Harry Jones Thaddeus R.H.A. 1860-1929
Study of Sir Richard Owen
Charcoal on paper, 23.5 x 15 cm.
Signed and inscribed ‘Sir Richard Owen KTB (from life) Richmond Park, June 26th 1888’
This understated but significant drawing marks the establishment of a friendship between Thaddeus and the veteran comparative anatomist and palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen that would last for several years, and also formed the basis of one the artist’s most celebrated and highly publicised portraits.
The commentary surrounding Thaddeus’s full-length portrait of Owen, directly linked to the present drawing and now in Lancaster Town Hall, began when the artist was invited to show the picture to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in early 1889. ‘There is a terrible jealousy in the artistic world over here’ reported the Freeman’s Journal (25 February), ‘at the special favour shown by the Queen to the Cork artist, Mr Thaddeus’. As it happens, Thaddeus had been invited to a private audience at Windsor three years earlier. This royal endorsement was attributable to important aristocratic connections Thaddeus had made several years earlier. His introduction to Owen, former tutor to Queen Victoria’s children, was through the family of the Duchess of Teck (Queen Victoria’s cousin), who he had befriended in Italy some years before. Thaddeus’s reception by the Queen precipitated widespread comment on the portrait, and prompted the artist, ever alert to opportunity, to exhibit it at the RHA in 1891 and, some six years after selling it, in his important solo show at the Continental Gallery in New Bond Street in 1902.
Not all the attention the portrait attracted was quite so positive. In 1890, the engraver, Frank Sternberg, who had been enlisted by Thaddeus to produce a print after the portrait, brought an action against Thaddeus for failing to pay him in full. Thaddeus, who argued that Sternberg’s work was ‘negligent’ and ‘improper’ lost the case, despite the appearance in his defence of no less a figure than Frederick Lord Leighton.
The attention Thaddeus’s portrait, in which a gowned Owen rests his hand on a dinosaur skull, attracted was all the more remarkable when one considers that it was based on a photograph of 1852. Thaddeus merely replaced the head with a more recent likeness based on the current drawing.
The drawing itself is a testament to Thaddeus’s burgeoning skill at capturing a good likeness. He had proved throughout the 1880s an accomplished and sought-after portraitist, and would continue to develop an international network of patrons for the next two decades. Owen had commanded a formidable reputation for much of his career, but Thaddeus remembered the ageing scientist as ‘the gentlest and kindest of mortals’, who had regaled him with stories while sitting for him (Recollections of a Court Painter (1912), 183). Thaddeus visited him again in 1889, before departing for Egypt, and in 1891, shortly before Owen’s death, when Owen signed proofs of Thaddeus’s own engraving after the portrait, executed as a replacement for Sternberg’s. He presented one of these prints to W.E. Gladstone, ‘as a memento of a great and learned man & a tribute of respectful esteem from myself’ (28 January 1892, Gladstone Papers, vol.CCCCXXVII, 44512 f.143) and another, no doubt in response to his earlier audience, to Queen Victoria. During his visit of 1891, Thaddeus produced studies close in character to the present drawing, among them a drawing of Owen at his desk signing proofs of the print which were reproduced in a contemporary journal.
Brendan Rooney