The Rt. Hon. William Windham III MP (1750-1810)
Hugh Douglas Hamilton (Dublin 1739/40 - Dublin 1808)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
1773 (signed and dated)
Materials
Pastel on paper
Measurements
237 x 188 mm
Order this imageCollection
Felbrigg, Norfolk
NT 1403055
Summary
Pastel on paper, The Rt. Hon. William Windham III MP (1750-1810), by Hugh Douglas Hamilton RHA (Dublin 1739/40 – Dublin 1808), signed and dated 1773 on the back. An oval head-and-shoulder portrait of William Windham wearing a white coat, turned to his right, with a grey background. Son of William Windham II and Sarah Hicks; married Cecilia Forrest. A Whig politician who rose to being Secretary of War under Pitt (1794-1801) and again in Grenville's ministry (1806-7), when he was associated with the reform of conditions in the Navy. According to the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, he was ,pious, chivalrous, and disinterested, and his brilliant social qualities made him one of the first gentlemen as well as one of the soundest sportsmen of his time'. The article refers to his diary, published in 1866, as showing him to have been vacillating and hypochrondriacal in private, but excuses his political inconsistency, which led him to his being nicknamed ,Weathercock Windham'. He was a good orator, and became the leader of his party in the Commons, so was much offended to be offered a peerage after Fox's death: "They want ordanance, and yet would begin by spiking one of their greatest guns!" (Earl of Ilchester, The Home of the Hollands, 1937, pp.241-42). Acquired at a sale in Wymondham in 1974. The signature is reputedly that of an otherwise unknown James Hamilton, but it is more likely to be that of Hugh Douglas Hamilton, who is reputed to have been kept so busy painting such oval pastels in London, at 9 guineas a time, between c.1764 and 1778, that: "he had to put off to the evening the picking out and the gathering up of the guineas among the bran and broken crayons in his crayon boxes, where in the hurry of the day he had thrown them". It is not, however, entirely characteristic of him.
Provenance
Acquired at a sale (Phillips Son and Neale, London) in Wymondham in 1974
Makers and roles
Hugh Douglas Hamilton (Dublin 1739/40 - Dublin 1808), artist previously ascribed to James Hamilton, artist