Daniel Gardner

This portrait, painted in 1783, is the masterpiece of Daniel Gardner, the Kendal-born artist who studied drawing with George Romney and worked in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds before finding his métier with portraits in a dazzling combination of gouache and pastel on paper. The thirteen-year-old Mary Whitbread, daughter of the celebrated brewer Samuel Whitbread, stands pensively in a woodland glade. Her white dress and blue sash subtly emphasize her youthful purity and freshness. Gardner makes great play of the charming softness of 1780s fashionable dress, a reaction against the much-caricatured, high-piled hairstyles and fussy gowns of the previous decade. Mary’s powdered hair is teased into fluffy curls; soft ruffles frame her white neck. A child on the brink of womanhood (and marriageability), she has the poise of perfect breeding. An elegant, broad-brimmed hat, topped with a feather that is a tour-de-force of quivering movement, leaves us in no doubt that although Mary is walking in the woods, communing with nature, she is no sylvan hoyden.

The Portrait of Mary Whitbread is a superb example of Gardner’s inventive technique, which combines the gossamer radiance of pastel with the dramatic power associated with oil paint. He has ground pastel colors and used water as a medium, probably thickened with gelatine, to achieve the fluidity and impasto required.¹ Mary Whitbread’s pearly complexion is delicately contoured with black chalk. The autumn foliage to the right of the painting is executed richly and speedily with a palette knife, while dashingly-worked impasto at the upper left conveys the sense of the sun in a burst of afternoon radiance, filtering through the leaves.

Mary Whitbread, with her father’s brewing fortune and her mother’s aristocratic connections, was indeed a handsome, clever, rich and eligible heiress. Samuel Whitbread (1720-1796), who came from prosperous, Nonconformist Bedfordshire yeoman stock, built up a vast business from the sale of porter (dark beer) at his London Hind’s Head brewery, a building which survives today. He embraced the innovations of the Industrial Revolution, installing only the second example of James Watt’s steam engine in London, which was admired by King George III and Queen Caroline on a visit to the brewery in 1787.

Mary was the daughter of Samuel and his second wife Lady Mary Cornwallis, whom he married on 18^th August 1769. Lady Mary was the daughter of Earl Cornwallis and sister of Charles, 1^st Marquess Cornwallis (victor in India and loser at Yorktown) and Admiral ‘Billy Blue’ Cornwallis; sadly, she died in giving birth to Mary. 

Mary was brought up in the ethos of Whitbread’s practical Christian piety. As a girl she copied materials produced by her father’s friend Thomas Clarkson, denouncing the evils of the slave trade; later she became a friend of the Abolitionist William Wilberforce. In 1795 Mary married Captain George Grey RN (1767-1828) of Falloden, Northumberland, son of the 1^st Earl Grey and brother of the future Whig Prime Minister and architect of the 1832 Reform Act, Charles, 2^nd Earl Grey.

Captain George Grey saw action at the Battle of the Saintes (1782) and was Admiral Sir John Jervis’s flag captain at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797. The following year Mary joined him in Gibraltar, remaining characteristically unruffled when coming under fire from the French on the voyage out. Their first son George (1799-1882), a future Home Secretary, was born on the Rock. Grey’s return home with Jervis (now Earl St Vincent) in 1801 signalled the end of his fighting service. After briefly commanding the Royal yacht at Weymouth, he was Commissioner of Sheerness Dockyard from 1804 to 1806 and from 1806 to 1828 Commissioner at Portsmouth.

In addition to bringing up her nine children, Mary devoted her formidable energies towards the welfare of the Portsmouth dockyard workers and their families, invalid sailors and sailors’ orphans. Inspired by the Evangelical Christianity of her upbringing, which her husband shared, she was a moving force in the Naval and Military Bible Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) and the Religious Tract Society. These institutions sought to strengthen faith and improve welfare not only among the men of the Royal Navy, but among merchant seamen, fishermen, seaborne soldiers and convicts. Mary was a friend and staunch supporter of the Reverand George Charles Smith, ‘internationally recognized as the founder of organized mission to seafarers’; their valuable work continues today as The Mission to Seafarers.² As Portsmouth correspondent of the BFBS, Mary distributed nearly 30,000 Scriptural tracts between 1810 and 1815, and urged officers leaving for sea ‘to attend to the welfare of their own immortal souls, and to seek the spiritual good of their ship’s company’.³ ‘Blue Light’ (Evangelical) officers – among whom could be numbered such dashing fighting men as Admiral James Saumarez, Admiral Sir Edward Pellew and Jane Austen’s brother, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Francis Austen - combined ‘professional skill with proven piety’, discipline with humanity.⁴ Life as the wife of the Commissioner of Portsmouth Dockyard involved glamour as well as duty. In 1814 the Greys played host to the Prince Regent and Tsar Alexander I of Russia, during the Allied Sovereigns’ visit to England to celebrate what they erroneously supposed was the end of the Napoleonic Wars. George Grey was created 1^st Baronet Grey of Falloden to mark the occasion. After her husband’s death in 1828, Mary continued her philanthropic activities until her own death in 1858.

By birth and marriage Mary was part of a powerful network of Whig political activity. Her brother, the mercurial and tragic MP Samuel Whitbread the Younger (1764-1815), was an ally of Wilberforce in the campaign to abolish slavery. He ran through the massive Whitbread fortune in the pursuit of his political ambitions, although the brewery survived because of the cooler heads appointed by his father. A school friend of Charles Grey, the future Prime Minister, in 1788 Samuel married Lady Elizabeth Grey, the sister of Charles and George Grey, doubly interlinking the two families. This must be why Gardner’s portrait of Mary Whitbread was in Lady Elizabeth’s possession for many years. Samuel would have inherited it as his father’s heir; when he committed suicide in 1815 it remained in his widow’s possession, passing to Mary’s eldest son Sir George Grey, 2^nd Bt. (1799-1882) when Elizabeth died in 1846.

Sir George Grey, 2^nd Bt., deeply religious and philanthropic like his parents, was three times Home Secretary in Whig administrations from 1846. In 1845 he inherited his uncle’s estate of Falloden and was always happiest when in the countryside of his Northumbrian homeland. Of Mary’s other children, her daughter Elizabeth (1800-1818) married the 1^st Earl of Gainsborough and her daughter Jane (1804-1838) became the wife of the banker Francis Baring, 1^st Baron Northbrook. Her second son Charles (1811-1860) was Paymaster of the Civil Services in Ireland.

DANIEL GARDNER

Kendal 1745 – 1805 London

Daniel Gardner was a portrait painter whose style especially evokes the glamour and ‘sensibility’ of the 1770s and 80s. He invented a technique of combining oil, gouache and pastel on paper laid on canvas, which gives sparkle and texture to his small-scale full-lengths of high-society sitters.

Gardner was born in Kendal, Westmorland, the only son of a master baker. His mother was the daughter of Alderman Redman, a business associate of George Romney’s father. A keen amateur watercolorist, Mrs Gardner gave early encouragement to the career of George Romney, who in turn taught Daniel to draw. Gardner went to London in 1767 and in 1770 entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he studied with GB Cipriani, Benjamin West and Johan Zoffany. In 1773 he won a silver medal for the drawing of an academy figure and exhibited a Portrait of an old man at the RA, the only time that he ever exhibited there.

Gardner joined the studio of Joshua Reynolds as an assistant, to gain experience in oil painting. His oils are influenced by Reynolds, strongly impasted, sometimes somewhat ponderous. Gardner found his métier with small-scale full-length portraits and conversation pieces in his dazzling combination of oil, gouache and pastel, translating the glamorous theatricality of Reynolds’s Grand Manner into something more informal and playful. His compositions emphasize the bond between mother and child and the affection of siblings, a reflection of the late eighteenth century cult of ‘sensibility’. His paeans to family life reach their apogee in the elaborate oil, gouache and pastel Mrs Justinian Casamajor and eight of her children, 1779 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT). His sitters included the cream of Georgian society, among them the Duke of Buccleuch and the Duchess of Rutland.

Daniel Gardner was an eccentric who was observed by his patrons the Heathcotes wandering off into the woods to gather plants to use for experiments with pigments⁵. He refused to take pupils, would admit no visitors to his studio, and kept it firmly locked. Even sitters were not allowed to see their portraits before they were finished. In 1776 Gardner made a happy marriage to Anne Haward, sister of the engraver Francis Haward. Their son George was born in 1778, but Anne and her second son died in 1781. Gardner retained his links with Kendal, sending his son George to be educated there and amassing property and land in the town and its environs, which brought him a handsome income.

In 1802-3, during the Peace of Amiens, Gardner and his son took the opportunity (along with many other artists, including Thomas Girtin) to travel to Paris to see the Italian treasures looted by Napoleon. He sketched extensively in the Louvre and narrowly escaped being made a prisoner of war when hostilities resumed. Gardner’s combative personality did not make him popular among his fellow artists, but he formed a genuine friendship with the young John Constable, whom he introduced to Lakeland scenery, and of whom he made a beautiful portrait in 1796 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). He also painted Constable’s father, the miller Golding Constable (Wolsey Art Gallery, Ipswich). Described by Joseph Farington as ‘extremely parsimonious’, Gardner left more than £10,000 at his death in 1805.

We are very grateful to Susan Morris for preparing this catalogue entry.

1. Information kindly provided by paper conservator Jane McAusland.

2. Roald Kverndal, ‘Grey [neé Whitbread], Mary, Lady Grey (1770-1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, on-line edition  

3. Obituary of Lady Grey in The Record, 26^th May 1858; quoted in Kverndal DNB article, op. cit.

4. Dr Gareth Atkins, review of Richard Blake, Evangelicals in the Royal Navy, 1775-1815: Blue Lights and Psalm-Singers (2008) in Reviews in History (www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/799)

5. GC Williamson, Daniel Gardner, London 1921, p.30.