Mr. (subsequently Sir) Robert Kerr Porter, at the age of nineteen
produced a performance at once inconceivable and unparalleled--the
panorama of _the Storming and Capture of Seringapatam_. It was not the
very first thing of its kind, because there had been a panorama of
London exhibited in Leicester Fields by Mr. Barker; but it was the very
first thing of its kind, if artist-like attainments be considered. The
learned, (says Dr. Dibdin,) were amazed, and the unlearned were
enraptured. I can never forget its impression upon my own mind. It was a
thing dropt from the clouds--all fire, energy, intelligence, and
animation. You looked a second time; the figures moved, and were
commingled in hot and bloody fight. You saw the flash of the cannon, the
glitter of the bayonet, the gleam of the falchion. You longed to be
leaping from crag to crag with Sir David Baird, who is hallooing the
men on to victory! Then again, you seemed to be listening to the groans
of the wounded and the dying--and more than one female was carried out
swooning. The oriental dress, the jewelled turban, the curved and
ponderous scimitar--these were among the prime objects of favouritism
with Sir Robert’s pencil: and he touched and treated them to the very
spirit and letter of the truth. The colouring, too, was good and sound
throughout. The accessories were strikingly characteristic--rock, earth,
and water, had its peculiar and happy touch; and the accompaniments
about the sally-port, half choked up with the bodies of the dead, made
you look on with a shuddering awe, and retreat as you shuddered. The
public poured in by hundreds and by thousands for even a transient
gaze--for such a sight was altogether as marvellous as it was novel. You
carried it home, and did nothing but think of it, talk of it, and dream
of it. And all this by a young man of nineteen.
Miss Jane Porter, Sir Robert’s sister, wrote for Dr. Dibdin a very
interesting narrative of this extraordinary work.
“It was two hundred and odd feet long,” says Miss Porter; “the
proportioned height I have now forgotten. But I remember, when I
first saw the vast expense of vacant canvas stretched along, or
rather in a semicircle, against the wall of the great room in the
Lyceum, where he painted it, I was terrified at the daring of his
undertaking. I could not conceive that he could cover that immense
space with the subject he intended, under a year’s time at least,
but--and it is indeed marvellous!--he did it in SIX WEEKS! But he
worked on it every day (except Sundays) during those weeks, from
sunrise until dark. It was finished during the time the committees
of the Royal Academy were sitting at Somerset House, respecting
the hanging of the pictures there for that year’s exhibition;
therefore it must have been towards the latter end of April. No
artist had seen the painting of Seringapatam during its progress;
but when it was completed, my brother invited his revered old
friend, Mr. West, (the then President of the Royal Academy,) to
come and look at the picture, and give him his opinion of it, ere
it should be opened to the public view. * * * Mr. West went over
from the Lyceum, on the morning on which he had called to see my
brother and his finished painting, to Somerset House, where the
Committee had been awaiting his presence above an hour. ‘What has
detained our President so long?’ inquired Sir Thomas Lawrence of
him, on his entrance. ‘A wonder!’ returned he, ‘a wonder of the
world!--I never saw anything like it!--a picture of two hundred
feet dimensions, painted by that boy KERR PORTER, in six weeks! and
as admirably done as it could have been by the best historical
painter amongst us in as many months!’ You, my dear Sir, need no
description of this picture; you saw it; and at the time of its
exhibition you also must have heard of, and probably also saw, some
of the affecting effects the truth of its pictorial war-tale had on
many of the female spectators.
“After its exhibition closed, it was deposited, packed upon a
roller, in a friend’s warehouse. Thence, some circumstances caused
it to be removed successively to other places of supposed similar
security, but in one of which I believe it finally perished by the
accidental burning down of the premises. The original sketches of
this ‘noble and stupendous effort of art,’ as you so truly call it,
are now in my own possession; and you may believe I value them as
the apple of my eye. I must not forget to mention, with regard to
Seringapatam, that had our British government, at the time of my
brother’s ardour for these paintings, possessed a building large
enough for the purpose, he would have presented his country with
that picture, and three others on British historical subjects, to
form a perpetual exhibition for the benefit of its military and
naval hospitals. Mr. Pitt lamented to him the impossibility then,
of commanding such a building; so the project fell to the ground.
The last of these intended four pictures was that of ‘_The Battle
of Agincourt_,’ which my brother afterwards presented to the city
of London, where it was hung up in the Egyptian Hall of the Mansion
House. Some alterations in the room occasioned its being taken down
for a temporary purpose; but it never saw the light again until
_last year_, when (after above a dozen years oblivion in--nobody
knew where), it was accidentally found in one of the vaulted
chambers under Guildhall. When disentombed, it was hastily spread
out against one of the walls of the great hall itself, and
announced, in the newspapers, as a picture of _unknown antiquity_,
of some also unknown but evidently distinguished artist; and most
probably it had been deposited in those vaults for security, at the
_great fire of London_, and had remained there, unsuspected, ever
since! The hall was thronged, day after day, to see it; and Sir
Martin Shee told me, that so great was the mysterious valuation the
discovery had put on it, that he heard he had been quoted as having
passed his opinion on it, that ‘it was a picture worth £15,000!’
Without proper safeguards behind the canvas, a long exposure on the
wall would have injured the picture; and it was taken down again
before I came to London, after having heard of the discovery of the
‘_Agincourt_’--for I immediately recognised what, and whose, the
picture was--and hastened to inform the present gentlemen of the
city corporation accordingly.”
Such is the affectionate narrative from the pen of the youthful
painter’s sister.