Sir Charles Wyndham (Charles Culverwell)

Inscriptionback to top

Signed in ink bottom right: ‘Hy. F.’

This portraitback to top

This characteristically vigorous caricature by the illustrator Harry Furniss shows Wyndham in advanced age, the contours of his still strong but slightly sagging features emphasized through the pince-nez balanced delicately on the end of his nose. He continues to cut a dashing figure, in well-cut morning suit with top hat and cane, and a stiff wing collar that exaggerates the length of his neck to comic effect. The manner in which he perches on a table, one hand resting on jutting hip, the other casually resting across a chair back, projects an air of easy confidence and authority. NPG 3535 was drawn for and published in Furniss’s folio volume Garrick Gallery Caricatures, which features 130 contemporary members of the Garrick Club|gloss} in relaxed poses. Wyndham was elected to the club in 1886, the year he first played the title role in David Garrick at the Criterion Theatre. Wyndham’s biographer maintains, however, that he was ‘never an inveterate clubman – there was no time – and because he always walked [to his home in] St John’s Wood after the theatre, he could not attend supper parties. Still, the new honour pleased him.’ [1]

It is not known whether Furniss and Wyndham were personally acquainted, nor if this portrait was drawn from life. Furniss does not make particular mention of him in his 1919 autobiography My Bohemian Days, although in his later text Some Victorian Men (1924), he unfavourably compares Wyndham’s performance in the role for which he was best known with an earlier interpretation by Edward Askew Sothern: ‘Although Sir Charles Wyndham, in a later generation, regarded David Garrick as his own great part, those who remember the original, the refined, gentlemanly, finished performance of Sothern, cannot for a moment admit there was any room for comparison between the two.’ [2]

See NPG collection 3337–3535, 3554–3620. For more information on drawings published in Garrick Gallery Caricatures, see also NPG collection 4095(1–11).

Elizabeth Heath

Footnotesback to top

1) Trewin 1980, p.108.
2) Furniss 1924, p.152.

Physical descriptionback to top

Whole-length, to left, profile almost to left, seated on a table with left hand on hip, right hand holding cane and top hat, wearing pince-nez with black ribbon and a morning suit.

Provenanceback to top

The artist; his sons, from whom purchased (through Theodore Cluse), April 1947

Reproductionsback to top

Furniss [1915–16], pl.46.

View all known portraits for Harry Furniss

View all known portraits for Sir Charles Wyndham (Charles Culverwell)