Early Georgian Portraits Catalogue: Ward

John Ward (1679?-1758)

Biographer; clerk in the navy office; schoolmaster in Moorfields, 1710; professor of rhetoric, Gresham College, London, 1720-58; FRS, 1723; FSA, 1736; published treatises on rhetoric, dissertations on classical topics, and The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College,1740; hon. LLD Edinburgh, 1751; left his manuscript antiquarian collections to the British Museum, of which he was a trustee.

590 By an unknown artist
Oil on canvas, 23 ½ x 18 ¾ in. (597 x 477 mm); blue eyes, light brown eyebrows, cleft chin, grey wig, fresh complexion; dark grey coat, white cravat; yellowish grey background shading to dark grey green.

Inscribed on the back of the second canvas, in a late eighteenth century hand: Johannes Wardus juris utriusque doctor / Rhetoricus Professor Greshamensis / Regal. et Antiquar. Societat. Londini Sodalis / Et Musei Britannici Curator I ob . 17 oct. 1758, aet. 79 [1]

On stylistic grounds, it is possible that NPG 590 was not taken from life, but the painter has not been identified. If not from life, the source could be the Ramsay (seeIconography). The sitter has a fairly aged appearance.

Condition:slight losses along edges. The painting has not been relined, but the original canvas has been laid over a second canvas, surface cleaned and varnished 1879, 1895.

Collections:transferred 1879 from the British Museum, to whom it had been presented by Thomas Hollis (1720-74), a pupil of the sitter. [2]

Iconography

The only other known likeness of Ward is Allan Ramsay's signed and dated portrait of 1749 in the County Museum, Warwick. [3]

Notes

1. Scharf, p.457, gives only the last line of this inscription.
2. The statement in the DNB, XX,p.778, that an anonymous portrait is in the NPG as well as in the BM appears to be a confusion.
3. Exh. 'Paintings and Drawings by Allan Ramsay', RA 1964 (18). Purchased 1974; formerly in the Loveday family through Mrs Abigail Goodwin, whose daughter married John Loveday; Mrs Goodwin was a cousin-once-removed of Dr Ward and his residuary legatee.