The Hon. Peniston Lamb (1770-1805), with his horse Assassin and his dog Tanner

This handsome portrait is a fine work dating from the 1790s, when Benjamin Marshall painted some of his most graceful and refined early pictures. The sitter, the Hon. Peniston Lamb, was the eldest son of Sir Peniston Lamb, 1st Viscount Melbourne (1748-1828), and Elizabeth Milbanke, Viscountess Melbourne (1749-1818). Described as 'gentle-hearted and engaging…every dog and horse in the stable, loved him’, Peniston was also known to have enjoyed sporting pursuits: ‘a capital shot, and rode well to hounds…Lord Melbourne was never tired of telling how 'Pen' had led the field' (Boyle, op. cit., p. 320). Marshall shows his subject here in a self-assured pose, alongside dog Tanner and horse Assassin, the latter bred by George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, the long-time lover and advisor of Peniston’s mother. Marshall demonstrates his expertise in depicting animals in motion, here drawing on the playful relationship between horse and dog.

In Boyle’s 1885 Panshanger catalogue (op. cit., p. 324), and in subsequent literature, this painting was given to George Stubbs. Although the two artists never met, Marshall’s early works show the influence of the great equestrian painter, evidently absorbing the majesty and elegance of his pictures. The same effect is visible in Marshall’s other paintings from 1799, including Diamond with Dennis Fitzpatrick Up (New Haven, Yale Center for British Art), which Judy Egerton called ‘one of the few racehorse and jockey pictures which comes close to rivalling Stubbs’ (George Stubbs, Painter. Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 625). The present work probably dates from around 1799, when Marshall was leasing a studio in Marylebone following an apprenticeship with Lemuel Francis Abbott. After quickly establishing a reputation for his mastery of racing and hunting pictures amongst English royalty and aristocracy, Marshall developed a unique position in the sporting world, writing frequently for The Sporting Magazine and embedding himself in the Newmarket culture after his move to Norfolk in 1812.

Peniston was immortalised in several portraits by other major eighteenth-century painters. In a conversation piece by Stubbs painted circa 1770 commemorating the marriage of his parents (London, National Gallery; visible in fig. 2), his mother, Elizabeth Milbanke, is shown seated in a ’Phaeton’ carriage, when probably pregnant with Peniston. Shortly afterwards, Sir Joshua Reynolds captured the sitter as a baby being removed from a cradle by his mother, and around twelve years later, as a student at Eton College with his two younger brothers, William and Frederick (both East Sussex, Firle Place). Later arresting portraits by artists including Sir Thomas Lawrence (fig. 1), show him as a young man, with the same confidence and poise evident in the present work.

A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
On Peniston's death in 1805, his brother William, later 2^nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848) and Prime Minister under Queen Victoria, became the heir to the family estates, which subsequently passed to their sister, Emily Anne Lamb, later Viscountess Palmerston (1787-1869). On Emily’s death, the picture passed to her grandson, Francis Cowper, 7^th Earl Cowper and it hung at Panshanger House until the death of Ethel, Baroness Desborough in 1952.

The paintings collection at Panshanger was considered one of the best in Britain; with a nucleus formed by the 3^rd Earl Cowper, it included such works as the eponymous Small Cowper Madonna and the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, both by Raphael and both today at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Fra Bartolomeo’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum). A photograph of carefully arranged family portraits in the late Earl Cowper’s Sitting Room at Panshanger (fig. 2) shows the present painting by Marshall hanging alongside family portraits by George Stubbs, Thomas Lawrence and George Romney.