Mordaunt Ricketts

Maker William Owen (British, 1769 - 1825)

SitterSitter: Mordaunt Ricketts (British, 1786 - 1862)

Collections

British Paintings

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Date1793

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensionscanvas: 36 × 25 in. (91.4 × 63.5 cm.) frame: 43 3/4 × 36 × 3 1/2 in. (111.1 × 91.4 × 8.9 cm.)

DescriptionStanding three-quarter length, three quarter view of face turned to the proper right, in an open landscape. Proper right arm leaning on a mossy bank or rock. Dressed in brown velvet suit, white ruffles at collar. Brown hair cropped short, slightly curly. Trunk of tree grows out of bank to the left. River, trees, and bright sunset in right distance.

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Bequest of Florence M. Quinn

Label TextMordaunt Ricketts was born at Grove Place, Hampshire, on June 5, 1786, the third son among five children of Sophia (Watts) (c.1753-1830) and George Poyntz Ricketts (1749-1800). He was christened exactly one month later at Saint Mary's Church, Marylebone Road, London. His father's family had a long history of military and civil service in the Caribbean; his great-great grandfather, William Rickards, had participated in the Parliamentary Army's conquest of Jamaica in 1655. His father, only son of Jacob and Hannah (Poyntz) Ricketts of Grove Place and Midgham, Jamaica, served as Governor of Barbados from 1794-1800. Mordaunt's maternal grandfather, William Watts, had been governor of Fort William in Bengal. Like his two elder brothers, Mordaunt entered the Foreign and Colonial Civil Service and was Resident (envoy of the East India Company) at the court of Lucknow, Oudh, from 1723-29. He was the first Resident to assume the honor of placing the crown and robe of state on the King of Oudh during the coronation ceremony. He married twice; first to Maria Elizabeth Crommelin, daughter of Charles Russel Crommelin, H.E.I.C.S., and secondly to Charlotte Elizabeth (Fitzgerald), daughter of Martin Fitzgerald and widow of George Ravenscroft. There were children from both marriages. Mordaunt Ricketts died on July 29, 1862.

Painted at the outset of William Owen's professional career, this portrait provides a foretaste of the sentimental genre scenes of children in rustic settings for which the artist would later become well known. Seven-year-old Mordaunt Ricketts stands alone in a wooded landscape dimly illuminated by the hazy glow of the setting sun. The darkness of the scene draws our attention to the boy's warmly illuminated face. The meditative tilt of his head and the faraway gaze of his soulful brown eyes hint at a melancholic intelligence well in advance of his tender age. Indeed, he seems to partake fully in the poignant and poetic mood of his surroundings as he leans his elbow against a mossy bank and gazes into the distance.
Owen's idealization of young Mordaunt Ricketts's instinctive sympathy with the natural world reflects the new romantic ideal of the "child of nature." Powerfully explored in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel Emile (1762), the idea gained ground during Rousseau's temporary exile in England (1765-67) and was taken up by British writers in the ensuing decades. Rousseau's perception of the child's inborn state of innocence, uncorrupted by society and ennobled by insights beyond those of adults, had a profound impact on the way children were represented in eighteenth-century British art. Here, Owen encourages us to look up to young Mordaunt Ricketts, both literally and figuratively, by adopting a low vantage point that causes the small boy to appear as an imposing figure in the landscape. This physically ennobling treatment lends authoritative gravity to the child's dreamy mood, which is further dramatized by the dramatically lit and hazily atmospheric setting. The rosy cheeks, full, red lips, and lustrous hair suggest that the boy's physical beauty has been idealized along with his character. In all these respects, Owen reveals the influence of Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits and genre pictures had initiated a vogue for sweetly sentimental images of children in late eighteenth-century Britain. Owen appears to have consciously modeled his art on Reynolds's at this early stage of his career. He became a fixture of the older artist's studio soon after arriving in London in 1786, copying at least one of his paintings and seeking his advice.
Owen shows Mordaunt Ricketts wearing the two-piece skeleton suit that became fashionable in the late 1780s as a transitional form of clothing for boys to wear between the ages of four and ten. Many British families commissioned portraits of their male children at this interim stage, shortly after they had abandoned the unisex gown shared with their sisters, but before their graduation into a miniature version of adult male dress. The skeleton suit portrait seems to have commemorated a boy's first steps toward adulthood, while simultaneously celebrating his special status as a child. This double purpose may have contributed to the bittersweet air of precocious maturity with which Owen characterizes Mordaunt Ricketts, who at seven had reached the age at which many English boys were sent away to school.
The broad, white linen collar traditionally worn under the skeleton suit provided Owen with an opportunity for some lovely effects of the brush. The tucked folds and irregular profile of the ruffled edge are particularly impressive in a fledgling painter, defined with confident strokes of a dry brush so that the brown wool of the suit appears beneath the transparent white fabric. The boy's long, shaggy hairstyle and the casualness with which he wears his clothes (with the white collar open at the neck and the brown wool jacket unbuttoned at the wrists and down the front) are consistent with the romantic ideal of attiring children in loose clothing that allowed their bodies to move freely and develop naturally.
Despite their long periods of residence abroad, the Ricketts family commissioned numerous portraits from a variety of well-established London artists. It is striking that they offered a commission to a painter as untried as Owen, who had only begun his studies at the Royal Academy Schools in 1791 and who exhibited at the Academy for the first time the following year. Among his first exhibited pictures in 1792 was an unidentified Portrait of a Young Gentleman, which perhaps attracted the attention of Mordaunt's parents. In addition to the present portrait, they evidently commissioned Owen to paint a pendant of Mordaunt's five-year-old brother Frederick, whom he represented in a similarly romantic and thoughtful vein, resting his right hand on a book, with a red curtain backdrop (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). The two portraits were painted in the year preceding the Ricketts' departure for Barbados, where the boys' father, George Poyntz Ricketts, would serve as governor from May 26, 1794 until his death at the age of fifty-one in 1800. The paintings may have accompanied the family to the West Indies, for they were not exhibited until 1800, when the widowed Sophia Ricketts and her children returned to England.
Mordaunt's elder sister Isabella ultimately inherited this portrait, and it remained with her descendants until the early twentieth century. The family's affection for the picture is suggested by the existence of a contemporary copy, and its inherent appeal to a broader audience led to the publication of an engraving by E. Milner. As a demonstration of the regard for the "natural child" in late-eighteenth-century Britain and as an important early work in William Owen's career, this poignantly thoughtful and sensitive portrait is a painting of considerable interest and significance.

Status

Not on view

Object number44.98