Johan Zoffany: Colonel Blair with his Family and an Indian Ayah

Johan Zoffany, Colonel Blair with his Family, Tate Britain, London. 

    
Zoffany’s painting depicts Colonel Blair (commander of the British troops at Cawnpore in India), the Colonel’s wife, their elder daughter Jane, their younger daughter Maria, and an unnamed Indian girl who is probably an Ayah - a lady’s maid (Webster 525). This type of picture is called a “conversation piece”, a group portrait showing a family in a domestic interior, sometimes accompanied by friends or servants. The Blairs are elegantly dressed, sit upon fine chairs, and are waiting to hear their daughter Jane play the piano. It is as if they are trying to recreate the way of life they had back in England. English people in India often spent their evenings drinking tea, playing cards, and listening to music (Spear 56). The picture shows the Blair family at their very best, and yet it is also human and informal. The family do not seem to be posing for the benefit of the viewer. The Colonel looks at his wife, Mrs Blair looks at her daughter Jane, and only the young people are aware of the viewer. This creates the illusion that we are intruding upon a private moment. English families in India had large numbers of servants (Spear 51) and yet we are only shown one of them here, the Ayah. The two pets – the cat and the dog – also add to this mood of domestic informality.

The picture is very concerned with family relationships and gender roles. Although it is a group portrait, the faces of the sitters are not strongly individualised, perhaps because the picture is primarily about their social roles. They are dutiful daughters and loving parents. Marital portraits of the later eighteenth century celebrate an “emotional relationship between husband and wife”, as Kate Retford has shown (Retford 49). Colonel and Mrs Blair are holding hands, and Colonel Blair looks lovingly towards his wife. Another example of marital affection would be Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Hallett, The Morning Walk (1785, National Gallery), in which the couple are strolling arm-in-arm together. In eighteenth-century portraits of families, the son and heir is usually shown on the right hand side of the father, while the other children are grouped around the mother (Retford 129). This is basically the arrangement used by Zoffany in his portrait of Colonel Blair and his family, except that it is Blair’s elder daughter who is given the place of honour beside her father, presumably because he had no son. The elder daughter, seated at the piano, is slightly separated from the rest of the group to emphasise her importance, and also to show that she is more adult than her younger sister, who seems more interested in her pet cat and dog. Piano-playing was thought to be a suitable pastime for a lady. The poses of the figures also offer clues to their expected behaviour. The mother and elder daughter sit stiffly upright, the younger daughter stands in a more relaxed pose, leaning against her mother’s chair, and the Colonel adopts a “masculine” posture, with legs apart and a hand resting on his thigh. The Ayah, who is from a different culture, clutches the cat and wears no shoes.

The clothing worn by the figures offers further clues to their social roles. The mother and elder daughter wear fashionable and formal dresses, very impractical for a hot country like India, while the younger daughter wears a looser gown and has her hair unbound. Maria’s gown with its high waist anticipates the fashions of Jane Austen’s time. The English ladies are fashionably pale in complexion, and do not appear to have been tanned by the Indian sunshine. The Colonel wears a military uniform, to remind us of his professional responsibilities outside the home. Interestingly, the red, black and white of his uniform links him to the Ayah, who wears a red shawl and holds a black and white cat. Perhaps this suggests that both of them are outsiders, with a second life outside the domestic world depicted in the picture. The beautiful costumes worn by all the figures are accentuated by the grey and olive-green background, which helps to give an overall unity to the picture.

The Blair family are gathered to hear Jane play the piano, which is the main action of the picture. This is a typical format for a “conversation piece”. As Mary Webster says, in most conversation pieces “the sitters are linked to one another or to the whole group by an action” (Webster 114).  A secondary action is created by Maria, the younger daughter, who has moved to the other side of the picture to greet the Ayah, possibly to help her protect the cat from the dog.

Another feature of a typical “conversation piece” is the display of objects – furniture, porcelain, clocks, mirrors, carpets, oil paintings, and the like – which are intended to advertise the wealth and good taste of their owners. The Blairs have a fairly modest collection of objects – some fine chairs, a piano, a mirror, and three oil paintings – but these serve to demonstrate that they have brought a cultured and English way of life with them to India. The presence of the Ayah is the only obvious clue that we are in India, and this must have been one of the reasons for the inclusion of the Ayah in the picture. However, the three paintings on the wall at the back of the room, although in a European style, are nevertheless scenes of life in India. The large painting in the middle includes Indian buildings and an elephant, while the two paintings on either side of it depict “wood being piled up in preparation for a suttee” - the burning of a widow - and “the ceremony of Charak Puja or hook swinging” - hanging from hooks to placate the goddess Kali (Webster 525). Why would the Blairs have wanted pictures of such subjects? One possible explanation is that they refer to the problems of governing India, the job Colonel Blair had been sent to do. As Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk point out, Europeans liked to emphasise any bad features of the countries they were conquering, because this would “help to justify Western intervention in the East” (Hatt 229).

The three background paintings also serve a compositional function, in that the bottoms of their frames form a long straight line above the heads of the family – but not including the Ayah – helping to unite the family into a group. The whole setting of the space in which the Blairs are placed acts as a kind of stage set to display the family members. The figures are strung out in a line, like actors on a stage, and the entrances on either side are like the wings of a stage. The ante-room at the extreme right of the picture even contains a large mirror, in which the family could have prepared for their appearance. All this may be an influence from Zoffany’s past experience, as he had specialised in painting scenes from plays, particularly ones featuring the famous actor David Garrick. This would also suggest that Zoffany is depicting an invented setting, not a room in the Blairs’ actual home, especially as it does not look like a real space. We seem to be looking at an interior, and yet the extreme left leads straight out into the garden, without any intervening door. It is interesting that this probably imaginary setting includes a column (on the left) and a bunched-up curtain (on the right). A column adjacent to a curtain were stock properties of portraits in the grand manner, intended to convey the sitter’s aristocratic status, seen for example in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Charlotte Hill, Countess Talbot (1781, Tate Britain). Perhaps the column and the curtain were kept separate in the portrait of the Blairs to prevent them from being accused of having ideas above their station.

Comparison with Sir Joshua Reynolds also serves to emphasise the old fashioned way in which Zoffany was working. Reynolds and Gainsborough promoted bravura and painterly styles, somewhat broad brush and indeterminate.  For example, in Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Hallett we see two people in motion, light breaking on the horizon, waving trees, contrasts of light and shade, and subdued colours, all painted in a flickering, impressionistic manner. By contrast, Zoffany’s picture has sharply defined outlines, bright and clear colours, a symmetrical arrangement, and an abundance of details.  The Blairs were probably quite conservative in their tastes, and this kind of picture must have been exactly what they wanted. The picture would act as a record to remind them of their time in India, and perhaps to advertise their status to their friends and visitors. Also, as Hatt and Klonk point out in a different context (Hatt 229), such a precise and “realistic” style would have helped to persuade people that this was an accurate depiction of the Blairs’ life in India.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the picture is the relationship between Maria and the Ayah, who appear to be of similar ages. Although the Ayah would have been a servant, the picture presents the two girls as companions, standing close together. Maria strokes the cat while the Ayah holds it for her. We feel that Maria may be emotionally closer to the Ayah than she is to her older sister Jane. There is an implied contrast between the cultured, adult world represented by Jane at the piano and the childish but livelier world represented by Maria, the Ayah and the cat. Cats tend to feature in portraits of children, for example Hogarth’s portrait of The Graham Children (1742, National Gallery) and Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat (1760-1, National Gallery). Without knowing more about the Blairs’ household, it is impossible to know the exact status of the Ayah, and whether she was more than just a servant. It is nice that she is included in the picture, although she seems to have entered the room from outside, just a moment ago, which rather suggests that she is not seen as being one of the family circle. But the interaction between Maria and the Ayah is the most touching part of Zoffany’s picture, and it is good that Maria was the one who eventually inherited the picture (Webster 525)

Works Cited

Hatt, Michael and Charlotte Klonk, “Postcolonialism” in Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006, pages 223-239

Retford, Kate, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-century England, New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2006

Spear, Percival, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-century India, London: Oxford UP, 1965

Webster, Mary, Johan Zoffany 1733-1810, New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2^nd ed. 2011