Edwin Long - Henry Irving as Hamlet

signed and dated l.l.: EDWIN LONG 1880

oil on canvas
62 3/4 by 44 1/2 in
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Austin Brereton, Henry Irving – A Biographical Sketch, London 1883, in which a detail of the portrait is used as a frontispiece;
Magazine of Art, 1897, p. 171;
Austin Chester, ‘The Art of Edwin Long, R.A.’, Windsor Magazine, February 1908, pp. 332-50, illustrating a detail;
Richard Quick, The Life and Works of Edwin Long, R.A., Bournemouth, 1931, pp. 6, 15, illus. p. 45;
Mark Bills, Edwin Longsden Long RA, London, 1998, p. 122, illustrated from an engraving, and with detail, catalogue no. 165



CATALOGUE NOTE


Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) whose career spanned four decades of the nineteenth century and the first five years of the twentieth was one of the greatest all English actors. He first gained recognition in the role of Digby Grant in the comedy The Two Roses, in 1870, and was rapturously acclaimed the following year when he played Mathias in the melodrama The Bells. He first played Hamlet in 1864, at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, and was to do so regularly, as a member of various touring companies, in the next few years. However, it was his performances of Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre in London in 1874 under H.L. Bateman which caused a public sensation. In 1875 Edward R. Russell’s adulatory Irving as Hamlet concluded its description of Irving’s interpretation of the role: ‘To present this matchless figure worthily and vividly has been the highest ambition of every great actor, and that ambition Henry Irving has abundantly fulfilled … To Irving belongs the merit of snatching – with a hand feverish, perhaps, but sure – graces which were not, and can hardly become, in a stage sense, traditional. He has made Hamlet much more, and something more ethereal, than a type of feeble doubt, of tragic struggle, or even of fine philosophy. The immortality of his Hamlet is immortal youth, immortal enthusiasm, immortal tenderness, immortal nature’. The production ran for 200 nights, a record for any Victorian staging of a play by Shakespeare. Hamlet was revived at the Lyceum in 1878, by which time Irving was himself manager of the theatre, with Ellen Terry in the role of Ophelia. Thus commenced one of the most famous and celebrated theatrical partnerships of all time. Suggestions that the relationship between Irving and Terry was a romantic one were made, but have never been proved.

Sir Henry Irving died on 13 October 1905, following a performance of Tennyson’s play Becket at Bradford. His last words on stage were those given by Tennyson to Thomas Becket: ‘Into Thy lands, O Lord! Into Thy hands’. His death lead to an upheaval of national grief and intense mourning. Irving was buried in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey on 20 October 1905, close to the statue of Shakespeare and beside the grave of David Garrick. An exhibition to mark the centenary of Irving’s death is presently on show at the National Portrait Gallery. Among many fascinating objects belonging to Irving on display is his own annotated copy of Hamlet, given to the Garrick Club by Sir John Gielgud. Also on loan to the exhibition from the Garrick Club is John Everett Millais's magnificent portrait of Irving, of 1884.

Edwin Long’s portrait of Henry Irving in the role of Hamlet must first have been contemplated when Irving and Long were together in 1879 as fellow-guests of Angela Burdett-Coutts (1841-1906), who had that summer chartered a steam-yacht – the Walrus – to take her and her party into the Mediterranean and Aegean. The cruise commenced on 23 July 1879, with Edwin Long and his wife going on board at Weymouth. Long eventually painted three portraits of Irving, each to the commission of Baroness Burdett-Coutts.

CSN