The O’Neill Boys with a Chariot in the Grounds of Shane’s Castle
Francis Wheatley (London 1747 – London 1801)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
circa 1782 - 1784
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
749 x 876 mm (29 1/2 x 34 1/2 in) (framed oval)
Place of origin
Great Britain
Order this imageCollection
Stourhead, Wiltshire
NT 732262
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, The O'Neill Boys with a Chariot in the Grounds of Shane's Castle by Francis Wheatley, RA (London 1747 – London 1801), circa 1782 - 1784. A horizontal painting framed as an oval. A small boy, in long white dress with orange sash, is pulling a gilt chariot by a pink ribbon, in which is seated a smaller child wearing white with a blue sash. A little dog is in the foreground and an eighteenth-century Gothic house is visible beyond a lake. The house is probably Shane's Castle, Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland where the O'Neill family had their country seat and which burnt down in 1816.
Provenance
Probably sent over to Stourhead after the death of Henrietta Boyle, Mrs John O’Neill (1755/6-1793) (daughter of Susanna Hoare and Henry Hoare II) in 1793 and thence by descent. Given to the National Trust along with the house, its grounds, and the rest of contents by Sir Henry Hugh Arthur Hoare, 6th Bt (1865 – 1947) in 1946.
Credit line
Stourhead, The Hoare Collection (National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
Verso: On back of frame in white paint: 382
Makers and roles
Francis Wheatley (London 1747 – London 1801), artist British (English) School, artist previously catalogued as attributed to John Trotter (ac. 1755 - d. Dublin 1792), artist previously catalogued as attributed to John Foldsone (fl.1769 - d.1784), artist
References
Robin Simon, The Portrait in Britain and America, Oxford 1987 Crookshank 2002: Anne Crookshank and The Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1660–1940, New Haven & London, 2002, p. 99, fig. 130 (reversed erroneously)