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Description: oil on canvas

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Dimensions: measurements note 40 3/4 by 32 5/8 in.; 103.5 by 83 cm.

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Provenance: William Witter, Tarporley, Chesire;
With Derek Johns, London, from whom purchased by the present collector.

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Published: M. Postle, Thomas Gainsborough, London 2002, p. 25 plate 21.

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTOR
This work, which Martin Postle dates to circa 1770s, is after Van Dyck's original of 1638, now in a private collection. Gainsborough frequently copied works by Old Master painters and today we know of at least eight copies after Van Dyck by his hand. Gainsborough's copies, however, are not slavish reproductions of the originals, but masterpieces in their own right. As Gainsborough's contemporary Sir Joshua Reynolds aptly noted, Gainsborough "occasionally made copies from Rubens, Teniers, and van Dyck, which it would be no disgrace to the most accurate connoisseur to mistake, at the first sight, for the works of those masters."υ1 Gainsborough likely became familiar with the Van Dyck portrait of Sir Thomas Hanmer when he received a commission to paint the gentleman's descendents at Weston Park. Gainsborough's Hanmer is more muted and more freely painted than is Van Dyck's original. Gainsborough has eliminated superfluous detail and imbued it with his own personal aesthetic sensibility, while maintaining the elegance and grace that were synonymous with the Court Portraiture of Van Dyck. Thomas Hanmer was not only a well-connected member of England's aristocracy, but also a prominent horticulturist and writer. He was a close friend of John Evelyn and is said to have contributed a chapter to his unpublished text, Elysium Britannicum.υ2 In 1933 Hanmer's own manuscript was rediscovered and published as The Garden Book of Sir Thomas Hanmer.

The present portrait has been previously inspected firsthand by John Hayes, Sir Oliver Millar and Christopher Brown who all confirmed the attribution to Gainsborough. 1 J. Reynolds: Discourses on Art (London, 1778); ed. R. R. Wark (London, 1959/R New Haven and London, 1975) [14th discourse].
2 J. Martin, "Sir Thomas Hanmer" from The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.