Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas

The fourteen-year-old boy in this portrait was recently identified as Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas. He sat for Reynolds on July 10, 1782 – the day after Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington, had a sitting. Stanhope had recently returned form a military post in Jamaica, and he likely brought Thomas – who may have been attached to his regiment or enslaved on a plantation owned by Stanhope’s step-father-in-law – back to Britain as an attendant. Thomas was later baptized, when he was nineteen, on the same day as Stanhope’s newborn child. Much remains to be uncovered about Thomas’s life, though parish registers reveal that he married and moved to Sussex, where his son John Henry was born in 1794.Thomas later returned to London, where in 1816 he died, just nine days after he was admitted to a workhouse for the poor. He is buried in Camden Town Cemetery, now St. Martin’s Gardens.

Gallery Label for installation of permanent YCBA collection, 2022