The Irish Don Quixote
A portrait of Owen Swiny
Many biographers will admit to having an obsession with their protagonists, and I am no different. However, what can also happen is an obsession with minor subjects (bit-players in your hero’s story) who sometimes threaten to overatake your whole book. In my case, it’s a man called Owen Swiny. Or Macswinny. Or McSwiney.
Today, most people encounter Swiny - if at all - in reference books such as Grove’s Dictionary of Music, which will talk about him as Handel’s assistant or agent. Swiny began his career in London as an impresario, notably working with John Vanbrugh on the running of the Haymarket theatre (England’s first opera house) and later assisting Handel in finding singers for the Royal Academy of Music.
However, I first got to know him in the context of a biography I was writing about the 18th-century actress Peg Woffington. He seems to have met her when he was in his mid-fifties and she was in her twenties. She fondly called him ‘Mac’ and he acted as her friend, agent, secretary and (possibly?) lover.
Swiny hailed from near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, the son of a Protestant rector. He is often described as ‘shady’ or a ‘scoundrel’ because - back in 1713 - he was implicated in the bankruptcy of Vanbrugh’s theatre and absconded to France in order to avoid arrest. He was obliged to stay abroad for 20 years, spending most of his time in Venice and developing a sideline as an art dealer. As well as discovering the most famous artist of the age - Canaletto - Swiny also worked as Handel’s agent in Italy.
By the 1730s, most of Swiny’s adversaries were dead, and, with help from the 2nd Duke of Richmond, he returned to London (at this point, Swiny added ‘Mc’ to his name, perhaps to distance himself from the past). For the next couple of decades he chased the fascinating Mrs Woffington around town and occasionally got into fights with her young suitors. On his death in 1754, he left her his entire estate, disinheriting some of his relatives in the process.
Around 1737/38, Swiny was painted by the French artist Jean-Baptiste van Loo, who had a fashionable studio in Covent Garden. The painting (now in a private collection) was later engraved by John Faber the Younger (above) and represents another obsession of mine.1 It shows him seated and looking to the upper right of the frame, his eyes lifted and his forehead bathed in light (the pose is from Dutch religious art and is known as ‘dislocated piety’). Swiny is resting one elbow on a table cluttered with writing paraphernalia, and he wears an eye-catching outfit: a slashed doublet with paned sleeves and pointed lace cuffs, and underneath it, a partially unbuttoned waistcoat. However, with his long, straggly hair, thick beard and devotional expression, he could almost pass for a saint. His eyes are raised to heaven as he gestures towards a book in his lap.
Although the picture borrows techniques from religious art, the aim of the portrait is to characterise Swiny as a virtuoso: a man of taste. The presence of props such as an inkpot and quill inform us that he is a man of literary talent, while his slashed sleeves, and lace cuffs were a popular form of masquerade costume (often referred to by art historians as ‘Van Dyck dress’). The unbuttoned waistcoat was another fashionable touch, perhaps suggesting aristocratic negligence. Here, Swiny appropriates the same imagery of the aristocrats who had done the Grand Tour, but it’s also a clever reference to his 20-year Venetian exile.
Yet something isn’t quite right with this picture. Although Swiny sports the collar-length hair of the Restoration period, his full beard is a mystery. Most men in the late 17th century favoured a small, pointed beard and, by the time the portrait was painted in the 1730s, it was usual to be clean-shaven. None of Swiny’s other portraits depict him with facial hair, and a bushy beard would have been at odds with emerging notions of politeness (men with unkempt hair and beards were usually regarded as hermits, ‘wild’ men or lunatics).2
But the real mystery is the book in his lap. It’s a copy of Don Quixote.
In April 1731, Swiny took a voyage to Lisbon with the young aristocrat Gustavus Hamilton, also known as Lord Boyne. This was a pleasure cruise, rather than a work trip, in which the Irishman joined Boyne’s aristocratic friends: Sir James Gray and Joseph Alston. We know the identities of the travellers because Colonel Elizeus Burges - a friend of Swiny’s - sent the following intelligence to the Secretary of State:
Lord Boyn, Sr James Gray, Mr Alston and Mr Swiny went on board a small Scotch-ship last night, in order to visit the isles of Malta and Minorca, Gibraltar, Cadiz and Lisbon; from whence they propose to come back by land, and see all that is worth seeing in Spain in their return to Italy again, where they are under some sort of promise to be by the end of the Autumn. They sailed today about noon, with a fair wind and the appearance of very fine weather.
It was not unusual for young men of the Grand Tour to be accompanied by an older male, usually a tutor, who acted as wise counsel.3 Given that Swiny had travelled through central Italy with Boyne and Edward Walpole during the summer of 1730, it seems that he occupied the ‘tutor’ role on this trip to Lisbon. Once they reached their destination, Boyne seems to have stayed on-board, leaving the other three to return by land. Joseph Spence encountered Swiny in Venice sometime between November 1731 to March 1732, suggesting that he made it back on schedule.
Apart from Colonel Burges’s brief reference, there is a record of the trip in the form of a painting by Bartolomeo Nazari (above) a copy of which is owned by the National Maritime Museum.4 The image shows five men around a table in a ship’s cabin with a large punch-bowl in front of them. All of the sitters wear maritime dress (sailors did not have a uniform until 1857, but they did wear distinctive clothing). In the foreground, Lord Boyne - aged about 21 - sits with his hands resting on the back of his chair. To his left is Sir James Gray, aged about 23, who is also seated and holding up a map. Joseph Alston, aged 25, stands behind Gray and holds up a sailor’s stick. To the left of them are the master of the ship, who points at a Danish crown compass hanging from the ceiling, and Owen Swiny, aged about 55, standing with a glass in his left hand and his right on a book.
It looks like he’s swearing on a Bible … but it’s actually a copy of Don Quixote.
From its first translation into English in 1612, Cervantes’ novel was used in British portraiture as shorthand for connoisseurship, but here it seems to represent something of personal value to the sitter.5 One of my theories is that Swiny was actually involved in an early translation of the novel. We know from his activities in Vanbrugh’s theatre that he was acquainted with Peter Anthony Motteux: a theatrical adaptor who, in 1706, wrote the libretto for the Haymarket’s opera Temple of Love and the epilogue to Vanbrugh’s play, The Mistake. Motteux also penned a celebrated translation of Don Quixote in the early 1700s which he described on the title page as ‘translated from the original by several hands’.
There has been much speculation about who Motteux’s fellow translators were. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography suggests candidates such as William Wycherley, William Congreve, Samuel Garth and Tom Brown. But what if Swiny was also one of the ‘several hands’ that helped to translate the novel? He spoke French and would have been able to understand the François Filleau de Saint-Martin translation of Don Quixote which Motteux used (along with borrowings from Shelton and Phillips) as a basis for his own. Is this why Swiny gestures at the book from his writing table, the light of divine inspiration striking his forehead?
Another theory of mine - more fanciful perhaps - is that van Loo’s portrait is supposed to show Swiny masquerading as Don Quioxote. In the novel, the famous knight is introduced to us in a ‘‘Plush Coat [and] Velvet Breeches”, and in his portrait, Swiny also wears velvet clothing, along with that bushy beard: a possible sign of madness. Given his ignoble flight from the Haymarket theatre in 1713, perhaps Swiny thought that Don Quixote might be a useful identity in which to plead for leniency?
The word ‘quixotic’ was in use in the early 1700s to mean hopelessly idealistic and impractical - and Swiny certainly had a penchant for grand schemes. His letters, which trundled their slow way from Venice to the Duke of Richmond in Sussex, show him to have been an entertaining companion: flamboyant; a charmer. His references to his projects, particularly a series of tomb paintings which he hoped the Duke would buy, are tinged with Cervantine pathos: “It is a work that I have set my heart upon, and I bear a thousand inconveniences, with some sort of pleasure, even from a view (that I imagine before my Eyes) of seeing it published to the world”, he wrote.
Additionally, this period marked a watershed in the British appreciation of Cervantes’ work. In 1738 - around the time that Swiny was painted by van Loo - another landmark edition of Don Quixote appeared in English, commissioned for the Queen by Lord Carteret, it was translated by Charles Jervas and printed by Jacob and Richard Tonson. By this time, the image of Don Quixote was in a state of transition from madman to polite, Neoclassical hero, and this can be seen in John Vanderbank’s illustrations for the Carteret edition, one of which shows Quixote in his study wearing Van Dyck dress and reading a book.6
And so we circle back to the van Loo portrait of Swiny. Just as Cervantes and his ‘Knight errant’ entered the pantheon of tasteful heroes in Van Dyck dress, so Swiny calculated that depicting himself as Don Quixote could help to rehabilitate his tarnished image in London.7 The idea is amusing and clever. After all, what better way to make amends than as the misunderstood hero - a knight-errant whose fertile imagination has outstripped the small minds of your critics?
For some time the painting was thought lost but it resurfaced at Christie's on 7 March 1927 (lot 113), when it was bought by an anonymous buyer. It, or another version, was at Sotheby's, New York, on March 27th 1987. There is a copy on enamel by Nathaniel Hone at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire, showing Swiny with grey eyes, along with hair and beard of a grey-white colour; he wears a dark blue coat and a bright blue waistcoat. According to William Laffan’s essay in Irish Fine Art in the Early Modern Period: New Perspectives on Artistic Practice, 1620-1820, the palette is faithful to the original, which is now in an Irish private collection. There are copies of Faber’s mezzotint in The British Museum, London, and the Henry E. Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, California.
I am grateful for Dr Alan Withey’s comments; for an in-depth analysis of the symbolism of beards see his Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England 1650–1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 33-54.
The tutor was also known as a ‘bear-leader’.
Today, three versions of his Lord Boyne in his Cabin exist in various collections in the UK - the one in the National Maritime Museum is probably a copy by another artist.
Swiny’s travelling companion, Sir James Gray, was painted in 1741 by George Knapton, with two works by Cervantes (Don Quixote and The Exemplary Novels) on the table beside him. As well as being Minister Resident at Venice from 1746 to 1752, Gray would eventually become Britain’s Ambassador to Spain, which suggests an enduring interest in Spanish culture.
For more on this see Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). The Carteret edition included, for the first time, a biography of Cervantes and an attempt at a portrait: conceived by William Kent from Cervantes’ descriptions of himself.
It was not the first time that Swiny had fallen back on such a strategy; in 1705, when his play, The Quacks, was pulled from the performance schedule, he sulked that the Lord Chamberlain was like “the old Woman in Don Quixots Library”: a reference to the housekeeper in Cervantes’ novel who indiscriminately throws Don Quixote’s books out of the window in a parody of the auto-da-fé.