Lot 71: HOOK, THEODORE EDWARD (1788-1841, humorous writer and poet)

PORTRAIT BY SAMUEL DE WILDE (1785-1841),
watercolour with touches of red chalk and pencil, three-quarter length, signed and dated 1806 by De Wilde, 9½ x 7½ in (24.2 x 19.1 cm).

EXHIBITED: Cheltenham Literary Festival, Faces and Places, 1982.

There are three portraits of Hook in the National Portrait Gallery, none of them as early as the present portrait, and thirty-two portraits of other sitters by De Wilde. A similar portrait of Hook, of 1807, aged 20 years, is reproduced as the frontispiece of R.H.D. Barham, The Life and Remains of Theodore Edward Hook, 2 volumes, 1849, and in The Man who was John Bull by Bill Newton Dunn, 1996.