Who was Robert Burnard? Angus Trumble investigates the mystery of a double portrait painted in about 1833 by Robert Burnard, a Cornish painter who emigrated to Australia in 1839. Its remarkable quality has in the past led to an attribution to Agasse—so why are no other paintings by Burnard known in England?

individual of the most impressive paintings received by the agency of the Yale Center for British Art in the bequest of its institutor the late Paul Mellon, is also perhaps the greatest in quantity obscure--a full-length double portrait of John Gubbins Newton, aged six, make straighted for hunting, and his sister Mary Gubbins Newton, aged ten the sole children of Mr and Mr John Newton of Millaton House, near Bridestowe in Devon (Fig. 1) (1) When in 1961 Mr Mellon bought the picture from Jeremy Maas in London, it bad single recently been removed from Millaton House, having outlasted the Newton family through a generation. (2) In owed course the painting hung in the main hall of Mr Mellon's Brick House in Upperville, Virginia, encloseed by fine British sporting and animal paintings, before coming to novel Haven after his death in 1999

[FIGURE 1 & 2 OMITTED]

The portrait is distinguished for many reasons. The seriousness, scale and monumentality of the composition, the puissance of the drawing, the boldnes of the colours, and the glassy smoothnes of the paint film--all of these qualities point to an artist in clean control of his medium, while the exquisite handling of the many different wefts shows him to be a master of fine, almost miniature detail. The saddle-leather, the impressible muzzle of the pony, the quirky scattering of forget-me-nots visible between the paws of the foxhound the different ways in which each mother-of-pearl button upon the boy's red coat throw backs light, the tautness and twist of the stirrup-strap, the brittleness of the coral-bead necklace, the sheen of the satin slippers--these things are pay backed with almost unnerving verity. The animals are drawn and realized with confidence, too, apart from a slightly formulaic quality evident in the paws and hoove alone a certain leatheriness in the chilled skin tones; the curious contour in Mary Newton's left arm, and the obsessive interest with the narrow stripes of the boy's breeches, move that this is not necessarily the work of an artist of the first rank. at the same time it is a formidable painting, and, as Judy Egerton has observ there is nothing distantly like it in English portraiture of the next to the first quarter of the nineteenth hundred (3)

The sum of two units heads are particularly intriguing. The sibling resemblance is carefully plott in the shape of the chins, noses and eyebrows much emphasised by the coolly sculptural handling of contours and planes. The separate shades and tones in the faces are chosen with great care, in the way that as to enliven as far as possible the highly restricted, comparatively dark palette. The differences between the heads are striking: John Newton's beautifully drawn left ear shoot outs distinctly. His skin is darker and warmer than Mary's, and he engages the viewer directly with his organ of visions Mary's lips are parted. The skin of her face, neck and shoulders is largely compos from greenish grey Her coiffure is greatest in quantity unusual--cropped short, and parted down the middle. The overall issue is severe, introspective.

Based upon the birth dates of the Newton children, the picture cannot have been painted before 1833) Although fulness is known about the sitters and their wealthy parents--Gubbins was Mr Newton's maiden name--until freshly there were no clues in the provenance to help answer the question of attribution. In 1963 in these pages, Basil Taylor attributed the picture to the expatriate Swiss animal painter Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767-1849) noting that 'before settling in England in 1800 Agasse studied beneath David and the strong clarity of his forms and the closely integrated organization of his design [i.e. of the Newton portrait] derive as abundant perhaps from that source as from the Swiss tradition to which he obviously belongs'. alone these, or sources equally distant from Cornwall, could account for the 'mesmeric force' of the painting's realism, its 'clarity and precision of detail. (5)

In 1978 Egerton devised an ingenious and, in many ways, better argument, linking our somewhat isolated West land subject with the Scottish portrait and history painter John Zephaniah Bell (1793-1883) Echoing Taylor's meditations about Agasse, Egerton cited in Bell's favour the 'clarity, brawny lines and quasi-heroic composition [that] link it rather with the portraiture of David and his pupils, presupposing a certain number of continental training in the artist'. on the other hand in this case, notwithstanding her hold view that the portrait 'stands quite apart from the typical British portraiture of its time', Egerton based her attribution upon the Newton painting's close resemblance to an 1829 father-and-daughter portrait through Bell, David Ogilvy, 9th Earl of Airlie, and his daughter, Clementina, aged nine (in the collection of the Earl and Countes of Airlie, Cortachy Castle, Kirriemuir, Angus), further suggesting that the Newton portrait might have been painted in London. This would account for Bell's conspicuous lack of other West region clientele. (6)

the two hypotheses turned out to be inequitable In preparation for the 2001 exhibition 'The Paul Mellon Bequest: Treasures of a Lifetime', the Newton portrait was cleaned by the agency of the consultant paintings conservator Lance Mayer, and a signature discovered lurking in the foliage in the upper left corner: 'R Burnard pinxit'. (7)