friends the Codringtons:

I called at Sir William Codrington’s, My reception there will furnish matter for a letter to Mr. Bethel. It was perfectly in his spirit [see below]: all his sisters, in the first place, insisted I should take physic … My Lady Cox, the first night I lay there, mixed my electuary, Lady Codrington pounded sulphur, Mrs. Bridget Bethel ordered broth. Lady Cox marched first up-stairs with the physic in a gallipot; Lady Codrington next, with a vial of oyle; Mrs. Bridget third, with pills; the fourth sister, with spoons and tea-cups. It would have rejoiced the ghost of Dr. Woodward to have beheld this procession … ¹⁴

To explore what Pope and his friends thought portraits could actually do in medical relationships between them, let us consider the relationship of care between Pope and his friend, Hugh Bethel (?1648–1717), the brother of Lady Codrington. This relationship centres on a portrait that was never actually made. Yet the background, context and preparation for the portrait show that friendship and health were pivotal to how they thought about portraiture and what portraiture meant for their relationship.

Bethel was a Catholic friend of Pope’s from Yorkshire. He was an extremely close medical confidant. Each considered the other a relay of local medical news and knowledge, and they sought opinions on each other’s behalf. Besides this, they continually offered each other their own advice and solace. In fact, Pope confided most of his ailments to Bethel; there is evidence of Pope describing at least a dozen ailments and the treatments of at least a handful of doctors. ¹⁷

Portraits of the two men assumed poignant meanings in relation to their mutual medical support. In winter, 1740, Pope wrote to Bethel describing his ‘crazie health’. He was in a ‘low dispirited way’, with ‘constant Pain in my side’ and ‘a difficulty of Urine’. Only the fear of catching a cold dissuaded Pope from travelling to Yorkshire to seek Bethel’s immanent solace. In place of his self, he decided that although

Your friend [William] Kent … has sent you [Enoch] Zeeman’s picture without any Alteration, for he says he cannot, or will not, mend it, … I must sit to him for another for you. Which you may be sure I shall readily do, whenever he will. ¹⁸

Bethel, for his part, in a gloomier reply, explained that he gave his portrait to spare Pope the trouble of having to make a posthumous one:

The picture I ordered to be sent to you was done by a Painter in Rome … I remembered your having your friend Mr Digby drawn after his death … [and] I thought I would save you that trouble. ²¹

Having received Bethel’s portrait – at the time without such an explanation – Pope clearly thought he had to reciprocate. Presumably, Pope imagined the Van Loo copy would work for Bethel as Bethel’s portrait had for him – as a token of thanks and a totem of support. Bethel already had a Kneller portrait of Pope. But, Pope was so keen to send Bethel another portrait as soon as possible – in order to satisfy this particular and immediate emotional demand – that he gave up on Kent and looked to another artist altogether.

Pope’s and Bethel’s friendship did not necessarily turn on sharing health stories and lifestyle tips. They found all sorts of other affinities to one another, including their religion and Pope’s work. Yet, it is telling that their desire to share portraits first coincided with a bout of ‘crazie health’ and later crystallised when their mutual medical involvement became more intense. Not only could portraits commemorate this medical help, they could also be invested – perhaps like Roman Catholic icons – with power to bestow calm and courage on the afflicted, to bring ease to the diseased.

Pope and medical virtuosi

This example backs up what historians like Marcia Pointon and Ludmilla Jordanova have long argued: that portraits were made to do social work for people; that they were active in making and sustaining social relationships. ²² Eighteenth-century portraits also became decidedly social ‘things’ when they were given as marks of personal esteem or as tokens of cultural affinity between men (or groups).

Medical men formed social relationships. The chartered medical colleges, including the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Medicine, are examples of early-modern medics’ sociability. But medical men moved in wider socio-cultural circles, too – and with men who included their patients. How and why did portraits circulate in cultural networks that included Pope and his doctors?

Earlier we looked at Pope as a man of virtue. Virtue not only rebutted suggestions of deformity but also identified him as an exemplar of the powerful 18th-century ‘code’ of virtue. This was an impulse of classically inspired civic humanism that prevailed in ‘polite’ society well into the 18th century. It prescribed an ethic, an etiquette and an aesthetic. Indeed, virtu commanded men to partake of all manner of aesthetic and intellectual pursuits – among them poetry, collecting curiosities, natural philosophy, antiquarianism, architecture, music and portraiture. Virtuosi aspired to be men of deep and wide learning; they avoided conscious over-specialism. One contemporary biography of Dr Richard Pulteney (1730–1801) explicitly mentioned that Pulteney partook of ‘occupations which may be considered as only remotely connected with his profession’. ²³

As Craig Hanson has convincingly demonstrated, both artists and medical men were among those cultivated men who sought to be virtuosic in this sense. ²⁴ Pope’s friend, the artist Jonathan Richardson, was a devotee of Shaftesbury. Wealthy royal physician, Richard Mead was a celebrated virtuoso. Pope also considered himself a man of ‘the Virtuoso-class’. ²⁵ He invited doctor-virtuoso Sir Hans Sloane to analyse his mineral collection as curiosities.

Portraits were used by Pope and members of the medical faculty and virtuoso community as the threads that created and secured their kinship. Jonathan Richardson painted over 40 different likenesses of Pope, which articulated both his and Pope’s association to the medical faculty and virtuoso community. Let us consider one portrait, painted in oil on canvas circa 1738 (Figure 3). It is a half-length profile. Pope sports a reddy-plum coat with a brown collar. His hair is dark brown, his lips a deep red. The rendition of the skin resembles Richardson’s earlier laureate portrait of Pope in the National Portrait Gallery, in which thick swathes of paint streak across his left cheek. It also chimes with Joshua Reynolds’ comments at Lord Harley’s picture sale in 1742; ‘the muscles which ran across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords’. ²⁶ The portrait was not made on Richardson’s whim, however. Indeed, it was commissioned by Richard Mead, who held royal medical appointments under Queen Anne and later George II. An 1825 inscription on the reverse reads that ‘this portrait of Pope was taken from life by Richardson for Dr. Mead the Physician …’ This portrait is almost certainly the one Pope referred to on January 4th 1737/1738, when he wrote to Richardson that ‘I will come to you to morrow by eleven, to sit till one if you please, for the Drs picture.’ ²⁷ OPEN IN VIEWER

As hinted by Pope’s reference to the Mead’s title, Pope was Mead’s patient. There is plenty of evidence that reveals Mead’s role as Pope’s doctor – one of his most trusted physicians no less, whose opinion Pope sought time after time. Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot, composed in 1734 and deemed one of Pope’s more autobiographically informative works, reads:

I’ll do what MEAD and CHESELDEN advise

To keep the Limbs and preserve these Eyes.

For all that Pope was Mead’s patient, this portrait does not show Pope as Mead’s patient – in much the same way as Pope did not refer to Mead as his doctor. The portrait is rather a material commemoration of Pope’s, Richardson’s and Mead’s broader kinship. Pope’s use of the term ‘Dr’ points to the easy infusion of the medical into this wider cultural connection between commissioner, artist and sitter. This point gains force when we set the portrait in the context of Mead’s ownership of Richardson Popes. We know that Mead possessed many portraits of Pope by Richardson and distributed them to others, including his medic son-in-law, Edward Wilmot (1693–1786).

Pope’s ties to Richardson and medical men were more substantial that any one portrait might indicate. Richardson also painted William Cheselden for the Royal College of Surgeons. Cheselden aided Pope in his final years. Pope even claimed Cheselden knew his health better than any other practitioner. Richardson’s series of graphite-on-vellum drawings, executed in 1735–1740, makes the link between Pope and the medico-virtuosic faculty especially clear. ²⁸ The grouping consists of Pope, Sloane, Cheselden and Martin Folkes. All four are bust length drawings. All four are similarly sized. All four depict their sitter wearing headwear. All four were drawn with denser strokes on the cheek, jaw and nose. Richardson aligns these men by the overall uniformity of his compositions.

Richardson’s series begs a comparison with the more consciously conceived and uniformly produced series of medals that Jean Dassier struck in February 1740/1741, which included Pope among them. Antiquarian and art critic George Vertue tells us in his Notebooks that

Dassier has published proposals for cutting several medals or dies – the portraitures of famous men living in England. Martin Folkes Esq. is done very like him … The subscription is four guineas for thirteen medals … Robert Barber, M.D … Martin Folkes … Richard Mead, M.D., Alexander Pope … Sir Hans Sloane, Abraham De Moivre. [They are] done from the life and are free and boldly cut but not so elaborately.nor so high finish.as others, there appears a little of the fa-presto [sic].

The work that portraits did to connect people could be undertaken more subtly, too. Portraits need not be analysed just in and of themselves. Some of Richardson’s portraits aligned men within the same cultural community by being used in tandem with other artefacts. For instance, a copy of Richardson’s ‘ΟϒΤΟΣ ΕΚΕΙΝΟΣ’ etching was inserted into a 1725 quarto edition of Pope’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (Figure 4). It was inserted just before the official frontispiece; Vertue’s engraving of a bust of Homer that Richard Mead owned. ²⁹ Pope was a knot of complex medico-virtuosic threads, the meanings and associations of which could be teased out at various artefactual levels. OPEN IN VIEWER

Conclusion

Pope’s many portraits embody how the historical domains of medicine, medical life and portraiture intersected at various levels of his portraits’ production, design, reception and afterlife. We first saw how his portraits could explicitly depict the signs of his (ill-) health, in particular his headaches. We also saw how Pope’s visually literate contemporaries as well as later viewers of his portraits were able to decipher these signs and relate his iconography to specific states of health and sometimes even to specific conditions. We then saw how certain portraits were part of a dialogue about ideas of health that became attached to Pope. Especially by their design and by where they were made to be seen, they could rebut some of Pope’s attackers’ derogatory health- and character-claims. Indeed, they proposed that Pope was rather a well-formed man of virtue. Finally, we considered how some of Pope’s portraits derived from very specific medical relationships – crucially with Pope as a patient of the portraits’ commissioner or intended recipient – and could also operate to associate Pope to kindred virtuosi. Explaining these intersections has required that we pay attention to the minutiae of portraits’ look and feel, to their ‘materiality’ and ‘specificity’, to their purposes and uses as art as well as to their roles as objects and things. It has also required paying specific attention to facts of Pope’s life, including such basic things as who his friends were. Approaching these portraits from such angles has shown how one man’s iconography can put these historical domains – the very stuff of medical biography – in the same frame.