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Introduction
The portraits included in
Art for the Nation trace the
development of portrait
painting in England over a
period of nearly 300 years,
but especially where the
collections are strongest,
in the 17th and 18th
centuries. The Museum’s
portrait collection includes
important works by
artists including Hogarth,
Gainsborough, Reynolds
and Romney, and also
outstanding examples by
less-well-known portrait
painters. The collection,
originally formed to
commemorate and
educate, also tells the
story of portrait painting
in England and how it
developed.
1. Room 8
Charles Howard,
1st Earl of Nottingham (1536–1624)
Daniel Mytens (c.1590–1647) c.1620
2. Room 8
Admiral Sir John Harman (c.1630–73)
Sir Peter Lely (1618–80) 1666
3. Room 11
Inigo Jones (1573–1652)
William Hogarth (1697–1764) 1757
4. Room 12
Emma Hart (c. 1761–1815) in
a cavern
George Romney (1734–1802)
1785–86
5. Room 12
Joseph Miller and Thomas Allen,
Greenwich Pensioners
John Burnet (1785–1868) c.1832
6. Room 18
Captain Sir Alexander Schomberg
(1720–1804)
William Hogarth (1697–1764) 1763
7. Room 18
Commodore the
Hon. Augustus Keppel (1725–86)
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92)
1749
8. Room 20
Herbert Barnard John Everett
(1877–1949)
Sir William Orpen (1878–1931) 1900
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1. Mytens
Room 8
Charles Howard,
1st Earl of Nottingham
(1536–1624)
Daniel Mytens
(c.1590–1647)
c.1620
Daniel Mytens was born in Delft
and entered the Guild of St Luke
at The Hague in 1610, where
he developed a fine painting
technique. He moved to London in
1618 and gained the patronage of
the Earl of Arundel. In 1624
James I gave him a grant of £25 as
well as an annual pension for life
of £50. When Charles I succeeded
the throne in 1625, he appointed
Mytens ‘one of our picture-drawers
of our Chamber in ordinarie’
for life.
Mytens introduced a new
elegance and grandeur to English
portraiture, especially in fulllengths. From 1620 to 1634 he
received a continuous series of
payments for pictures painted for
the Crown.
This portrait of Charles Howard
was one of several owned by
Charles I. It was sold when
Parliament dispersed his
collection, after the king’s
execution, but was recovered at
the Restoration. It then remained
in the Royal Collection until
presented to Greenwich Hospital
by George IV in 1825.
Charles Howard, 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham and later
1st Earl of Nottingham, was appointed Lord Admiral in 1585.
Two years later he was designated ‘lieutenant-general and
commander-in-chief of the navy prepared to the seas against
Spain’. In the background of the painting there is a representation
of the English fleet in action against the Spanish Armada of 1588,
the campaign on which Howard’s fame largely rests.
The portrait was painted shortly after Howard retired from active
service in 1618. It is a fine example of the style of formal fulllength portraiture for which Mytens became famous. His best
full-length portraits of the English court are comparable with
those by any other northern European court painter up to that
time. He was the most successful portrait painter at the court
until the arrival of van Dyck in 1632, whose mature court style
made Mytens’ portraits seem out of date.
2. Lely
Room 8
Admiral Sir John Harman
(c.1630–73)
Sir Peter Lely (1618–80)
1666
Peter Lely, a Dutchman, arrived
in England in 1641 following the
death of van Dyck and very soon
became the leading portraitist
of the day. He began working
for Charles I and continued to
flourish under the Protectorate
of Oliver Cromwell and his son.
After the Restoration of 1660, he
was appointed Principal Painter to
Charles II and granted an annual
pension of £200 ‘as formerly to
Sr Vandyke’.
This portrait of Sir John Harman is one of a set of thirteen
portraits painted for James, Duke of York, of his flag-officers
at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665, the first major action of the
Second Dutch War (1665–67). Harman served throughout the
Dutch Wars, which ended in 1674. As commander-in-chief of
the West Indies, he sailed into Martinique in 1667 where he
silenced the fort and destroyed 20 of 24 French ships. He was
also responsible for capturing Surinam in South America from the
Dutch.
Harman’s portrait is perhaps the most dashing of the thirteen
‘flagmen of Lowestoft’. It was one of those seen by Samuel
Pepys when he visited Lely’s studio on 18 April 1666 and ‘saw
the heads, some finished, and all begun, of the Flaggmen in
the late great fight against the Dutch. The Duke of Yorke hath
them done to hang in his chamber, and very finely they are
done indeed’. The heads of the flagmen portraits are among
Lely’s finest but the portraits appear to have been completed
by studio assistants. In some of them, there is awkwardness in
the relationship between the body and the head. This is not so
obvious in Harman’s.
George IV presented eleven of the thirteen ‘flagmen’ portraits to
Greenwich Hospital in 1824 with an early copy of the twelfth, of
Admiral Sir John Lawson. The originals of Lawson and one of
Prince Rupert were retained in the Royal Collection, although the
Hospital later obtained a copy of the latter which is also now in
the Museum.
3. Hogarth
Room 11
Inigo Jones (1573–1652)
William Hogarth
(1697–1764)
1757
William Hogarth was born in
London in 1697. His father, a
schoolmaster and writer, often
found himself incarcerated in a
debtors’ prison. Hogarth was
apprenticed to a goldsmith
and engraver of silver plate.
He established himself as an
engraver of cheap shop cards
while attending the Saint
Martin’s Lane Academy and
studying painting under the
successful decorative painter
James Thornhill (1675/61734). Around 1730 he set up a
portrait–painting practice – from
necessity rather than desire
– and his portraits introduced a
refreshing vitality and sincerity,
at a time when many artists
flattered their subject.
This portrait of Inigo Jones, the architect of the Queen’s House,
was commissioned by Sir Edward Littleton MP, who was fitting
out his new house, Teddesley Hall near Stafford, in the neoclassical style. Littleton was keen to decorate it with portraits
of ‘British worthies’, most represented in an important series of
terracotta busts by Rysbrack of which the Museum now holds
three, including of Oliver Cromwell and Sir Walter Raleigh.
This work is closely based on Robert van Voerst’s engraving from
a red chalk drawing by van Dyck, which is now at Chatsworth.
Hogarth studied van Dyck’s technique carefully and the portrait
vividly evokes the presence of a man who had died a century
earlier. Hogarth admired van Dyck’s style of portraiture, which he
thought had inspired an English tradition. A contemporary portrait
of Jones, by William Dobson, is displayed on the ground floor of
the Queen’s House.
There are two letters from Hogarth to Sir Edward Littleton in the
National Maritime Museum’s collection in which he explains the
reasons for late delivery of the picture. On 9 September 1758 he
wrote;
I should have sent your Picture long agoe if it had not been
for a few accidents which have prevented me, I mistook the
size, and did not find my mistake till the frame (which had
been long making) came home. When the second frame
came home, which had been a good while about too, I had
lost your direction but having at last found it the Picture will
go on Monday to the carrier directed for you at Rugeley.
The picture’s present frame is almost certainly the second one
referred to by Hogarth.
4. Romney
Room 12
Emma Hart (c. 1761–1815)
in a cavern
George Romney
(1734–1802)
1785–86
BHC2736
George Romney was born in
Lancashire, son of a builder
and cabinet maker. After
establishing a successful
practice in York and Kendal
he travelled first to London in
1762 then on to Paris and Italy,
where he studied sculpture
and the Renaissance masters.
He returned to London in 1775
and became a popular portrait
painter. His portraits tend to
please the eye – which helped
his business fortunes. He was
championed by the Society
of Arts but chose never to
exhibit at the Royal Academy.
In 1798, suffering from mental
depression and failing health,
he returned to Kendal to die.
This painting may be the
one described by one of
Romney’s studio assistants
as Absence, for it may reflect
Romney’s feelings about
Emma’s departure for Naples
in March 1786. Emma was one
of Romney’s most frequent
and favourite portrait subjects,
and he was perhaps infatuated
with her. He kept this portrait
throughout his life.
Emma Hart, the beautiful daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith, had
an inauspicious beginning of domestic service, becoming the
maltreated mistress of Sir Henry Featherstonhaugh. From this
life she was rescued and educated by the Hon. Charles Greville
before being ‘passed on’ to Greville’s widowed uncle, Sir William
Hamilton, British Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,
in Naples. Hamilton’s kindness led to the couple being married
in 1791. Two years later Emma was introduced to Horatio Nelson
but they did not meet again until after the Battle of the Nile in
1798, when the wounded admiral recuperated at their home in
Naples. Here Emma’s hero-worship and their friendship rapidly
developed into a passionate affair and eventually, until Hamilton’s
death in 1803, a scandalous ménage-à-trois.
In the late-19th century this portrait gained the romantic title,
Lady Emma Hamilton as Ariadne. It was thought to show Emma
posing as the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who in Greek
mythology helped Theseus to escape from the Minotaur’s
labyrinth only to be abandoned by him on the island of Naxos.
This was an invention, possibly intended to make it more easily
acceptable within the Nelson/Hamilton iconography. It was
painted some years before Emma married Hamilton.
When the portrait came up for sale at Christies in 1944, the
Museum’s first director, Professor Sir Geoffrey Callender (1875–
1946) immediately recognized it as ‘a masterpiece’ and with
Sir James Caird mounted a campaign to acquire it. A potential
problem was that the Chairman of Trustees, Lord Stanhope,
might object to the exhibition of a portrait of Lady Hamilton in
the National Maritime Museum, and oppose expenditure ‘on an
exhibit that was not purely maritime’. Caird deftly handled the
situation, offering to defray the considerable cost himself.
5. Burnet
Room 12
Joseph Miller and
Thomas Allen, Greenwich
Pensioners
John Burnet (1785–1868)
c.1832
John Burnet was a Scottish
painter and engraver. He moved
from Edinburgh to London in
1806 and established himself
as a painter of portraits,
landscapes and rural genre
scenes.
Between 1808 and 1862 he
regularly exhibited at the Royal
Academy, the British Institution
and with the Society of British
Artists. He also wrote manuals
and books on drawing, painting
and artists.
Portraits of ordinary sailors are extremely rare as they did not
have the means to commission them. However, the existence of
the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich provided artists with
the opportunity to paint and draw its residents, the vast majority
of whom had served at sea in the Royal Navy. The pensioners
that Burnet painted in the early 1830s had all been at sea around
the time of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
These portraits are two studies of Greenwich Pensioners which
Burnet made for his 1837 painting Greenwich Pensioners and
Naval Heroes. It shows pensioners celebrating the anniversary
of Trafalgar in Greenwich Park and was painted speculatively
to complement David Wilkie’s Chelsea Pensioners Reading the
Waterloo Dispatch, which was owned by the Duke of Wellington.
The Duke bought Burnet’s picture and both are now hanging in
Apsley House, London, his former home.
Many naval officers had personal servants but they are rarely
recorded. Although painted many years later, this portrait of
Thomas Allen is an exception. Allen (d. 1838) was ‘body servant’
to Admiral Nelson from 1795 to about 1805. In a letter of August
that year to the Reverend J. Glasse, the context of which is not
entirely clear, Nelson wrote of Allen;
Although I kept him many years about me, yet I fear he did
not make a very grateful return to my kindness to him; he
never was my Steward nor do I think him able to perform
such a service well.
Though not a seaman, Allen was later admitted to Greenwich
Hospital, apparently by Sir Richard Keats, the Governor, or his
successor Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy: his grave is just beside
the Museum in the old Hospital burial ground, marked by the
monument Hardy placed on it.
6. Hogarth
Room 18
Captain Sir Alexander
Schomberg (1720–1804)
William Hogarth
(1697–1764)
1763
BHC3015
Hogarth worked under the
successful painter, Sir James
Thornhill (1675/6–1734)
– famous for the ceiling
decoration of the Painted
Hall here at Greenwich – and
married his daughter. From
1730 he achieved unique
popular success with his
modern satirical morality tales,
painted for exploitation in
engraved form – The Harlot’s
Progress (c.1731), The Rake’s
Progress (c.1735) and Marriage
à la Mode (c.1742–44). At the
same time he was busy with
portrait commissions. In 1757
he was appointed to the official
position of ‘Serjeant Painter’
to George II, following in the
footsteps of his father-in-law,
Thornhill.
This portrait is signed and dated 1763, the year before Hogarth’s
death. It may have been painted to coincide with Schomberg’s
marriage to Arabella Susanna Chalmers that year.
Schomberg was the son of a German-Jewish physician, who
settled in England around 1720, and was one of several brothers:
Isaac was Hogarth’s physician and a print collector; Ralph (whose
portrait by Gainsborough is in the National Gallery, London) was
also a physician; Alexander joined the Navy.
During the Seven Years War (1756–63) he assisted at the taking
of Quebec and was closely associated with the commander
there, General James Wolfe (1727–59) who, like Nelson later, died
in the hour of victory. The capture led to France ceding its North
American possessions to Britain through the Treaty of Paris in
1763. Schomberg later came into conflict with the young Prince
William Henry (William IV from 1830) when both were serving
under Nelson in the West Indies and ended his career as longserving captain of the official yacht of the Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland.
Over the years the paint of this portrait has become transparent,
making one of Hogarth’s adjustments visible as a pentimento or
visible correction: this is a change in the line of Schomberg’s right
shoulder.
7. Reynolds
Room 18
Commodore the
Hon. Augustus Keppel
(1725–86)
Sir Joshua Reynolds
(1723–92)
1749
BHC2821
This is the earliest of many
portraits of Augustus Keppel
painted by Joshua Reynolds. The
two men became lifelong friends
when, early in 1749, they were
introduced by Lord Edgcumbe,
Reynolds’ early patron. On 11
May 1749 Reynolds sailed with
Keppel from Plymouth to the
Mediterranean in the Centurion,
en route for Italy. Reynolds
spent the rest of the year with
the British garrison on Minorca,
before setting off in January
1750 for Rome, where he stayed
for two years.
While at Minorca, Reynolds painted portraits of the garrison
officers. It is possible that this portrait, which is signed and
dated 1749 in the lower left corner, was painted in England
before they set off. However, the inclusion in the background of
a mountainous Mediterranean landscape and Keppel’s ship, the
Centurion, flying a commodore’s broad pennant, suggests that it
was painted on Minorca.
After his return to London in 1752 Reynolds painted his great
full-length portrait of Keppel which is hanging in Room 12. This
seems to have been in gratitude to Keppel and it was the portrait
that made the artist’s name.
Keppel was a member of a leading Whig aristocratic family, who
had come to England in 1688 with William of Orange (Wiliam III).
As a young man he sailed round the world on Anson’s famous
raiding voyage of 1740–44 against the Spaniards in the Centurion
(the ship he later commanded). The scurvy – vitamin C deficiency
– which affected that voyage is said to have deprived young
Keppel of many of his teeth, prompting a modern historian to
observe that his portraits always show his mouth firmly shut.
8. Orpen
Room 20
Herbert Barnard John
Everett (1877–1949)
Sir William Orpen
(1878–1931)
1900
BHC2684
William Orpen studied drawing
at the Metropolitan School of
Art in Dublin (1894–97) and at
the Slade School of Fine Art
in London (1897–99) with his
distant relative, the marine
and landscape painter, John
Everett. They shared a studio
together where this portrait was
painted. Orpen exhibited it at
the winter exhibition of the New
English Art Club in 1900.
Orpen was a fashionable
portrait painter who later
produced memorable work as
an official war artist in The First
World War. This portrait shows
the influence of two British
artists of American origin,
James Abbott McNeil Whistler
(1834–1903) and John Singer
Sargent (1856–1925).
There is a preliminary sketch for this portrait in Bradford City Art
Gallery, in which Everett is shown clean-shaven. Here he sits
against a background of his own watercolours and drawings of
ships. His telescope and a roll of maps can be seen in the corner.
In 1898 he departed on the first of many world voyages which
inspired his unusual seascapes of the 1920s and 1930s.
Everett inherited enough money to allow him to travel and be
an artist without having to paint for a living. He also avoided
publicity, sold very few pictures and on his death bequeathed his
entire life’s work to this Museum. It includes over 2500 paintings
and drawings: the Museum has usually exhibited examples but
has only held one major Everett exhibition, in 1964.
Consequently, and because there is no market in his work, he
remains undeservedly little known.
He himself owned this portrait and bequeathed it to the National
Portrait Gallery, London. Because it seemed more sensible that
it be kept with his own collection it was transferred here in 1950.
Examples of Everett’s work can be seen in Room 21.
For further information about
these highlights or details
about other works in the
collection visit
Art for the Nation
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