Portrait of Joshua McGeough of Drumsill (1747-1817)
Samuel Percy (Dublin 1750 - London 1820)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1811
Materials
Polychrome wax on wood
Measurements
273 x 241 mm
Place of origin
Great Britain
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 564569
Summary
Sculpture, polychrome wax on wood; portrait of Joshua McGeough of Drumsill (1747-1817); Samuel Percy (Dublin c. 1753 – London 1819); 1811. A portrait of Joshua McGeough of Drumsill House, by the Irish wax sculptor Samuel Percy, signed and dated 1811. Joshua McGeough’s will , in which he left Drumsill House to his second son Walter, but stipulated that he could not live there until at least two of his three sisters had either married or died, was the catalyst for Walter McGeough's decision to build the Argory.
Full description
A polychromed wax portrait of Joshua McGeough of Drumsill (1747-1817), by Samuel Percy (Dublin c. 1753 – London 1819). The sitter is depicted frontally, his head turned slightly to his left; he wears a coat, buttoned up; the lower section concealed by a swathe of wax drapery, more drapery behind. The portrait is in its original gilded moulded frame. On the backboard is an inscription in the sculptor's hand, with his signature and the date 1811, as well as instructions as to how to view a portrait such as this to best advantage, Percy advising that the top of the frame should be help parallel to the window, ‘that all the features may / catch equal Light and Shadow’. The portrait depicts Joshua McGeough of Drumsill (1747-1817), whose will was the principal cause of the building of the Argory. Having all but left his first son out of his will, Joshua bequeathed Drumsill House to his second son Walter, but forbade him from living there until at least two of Walter’s three sisters had married or died. At that point, Walter McGeough decided to build himself a new house. The portrait was formerly at Drumsill House, listed in an inventory taken on 23-24 February 1894, as in the Library: ‘Wax Picture in Gilt Frame (Joshua McGeough) £20.0.0’. .). It came to the Argory with other contents in 1916, when the family decided to sell Drumsill House. It seems likely that the portrait once had a pair, since the instructions in Samuel Percy’s hand on the back of the picture refers to ‘these Portraits’. Samuel Percy was probably born in Dublin, the son of a a sculptor who had came from England to work as an assistant to John van Nost. The young Percy studied in the Dublin Society drawing schools and by 1772 was exhibiting wax sculptures at the exhibitions of the Dublin Society of Artists. Percy’s career throughout his life can mainly be tracked through the hundreds of advertisements for his services that he regularly placed in newspapers, in the towns and cities where he was living. These show that, although he seems to have begun his career working as a sculptor in a range of materials and techniques, from an early date he had opted to specialise in wax portraiture, a valuable means in an era before photography to create naturalisatically coloured three-dimensional portraits. From the mid-1770s until he moved to London in November 1784, Samuel Percy spent significant periods of time in Armagh, where he worked as Drawing Master at the Royal School. In 1782 he was in Dublin, but then he moved to Liverpool and, from there, eventually to London, where he lived for much of the remainder of his life, although he would undertake working tours to many parts of England and Scotland. Indeed, Percy's propfessional practice saw him moving from town to town, advertising his arrival before then modelling portraits accordimg to the response to his adverts. His method must have been relatively successful, since Percy was an enormously productive sculptor, who claimed in 1809 to have produced more than 3,000 portraits alone (Ord-Hume 2020, p. 26), although he never became wealthy from his profession. Until 1790 Percy mainly modelled his portraits in profile, but from that date also began to offer full-face portraits in high relief. He also made more elaborate multi-figure ‘tableaux’, such as the 'Three Musicians' or the 'Death of Volatire', both in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the sort of works for which he is perhaps best known today. The portrait of Joshua McGeough is a characteristic example of Samuel Percy’s full-face portraits, which usually include a sweep of drapery below the bust section. Although the identification of the portrait as Joshua McGeough is no doubt correct, it is not entirely clear how the portrait could have been made in 1811, since the sitter is not known to have left Co. Armagh that year, but nor is Percy known to have visited Ireland. He is however known sometimes to have made portraits from descriptions, obviating the need for a sitting. Jeremy Warren September 2022
Provenance
Drumsill House, the Library, in 1894; transferred with the contents of Drumsill to The Argory in 1916; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Credit line
National Trust Collections (The Argory, The MacGeough Bond Collection)
Marks and inscriptions
Back, inscription in Samuel Percy’s hand:: To see these Portraits to advantage, / Hold the top of the frame paralel to / the window, that all the features may / catch equal Light and Shadow / S. Percy 1811 Back of frame, lower left, handwritten label:: Drumsill
Makers and roles
Samuel Percy (Dublin 1750 - London 1820), artist
References
Moore 2015 Anna Moore, 'Discovering a Samuel Percy wax portrait in Northern Ireland' in Understanding British Portraits, 3 March 2015 Ord-Hume 2012: Ruth Ord-Hume, ‘”That Ingenious Artist, Mr Percy”: the wax tableaux of Samuel Percy’, The Sculpture Journal, 21.2 (2012), pp. 103-117. Ord-Hume 2020: Ruth Ord-Hume, Mr. Percy. Portrait Modeller in coloured wax. The Miniatures and Tableaux of Samuel Percy, London 2020, pp. 82, 244-46, fig. 119.