William Mason

This portraitback to top

A replica of the oval painting in York City Art Gallery (510), exhibited RA 1778 (87), and given by Mason to the 2nd Earl Harcourt. [1] Mason seems not to have liked it: ‘It makes me look like Le Beck’s head in the Strand. All my relations who saw it … cry shame on it’, Mason wrote; [2] but he was soon reminded by the poet William Whitehead that he was ‘grown grey-haired & intolerably fat’. [3] The following year Doughty made his fine mezzotint from the Reynolds portrait of 1774.

Footnotesback to top

1) Illus. York City Art Gallery, Cat. of Paintings, II, 1963, pl.29; engraved A. Warren 1820 from a drawing by J. Thurston.
2) To Lord Harcourt, 20 June 1778 (E. W. Harcourt ed., The Harcourt Papers, VII, p 590); Le Beck painted by Kneller and engraved A. Miller 1739, looking decidedly overweight.
3) As Mason told Lord Harcourt in an undated letter of 1779 (E. W. Harcourt ed., The Harcourt Papers, VII, p 60).

Physical descriptionback to top

Blue eyes, powdered grey hair, wearing a grey coat; a reddish-brown curtain behind.; within a painted oval, black spandrels.

Provenanceback to top

Lord Campden;¹ Phillips, 13 April 1970, lot 156, bought Leggatt for the NPG.

¹ As indicated by an ink label on the stretcher: Wm Mason/Reynolds/Coll. of Lord Campden, presumably a Viscount Campden who succeeded as Earl of Gainsborough.


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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