Amelia Hume, Lady Farnborough (1772–1837)

after Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (Plympton 1723 - London 1792). Oil painting on canvas, Amelia Hume, Lady Farnborough (London 1772 – Bromley 1837) after Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (Plympton 1723 - London 1792). Half-length portrait of a young woman wearing a white dress, a black cloak and large black and white hat, landscape setting with trees and sky on the left. Amelia Hume was born on 23 January 1772. She was the eldest daughter of Sir Abraham Hume, 2nd Bt (1748/9-1838). and Lady Amelia Egerton (1751-1809), and co-heiress with her sister Sophia Hume, Lady Brownlow (1787/8-1814). Married on 18 May 1793 at Berkeley Square, London, to Charles Long, 1st Baron Farnborough (1761-1838) of Bromley Hill Place, son of Beeston Long (1710-1785) and Sarah Cropp. Amelia was a celebrated amateur watercolourist. She died on 15 January 1837 at age 64 The key question as to this picture is whether it is “the remains of the original Reynolds” (Ellis Waterhouse’s notes, 1946, quoted by David Mannings Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, 2000, p.270. No.966), for which Sir Abraham Hume paid the fee of 50 gns. in 1788, or whether the original was not the painting that passed by collateral descent from the Longs/Farnboroughs to Samuel Long, by whom it was lent to the B.I. in 1850, and thence to Miss N.P. Dawson, in whose sale [WHERE?] on 1st March 1946 it was lot 67, when it was dismissed by Waterhouse (as cited by Mannings) as “a ruined and deplorable contemporary copy.” Untraced since, it is impossible to compare this wreck with that at Belton, but the probability is nonetheless that it was the actual original. Not only would one expect the original to have gone with the sitter on her marriage to Charles Long in 1793, but – much more decisively – the portrait was not amongst Reynolds’s other portraits, and copies of Reynolds by Rising – in Sir Abraham Hume’s 1824 catalogue of his collection. The evidence therefore points to its having been a copy painted for the sitter’s younger sister, Sophia Hume, Lady Brownlow. Belton House, Lincolnshire (Accredited Museum)