Portrait bust of the Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone
Frank Theed (1850 - after 1906)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1890
Materials
Marble
Measurements
762 mm (H); 530 mm (W); 300 mm (D)
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
Hatchlands Park, Surrey
NT 1166744
Summary
Sculpture, marble; The Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898); Frank Theed (Edward Francis Toone Theed, 1850- after 1906); 1890. A marble portrait bust of the British politician and four times Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone. The portrait is dated 1890, so was made during a period when Gladstone was in opposition. Lord Rendel was a friend and political ally of Gladstone, who was often entertained at Hatchlands. Rendel's daughter Maud married Gladstone's son.
Full description
A marble portrait bust of the Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), depicting the politician in his habitual public dress of a wing-collared shirt and bow-tie, a waistcoat, here undone at the top button, and a frock coat. Gladstone is shown, bewhiskered, looking slightly to his left. Mounted on a turned polished marble socle, signed and dated at the back. The sculpture is one of innumerable portraits of William Gladstone, one of the towering figures in British politics in the nineteenth century, Liberal statesman and four-times Prime Minister. When this bust was made, in 1890, Gladstone was in the middle of a spell in opposition (1886-1892). It was formerly attributed, through a misreading of the signature, to an otherwise unknown sculptor J.P. Head, but is in fact signed by Frank Theed, a member of the Theed dynasty of sculptors. His grandfather was William Theed I (1764-1817) and his father William Theed the Younger (1804-1891), one of the most successful sculptors working in nineteenth-century Britain. His son Frank (Edward Francis Toone) Theed, far less successful than his father and grandfather, seems to have specialised in portrait sculpture. He exhibited at the Royal Academy sporadically between 1873 and 1888, his exhibited works invariably portrait busts or medallions. In 1898, Theed exhibited in the ‘Autumn exhibition of modern pictures in oil and water-colours’, held at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool a marble bust of Gladstone (no. 1401), quite probably the present bust or else another version of it, priced at £157 10s. Theed appears in the 1901 census in which he describes his profession as sculptor, whilst there is a bust of the physician Sir John Simon by him, dated 1906, in St Thomas’s Hospital. Otherwise nothing is known of Theed’s later life, or when he died. Frank Theed must have begun working on this bust in 1889, as William Gladstone noted in his diary for 6 April 1889 that ‘Mr Theed worked from my head’. William Gladstone was also portrayed by Frank's father William Theed the Younger, in a statue in Manchester Town Hall, begun in 1877 and completed in 1879, and a portrait bust in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, sculpted the year before, in 1878. Jeremy Warren May 2023
Provenance
Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (1887-1959); Christie's, 7 March 1958; bought by the Ministry of Works and transferred by HM Treasury to the National Trust in 1958.
Marks and inscriptions
Back of bust: : F. THEED. Sc. 1890.
Makers and roles
Frank Theed (1850 - after 1906), sculptor J. P. Head (fl.1890), sculptor