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Lot Essay
The sitter was the first wife of Charles Hawkins, son of Sir Caesar Hawkins, 1st Bt., of Kelston, who, like his father, was Serjeant Surgeon to King George III. Her eldest son Caesar (c.1774-1806), was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and was a Captain in the 8th Light Dragoons. Her daughter Louisa Anne (d.1840) married, in 1801, Thomas Truesdale Clarke of Swakeley's, Middlesex, and Binham Abbey, Norfolk, in whose family this picture initially descended. Ward and Roberts (op.cit) record that Mrs Hawkins sat for this portrait in 1776 and 1777, her daughter in 1778 and 1782, and her son in 1776. Swakeleys, originally built by Sir Edmund Wright between 1629 and 1638, had belonged in the late seventeenth century to the financier Sir Robert Vyner. In 1751 it was sold by Benjamin Lethieullier to the Rev'd Thomas Clarke, Rector of Ickenham, who was succeeded there by his son Thomas Truesdale Clarke. The Clarke family later added the additional name of Thornhill to their own on the marriage of William Capel Clarke (d.1898) to Clara Thornhill, co-heir of Thomas Thornhill of Fixby hall, Yorkshire, and Riddlesworth Hall, Norfolk. In 1927 Thomas Bryan Clarke-Thornhill sold most of the Swakeleys estate for development as a residential suburb, although the house, which was acquired by the London Postal region Sports club in 1955, still stands. The portrait, which was presumably sold by the Clarke family at some point in the early part of the twentieth century, was later in the collection of the American newspaper and magazine tycoon and philanthropist Cyrus Curtis (1850-1933).