THOMAS FRYE (c.1710-1762)
Portrait of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, of Brympton D’Evercy in Somerset (1701-1771), three-quarter length
Oil on unlined canvas, and contained in its fine...

THOMAS FRYE (c.1710-1762)
Portrait of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, of Brympton D’Evercy in Somerset (1701-1771), three-quarter length
Oil on unlined canvas, and contained in its fine original carved and gilded frame, 127 x 102cm (50 x 40¼”)

 

Provenance: By descent at Brympton D’Evercy, Somerset, to Lady Georgiana Fane (1801-1874); her nephew the Hon. Spencer Ponsonby-Fane (d. 1915), younger son of the 4th Earl of Bessborough, and thence in the Clive-Ponsonby-Fane collection until the contents were largely dispersed in 1956; Private Collection

 

Thomas Frye, from Edenderry, County Offaly, was the most extraordinarily inventive of Irish Georgian artists, and arguably the most underappreciated – at home at least. His achievements are better appreciated internationally, indeed Martin Postle argues that he is one of the ‘most intriguing and original artists to have emerged in Britain during the eighteenth century’. His activities straddled the dividing lines between the fine, graphic and applied arts – just at the moment when specialisation was becoming the norm. As his epitaph noted he was the ‘inventor and first manufacturer of porcelain in England’ at his factory in Bow, east of London, while, as Josiah Wedgwood put it, in 1769 he was ‘famous for doing heads in mezzotinto’, and his prints (‘dazzlingly innovative’, in Toby Barnard’s phrase) are among the most sought-after of all mezzotints. However, he was first and foremost a portrait painter, and he had enjoyed great success in the profession since winning a commission to paint a full-length state portrait of Fredrick, Prince of Wales for the Saddlers’s Company in the City of London in November 1736. As his epitaph noted: ‘No one was more happy in delineating the human countenance, He had the correctness of Van Dyke, & the colouring of Rubens’. Even Ellis Waterhouse who is generally grudging in his praise of Irish artists noted that Frye was ‘one of the most original and least standardised portrait painters of his generation’.

Frye’s career in London exemplifies the period’s incipient globalization – of materials and motifs. He attempted to emulate Chinese porcelain technology with, it seems, clay imported from North America, while his pioneering production of mezzotint scraping imitated, quite openly, the work of the Venetian painter and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. Reciprocally, Frye was directly influential on artists of rather greater reputation than his own. John Singleton Copley, as a young man in Boston (where Bow porcelain was advertised as being for sale), copied Frye’s mezzotint heads, while some of Wright of Derby’s most famous – and paradoxically innovative – works have been shown to quote almost verbatim from the same series.

The portrait depicts Thomas Fane (1701-1771), the second son of Henry Fane of Brympton d'Evercy in Somerset (fig. 1), a manor house often described as the prettiest in England. In 1757 Fane succeeded his unmarried elder brother Francis to their father's Brympton estate and in 1762 inherited the title of Earl of Westmoreland, and the seat at Apethorpe Hall, in Northamptonshire from John Fane, 7th Earl of Westmorland, his father's childless second-cousin – and one of Marlborough’s most distinguished officers.

It was for the sitter’s grandson, John, the 10th Earl, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1789 and 1794, that Westmorland Street in Dublin was named. In another historical twist, in 1762 Thomas’s daughter Mary, married Charles Blair, a wealthy owner of plantations in Jamaica, who was the great-great grandfather of Eric Arthur Blair, better known to history as George Orwell, making Frye’s sitter here Orwell’s great-great-great grandfather.

An instructive comparison can be made between the present portrait, which dates from about 1740 and a later portrait of the same sitter by Sir Joshua Reynolds (fig. 2), especially interesting as we know that Frye was on very cordial terms with the younger artist. Reynolds’s full length dates from 1761 and hence shows the sitter as noticeably older but recognisably the same, genial and rather bluff individual. Perhaps helping to date the work, and certainly indicative of Frye’s studio practice, the hands, particularly that resting on his hip, are almost identically positioned in his 1739 portrait of Sir Charles Kemeys-Tynte (fig. 3) (National Gallery of Ireland). No doubt a shared preparatory drawing was reused, rather than the artist trying his sitters’ patience by depicting their hands individually.

 

 

 

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