George Lucy (1714 – 1786)
Thomas Gainsborough RA (Sudbury 1727 - London 1788)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1760 (record book)
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
740 x 610 mm
Order this imageCollection
Charlecote Park, Warwickshire
NT 533837
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, George Lucy (1714 – 1786) by Thomas Gainsborough RA (Sudbury 1727 - London 1788), 1760, for which the artist supposedly charged eight guineas. A half-length portrait, sitter posed slightly right, wearing a blue velvet coat edged with white fur, white cuffs and stock, powdered hair held in place with black ribbon. He also wears a blue waistcoat with left hand inserted. Plain background with a decorative edges. Framed in a carved gilt wood frame with a shell in each corner. Hangs from chains. Commissioned by the sitter, and thence by descent; when Mary Elizabeth Lucy wrote, the portrait (the present one), in which: "He is dressed in a coat of a fine blue colour, edged with white ... [with] ... a well-powdered wig on", hung "in the great hall, over the door to my sitting-room", whereas the other version hung "on the wall of the dinner-room, in the Rectory, at Hampton Lucy".
Provenance
Presented to the National Trust by Sir Montgomerie Fairfax-Lucy (1896 – 1965), two years after the death of his father, Sir Henry Ramsay-Fairfax, 3rd Bt (1870 – 1944), with Charlecote Park and its chief contents, in 1946.
Makers and roles
Thomas Gainsborough RA (Sudbury 1727 - London 1788), artist
References
Lucy 1862 Mary Elizabeth Lucy, Biography of the Lucy Family, of Charlecote Park, in the County of Warwick, London, 1862, pp. 111-12 Waterhouse 1953 E. K. Waterhouse 1953, "Preliminary Check List of Gainsborough Portraits", Walpole Society, XXXIII, 1953, p. 71 Waterhouse 1958 Ellis K. Waterhouse, Gainsborough, London 1958, pp. 79-80, no. 462 Fairfax-Lucy 1958 Alice Fairfax-Lucy, Charlecote and the Lucys, London 1958, p. 120 Sloman 1997 Susan Sloman, "Sitting to Gainsborough at Bath in 1760", The Burlington Magazine, May, 1997, pp.325-338 & fig. 38.