Description
Portrait of Gerard Anne Edwards (1733 - 1773), full-length, in a brown velvet jacket with a red and gold brocaded waistcoat, by a table bearing books and a globe, holding a scroll extolling the benefits of education, a balcony and landscape beyond
signed and dated 'J Shackleton pinxt 1743' (lower right, at the base of the column) and inscribed 'Tis education forms the tender Brain, Thence noble or mean Thoughts we entertain.' (on the scroll)
oil on canvas
70 1/4 x 47 in. (178.4 x 119.4 cm.)
in a contemporary George II carved and gilded frame with flowers and fruiting foliage, the upper corners with shells, crested with a coat of arms, attributable to Matthias Lock, circa 1740 - 1745
Notes
Gerard Anne Edwards was the son of Mary Edwards, an heiress with a strong streak of independence, and Lord Anne Hamilton, fortune-hunter and younger son of the 4th Duke of Hamilton by his second wife Elizabeth, daughter and sole heir of the 5th Baron Gerard. Mary Edwards and Lord Anne lived openly together for about two years. They are often said to have married clandestinely, probably in the Fleet Prison, but no record of their marriage has been traced there or anywhere else. It seems likely that Mary Edwards declined marriage in order not to surrender control of her vast fortune to a husband.
Their son Gerard was born on 4 March 1733. On 28 March of that year Mary Edwards had him baptised in St. Mary Abbotts, Kensington, as Gerard Anne Edwards, adding 'Singlewoman' after her own name in the baptismal register, thus declaring her son to be illegitimate. She never styled herself 'Hamilton', though she allowed Lord Anne to add 'Edwards' to his own name. When she found that he had made use of this to appropriate some of her stocks, she broke with him, and brought up her son Gerard by herself, with special attention to his education.
Mary Edwards' independence was reflected in her patronage of the arts. She was attracted to the work of William Hogarth early on, and became one of his most important patrons. She continued to admire his work until her death in 1743. Hogarth painted Gerard Anne Edwards in his Cradle in 1733 (National Trust, Bearsted Collection, Upton House), and soon afterwards painted The Edwards Conversation Piece (private collection) of the young Gerard as a toddler, with Mary Edwards and Lord Anne on the terrace of Mary's house in Kensington. In this Mary holds a volume of The Spectator, open at Addison's essay on how to bring up children virtuously. Hogarth's splendid single portrait of Mary Edwards in scarlet, with a text exhoting people to defend their inheritance, is in the Frick Collection, New York. Her interest in Hogarth's work also extended beyond his portraiture; she acquired his completed painting of Southwark Fair in 1734 or 1735 and may have bought others as well that, like Southwark Fair, were not retained by the family after her death (see R. Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, I, New Haven and London, 1971, p. 355).
It cannot be a coincidence that this most Hogarthian of Shackleton's major portraits was painted for a family with whom Hogarth himself was so closely involved. In one of the most sympathetic of all his portraits, Shackleton depicts Gerard Anne Edwards at the age of ten, honouring his mother's precepts by holding a scrolled text extolling the benefits of education. In 1743, the year in which this portrait was painted, Mary Edwards died, entailing all her property on her son and his male heirs. His illegitimate status debarred him from succeeding in the Hamilton line. On 8 October 1754, he married Lady Jane Noel, sister of the 6th Earl of Gainsborough. Their son and heir took, by royal licence, the name of Noel instead of Edwards, and inherited the Noel estates in Rutland as well as the vast Edwards estate. Gerard Anne Edwards died on 5 November 1773, in Twickenham.
Little is known about John Shackleton's early career. By the time of this portrait he was already a mature artist, living in Berkeley Street, in the heart of fashionable London, moving in intellectual circles such as that surrounding William Windham (1717 - 1761) of Felbrigg, Norfolk, of whom a full-length portrait in Hungarian costume by Shackleton is at Felbrigg (National Trust), and his tutor Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702 - 1771), who had returned from Geneva in 1741. In 1742 he had married Mary Anne Regnier of St. Anne's, Soho, at St. George's Chapel, Hyde Park Corner. The 1740s were critical years for Shackleton. He succeeded in consolidating his reputation as one of the preeminant portrait painters in London and managed to secure the patronage of some of the most influential figures in England. Apart from his connection with the Edwards family, his particularly fine portrait of John Bristowe, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle's steward on his estates at Clumber and Haughton in Nottinghamshire, seems to indicate that he had already established the relationship with the Pelham family that was to be so important in his later career. The 1st Duke of Newcastle's brother, the Rt. Hon. Henry Pelham (1695 - 1754), who was Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1743 - 1754) sat for a double portrait with his secretary John Roberts in 1752. The high esteem in which Shackleton was held in Whig circles is reflected in his appointment, after the death of William Kent, as Principal Painter in Ordinary to the Crown by King George II in 1749, an office which he continued to hold on the succession of King George III in 1760, until his death in 1767.
The present portrait's elaborately carved frame is bordered by a spiralled ribbon-twist and elegantly serpentined in the George II 'Picturesque' manner. Celebrating the achievements of the Edwards family, it is festooned with an abundance of fruit and flowers and displays their armorial cartouche together with Venus-shells, which are tied at the centres and corners by beribboned and bubble-gadrooned reeds. Its design and the exceptional naturalism of its carving is typical of the work of the celebrated Long Acre carver Matthias Lock (d. 1765), author of carver's pattern books such as 'A New Drawing Book', 1740, and 'Six Sconces', 1744. The frame forms an integral part of the whole and would no doubt have been in Shackleton's mind when he was planning his composition.
