Identifying a mystery portrait by Arthur Devis (1712–1787)
From Gainsborough Dupont to William Hall, 2nd Viscount Gage
Deborah Gage and Tessa Murdoch
In 1887, Arthur Giraud Bowning and Henry Wagner, Directors of the French Hospital, a Huguenot charity founded in London in 1708 to provide shelter and care for Huguenot refugees, presented a portrait which they believed represented Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797) the Huguenot nephew of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) (Pl 1).
I William Hall Gage, 2nd Viscount Gage by Arthur Devis (1712–1787), c1752. Oil on canvas, 75 x 59 cm.
The French Hospital Collection. Photograph by Brenda Norrish
In 1794 Dupont was elected a Director of the French Hospital and so his presumed likeness was a relevant addition to the growing collection of portraits of Huguenot directors housed in the new French Hospital building designed by architect Robert Lewis Roumieu in Victoria Park, Hackney. This portrait, along with the rest, is now in La Providence in Rochester, which has been the home of the French Hospital since 1959.
Dupont was apprenticed to his more celebrated uncle and trained at the Royal Academy Schools. He took over the studio in Schomberg House, Pall Mall, after his uncle’s death in 1788. Dupont was eventually buried in the same grave as his uncle at St Anne’s, Kew Green, Richmond, Surrey.
In 2009, although unsigned, the Rochester portrait was published as by Arthur Devis (1712–1787). The composition compares with other Devis portraits of gentlemen standing against trees with a rivers in the background.[1] Examples include Sir Robert Rich of Ross Hall, Suffolk and Waverley Abbey, Surrey painted c1756–58 (King’s Own Royal Regiment, City Museum, Lancaster).[2]
In May 2025, Deborah Gage invited Tessa Murdoch to visit their family home, Firle Place, near Lewes, East Sussex, where she is curator. At the foot of the main staircase hangs an almost identical portrait to the unsigned, hitherto unidentified, portrait belonging to the French Hospital, Rochester. The Firle version represents William Hall, 2nd Viscount Gage (1718–1791), and is signed and dated on the tree trunk ‘Art Devis fe 1752’ (Pl 2). This then, is the sitter in the Devis portrait at Rochester – not Gainsborough Dupont.
2 William Hall Gage, 2nd Viscount Gage by Arthur Devis, 1752. Oil on canvas, 78 x 62 cm.
Trustees of the Firle Estate. Photograph by James Ratchford
The background of both canvases shows William Hall’s mother’s estate, Highmeadow in Gloucestershire, with the River Wye and a village in the distance, here identified as Newland. The fine medieval church and the adjacent cluster of houses is ‘like a Cathedral close’. There are compositional differences between the Firle and Rochester canvases. In the Firle painting, William Hall (proudly carrying his mother’s family name) is leaning against a tree dressed in a long scarlet waistcoat and breeches with a dark blue overcoat and a large collar, a white stock around his neck, elaborate frilled gauze cuffs, white stockings and buckled shoes; he holds a black tricorn hat in his right hand. The Rochester canvas is slightly the smaller of the two (75 x 59 cm), and the face has suffered from overcleaning and thus lost some of its layers of glaze. In this version, William Hall wears an outer coat and a fob watch hangs from his waist. There are three additional leafy plants in the foreground on either side of his figure, and another smaller one at the base of the tree, just in front of his feet.
The Firle canvas is slightly larger (78 x 62 cm) and it also varies from the Rochester portrait in some of the details: for example, the buttonholes of both the long scarlet waistcoat and dark blue overcoat are elaborately edged with gold embroidery and buttons. Moreover, in this version William Hall is shown wearing an indoor coat, as the waistcoat has a collar that rises above and rests on top of the coat.
Why might there be two Devis portraits of William Hall Gage? The Irish title of Viscount Gage of Castlebar Island, County Kerry, was created in 1720 for William Hall’s father, Thomas (c1695–1754) with the subsidiary title of Baron Gage of Castle Island in the County of Mayo. The title followed the family’s conversion from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism after the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion and was supposedly granted as a reward for Thomas’s part in exposing the fraudulent sale of the Earl of Derwentwater’s confiscated estates – for which he received thanks from the House of Commons in 1732, long before he inherited Firle. The 1st Viscount was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1728 and managed the household of Frederick, Prince of Wales, between 1747 and 1751.
Thomas married Benedicta (d 1749), daughter of Benedict Hall [II] (c1655–1714), who had been the last of the Hall male line. His grandfather, Benedict [I] (1590–1668), began building Highmeadow in the mid-1630s. It was completed by his son, Henry Benedict Hall (c1625–1687), and was subsequently engraved by Colen Campbell in Vitruvius Britannicus (vol II, pl 40). Thomas also inherited Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire upon the death of his father, Joseph Gage (1652–1700), whose mother Mary Chamberlain had acquired the property following the death of her father, John Chamberlain, in 1651. Thomas sold Shirburn Castle just before his marriage to Benedicta in 1717, thereby adding to their joint wealth. In 1744, on the death of his cousin, Sir William Gage (1695–1744), Thomas inherited the family seat at Firle Place, which turned out to mark the beginning of the end of the Lordship of Highmeadow. Thomas Gage may have inherited Firle because he had conformed to the Church of England in 1719 (as mentioned above), thus bypassing the recusant penal laws, which remained in effect until long after the Act of Settlement, 1701.
Thomas, 1st Viscount Gage, focused his attention upon Firle Place, where he completed the last phase of a campaign of Georgian re-modelling that had been begun by Sir William. The family divided the year between Highmeadow and Firle, and certainly Thomas’s children felt a close attachment to the Gloucestershire estate: all three were born there. William Hall’s younger brother, General Thomas Gage (1719–1787), led a distinguished career as a colonial administrator and Commander-in-Chief, North America, during the early days of the American Revolution. He had closer links to Highmeadow than Firle. When he returned to England in 1773 after 17 years’ absence in America, General Thomas Gage and his wife, Margaret, lingered at Highmeadow, so that his daughter Charlotte could be born there. An oval portrait of William and Thomas’s sister, Benedicta Maria Theresa (d 1773), which hangs over the fireplace in the Palladian Drawing Room at Firle, also shows Highmeadow in the background.
The Devis portrait of William Hall Gage at Firle is dated 1752, and so the sitter was then aged thirty-four. While his father’s main home was by then Firle Place, William Hall largely lived at Highmeadow. Conceivably, one Devis portrait was painted for Highmeadow (the French Hospital canvas), and subsequently a second was commissioned for Firle. Devis was known to paint replicas, and at roughly the same time, and would usually work up a portrait in the studio after a first ad vivum sitting, with aid of mannequin dolls. This practice particularly applied to arrangements of groups of sitters and, for example, two known variants exist of a conversation piece by Devis depicting James Barry, 4th Earl of Barrymore; Thomas Lister of Gisborne Park, Clitheroe; and Richard Shuttleworth of Forcett, Yorkshire.[3] In these cases, there may even have been a third canvas, one for each of the sitters.
One of the Devis portraits of William Hall may have left that family collection in 1805, when Highmeadow was pulled down: records indicate that other paintings were sold from this Gloucestershire property. The history of the Firle portrait is unrecorded before it was acquired by the 6th Viscount Gage (1895–1982) in 1976.[4]
William Hall followed his father’s footsteps into court circles and politics, sitting in Parliament as MP for Seaford between 1744 and 1747 (as an Irish peer he could sit in the House of Commons). He succeeded to the Gage title and estates in 1754 and held the lucrative perquisite of Paymaster of Pensions between 1755 and 1782. He married Elizabeth Gideon, daughter of the great Jewish financier Sampson Gideon (1699–1762). William and Elizabeth’s seven children all died, so that Firle – and the title – were inherited by General Thomas Gage’s son, Henry (1761–1808). William Hall’s later portrait by Thomas Gainsborough, 1774, in that artist’s mature feathery style, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1777: both Devis and Gainsborough depict the sitter outdoors and in a contrapposto pose.
Recent cleaning of the Gainsborough portrait of William reveals pentimenti, and a sword was apparently painted out. It was probably intended for 16 Arlington Steet, there intended to keep up with Hall’s neighbours, the Eardleys. This Arlington Street house was inherited by the 2nd Viscount Gage in 1754 from Maria Shireburne, Duchess of Norfolk (1692–1754).[5] Shortly after 1777, William Hall exchanged his own Gainsborough portrait for two other portraits, one of his brother-in-law, Sir Sampson Gideon, by Reynolds (at Firle today) and another of his wife by Gainsborough. (Sampson Gideon, 1744–1824, was son of the first Sir Sampson mentioned above and was brought up a Christian, the religion of his mother. He was therefore eligible for a peerage and, after changing his name to Eardley in 1789, he was created an Irish peer the same year, as Baron Eardley.) The Gainsborough full-length portrait of William Hall Gage hung at the Gideon/Eardley town house at 22 Arlington Street until, 175 years later, it was acquired from that family by the 6th Viscount Gage in 1952: it has taken pride of place in Firle’s Palladian Drawing Room ever since.
Hugh Belsey, former Curator, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, visited the French Hospital, Rochester, some 30 years ago to see the ‘Gainsborough Dupont’, when he confirmed that the attribution made no sense. At the time that Henry Wagner (whom we now turn to) was collecting, Hugh Belsey suspects that no one had a clue what a Dupont, or a Devis, looked like, and the attribution was made on the grounds that there was some similarity with portraits by the young Thomas Gainsborough. Dr Belsey agreed that the painting is another version of the Firle portrait by Devis.[6]
3 Henry Wagner by Hugh Goldwin Rivière (1869–1956), 1926. Oil on canvas, 80 x 63 cm.
The French Hospital Collection
Henry Wagner (1840–1926) (Pl 3) came from a wealthy Brighton family that originated in Silesia, but he claimed Huguenot descent through his connections with the Teulon family. His engagement with the French Hospital (he was elected as Director in 1865) developed his passionate interest in Huguenot genealogy, later inherited by his cousin, Sir Anthony Wagner, Garter King of Arms. Henry Wagner was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1875. The collection of extracts from Huguenot wills and over 900 pedigrees that he bequeathed to the French Hospital is one of the most used resources in the Huguenot Library now administered by the Huguenot Society and located at The National Archives. In addition to the portrait presented as of Gainsborough Dupont, Wagner also presented, in 1923, pendant portraits of Peter and Clara Le Heup by Giles Eckhardt of 1747.
Wagner had started to collect paintings as an undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford, and his home at Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, was later so crammed with paintings that they were even screwed onto the back of the doors. Wagner gave a painting by Lorenzo Monaco to the National Gallery in 1912, and further gifts followed in 1918 and 1919, and again in 1921, when he left London and moved back to Brighton. In 1924 the National Gallery was able to choose 12 more of his early Italian paintings.
The portrait of Henry Wagner painted in 1926 by Hugh Goldwyn Rivière (1869–1956), currently displayed in the Huguenot Museum, includes the family coat of arms demonstrating the connection with the Huguenot Teulon family.
4 Arthur Giraud Browning FSA by Arthur Bentley Connor (1880–1960). Oil on canvas, 108 x 90 cm.
The French Hospital Collection
Wagner’s older contemporary Arthur Giraud Browning (1835–1907) (Pl 4) was elected French Hospital Director in 1873 and served as Secretary in 1875 and Deputy Governor in 1898. On his death in 1907, the bookcase in oak, with the inscription ‘Browning 1907 Memorial’, commemorated the Trust he founded in 1895 for the purchase of books and manuscripts. By 1901 the library had between 2000 and 3000 volumes, many of them gifted by fellow directors Sir Henry Layard and Henry Wagner. Browning was keen to develop the French Hospital’s potential as a centre for Huguenot studies. In 1885, AG Browning founded the Huguenot Society of London and served as its President from 1900 to 1905. A window in the French Hospital Chapel at Victoria Park was dedicated to his memory in 1908. The books served as the core of the Huguenot Library deposited at the National Archives.
The authors would like to thank Philip Hutton and Anthony Mould.
- Tessa Murdoch and Randolph Vigne, The French Hospital in England: Its Huguenot History and Collections, Cambridge 2009), fig. 76, pp62, 120. ↑
- Polite Society by Arthur Devis: Portraits of the English Country Gentleman and his family, exh cat., Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, 1983; National Portrait Gallery, London, 1984, cat. 39, pp58–9. ↑
- Information courtesy of Anthony Mould. ↑
- Christie’s, 26 March 1976, ‘The Property of a Deceased Estate: The Hon. F. Wallop’. ↑
- James Kelly, Associate Professor in the History of Catholicism at Durham University, suggests that some form of recusant financial arrangement dictated Duchess Mary’s choice of legator. ↑
- The late Ellen G D’Oench in The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis & his contemporaries, catalogue of an exhibition in the Yale Center for British Art, 1980, includes the Firle painting in a checklist (p83, no. 66) but makes no mention of the Rochester version. ↑