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Edward Oram

41 of 3516 portraits matching these criteria:

- subject matching 'Pencil'

Edward Oram, by John Flaxman, circa 1780 -NPG 3112 - © National Portrait Gallery, London

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Mid-Georgian Portraits Catalogue

Edward Oram

by John Flaxman
circa 1780
6 1/2 in. x 5 3/8 in. (165 mm x 137 mm)
NPG 3112

Inscriptionback to top

Inscribed bottom right: J. Flaxman and below, centre: Edward Oram/painter.

This portraitback to top

No other portrait of Oram is known and the identification is based on the contemporary inscription. It was presumably drawn at the time when both Flaxman and Oram were being patronised by the Rev Anthony Stephen Mathew (1733-1824) and his blue-stocking wife, an episode described by J. T. Smith and Gilchrist with ‘infuriating vagueness’. [1] For their house at 27 Rathbone Place ‘Loutherbourg’s assistant, young Oram’ painted a window ‘in imitation of stained glass’ and Flaxman furnished ‘models in putty and sand, of figures in niches in the Gothic manner’. [2] NPG 3112 may be compared with Flaxman’s drawings of Mathew and his daughter Harriet, [3] which have been dated c.1780, the former bearing an identical ‘signature’ to NPG 3112. [4]

Footnotesback to top

1) Iolo A. Williams, Burl. Mag., CII, 1960, p 246.
2) J. T. Smith, Book for a Rainy Day, 1845, p 83; A. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 1863, I, pp 44-45; Notes and Queries, CXCVI, 1951, pp 162-63. Oram’s last recorded address, in 1799, was 5 Gresse Street, Rathbone Place.
3) In 1960 these drawings were, respectively, in the collections of Iolo A. Williams and E. Croft Murray; illus. Burl. Mag., CII, 1960, p 251.
4) Williams, loc. cit., pp 246, 249; it is possible that these ‘signatures’ may have been added by Flaxman’s adopted daughter, Maria Denman. A drawing of Mathew’s son, Henry William Mathew, also dateable c.1780, belonged to Iolo Williams in 1960.

Provenanceback to top

Purchased from Appleby 1941.1

1 Unnamed among 'a miscellaneous lot of portrait drawings' (Trustees Minutes, 6 February 1941, and Statement of Expenditure, 3 April 1941 (NPG archive)).

Exhibitionsback to top

Angelika Kauffmann und ihr Zeitgenossen, Bregenz, Vienna, 1968 (hors catalogue).


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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