Room 9
The Kit-cat Club portraits
The Whig party in support of a Protestant monarchy

These portraits by Sir Godfrey Kneller are of a group of influential Whigs, all members of the Kit-cat Club. As a political party the Whigs supported the 1688 Revolution which brought William III to the throne and were pledged to uphold the Protestant succession to the throne. The Kit-cat Club was founded in William III's reign, largely by Lord Somers, the Lord Chancellor, and the publisher Jacob Tonson, its secretary. It began meeting in Christopher Cat's tavern near Temple Bar, and took its name from his mutton pies known as Kit-cats. Members included leading Whig MPs and landowners, younger men like Sir Robert Walpole and William Pulteney, the writers Addison, Vanbrugh, Congreve and Steele, as well as the Duke of Marlborough and the Earl of Burlington, though these last two are missing from the set of portraits.

By 1715, with the French defeated, the Protestant George I on the throne and the first Jacobite rising repelled, the objectives of the club were achieved, and by 1725 Vanbrugh was writing to Tonson about the club as a memory, and expressing a wish to have one meeting that winter, 'not as a club, but old friends that have been of a club, and the best club that ever met'.

The portraits were gifts from members to Tonson. They were painted over a space of more than twenty years by Sir Godfrey Kneller, himself a member of the club. He adopted a standard 'kit-cat' format of 36 x 28 inches, rather larger than the usual 30 x 25 inches; the new size readily allowed for one of the sitter's hands to be shown and it encouraged a wider variety of poses. The paintings were framed as a set in 1733 for two guineas each by the King's framemaker, Gerrard Howard, to hang in a special room which Tonson's nephew had built at his house at Barn Elms near Barnes. The set was made known to a much wider audience through the book of mezzotints of the portraits engraved by John Faber and published in 1735. More than forty of the original portraits survive. They were given by the National Art Collections Fund in 1945 and are displayed here and at Beningbrough Hall in Yorkshire.

Portraits on display

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 08 August 2008