Ian Handford: The Torbay artist who won over the Queen and became Britain’s ‘greatest prude’

The first part of this series can be read HERE.

With his sabbatical over at Maidencombe, Torquay, Brunel returned home and weeks later suffered a breakdown through overwork.

He and Mary then went to Europe to get warmth and again convalesce. In Torquay meanwhile Horsley’s career as a painter began to change his life forever. 

The year previous he had been introduced to the Royal family and invited to attend the birth of Princess Beatrice. 

That invitation had been arranged through the Royal dresser when she explained to Her Majesty and Prince Albert that his Reverend was a rising star in the artist world. Privately the Queen had asked him to do the first  portrait of her new child Princess Beatrice in secret, which would require him dodging in and out of Buckingham Palace while avoiding Prince Albert as she wanted the portrait to be a birthday surprise.    

Returning to London after convalescing, Brunel now found he had been diagnosed with a disease of the kidney and that it was unfortunately untreatable and apparently caused or lying dormant for decades after being dragged out from the polluted underground tunnel in London. 

Arrangements were quickly made to bring him down to the Westcountry so that he might at least see his new South Devon Railway and the only just completed Saltash Bridge at Plymouth.  

The bridge was viewed while lying in a coach as by then he was unable to stand. Once back in London Isambard Kingdom Brunel died at just 53 in September 1859.

When the Reverend had married Rosamund her personal inheritance was still in trust and now she and her brother Francis Seymour Haden suddenly found themselves  rich. Interestingly, like her husband Francis was an amateur etcher and he had even founded the Royal Society of Painters while Horsley now with his career blossoming would by 1875 be appointed Rector of the Royal Academy and the organiser of the first Old Master Winter Exhibition.

With the Reverend having always been an avid reader of The Times newspaper and satirical magazine Punch, both would suddenly attack his lifelong solemnity and prudity in spite of his “blossoming career”. 

Their U-turns came after an incident where they had read a letter to The Times from a lady complaining about the rising “corrupt practice, imported from the Paris saloons - of drawing of nudes”. 

Horsley had seen fit to try and support her view Horsley and similarly wrote to the Times although anonymously  using a letter he titled - “ Women’s Plea”- before then signing it “H” as a British matron on May 25, 1885. 

A hugely sympathetic reply was then written by -The Church of England Purity Society - which should have seen an end of the story.  But no. Mere days   later it would be The Times that renamed him “Clothes Horsley”, in effect a cartoon figure.  

That immediately saw female art students who had viewed Horsley’s painted nudes formally attack him at all the institutions - a Church of England Congress in October 1885. 

His Reverend sent no further reply but was now ridiculed by the magazine Punch who chose to write a piece featuring a cartoon they entitled The Model British Matron, depicting Horsley him as a male corseted matron.  

It was a sad end to what had been a successful and long career as thereafter he was viewed as “Britain’s greatest prude”. 

The  Royal connection and being the designer of the nation’s first Christmas card were now largely forgotten until John Calcott Horsley died at 85 on October 19, 1903. 

It was not until 1988 that Torbay Civic Society chairman Ena Hocking finally erected one of our earliest blue plaques at Orestone and chose to  use the following words on the plaque: “The sometime home of the artist John Calcott Horsley and his relative and friend IK Brunel” which may still be viewed on the wall of now Orestone Manor Hotel.  

NEXT WEEK: Elizabeth Goudge 145