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Lot Essay
This picture is one of the most heroic portraits by an Irish artist in th 18th Century.
Captain the Hon. Robert Boyle Walsingham (1736-1780) was the fifth son of Henry Boyle, 1st Earl of Shannon (1684-1764), of Castle Martyr, Co. Cork, and his second wife Harriet, youngest daughter of Charles Boyle, 3rd Earl of Cork and 2nd Earl of Burlington.
The sitter's father, who was created Earl of Shannon in 1756, was one of the most important and dominant figures in Irish political life in the 18th Century; he was Speaker of the Irish House of Commons between 1733 and 1756, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, 1733-5, 1739-54 and 1755-7, a Commissioner of the Revenue, 1735-9, and one of the Irish Lord Justices no fewer than nineteen times between 1734 and 1764. Some of the ambition, courage and skill which had led to his success was inherited by his fifth son.
As a younger son Boyle was obliged to pursue a career and he opted for the Navy. By the age of twenty he had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and given command of the supply ship HMS Crown, an unglamorous but necessary apprenticeship as a ship's commander, after which he was posted to the sloop of war HMS Badger. His subsequent promotion was swift: on 16 February 1757 he was gazetted as a commander, and on 15 June of the same year he was raised to the rank of Captain and assigned to the frigate HMS Jason. A little later in the same year he was given the command of the Coventry class frigate HMS Boreas, which had been launched that July, which he commanded until the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, participating in a number of important naval actions including the capture of Louisbourg which this portrait celebrates.
The capture of the harbour and fortress of Louisbourg, on the eastern side of Isle Royale (later Cape Breton Island), was of great importance in the race between Great Britain and France to dominate the trade and colonial development of Northern America. The first French settlement had been established there in 1713 and the French government oversaw its development into a large garrison town, of some four or five thousand inhabitants, dominated by a great fortress into which the French treasury poured vast sums of money. Their aim was to control the fisheries and the trade of the east coast of Northern America as well as to protect the maritime approaches to continental New France, centred around the St.Lawrence River, which by the 1750s consisted of some fifty thousand French settlers. Louisbourg became the headquarters of the French effort in the ceaseless war with Great Britain for control of eastern North America and its capture by the British in 1758, three years after the outbreak of the Seven Years War, was to herald the beginning of the end of independent 'New France' and the dominance of Great Britain in Canada.
The siege was a combined military and naval operation: the fleet, under Admiral Boscawen, consisted of twenty-three ships of fifty guns and over, supported by eighteen frigates, while the army, under the command of General Amherst, counted some twelve thousand men, among them the outstanding military leader Brigadier James Wolfe who led the principal attack and was in many ways the hero of the moment. The fleet and army sailed from Halifax on 28 May 1758 and arrived before Louisbourg on 6 June; with superiority in numbers it was only a question of time after the success of the initial landings that the fortress fell, which it did on 28 July 1758. Combined with the surrender of Fort Frontenac to Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet, one thousand three hundred kilometres to the west, this crucial victory opened the way to the conquest of New France the following summer; Fort Niagara, the last French stronghold in French Ontario, fell on 25 July 1759, and Quebec, in the siege of which Wolfe was to lose his life, on 18 September. British Canada, created by war, was confirmed by peace treaty in 1763.
Captain Boyle was evidently proud of the role he had played in the siege of 1758 as his heroic pose in this full-length portrait - against the backdrop of the conquered fortress and harbour of Louisbourg, and the contemporary inscription, make clear. Nathaniel Hone did not visit Louisbourg and for the topography in the picture he must have relied upon a mixture of prints, maps and earlier paintings, as well as perhaps the sitter's own first hand experience. The depiction of Louisbourg is one of a small number of early records of the town in oil. Peter Monamy had painted an earlier view of the fortress and harbour, after the previous siege and capture of the town in 1745, which was based on a sketch by Captain Philip Durrell, of which versions are in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (no. BHC0363) and the Royal Ontario Museum (Sigmund Samuel collection, no. 955.220). A panorama of Louisbourg from the north-east by Richard Paton, which dates from circa 1759, is in the Royal Ontario Museum (Sigmund Samuel collection, no. 951.197; see Georgian Canada, Conflict and Culture 1745-1820, catalogue to the exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, 1984, no. 37, colour plate 26). In the background of this portrait are shown some of Louisbourg's distinctive fortifications: to the left are the walls of the fortified town centre and in the distance to the right can be seen the Queen's Battery.
After Louisbourg, Captain Boyle Walsingham, who had assumed the surname of Walsingham after the death of his elder brother Henry in 1756, also commanded HMS Boreas in the West Indies with great distinction. However, his ambitions were not solely military and alongside his career in the navy he entered politics. In this he was greatly helped by his connection to the powerful Cavendish family which had been established with the marriage of his kinswoman, Lady Charlotte Boyle, daughter of the Earl of Burlington, to the 4th Duke of Devonshire, who became his political sponsor. He represented Knaresborough, a pocket borough which Lady Charlotte had brought into the Devonshire family, between 1758 and 1761; Fowey between 1761 and 1768; and Knaresborough again between 1768 and his death in 1780. He also demonstrated particular political and military prudence and farsightedness in his continued opposition to war with the American colonies between 1775 and 1778. However, neither his political nor his naval ambitions were to be fulfilled, for with the resumption of war with France in 1778 he was appointed to command HMS Thunderer, which, having played a daring part in an action against the French off Ushant, was lost at sea in the following October, while making her way to Jamaica, without a survivor. Walsingham had married, in 1759, Charlotte (d. 1790), second daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Bt., and his wife Lady Frances Coningsby, second daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Earl of Coningsby, an accomplished artist and poet and a well-known hostess. Their son Richard (1762-88) joined the army, while their daughter Charlotte, who after the death of her brother was the sitter's sole heir, became Baroness de Ros in her own right and married Lord Henry FitzGerald, third son of the 1st Duke of Leinster.
This portrait is one of Nathaniel Hone's most dramatic and accomplished full-lengths. The heroic pose of the sitter and the way in which he is set against conquered Louisbourg echo the grandeur and drama of Reynolds' early full-lengths such as his celebrated portrait of Admiral Keppel (Greenwich, National Maritime Museum), reflecting the sense of competition between the two artists. Hone must have relished the commission, for the sitter and his family were already closely connected to Reynolds. An entry in Reynolds' ledger for June 1760 records payment for portraits of Captain and Mrs Walsingham which were later in the collection of Lord de Ros and then in the S.B. Joel sale at Christie's on 31 May 1935 (M. Cormack, 'The ledgers of Sir Joshua Reynolds', Walpole Society, XLII, 1970, p. 138). Reynolds was later to paint another portrait of the sitter's wife, which was sold at Christie's on 20 November 1987, lot 95. He had also painted a portrait of the sitter's father-in-law, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Bt., in 1756, and a full-length of the sitter's brother, Richard, 2nd Earl of Shannon, in 1759 (E.K. Waterhouse, Reynolds, London, 1941, pp. 41 and 46 respectively). The boldness of this portrait also seems in some ways to anticipate Gainsborough's full-length portraiture of the 1760s, for example his portrait of Augustus, 3rd Earl of Bristol (Ickworth, National Trust). Hone may also have been aware that at the time he was busy with this portrait Admiral Boscawen, the most senior naval officer involved in the siege of Louisbourg, was sitting to another rival, Allan Ramsay (private collection; A.Smart, Allan Ramsay, A Complete Catalogue of his paintings, ed. J. Ingamells, New Haven and London, 1999, no. 510).
Captain the Hon. Robert Boyle Walsingham (1736-1780) was the fifth son of Henry Boyle, 1st Earl of Shannon (1684-1764), of Castle Martyr, Co. Cork, and his second wife Harriet, youngest daughter of Charles Boyle, 3rd Earl of Cork and 2nd Earl of Burlington.
The sitter's father, who was created Earl of Shannon in 1756, was one of the most important and dominant figures in Irish political life in the 18th Century; he was Speaker of the Irish House of Commons between 1733 and 1756, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, 1733-5, 1739-54 and 1755-7, a Commissioner of the Revenue, 1735-9, and one of the Irish Lord Justices no fewer than nineteen times between 1734 and 1764. Some of the ambition, courage and skill which had led to his success was inherited by his fifth son.
As a younger son Boyle was obliged to pursue a career and he opted for the Navy. By the age of twenty he had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and given command of the supply ship HMS Crown, an unglamorous but necessary apprenticeship as a ship's commander, after which he was posted to the sloop of war HMS Badger. His subsequent promotion was swift: on 16 February 1757 he was gazetted as a commander, and on 15 June of the same year he was raised to the rank of Captain and assigned to the frigate HMS Jason. A little later in the same year he was given the command of the Coventry class frigate HMS Boreas, which had been launched that July, which he commanded until the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, participating in a number of important naval actions including the capture of Louisbourg which this portrait celebrates.
The capture of the harbour and fortress of Louisbourg, on the eastern side of Isle Royale (later Cape Breton Island), was of great importance in the race between Great Britain and France to dominate the trade and colonial development of Northern America. The first French settlement had been established there in 1713 and the French government oversaw its development into a large garrison town, of some four or five thousand inhabitants, dominated by a great fortress into which the French treasury poured vast sums of money. Their aim was to control the fisheries and the trade of the east coast of Northern America as well as to protect the maritime approaches to continental New France, centred around the St.Lawrence River, which by the 1750s consisted of some fifty thousand French settlers. Louisbourg became the headquarters of the French effort in the ceaseless war with Great Britain for control of eastern North America and its capture by the British in 1758, three years after the outbreak of the Seven Years War, was to herald the beginning of the end of independent 'New France' and the dominance of Great Britain in Canada.
The siege was a combined military and naval operation: the fleet, under Admiral Boscawen, consisted of twenty-three ships of fifty guns and over, supported by eighteen frigates, while the army, under the command of General Amherst, counted some twelve thousand men, among them the outstanding military leader Brigadier James Wolfe who led the principal attack and was in many ways the hero of the moment. The fleet and army sailed from Halifax on 28 May 1758 and arrived before Louisbourg on 6 June; with superiority in numbers it was only a question of time after the success of the initial landings that the fortress fell, which it did on 28 July 1758. Combined with the surrender of Fort Frontenac to Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet, one thousand three hundred kilometres to the west, this crucial victory opened the way to the conquest of New France the following summer; Fort Niagara, the last French stronghold in French Ontario, fell on 25 July 1759, and Quebec, in the siege of which Wolfe was to lose his life, on 18 September. British Canada, created by war, was confirmed by peace treaty in 1763.
Captain Boyle was evidently proud of the role he had played in the siege of 1758 as his heroic pose in this full-length portrait - against the backdrop of the conquered fortress and harbour of Louisbourg, and the contemporary inscription, make clear. Nathaniel Hone did not visit Louisbourg and for the topography in the picture he must have relied upon a mixture of prints, maps and earlier paintings, as well as perhaps the sitter's own first hand experience. The depiction of Louisbourg is one of a small number of early records of the town in oil. Peter Monamy had painted an earlier view of the fortress and harbour, after the previous siege and capture of the town in 1745, which was based on a sketch by Captain Philip Durrell, of which versions are in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (no. BHC0363) and the Royal Ontario Museum (Sigmund Samuel collection, no. 955.220). A panorama of Louisbourg from the north-east by Richard Paton, which dates from circa 1759, is in the Royal Ontario Museum (Sigmund Samuel collection, no. 951.197; see Georgian Canada, Conflict and Culture 1745-1820, catalogue to the exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, 1984, no. 37, colour plate 26). In the background of this portrait are shown some of Louisbourg's distinctive fortifications: to the left are the walls of the fortified town centre and in the distance to the right can be seen the Queen's Battery.
After Louisbourg, Captain Boyle Walsingham, who had assumed the surname of Walsingham after the death of his elder brother Henry in 1756, also commanded HMS Boreas in the West Indies with great distinction. However, his ambitions were not solely military and alongside his career in the navy he entered politics. In this he was greatly helped by his connection to the powerful Cavendish family which had been established with the marriage of his kinswoman, Lady Charlotte Boyle, daughter of the Earl of Burlington, to the 4th Duke of Devonshire, who became his political sponsor. He represented Knaresborough, a pocket borough which Lady Charlotte had brought into the Devonshire family, between 1758 and 1761; Fowey between 1761 and 1768; and Knaresborough again between 1768 and his death in 1780. He also demonstrated particular political and military prudence and farsightedness in his continued opposition to war with the American colonies between 1775 and 1778. However, neither his political nor his naval ambitions were to be fulfilled, for with the resumption of war with France in 1778 he was appointed to command HMS Thunderer, which, having played a daring part in an action against the French off Ushant, was lost at sea in the following October, while making her way to Jamaica, without a survivor. Walsingham had married, in 1759, Charlotte (d. 1790), second daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Bt., and his wife Lady Frances Coningsby, second daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Earl of Coningsby, an accomplished artist and poet and a well-known hostess. Their son Richard (1762-88) joined the army, while their daughter Charlotte, who after the death of her brother was the sitter's sole heir, became Baroness de Ros in her own right and married Lord Henry FitzGerald, third son of the 1st Duke of Leinster.
This portrait is one of Nathaniel Hone's most dramatic and accomplished full-lengths. The heroic pose of the sitter and the way in which he is set against conquered Louisbourg echo the grandeur and drama of Reynolds' early full-lengths such as his celebrated portrait of Admiral Keppel (Greenwich, National Maritime Museum), reflecting the sense of competition between the two artists. Hone must have relished the commission, for the sitter and his family were already closely connected to Reynolds. An entry in Reynolds' ledger for June 1760 records payment for portraits of Captain and Mrs Walsingham which were later in the collection of Lord de Ros and then in the S.B. Joel sale at Christie's on 31 May 1935 (M. Cormack, 'The ledgers of Sir Joshua Reynolds', Walpole Society, XLII, 1970, p. 138). Reynolds was later to paint another portrait of the sitter's wife, which was sold at Christie's on 20 November 1987, lot 95. He had also painted a portrait of the sitter's father-in-law, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Bt., in 1756, and a full-length of the sitter's brother, Richard, 2nd Earl of Shannon, in 1759 (E.K. Waterhouse, Reynolds, London, 1941, pp. 41 and 46 respectively). The boldness of this portrait also seems in some ways to anticipate Gainsborough's full-length portraiture of the 1760s, for example his portrait of Augustus, 3rd Earl of Bristol (Ickworth, National Trust). Hone may also have been aware that at the time he was busy with this portrait Admiral Boscawen, the most senior naval officer involved in the siege of Louisbourg, was sitting to another rival, Allan Ramsay (private collection; A.Smart, Allan Ramsay, A Complete Catalogue of his paintings, ed. J. Ingamells, New Haven and London, 1999, no. 510).