William Shenstone

1 portrait

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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William Shenstone

by Thomas Ross
oil on canvas, feigned oval, 1738
29 7/8 in. x 22 1/4 in. (759 mm x 565 mm)
Purchased, 1964
Primary Collection
NPG 4386

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Thomas Ross (active 1730-1746), Artist. Artist or producer associated with 3 portraits.

This portraitback to top

Given by Shenstone to his servant Mary Cutler in 1754 'in acknowledgement of her native genius, her magnanimity, her Tenderness, & her Fidelity'. The frame is probably original, a delicate variation on a Kent frame with projecting square corners and ornament worked in the gesso. More detailed information on this portrait is available in a National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue, John Kerslake's Early Georgian Portraits (1977, out of print).

Linked publicationsback to top

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  • Kerslake, John, Early Georgian Portraits, 1977, p. 247
  • Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 561
  • Simon, Jacob, The Art of the Picture Frame: Artists, Patrons and the Framing of Portraits in Britain, 1997 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 8 November 1996 - 9 February 1997), p. 39, 156 Read entry

    Gilt pine, the ornament worked in the gesso and water gilt over a black bole except for the oil gilt cross-hatched corners (perhaps restored), the ground punched, hazzle-work next to the sight-edge gadrooning and the top edge, the sub-frame lap jointed with strips of timber applied to the sides of the sub-frame to create the stepped corners. 2 3⁄ 8 inches wide (3 1⁄ 8 inches at corners).

    This portrait of the twenty-four-year-old William Shenstone, creator of the celebrated landscape garden at the Leasowes near Birmingham, was probably painted while he was still in residence at Oxford or soon after he had returned home. Thereafter Shenstone rarely strayed far from the Leasowes, taking delight in his schemes for his garden and house, and those of his friends and neighbours.

    This frame is presumably the work of a local cabinet maker, working to Shenstone's instructions, which would explain the non-standard construction and the unusual combination of a Kent frame, albeit a rather delicate one, with ornament of the sort to be found on mirror frames of the 1720s. There is an emphasis on economy of effect, with much of the decoration worked in the gesso, the distinctly old-fashioned punched ground.

Events of 1738back to top

Current affairs

Fetter Lane Society founded in London by the Moravians; a reformed group of Protestants led by exiled Saxon Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf. He visits Britain to petition the king for protection for Moravian missionaries working in the British colonies. An act to this effect is finally passed in 1749.
John Wesley is converted, essentially launching the Methodist movement.



Art and science

Artist Allan Ramsay returns to London from Rome and sets himself up as a portrait painter.
Metallurgist William Champion patents a process to distil zinc from calamine using charcoal in a smelter.

International

Methodist preacher George Whitefield arrives in Savannah, Georgia to replace John Wesley; the first of seven visits across the Atlantic which make him one of the most widely recognised figures in the American colonies.
Merchant sailor Robert Jenkins presents his pickled ear (cut off by Spanish coast-guards in Cuba in 1731) to Parliament stirring up war fever against Spain and leading to the War of Jenkins' Ear the following year.

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