Enfilade

Press release from the Dorset County Museum:

Georgian Faces: Portrait of a County
Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, 15 January — 30 April 2011

Curated by Gwen Yarker

William Hogarth, "Portrait of Thomas Coombes, a Dorset Boatman Aged 108," 1742

Georgian Faces: Portrait of a County includes over sixty, mostly previously unseen, portraits of the people who shaped Dorset during the eighteenth century. The catalyst for the exhibition was provided by the Museum’s recent acquisition of George Romney’s Portrait of the Reverend Thomas Rackett as a Young Boy, a purchase made possible by the generosity of the Art Fund, HLF South West and local support. For the past year, curator Gwen Yarker (formerly of the National Maritime Museum) has been selecting portraits for the exhibition from all over Dorset and further afield. Some paintings are on loan from national institutions, but the majority have come from private collections. The exhibition shows portraits by many of the important portrait artists of the eighteenth century, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Gainsborough and Allan Ramsay. The exhibition also throws a spotlight on Thomas Beach, who was born at Milton Abbas, Dorset, trained with Reynolds and worked as a portrait painter in London, Bath and the West Country. The exhibition will provide the first opportunity for William Hogarth’s Portrait of Thomas Coombes, a Dorset Boatman Aged 108 to be exhibited for over 100 years. Hogarth’s father-in-law, the famous decorative painter Sir James Thornhill, was a native of the county who retired to Dorset in the 1720s.

George III visited Weymouth for his health following his first attack of porphyria. From 1789 to 1805 he regularly stayed in the town essentially requiring the court to relocate to the Dorset coast every year. From the 1790s the threat of invasion meant a local volunteer force was created. Portraits of several of its officers painted by Dorset-born Thomas Beach, feature in the exhibition. Georgian Faces also includes a series of cut-out silhouettes produced by George III’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, during her friendship with local diarist and botanist Mary Frampton.

Portraits of Poole’s merchant princes reveal the riches gained from cod fishing and fur trading with Newfoundland. A highlight is Thomas Frye’s unpublished Portrait of Sir Peter Thompson, now in Poole Museum. The portrait of this rich merchant came to light when Gwen Yarker was cataloguing in Dorset for the Public Catalogue Foundation.

The exhibition shows that Dorset was not an isolated rural county, but that many of its residents, especially the Reverend Thomas Rackett and his circle, brought the latest thinking, ideas and intellectual developments in London to rural centres such as Blandford. They in turn returned to the capital with their local discourses in natural philosophy, antiquarianism and archaeology.