Benjamin West, P.R.A. 1738-1820

Three quarter length, seated, wearing van Dyck dress, holding a map of Jamaica 

Commissioned by William Beckford, Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire;
By descent to Susan Euphemia, his daughter, who married Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton;
Thence by descent to his grandson William, 12th Duke of Hamilton (1845-1895), by whose Estate sold, Christie's, 6th-7th November 1919, lot 75, bt. Tooth;
John R. Morron, by whom bequeathed to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, "Beckford's Gothic Wests," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, XIII, October 1954, pp. 41-49;
A. Gardner and S. Feld, American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: I Painters born by 1815, 1965, pp. 34-35;
R. Kraemer, Drawings by Benjamin West and His Son Raphael Lamar West, 1975, p. 71;
M. Hamilton-Philips, "Benjamin West and Willima Beckford: Some Projects for Fonthill," Metropolitan Museum Journal, XV, 1981, pp. 158-64, fig. 2;
H. von Erffa and A. Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West, 1986, p. 490-492, cat. no. 592.

The sitter was the son of Peter Beckford (1643-1710) and his second wife, Anne Ballard.  At his death he was the wealthiest planter in Jamaica and was said to be “in possession of the largest property real and personal of any subject in Europe” (C. Leslie, A New History of Jamaica, 1740, p.267).  He was also a politician and served as Speaker of the Jamaican Assembly and as Comptroller of Customs.  He married Bathshua Herring, and was the grandfather of the famous connoisseur and collector, William Beckford of Fonthill.

The sitter’s Van Dyck costume has sometimes led scholars to identify the sitter as Peter Beckford, William Beckford’s great-grandfather, but an inscription on the portrait of the sitter’s wife (see following lot) identifying her as Bathshua, would seem to preclude this.

The present portrait was one of four portraits by Benjamin West in the collection of William Beckford, and these may have hung in the Oak Parlour in the south transept of Fonthill Abbey where Beckford normally dined (see Erfa and Staley, op. cit. p.492).  The portrait was painted long after the sitter’s death, and William Beckford may have commissioned the portrait, together with that of his wife (lot 71) as posthumous mementos of his grandparents.  Both portraits passed by descent to Beckford’s daughter, Susan Euphemia, who married Alexander, 10^th Duke of Hamilton.  Both works were sold in the Duke of Hamilton’s estate sale in 1919 and eventually entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The other two portraits by West (ibid. Cat. Nos. 594 and 615) are of Mrs William Beckford, William Beckford’s mother, and Elizabeth, Countess of Effingham, the sitter’s daughter.  Both works hang in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.