William Gifford Palgrave

1 portrait

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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William Gifford Palgrave

by Thomas Woolner
plaster cast of medallion, 1864
9 3/4 in. (248 mm) diameter
Given by the sitter's nieces, the Misses Palgrave, 1924
Primary Collection
NPG 2071

Sitterback to top

  • William Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888), Jesuit, traveller and diplomat; son of Sir Francis Palgrave. Sitter in 10 portraits.

Artistback to top

  • Thomas Woolner (1825-1892), Sculptor and poet. Artist or producer associated with 24 portraits, Sitter in 28 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Smartify image discovery app
  • Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 476
  • Various contributors, National Portrait Gallery: A Portrait of Britain, 2014, p. 153 Read entry

    William Palgrave was an explorer and scholar of the Middle East. After serving in the Indian army he converted to Roman Catholicism and worked as a missionary in southern India until 1853. He began his long engagement with the Arab world in 1855 as a missionary in Syria, where he witnessed the persecution of Syrian Christians. Palgrave’s most notable achievement lay in exploring Arabia, which had for years been closed to Europeans. In 1862 and 1863 he became the first Westerner to cross Arabia by a diagonal route, from north-west to south-east, travelling in disguise and at great risk as a European. He recorded his adventures and observations in his Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1865). A series of consulates, as far afield as Bangkok and Uruguay, followed.

    Thomas Woolner (1825–92) was the only sculptor of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and knew the Palgrave family through his intimate friendship with William’s older brother, Francis Turner Palgrave, the compiler of the famous poetry anthology, The Golden Treasury. Woolner wrote to Francis in September 1865 that he had read William’s Personal Narrative and had ‘for the last fortnight scarcely thought of anything else, I found it so absorbing’.

Events of 1864back to top

Current affairs

First of the Contagious Diseases Act. These acts allowed for the arrest, medical inspection and confinement of any woman suspected of being a prostitute in the port towns. Following huge public outcry over their discrimination against women, notably led by Josephine Butler, leader of the Ladies' National Association, the acts were eventually repealed.
Octavia Hill starts work on slums, and the International Working Men's Association is founded in London.

Art and science

The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics to the Royal Society. His paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field expresses the basic laws of electricity and magnetism in unified fashion. Maxwell's equations, as his rules came to be known, helped create modern physics, laying the foundation for future work in special relativity and quantum mechanics.

International

Austria and Prussia combine forces to seize Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark.
Britain cedes Corfu, acquired from France in the Second Treaty of Paris (1815) to Greece. Although Britain had vigorously suppressed an uprising in 1849 in Cephalonia aiming to restore Iolian islands, the government changed policy throughout the 1850s and 60s.

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