Portrait of the Honourable Henry Hastings (1550-1650), full-length, in a brown coat and hat, holding a tipstaff and glove, in an interior

The sitter was the second son of George IV, Earl of Huntingdon. He married Dorothy (d. 1638), second daughter of Sir Francis Willoughby, the builder of Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, and through her acquired Woodlands Park, near Horton, Dorsetshire, together with other remains of the old estate of Filiols. An eccentric sportsman, he always dressed in green and kept all manner of hounds and hawks, devoting much of his time to hunting. This portrait is a version of the type of which the original was recorded in the collection of the Earl of Shaftesbury. The Shaftesbury portrait is inscribed with an account of Hastings' life written by Anthony Ashley Cooper.

Hastings was the great grandson of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (see lot 14) and last of the Plantagenets, being the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence. The Gibbs's and tens of thousands of others descend from the Hastings' (see The Plantagenent Roll of the Blood Royal, by the Marquess of Ruvigny and Raineval. Clarence Volume) a work of remarkable ingenuity nourishing the vanity of Edwardian society.