John Smart, Portrait of Valentine Morris, later Governor of Saint Vincent, 1765

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of Valentine Morris, later Governor of Saint Vincent, 1765,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 4, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1514.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “John Smart, Portrait of Valentine Morris, later Governor of Saint Vincent, 1765,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 4, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1514.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This portrait depicts Valentine Morris, who inherited—and then lost—ancestral sugar plantations in the West Indies and Piercefield House in Wales.¹ Piercefield’s parkland, under Morris, became one of the finest examples of the sublime landscape in England.² Morris was thirty-eight years old when this portrait was painted, having married Mary Mordaunt, a niece of the 3rd Earl of Peterborough, seventeen years before.³ Morris was no stranger to commissioning portraits; he sat for Allan Ramsay (Scottish, 1713–1784) as a younger man, perhaps on the occasion of his marriage.⁴ His mother, Elizabeth Morris (née Wilmot), probably introduced him to John Smart, who had painted her likeness in 1762,⁵ three years before Smart created this portrait.

This finely painted miniature of an assured gentleman in his prime shows Smart beginning to find his feet as a portraitist. He painted Morris against the deep olive-brown background he typically used in the mid-1760s and rendered details such as his five o’clock shadow, the fine lines beneath his eyes, and the intricate gold embroidery on his coat with the precision that would become Smart’s hallmark. The textured case is made from shark or stingray skin, called shagreen, appropriate for a Caribbean colonist.

Morris was progressive in some ways, having been an early champion of road improvement.⁶ He was beloved by residents of nearby Chepstow for his princely hospitality, exhibiting a boundless generosity. Servants bearing food welcomed visitors of all social classes to Piercefield without charge. This seemingly liberal-minded gentleman did not see the irony, during his fruitless run for Parliament, in encouraging the local electorate to “cast off your shackles” by voting for a man whose wealth derived predominantly from enslavement.⁷

Morris’s improvements to Piercefield, which he designed with the poet Richard Owen Cambridge (1717–1802) over forty-five years, included a grotto, druid’s temple, and “giant’s cave.”⁸ Not far from Tintern Abbey, Piercefield was a favorite haunt of Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who said of its celebrated vistas, “Oh what a godly scene. . . . The whole world seemed imaged in its vast circumference.”⁹ Unfortunately, Morris’s vast expenditures at Piercefield, his predilection for gambling, and his failed election in 1771 led to financial ruin. Morris and his family fled to their estates in Antigua soon after the election. He was elected lieutenant governor of nearby Saint Vincent in 1772 and governor in 1776.¹⁰

Unfortunately, this prestigious post was unsupported by an income from the British government, forcing Morris to govern the island and defend it from the French from his own, already reduced purse. After the French retook Saint Vincent in 1779, Morris returned home, where he was confined in King’s Bench debtor’s prison.¹¹ He was released in 1781 and died three years later on August 26, 1784, having been “reduced to the greatest distress; his books and all his moveables were sold; even the gleanings of Mrs. Morris’s toilet [dressing table] were sold to purchase bread.”¹² His wife suffered the most from her husband’s extravagance, belied by his sober depiction by Smart: having attempted suicide during his imprisonment, she spent the rest of her life confined in an institution.¹³

Notes

1. Morris inherited Piercefield and properties in Antigua after the death of his father, Colonel Valentine Morris, in 1743. Due to reduced financial circumstances following vast expenditures on Piercefield and the 1771 election, the younger Morris began selling off various properties in the mid-1770s, beginning with the Morris Looby estate in Antigua and ending with the sale of his beloved Piercefield in 1786. On Morris’s properties and his role in enslavement, see “Valentine Morris II: Profiles and Legacies Summary,” Legacies of British Slavery Database, accessed August 24, 2024, http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146636527.

2. On Piercefield and the sublime landscape, see Victoria Perry, A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture, and the British Landscape (London: Hurst, 2022), particularly chapter five.

3. Their marriage is recorded on December 8, 1748, at St. Mary-le-Strand in London. Registers of Births, Marriages, and Deaths Surrendered to the Non Parochial Registers Commission of 1857, and Other Registers and Church Records in the Protectorates of Africa and Asia, class no. RG 8, piece no. 109, National Archives, Kew, digitized on Ancestry.com.

4. Allan Ramsay, Portrait of Valentine Morris, n.d., oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 25 1/8 in. (76.5 x 63.8 cm), sold at Christie’s, London, October 31, 2017, lot 45, https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6104643. His wife, Mary Morris, also sat for Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) at least twice, as recorded by Reynolds: “Mrs. Morris’s picture and the other to be directed to Val. Morris, Esq., Piercefield, Monmouthshire”; Algernon Graves and William Vine Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A. (London: Henry Graves, 1899), 2:668. One of their daughters was also painted by Reynolds, in a portrait titled Hope Nursing Love, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1769: Joshua Reynolds, Hope Nursing Love (Miss Morris as Hope Nursing Cupid), 1769, oil on canvas, 50 x 39 in. (127 x 99 cm), National Trust, Port Eliot, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/hope-nursing-love-miss-morris-as-hope-nursing-cupid-147971. A further intriguing connection between Morris and Reynolds is in the still-ambiguous history of a Black servant employed by Reynolds in the 1760s, who may have been named John Shropshire, uncovered by staff of the London Metropolitan Archives for a 2024 exhibition Unforgotten Lives: Rediscovering Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian, and Indigenous Heritage 1560–1860, April 5, 2023–March 27, 2024. Apparently the man had previously been enslaved by Morris in Antigua.

5. Mrs. Morris’s miniature was enclosed in a similar shagreen case lined with green velvet, also with an attached paper label identifying her. These miniatures had almost certainly remained in the Morris family for some time before being sold separately. John Smart, Mrs. Valentine Morris, in Mourning Dress, 1762, watercolor on ivory, 1 1/4 in. (3.2 cm) high, sold at Christie’s, London, June 2, 2009, lot 234, https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5206528.

6. After lobbying Parliament for the creation of turnpike roads in Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire, he famously argued that there were “no roads of any note in Monmouthshire.” When asked how one traveled there, he infamously replied, “in ditches.” Ivor Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris (Chepstow: Chepstow Society, 1964), 11.

7. In 1767, Morris was recorded as owning 1,004 acres and enslaving 284 people. In 1780, as his financial situation had become increasingly precarious, he owned 451 acres and enslaved 196 people. Vere Langford Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1806), 2:277. In the 1771 election, Morris’s political opponent taunted him with verses exposing this hypocrisy, stating “in a far distant land, my friends as I hear, he keeps many slaves, and I own that I fear he who makes men slaves there would make them so here, Go Massa, and drive you Negroes, We’ve no slaves in Monmouthshire.” Waters, The Unfortunate Valentine Morris, 24.

8. A near-contemporary account of Piercefield can be found in J. T. Barber, A Tour Throughout South Wales and Monmouthshire (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1803), 255–64.

9. Quoted in The Stranger’s Illustrated Guide to Chepstow and its Neighbourhood (London: J. Newman, 1843), 19.

10. Valentine Morris, A Narrative of the Official Conduct of Valentine Morris, Esq. (London: Hooper, 1787). See also the review of A Narrative of the Official Conduct of Valentine Morris, Esq. in The Monthly Review, Or, Literary Journal 78 (February 1788): 130–32.

11. King’s Bench later appeared several times in the literary works of Charles Dickens. Mr. Micawber was imprisoned there for debt in David Copperfield (1850).

12. Quoted in William Coxe and Edwin Davies, Historical Tour Through Monmouthshire (Brecon: Davies, 1904), 313.

13. Aleyn Lyell Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings (London: Arden Press, 1912), 2:42.

Possibly an unknown woman, by July 31, 1952 [1];

Possibly purchased from Old English Silver, Fine Portrait Miniatures, and Objects of Vertu, Sotheby’s, London, July 31, 1952, lot 109, as Colonel Valentine Morris, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of John W. (1905–2000) and Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1952–1965 [2];

Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.

Notes

[1] In the Sotheby’s July 31, 1952, sale, “A Lady” sold lots 107–109, including two portraits of Valentine Morris.

[2] In the sales catalogue, the miniature is described as “A fine miniature of Colonel Valentine Morris, by John Smart, signed and dated 1765, head and shoulders three-quarters dexter, gaze directed at spectator, powdered hair en queue, wearing blue coat with gold facings and white cravat, oval, 1 1/4 in., leather case. A small Miniature of Smart’s early period of the same sitter as that in the preceding lot. Graham Reynolds in English Portrait Miniatures illustrates on plate XIX another small example dated 1767.” Note that the 1767 miniature illustrated by Graham Reynolds is identified as “an unknown man” and only superficially resembles the other portraits of Morris. The incorrect title of Colonel Valentine Morris—referring to Morris’s father, who died in 1743, twenty-two years before this miniature was painted—suggests that this sale may refer to the miniature of the same date at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is also titled “Colonel Valentine Morris,” whose dimensions more closely correspond to those listed in the sale catalogue. However, the Starrs commonly purchased multiple miniatures in a single sale, and the Starrs acquired lot 114 in the same auction. According to Art Prices Current (1952–1953), A171, no. 4031: “John Smart: Colonel Valentine Morris, head and shoulders 3/4 sinister, gaze directed at spectator, hair en queue, wearing blue coat with gold facings and white cravat, signed, dated 1765, oval, 1 1/4 ins. (Leggatt), £45.” Archival research has shown that Leggatt Brothers served as purchasing agents for the Starrs. Out of the three works purchased by Leggatt Brothers in the July 31, 1952, sale, two are now in the Starr collection. See correspondence between Betty Hogg and Martha Jane Starr, May 15 and June 3, 1950, NAMA curatorial files.

John Smart, Portrait of Colonel [sic] Valentine Morris, Governor of Saint Vincent, 1765, watercolor on ivory, 1 1/4 x 1 1/16 in. (3.2 x 2.7 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1955-1-15.

John Smart—Miniaturist: 1741/2–1811, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 9, 1965–January 2, 1966, no cat., as Governor Morris.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 90, as Governor Morris of Piercefield.

John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 21, 2024–January 4, 2026, no cat., as Portrait of Valentine Morris, later Governor of Saint Vincent.

Catalogue of Old English Silver, Fine Portrait Miniatures, and Objects of Vertu (London: Sotheby’s, July 31, 1952), lot 109, as Colonel Valentine Morris.

Daphne Foskett, John Smart: The Man and His Miniatures (London: Cory, Adams, and Mackay, 1964), 71.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 90, p. 36, (repro.), as Governor Morris of Piercefield.