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Edward Gibbon

3 of 14 portraits of Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon, by Unknown artist, circa 1825 -NPG 3317 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Mid-Georgian Portraits Catalogue

Edward Gibbon

by Unknown artist
circa 1825
6 in. x 4 1/2 in. (152 mm x 114 mm)
NPG 3317

Inscriptionback to top

Inscribed below: Ed Gibbon the Historian in Militia uniform and up the right-hand margin: this is in my Mother, Lady Hollands1/handwriting & was given to me by Sam Walker 1870 CFox.

1 Elizabeth, née Vassall (1771-1840), who married 2) 1797 Henry Holland, 3rd Baron Holland.

This portraitback to top

A whimsical, posthumous caricature. Gibbon served as a captain with the South Hampshire militia 1759-62 (and attended annual training camps between 1766 and 1770, when he resigned), the ‘habits of a sedentary life’ being ‘usefully broken by the duties of an active profession’. But he was apparently not then the corpulent figure of later life, being described in 1757 as ‘a thin little figure, with a large head’. [1]

Footnotesback to top

1) See Gibbon, Autobiography, Everyman ed., n.d., pp 65, 102-04; Letters, I, p 200n.

Physical descriptionback to top

Black hat in his hand, black collar, gold-laced red coat, purple sash, black boots, a scimitar at his waist.

Provenanceback to top

3rd Baron Holland (d. 1840); Sam Walker; Gen. Charles Richard Fox (d. 1873) 1870; Bernard Halliday, bookseller, Leicester in 1935,1 when offered to the NPG; it was declined, but subsequently [1946?] acquired.2

1 Item 426 in Halliday’s Cat.196, 1935.
2 Offered with fourteen miscellaneous drawings (which are in the NPG reference collection); on 20 December 1935 C. K. Adams told Halliday that the drawings 'will not be required for this Gallery, but I think it is possible that one of the Trustees might be interested in them’ (NPG archive). It is assumed that an unidentified Trustee acquired them and subsequently presented them, according to the accession number, in 1946.


This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: John Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790, National Portrait Gallery, 2004, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.

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