Ozias humphrey biography of christopher
In our Parliament Chamber there hangs several portraits whose artists stood in the highest rank. One of them is that of Lloyd Kenyon, later 1st Baron Kenyon (1732-1802), the work of two of our finest portraitists of the late 18 and early 19 Centuries: George Romney (1734-1802) and Sir Martin Archer Shee P.R.A. (1769-1850).
Kenyon exemplified the able young person, an outsider to London, with no special educational, social or other advantages, whose life was transformed by joining an Inn of Court and the decision to pursue a career at the Bar. He was appointed Attorney General in three government administrations, before being appointed Master of the Rolls in 1784 and Lord Chief Justice in 1788, a post he held for the next 14 years until his death.
Born at Gredington in Flintshire on Friday 5 October 1832, Kenyon was educated at the local day school and Ruthin grammar school. His formal education ended at the age of 14, when he became articled to a solicitor in Nantwich, Cheshire. He became a student of the Inn on Saturday 7 November 1750 but lack of money, and his unsuccessful pursuit of a partnership in Nantwich, delayed his reading for the Bar until 1753. In London he lived frugally, in a single rented room in Bell Yard, and studied intensively. He was Called on Tuesday 10 February 1756 but, initially getting hardly any work, he continued his practice of attending Westminster Hall, and noting the cases he heard in the King’s Bench Courts – especially Lord Mansfield’s; his case notes were later published as Kenyon’s Reports.
From Lord Kenyon’s Summing-up in R v Rev. Gilbert Wakefield, tried and convicted for seditious libel in a pro-Revolutionary pamphlet:
I beg leave to say that I see no good in what has lately taken place in the affairs of another country. I see no good in the murder of an innocent monarch. I see no good in the massacre of tens of thousands of the subjects of that innocent monarch. I see no Object numberRCSSC/P 193 CollectionSpecial collections CategoryVisual works Object nameOil paintings, Portraits TitlePercivall Pott (1713-1788) DescriptionPortrait of Percivall Pott by George Romney, unsigned, 1788. Half length to right; with his left arm resting on a table with three books behind it, and a scroll of paper in his left hand. He wears a plum-coloured velvet coat with matching buttons, and a waistcoat open to show a white cravat and shirt-frill. His short grey wig has a black silk bow behind the neck. Pott began his career as an apprentice to Edward Nourse the younger in 1729. Nourse was active as a lecturer in anatomy and surgery, and Pott assisted with the preparation of dissections for Nourse's lectures. In 1736 Pott gained the Grand Diploma of the Company of Barber-Surgeons. With growing expertise and practice he applied for a post as assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital and, after an initial failure, was successful in 1745; he was appointed full surgeon to the hospital in 1759. In 1753 Pott and William Hunter were elected the first lecturers in anatomy to the new Company of Surgeons. Pott became a member of the court of examiners in 1763, and master of the Company in 1765. Pott wrote a number of surgical monographs and was influential as a teacher of surgery, lecturing first privately and later at St Bartholomew's Hospital. John Hunter was one of his pupils. Romney was born and died in the northeast of England but made his name in London as a fashionable society portraitist, rivalling Reynolds and Gainsborough. After training in Kendal under Cumberland artist Christopher Steele, he later travelled to Italy with fellow artist Ozias Humphrey to study art in Rome. The donor’s letter describes this portrait as ‘the last for which Mr Pott sat.’ H. Ward and W. Roberts ‘Romney’ (1904, 2, 125) record that Pott sat to Romney in 1781-83 and 1786; J H Pott paid Romney £21 in September 1788 and the portrait was se .
I thought this would be a short post but having done some reading it looks like being a long one. So first a bit of background on Romney who was born at Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, in 1734. Self Portrait painted in 1784 when Romney was fifty.
He was one of eleven children, his father was a man of many occupations farmer, builder, cabinet-maker, and dealer and not very prosperous in any of them. By the time Romney was eleven years old he was helping his father in the workshop, during this time he drew portraits of the other workmen and people. He also became a skilled woodworker and was able to make violins (which he played throughout his life). When he was twenty he made the acquaintance of a vagabond artist named Christopher Steele, who journeyed from place to place producing portraits, I wonder if there is still an opening for that sort of Itinerant!
In 1755 Romney became his pupil and was taken with him on his travels. In the following year Romney fell ill with a fever and was nursed by his landlady's daughter, a domestic servant named Mary Abbott, and being a romantic youth Romney married this girl in the first burst of his gratitude. Steele meanwhile had settled at York, and summoned Romney to join him there as soon as he was well enough, and since he was not earning enough to keep a wife, Mrs. Romney had to go back to service when her husband rejoined the man he was apprenticed to.
There was little that Steele, a mediocre artist and a loose liver, could teach Romney, and their association was more profitable to Steel than to him. After a year or two in bondage at York, Romney managed to purchase his freedom, and he then made a home for his wife at Kendal. With this town as his headquarters, he rambled about the Lake Country painting heads at two guineas each and small full-lengths at si Percivall Pott (1713-1788)