Dreweatts Donnington Priory Salerooms
Lot 221
Thomas Gainsborough R.A. (1727-1788) Portrait of Henry Fane, Half length wearing a lilac coat embroidered with gold, a tricorn under his left arm, in a feigned oval, Oil on canvas 74cm x 62cm. Provenance: Wormsley Park, Literature: E.K. Waterhouse, "Preliminary Check List of Portraits by Thomas Gainsborough", Walpole Society 1948-50, XXXIII, 1953, p. 38 (2); E.K. Waterhouse, Gainsborough, London 1958, p. 66 (no. 248); (unpublished) Catalogue of The Collection of Pictures & Drawings at Wormsley, The Property of F. W. Fane as "Portrait of Richard Luther Esq., Painted by T. Gainsborough". It is unusual for a regional auction house to offer a fine portrait by Thomas Gainsborough from the early 1760s. The portrait was painted at a time when the artist was rapidly establishing a national reputation in Bath. Gainsborough had visited Bath in the autumn of 1758 and decided that with so many visitors attracted by the spa it could sustain an ambitious artist better than Ipswich where he was then living. He returned to East Anglia in the spring of 1759, sold his belongings and returned to the West Country and set up his studio. Early the following year he leased a large property opposite the west front of the Abbey, renting out rooms to tourists and, a little later, his sister, Mrs Gibbon, opened a millinery shop in part of the building. The location was perfect. It provided a showcase for his work and a visit to his studio became an essential part of visiting Bath. Amongst his visitors in the early 1760s was Henry Fane who took the opportunity to commission two portraits from him. The canvases are almost identical, presumably made at the same time and painted brushstroke by brushstroke on two separate easels set up in front of the sitter. Fane, plump and self-possessed, wears a long bob wig with a pinkish-brown suit decorated with volutes of gold embroidery Ñ "lace" as the eighteenth-century termed it Ñ with, as contemporary etiquette dictated, his right hand is tucked into his waistcoat and his black tricorn held under his left arm. The better known portrait of Henry Fane, in a private collection, descended in the family of the sitter`s daughter, Mary, who married Sir Thomas Stapleton, 5th Bt. The painting on offer remained with the sitter and must have been one of the first pictures to decorate Wormsley Park on the border of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, an estate Fane had inherited in 1757, via his brother, from his maternal uncle. Henry was the third son of a Henry Fane born in 1669 and his wife Anne. In April 1752 John Scrope, Anne`s unmarried brother, died and, to quote Lord Pelham, he left "a vast fortune to Frank Fane; he will in all [probability get] at least £2000 a year in land and above £100000 in money". Frank was the eldest son and, together with his fortune, he inherited the two parliamentary seats at Lyme Regis which he shared with his brother Thomas. Frank died in 1757 and had property passed to Thomas and the parliamentary seat to his younger brother, Henry. In 1762 Thomas, now the eldest surviving son, succeeded a distant cousin and became the 8th Earl of Westmorland and marked his elevation by sitting to Thomas Gainsborough in his newly-acquired peer`s robes. It would have been at about this time that Henry sat for his two portraits. We would like to thank Hugh Belsey MBE for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. The present lot shall be included in Hugh Belsey`s forthcoming catalogue on portraits by Gainsborough which will be published by Yale University Press. Visit www.dnfa.com for condition reports
