There was another distraction for him in Paris: Giannetta Baccelli, an Italian dancer. The duke seems to have lost his head completely over her for the time being, for he gave her his Garter to wear as a hair-ribbon, with “HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE” in diamonds, brought her home to England with him, sent her to a ball in Sevenoaks wearing the family jewels—which provoked a great scandal in the county—and gave her one of the towers at Knole, which to this day remains, through the mispronunciation of the English servants, “Shelley’s Tower.” It was for this lady, or so the rumour ran, that he finally rejected the faithful and unfortunate Lady Derby. There was nothing that Dorset would not do for Baccelli. He had her painted by Reynolds, and painted and drawn by Gainsborough, and sculpted from the nude. He even wrote to his friend the Duchess of Devonshire asking her to do what she could for his protégée, “I don’t ask you to do anything for her openly,” he wrote, “but I hope que quand il s’agit de ses talents you will commend her. I assure you,” he adds rather pathetically, “she is une bonne fille, very clever, and un excellent cœur, and her dancing is really wonderful.”
Gainsborough’s large full-length portrait of Baccelli, originally at Knole, has been sold; but his pencil sketch for it remains, rather faded and very delicate of line. It is drawn in the ball-room: Baccelli stands on a model’s throne, pointing her toe and lifting up her skirt; Gainsborough himself stands in front of her, a palette in his hand, so that he turns his back towards the person looking at the drawing; the Chinese page, in a round hat, stands by. It reconstructs with great vividness the scene of her posing in the ball-room. The only pity is that the artist should not have drawn in the duke, who was surely there, looking on, and criticizing and making suggestions. The receipt for the big picture is at Knole, though no mention is made of the drawing (see illustration facing p. [208]):
Received of his Grace the DUKE of DORSET one hundred guineas in full for two ¾ portraits of his Grace, one full-length of Madsle Baccelli, two Landskips, and one sketch of a beggar boy and girl.
| £105 | THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, June 15, 1784. |
One of the “two ¾ portraits of his Grace” mentioned in this receipt is the one now in the ball-room, one of the most beautiful Gainsboroughs I know—included with five other pictures for the ludicrous sum of £105.
Reynolds’ portrait of the dancer shows a mischievous and attractive face, with slightly slanting eyes, peeping out from behind a mask which she holds up in her hand. The duke even went to the length of ordering the portraits of the servants he had provided for her, and among the collection of servants’ portraits in Black Boy Passage are Daniel Taylor and Elinor Law, servants of Madme Baccelli; Mrs. Edwards, attendant on Madme Baccelli; and Philip Louvaux, servant to Madme Baccelli. She evidently, with her servants and her tower, had a regular establishment at Knole, and many receipts bearing her signature witness the duke’s generosity towards her: “Received 7th April 1786 of Mr. Burlington [the agent] the sum of fifty pounds on account of his Grace the Duke of Dorset, Jannette Baccelli,” and so on. They had several children, all of whom died in babyhood, except one, alluded to in the following letter: “The duke has a very fine boy to whom Baccelli is mother, now at school near Knole. This, we think, is the only surviving progeny of the alliance,” but, much as I should like to know, I have no idea what became of this romantically-begotten scion, or even of whether he lived to grow up.
Perhaps the “heterogenous housekeeper” of Horace Walpole’s letter was Baccelli’s importation, for in another place he writes disgustedly of “Knole, which disappointed me much. But unless you know how vast and venerable I thought I remembered it, I cannot give you the measure of my surprise; but then there was a trapes of a housekeeper, who, I suppose, was the Baccelli’s dresser, and who put me out of humour....”
The connection seems to have lasted for a long time, for it is not until the end of 1789 that we come across an old newspaper cutting announcing with curious candour that “the Duke of Dorset and the Baccelli have just separated, and she is said to have behaved very well,” so that she eclipsed the records of Nancy Parsons, of Mrs. Elizabeth Armistead, and of poor Lady Derby. It is, I think, a not unpicturesque incident in the story of Knole—the dancer sitting in those stately rooms to Reynolds and Gainsborough, or descending from her tower to walk in the garden with the duke, attended by the Chinese boy carrying her gloves, her fan, or her parasol. Those were the days when the Clock Tower, oddly recalling a pagoda, was but newly erected; when the great rose-and-gold Chinese screen in the Poets’ Parlour was new and brilliant in the sun; when the Coromandel chests were new toys; and the Italian pictures and the statuary brought back by the duke from Rome were still pointed out as the latest acquisitions. And no doubt then the statue of the Baccelli reposing in her lovely nudity on her couch was not relegated to the attic, where a subsequent and more prudish generation sent it, but stood somewhere in the living-rooms, where it might be seen and admired in the presence of the smiling model. Amusement was caused too, no doubt, among the guests of the duke and the dancer by Sir Joshua’s portrait of the Chinese boy squatting on his heels, a fan in his hand, and the square toes of his red shoes protruding from beneath his robes. It was more original to have a Chinese page than to have a black one; everybody had a black one: “Dear Mama,” wrote the Duchess of Devonshire to her mother, “George Hanger has sent me a Black boy, eleven years old and very honest, but the duke don’t like me having a black, and yet I cannot bear the poor wretch being ill-used; if you liked him instead of Michel I will send him, he will be a cheap servant and you will make a Christian of him and a good boy; if you don’t like him they say Lady Rockingham wants one.” But the black page at Knole, of which there had always been one since the days of Lady Anne Clifford, and who had always been called John Morocco regardless of what his true name might be, had been replaced by a Chinaman ever since the house steward had killed the John Morocco of the moment in a fight in Black Boy’s Passage. This particular Chinese boy whom I have mentioned, whose real name was Hwang-a-Tung, but whom the English servants, much as they called Baccelli Madam Shelley, more conveniently renamed Warnoton—fell on fortunate days when he came to Knole, for not only was he painted by Sir Joshua, but he was educated at the duke’s expense at the Grammar School in Sevenoaks.
HWANG-A-TUNG
A Chinese boy, page to the 3rd Duke of Dorset
From the portrait at Knole by Sir Joshua Reynolds