The Third Earl of Bute (1713-1792) had the dubious pleasure of being both Britain’s first Scottish Prime Minister, and one of the most reviled political figures of the eighteenth century. Tasked with negotiating the Peace of Paris at the end of the Seven Years’ War, Bute attracted criticism in his short tenure (1762-63) for his powerful influence over the young king George III, advancing his fellow Scots at court, conceding too much to the French diplomatic effort, and proposing the unpopular cider tax. Art of Power: Masterpieces of the Bute Collection, however, makes a strong case for repositioning the Earl’s reputation for posterity from that of a failed politician, to a generous and judicious patron of the arts. This thoughtful exhibition brings together rarely-seen paintings from Bute’s enormous collection (based on original hangs at his house Luton Hoo), and artefacts and prints from Bute’s life and times, across two sites: the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow, and Mount Stuart, a frankly astonishing neo-gothic mansion on the Isle of Bute rebuilt by the Earl’s descendent. I would enthusiastically urge anyone to visit Mount Stuart itself for its awe-inspiring architecture, and the stories the tour guides can offer about the visionary, if eccentric, Third Marquess of Bute, who introduced wallabies to the island, and had his heart buried at the Mount of Olives. This review, however, concerns the Hunterian’s display, which works as a hugely impressive stand-alone exhibition, showcasing, amongst other masterpieces, many seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works – including two by Joos de Momper II and Jan Brueghel, Jan Steen’s A Cock Fight and Robbers Plundering a Farmhouse (dates unknown), and several Dutch interiors – alongside two oil paintings by Claude Lorraine, and illustrations from Bute’s own Botanical Tables (1785) by Johann Sebastian Müller. The exhibition also touches on Bute’s unpopularity as a statesman with the display of several amateur satirical etchings from the year of Bute’s ill-fated stint as Prime Minister, which universally deride the Scottish ‘Boot’ and his close relationship with Princess Alexandra.

While it is hardly a celebration of the Earl’s political career, then, Art of Power at the Hunterian is certainly an occasion to applaud Bute’s taste. Its exhibits are magnificent. In an octagonal room, full of real treasures, my eye was first struck by Jacob Van Ruisdael’s Distant View of Harlem (c.1660) – at first glance the scene looks dark, by being more than two-thirds an overcast, brooding sky, but closer inspection reveals minute labourers working a subtly coloured landscape. This sets up some interesting tensions for what the painting might suggest: while the scale of the sky in comparison to the figures seems to indicate their insignificance in the face of nature’s power, the carefully tended landscape in the painting attests to man’s successful attempts to tame nature to his own ends. On a wall which brings together small paintings from Bute’s picture cabinet, Nicholaes Berchem’s A Winter Landscape (c.1665-70) is a chilling, minutely detailed highlight that almost emits the icy blasts it depicts; in two stunning paintings by Roelandt Savey, subtly coloured figures eerily emerge seemingly out of no-where to populate beautifully rendered landscapes. Although it is the only exhibit not to come from Bute’s private collection, Johan Zoffany’s large-scale conversation piece depicting Bute’s three daughters – which captures a loveable, human bond between the sisters – is a reminder of Bute’s power as an artist’s patron: the accompanying booklet suggests that ‘it was likely through Bute that Zoffany gained royal attention and patronage’.

The impact of this selection of works from Bute’s collection, however, cannot be separated from their arrangement in the space. Throughout Art of Power, the viewer is invited to look more closely at the paintings on display by how they have been arranged. Thoughtfully modelled on original positioning at Luton Hoo, the hang provides juxtapositions of subject, style and mood wherever the viewer looks. In the octagonal room, De Momper and Brueghel’s Summer (c.1620), hung beside its sister painting Village with a bleaching field (Spring) (c.1620-23) – emphatically a painting of two halves, as well as two artists – develops an exhibition theme of subtle contrasts. Its dark, tree-topped foreground, peopled by Brueghel’s bright figures, gives way to a still landscape dominated by views of a castle and church, and the display space affords the viewer welcome opportunities to admire the skill of De Momper’s glimmering reflections – an effect muted in Village with a bleaching field by the clothing which covers most of the water. The space also contains the more startling grouping of Steen’s A Cock Fight, flanked by Claude Lorrain’s Evening: A Seaport at Sunset (1638) and Morning: A Wooded Landscape (c.1638). The brutal subject matter of Steen’s work, a moment of tension in which a defeated cock quietly expires before two men prepare to mirror the birds and fight, affords a violent contrast to the characteristic sense of other-worldly peace emitting from Claude’s Morning, and both Steen’s and Lorrain’s works gain by the comparison. While Gerard ter Borch’s portraits of Gosewijn and Freda Quadacker (c. 1663-8) display opulent interiors, if the viewer simply turns their head they face a row of affecting genre paintings which depict more humble domestic spaces. Throughout the exhibition, this historically influenced hang creates an interesting flow from one painting to another, even while effectively juxtaposing their subjects and styles.

Jan Steen, A Cock Fight, c.1660-1670 © The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart.
Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 110.7 cm.

The eye is further encouraged to roam – and make lengthy pauses – by the decision to collect the exhibition’s information labels in an accompanying booklet, leaving the viewer free to look first, and read later. The hang does display a lot in a relatively small area; the walls are not quite as tightly packed as we are told Luton Hoo’s were, but space is stretched probably as far as it can go for a modern display. I had to kneel to properly look at the two wonderful, but small, paintings by Roelandt Savery, and the too-subtle lighting did not work at this level to illuminate his intricate brushstrokes and tiny, delicately painted subjects which were, for me, a real highlight of the exhibition. However, the symmetry of these walls created a lovely moment in the display: corresponding pairs of paintings hung opposite each other meant the eye was treated to an attractive flow of movement and textures from one wall to the other. The beautifully lit, shimmering satin of Freda Quadacker’s gown, for example, felt subtly reflected in the ice in Berchem’s A Winter Landscape, and in the shining surface of the dresses of Bute’s daughters in Zoffany’s conversation piece hung nearby. While a selection of a private collection such as Art of Power could always run the risk of seeming eclectic (as Frans Francken II’s pleasingly chaotic interior painting A Collector’s Gallery (c.1630) shows), the picture cabinet display celebrates the differences in the collection’s paintings’ style and texture to brilliant, stimulating effect.

Art of Power also asks the viewer to think about the character of the collector, and his artistic legacy. Bute’s taste for Dutch painting is a unifying, underlying theme – works by De Momper and Brueghel, Jan Van der Heyden, Aelbert Cuyp and Meindert Hobbema, amongst others, filled the walls of the upper floors of Luton Hoo, and dominate the exhibition. Peter Black writes in the accompanying catalogue that Bute’s collecting of Dutch and Flemish works is notable because they were, ‘broadly speaking, landscapes and genre paintings, which are kinds of painting that in Bute’s time received a mixed critical reception.’[1] Britain’s landscape painting tradition developed during and after Bute’s lifetime, and Black also suggests that private displays influenced now-iconic work of artists like Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W Turner and John Constable.[2] In the context of the Hunterian’s display, it is easy to imagine the displayed Meindert Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape with a Watermill (date unknown) influencing a work such as Constable’s much-loved The Hay Wain (completed 1821). As out of touch with the eighteenth-century public as Bute was politically (he built Luton Hoo to escape the angry mobs that followed him around London), his taste for Dutch landscape painting perhaps surprisingly shows him attuned to the appeal of the British landscape movement, which would prove so enduringly popular.

Beautifully curated, Art of Power makes the most of a treasure trove, and the result is an invigorating, carefully judged display which invites the viewer to look more closely at the works on offer. Treasure hoards tend to be eclectic, and this enjoyably diverse selection is no exception, but somehow the curators have achieved the difficult task of making the widely varying nature of the paintings one of the exhibition’s greatest strengths. Perhaps it is because Bute emerges as a man obsessed with intellectual enquiry and innumerable hobbies, but contact with his collection inspires all kinds of questions and interests; I left feeling I’d love to see a Hunterian exhibition on eighteenth-century collecting practices, or about Bute’s specific method. Art of Power not only allows its visitors to experience a wonderful, rarely-seen collection, but affords insight into the mind and motivations of a divisive collector.

[1] Peter Black, ‘Quality and Quantity: Bute and the Collecting of Dutch Paintings’, in Art of Power: Masterpieces from the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart, ed. Caitlin Blackwell (London:  Prestel Publishing, 2017. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, held at Mount Stuart and The Hunterian, 31 March 2017- 14 January 2018), 58.

[2] Ibid.

Art of Power: Masterpieces of the Bute Collection is at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow and Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, from 31 March 2017 to 14 January 2018.