Daniel Gardner

Possibly presented to George, 2^nd Earl of Tyrone (1735-1800) in 1789, on the occasion of his elevation to the title of Marquess of Waterford;

thence by family descent

J. Ingamells, Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790, London 2004, p. 365;

C.S. Sykes, Private Palaces, London 1985, p. 151, illustr.;

N. Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online edition, J.338.1526

This portrait appears to represent an important commission for Gardner, for his subject was one of the leading aristocratic figures of the day. Born in Yorkshire in 1712, Hugh Smithson inherited his family’s baronetcy in 1729, aged only seventeen, upon the death of his grandfather, Sir Hugh Smithson, 3^rd Bt. In 1740 he married Lady Elizabeth Seymour (1716-1776), the daughter of Algernon, 7^th Duke of Somerset and, after the death of her brother, George, in 1744, she became sole heiress to the estates of the Percy family, for centuries Earls of Northumberland. In 1749, Smithson took on the surname Percy, and the following year George II granted him the earldom of Northumberland. This honour was raised to a dukedom in 1766.

In the present work, the Duke is seen full-length, wearing the robes of the Knights of the Garter, England’s oldest and most revered chivalric order, to which he had been admitted in 1756. Gardner’s composition is modelled on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s full length portrait of Charles, 2^nd Marquess of Rockingham, which the young Gardner may have seen while working as an assistant in Reynolds’s studio or knew from Edward Fisher’s print of 1774.¹

The pastel sees Gardner working with his trademark, and unique, technique where he uses finely ground pastel pigments to describe his sitter’s flesh tones and then both watercolour and gouache for the rest of the composition. The finely carved gilt-wood frame was almost certainly made to his design.

We are very grateful to Neil Jeffares for his help when cataloguing this lot.

^1.D. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds, New Haven 2000, p. 467, no. 1858