The Georgian Dead Parrot Sketch

Joshua Reynolds had a parrot. It appears in at least a couple of paintings; his portrait of Kitty Fisher, and most famously his painting of Lady Cockburn and her three eldest sons which hangs in the National Gallery. Those are the two I can think of, there may be others. In the portrait of Lady Cockburn, the bird is clearly added later, such a sitting would be implausible, especially given the notorious bad-temper of the bird. I rather like the way that the bird turns its back grumpily upon the assembled children, who seem less like they are aping the cherubs in Van Dyck’s painting Charity so much as they are just messing around. Cherubs are allowed to misbehave, children aren’t – they just irritate, and the parrot’s feathers are duly ruffled in annoyance.

The implication, I think, is that the sitting in the portrait of Kitty Fisher is genuine. She plays with the bird, and they both seem at ease with each other. The parrot is in the background however; its plumage is muted in comparison to the clothes and complexion of London’s most prestigious prostitute of the day. The main thing though is that they are getting on, isn’t it? She has tamed the disgruntled creature, and if we are to assume (as various critics have) that she was Reynolds’ mistress at this time, well she might.

I’m gradually starting to think that George Crabbe’s ‘friendship’ with Reynolds has been somewhat exaggerated by Victorian biographers keen to place him within the highpoint of fashionable society whilst at Belvoir. Certainly they met and knew one another, Crabbe even visited Reynold’s studios while he was working on The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents. I’m just not convinced that they got on. A difficult thing to prove, and not necessarily of much importance or interest to anyone, but there are various swipes made against him in the poems and one explicit reference made in ‘The Patron’ to the Duchess of Rutland’s curate (who Crabbe was) being jealous of the attention she paid to her painter, Reynolds.

With this in mind, it is perhaps worth reconsidering the motives with which he present’s Catherine Lloyd’s tragi-comic stuffed parrot in ‘The Parish Register’:

Her neat small room, adorn’d with maiden-taste,
A clipp’d French puppy, first of favourites, graced:
A parrot next, but dead and stuff’d with art;
(For Poll, when living, lost the Lady’s heart,
And then his life; for he was heard to speak
Such frightful words as tinged his Lady’s cheek:)
Unhappy bird! Who had no power to prove,
Save by such speech, his gratitude and love.

If you can’t gain the attentions of your patron’s wife over a man, kill his parrot in a poem. From memory, the portrait of Lady Cockburn in the National hangs only a few feet away from that most famous Georgian painting of a dead parrot, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, it’s a coincidence I think Crabbe would have been pleased with.

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