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Richard Lovell Edgeworth

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- subject matching 'Regency Ireland'

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Richard Lovell Edgeworth

by Horace Hone
watercolour and bodycolour on ivory, 1785
3 in. x 2 3/8 in. (76 mm x 60 mm) oval
Purchased, 1976
Primary Collection
NPG 5069

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Horace Hone (1754-1825), Miniature painter; son of Nathaniel Hone. Artist or producer associated with 8 portraits, Sitter in 1 portrait.

This portraitback to top

Educationalist and father of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, Richard Lovell Edgeworth's Protestant Anglo-Irish family owned an estate confiscated from Irish Catholics by James I. During the Rebellion of 1798, the Edgeworth estate workers rose against their landlord but were suppressed after a bitter struggle. As an Irish MP, Edgeworth campaigned for government control of popular education and between 1806 and 1811 was one of the commissioners appointed by the British government to enquire into public education in Ireland.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Ingamells, John, National Portrait Gallery: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790, 2004, p. 153
  • Rogers, Malcolm, Master Drawings from the National Portrait Gallery, 1993 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 5 August to 23 October 1994), p. 51
  • Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 193
  • Walker, Richard, Miniatures: 300 Years of the English Miniature, 1998, p. 83 Read entry

    Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a wealthy but radical landowner in County Longford, was obsessed with mechanical contrivances and won a silver medal from the Society of Arts for a land measuring device. His eagerness to know the result of a race at Newmarket led to the invention of an early telegraph, which was developed in 1804 into a government line from Dublin to Galway. He and his daughter, the writer Maria Edgeworth (author of Castle Rackrent, 1800) wrote a treatise, Practical Education (1798), and collaborated on their Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1821. Horace Hone probably painted Edgeworth's portrait in Dublin, where he was working in 1782.

Events of 1785back to top

Current affairs

George Prince of Wales secretly marries his mistress Maria Fitzherbert in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.
Prime Minister William Pitt introduces a bill proposing parliamentary reform and the abolition of 'rotten boroughs' but is defeated.

Art and science

William Cowper publishes his best -known poem The Task.
James Boswell publishes The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, narrating his travels with the late writer Samuel Johnson.
Physician and naturalist James Hutton presents his studies of local rocks to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, launching the era of scientific geology.

International

Warren Hastings resigns as Governor-General of Bengal and returns to England. His trial begins on charges of corruption in the administration of India.
French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon crosses the Atlantic to sculpt a statue of George Washington.
British government establishes a permanent land force in the Eastern Caribbean, based in Barbados.

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