Thomas Gainsborough, R.A.

(Sudbury 1727-1788 London)

Portrait of an officer, traditionally identified as the future General James Wolfe (1727-1759), half-length, in military uniform with a scarlet coat with green facings and a yellow waistcoat with loops of lace,

Footnotes

Provenance
Said to have been painted for Wolfe's fiancé, Miss Katherine Lowther, daughter of Sir William Lowther, 1st Bt., and sister of William, 1st Earl of Lonsdale
Mr. Stultered, 1839
Mrs. Gibbons
Her sale, Christie's, London, 5 May 1883, lot 23 (215 gns. to the following)
Thomas Woolner, R.A.
Sale, Christie's, London, 18 May 1895, lot 113 (520 gns. to the following)
H. Noble Pym, Foxwold Chase, Brasted, Kent, and by inheritance to
John Pym
Sale, Christie's, London, 14 June 1977, lot 107, as 'Portrait of a gentleman, apparently General Wolfe' (3,750 gns. to the following)
With Spink, London, 1978
The Collection of the late Caesar and Ruth Pinnau

Exhibited
London, Grosvenor Gallery, 1888, no. 97.

Literature
G.W. Fulcher, Thomas Gainsborough, Sudbury, 1856, vol. I, p. 224; vol. II, p. 224
Sir W. Armstrong, Gainsborough and his Place in English Art, London, 1898, p. 204
B. Wilson, The Life and Letters of James Wolfe, London, 1909, p. 352, ill.
B. Wilson, 'Portraits and Relics of General Wolfe', in Connoiseur, 1909, p. 7, ill.
A.E. Wolfe-Aylward, The Pictorial Life of Wolfe, Plymouth, 1924, p. 85, ill.
E.K. Waterhouse, 'Preliminary Checklist of Portraits by Thomas Gainsborough', in Walpole Society, XXXIII, Oxford, 1953, p. 115
E.K. Waterhouse, Gainsborough, London, 1958, p. 96, no. 732 (as 'Bath Period: quite unlike the admitted portraits of Wolfe')
J. Kerslake, National Portrait Gallery: Early Georgian Portraits, London, 1977, p. 317, note 1

Born at Westerham Vicarage in Kent, James Wolfe was the eldest son of General Edward Wolfe. He entered the army in 1742, his first experience of battle being at Dettingen in 1744. As a major-general in 1759 he sailed with 9,000 men to Canada and was put in command of the expedition to capture Quebec. His death in the hour of victory on 13 September is commemorated in the famous painting by Benjamin West.

The tradition that the present portrait was commissioned by Wolfe's fiancé, Katherine Lowther is interesting since his love-life has been the subject of some attention. His first recorded romantic attachment was late in 1747 while recovering from a wound in Flanders. There he met Elizabeth Lawson, a niece of his brigade commander, Sir John Mordaunt, but his parents disapproved of the match and during his enforced absence in Scotland she lost interest in him. Wolfe evidently had some difficulty in accepting this fact which resulted in a serious falling out with his parents after which he proceeded to drown his sorrows in a prolonged bout of dissipation. Later, while visiting his uncle, Major Walter Wolfe in Dublin, James met an unnamed widow of an officer who had been killed at Fontenoy, and the close nature of their relationship is evident from the fact that she would later be lampooned by George (the future 1st Marquess) Townshend as Wolfe's 'Irish Venus'. Then in 1758, somehow, in the midst of the preparations for the Quebec expedition, Wolfe, during a brief period of leave at Bath, renewed his casual acquaintance with Katherine Lowther, sister of the Cumberland landowner, James Lowther, later Earl of Lonsdale. By the time he sailed for Canada he had proposed and been accepted by her. Unfortunately none of their presumed correspondence survives and it is therefore difficult to reconstruct the nature of their relationship. It may simply have been a typically hurried pre-embarkation affair but there are odd hints that Wolfe may have been under some pressure from his ailing parents to settle down and marry advantageously — particularly since the mysterious 'Irish Venus' was evidently still very much in the background. Katherine Lowther eventually married Harry Powlett, sixth Duke of Bolton.