George Richmond, R.A.

Ann Oram, the artist’s mother seated in a chair

Signed with initials, dated 1829 and inscribed in pencil l.r.: My dear Mother, pen and brown ink and brown and grey wash over traces of pencil

Irregular, 16.7 x 10.7 cm

Provenance
Walter Coleridge Richmond, the artist’s son, by family descent


George Richmond was the son of the miniaturist Thomas Richmond and Ann Oram (1772-1859), a good-looking woman, possibly of Jewish descent, whose father had been an innkeeper at Kew Green. He has captured her in a moment of repose, her hands in her lap. This drawing was presumably made at the family house at 42 Half Moon Street, Mayfair, which remained the base to which the young George returned if he ran out of money. He records that in 1827 while living at Shoreham, where Samuel Palmer found him lodgings, he tried to live on 10 shillings a week ‘excepting some Tea and Sugar sent by my dear mother from London’ (Hartley MSS, quoted in R. Lister ‘George Richmond’, 1981, p. 16). This work shows traces of the influence of Henry Fuselli who was Professor of Painting and Keeper of the Royal Academy where the artist enrolled aged 15 in 1824.

Ann Oram was also painted by her husband Thomas who made a miniature of her wearing a bonnet in 1808, of which a stipple engraving was made by William Holl Jr.