ATTRIBUTED TO ENOCH SEEMAN PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM SHIPPEN ESQUIRE MP

Bears inscription upper right 'William Shipper/Esquire. MP./Pope's 'Downright Shippen', Born 1672/M.P. for Bramber 1707/A Leader of the Jacobite Party,/ committed to the Tower 1717, Died 1743'; bears exhibition label on reverse
Oil on canvas

F. Laybourne Poppan
Private Collection Melbourne

William Shippen (1673 - 1745) was a barrister, MP for Newtown, near Warrington, Lancashire, and a well-known Augustan wit and poet.  A Tory and moderate Jacobite, he found himself in opposition to the Hanoverian-Whig goverment, and in 1717 suggested that a royal speech 'seemed rather to calculated for the meridian of Germany than of Great Britain, and that the king was a stranger to our language and constitution.'  For this indiscretion George I had Shippen committed to the Tower of London, winning him immortality in Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace as 'downright Shippen.'  Sitter is identified by a document on the table in the portrait.

This work, attributed to the Georgian portraitist Enoch Seeman (1694 - 1745) was formerly in the collection of the Leyborne-Popham family of Littlecote House, Wiltshire, and was included in the encyclopaedic National Portrait Exhibition at the South Kensington Museums in 1866 - 67.

EXHIBITED
National Portrait Exhibition, 1867, cat. G. 1. (bears label on reverse)