he was brought up in a bookish hothouse and knew the famous authors of the day who came to dine. He acquired a considerable body of knowledge which was to prove most important as it later gave him an entrée into artistic society.
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His formal education was completed at Dr. Charles Burney’s newly-opened academy at Hammersmith, and probably at his other, more famous Academy at Greenwich. Dr. Burney was a distant relative, a contributor to the Monthly Review, an antiquarian and one of the great classical scholars of his time. It was here that Wainewright added to his Latin, Greek and the considerable body of knowledge which he delighted to display with such panache in his later essays.
Here, too, another talent burgeoned. He became proficient as a draughtsman. W. Carew Hazlitt, his first proper biographer, who collected and edited his essays in 1880, was able to see the book in which he drew at Dr. Burney’s. “It displays great talent and natural feeling” he recorded. The book is now lost. Wainewright himself declared: “The little attention I gave to anything was directed to painting, or rather to an admiration of it.” It was more than admiration; he decided to become an artist himself.
He was 19, articulate, well-schooled, well-connected and, most importantly, had a comfortable independent income.
But – and this was one of the roots of his tragedy – not enough to keep up the wardrobe and the inclinations of a dandy, for such he had become. His dandyism was to become more than a passing phase of youthful extravagance; it was the start of the profligacy which led to his downfall.
He had already studied painting under John Linnell, friend of Blake and an accomplished landscape and portrait artist, but to become anything of an artist himself it was necessary to
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become apprenticed to one of the successful, fashionable Royal Academicians. He chose Thomas Phillips, whose portraiture was already famous. The National Portrait Gallery in London calls him prolific, since he completed more than 700 portraits, many of them of the great men of the day in the arts and sciences... At Phillips’ studios in George Street, off Hanover Square, the young dandy mixed the paints and met the famous. At that time Phillips was painting literary figures, a series commissioned by the publisher, John Murray.
To the George Street studio came Coleridge, Southey, Byron and others. Phillips’ famous 1813 portrait of Byron in dramatic Albanian costume now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London; it is one of three versions that he produced. He also painted four versions of Byron in a plain blue cloak one of which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814. At the same time that this was painted, Wainewright himself portrayed the poet – in a similar pose.
Byron may have remembered the young apprentice from his sittings, of which there were at least four. He is said to have told his great friend the peculiar Lady Blessington - who was said to have transformed herself from an Irish slattern to a lady of quality - of the first man he ever saw wearing pale-lemon coloured gloves, “and devilish well they looked.” Many have attributed the wearing of these to Wainewright and he himself refers to wearing them in one of his essays. Gloves were a particular signifier of the dandy. The foppish Count d’Orsay, part of the scandalous ménage à trois with Lady Blessington and her husband, was
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Wainewright’s short apprenticeship to the fashionable portraitist Thomas Phillips brought him into contact with many of the literary and artistic figures of the day. When Phillips painted Byron, Wainewright did too and his painting still survives at Byron’s ancestral home in Nottinghamshire.
Newstead Abbey
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said to require six pairs of scented gloves to see him through the day.
Wainewright’s ‘Byron’ was auctioned at Christies in 1892 and was bought for 19 guineas by one of the Colnaghi family, the print-sellers, whom Wainewright was to know so well at the height of his literary and artistic success. According to the National Portrait Gallery, the picture was offered to them in 1936 by Lady d’Erlanger, who was disposing of Byron memorabilia, but they refused it because it was a copy, not an original Phillips, so it went to Newstead Abbey, Byron’s ancestral home, in Nottinghamshire, where it still hangs and is said to be one of the very few of Wainewright’s works which survive in Britain.
There was another notable painting in oils from around 1816. It was of Edward Foss, not just his relative and a trustee of the bequest but a childhood friend. Foss would later be the one who sent Wainewright to his downfall.
Apprenticeship in George Street did not suit Wainewright, he had too high an opinion of his own talents. After a few restless months, he cast around for something else to do, something with more excitement than the discipline of learning a profession. He recorded years later: “ever to be whiled away by new and flashy gauds (showy ornamental things), I postponed the pencil to the sword”. He was going to join the army.
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CHAPTER 2
AN OFFICER AND GENTLEMAN
The “new and flashy gauds” were the yellow facings and silver lace of The 16th (the Bedfordshire) Regiment of Foot. It was probably the peacock finery of the young Guards and dragoon officers strutting around London which had attracted Wainewright to the Army. He was once reported as saying airily: “No artist should serve as a soldier unless he is permitted to design his own uniform.”
He no doubt imagined himself as a dashing officer in a fashionable regiment, taking time off from the busy social round to perform feats of arms which could later be recounted at the dinner table. The truth was to be very different.
Coleridge had joined as a private, but Wainewright bought his way in as an officer, or rather, tolerant Uncle George Griffiths had to put up the money - £400 in cash demanded for the lowest rank of officer - as Wainewright had an allowance of only £250 a year.
It must have pained him that Uncle George was not more generous; £400 was the minimum price of a commission, and that in a county infantry regiment. The buying of commissions had gone on since the 17th century - the more you paid, the higher the prestige you enjoyed. It preserved the senior officer class as an exclusive cadre, built on wealth and social privilege, of which Wainewright had neither. He was on the bottom rung as an
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ensign; today’s rank would be a second lieutenant. (The equivalent in a cavalry regiment was a cornet; both ranks were abolished in the army reforms of 1871, as was the purchase of commissions).
With £735 to spare he could have become a cornet in the dragoons (which, in fact, he later hinted he had been) and £1,050 would have bought a coveted cornetcy in the fashionable Horse Guards, according to the table of prices for commissions printed in the Army’s General Regulations and Orders of 1815.
The recruiting agent in London for the 16th Foot
