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Richard Gildart

Joseph Wright of Derby1768

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Liverpool, United Kingdom

There is a distinct sense in this portrait of a meeting of two celebrities: the north of England’s foremost portraitist, recently arrived in Liverpool, painting his new home town’s senior citizen. In his mid-nineties at the date of this work, Gildart had been a Freeman of Liverpool for 70 years, Mayor three times (the first over 50 years previously) and M.P. for nearly twenty years. A merchant in the sugar trade all his life, he had witnessed Liverpool’s growth from a small local port into Britain’s second city. Neither party flinches from their encounter and the results are uncompromisingly direct and candid. As so often with portraits of the very old, there is no place for the trappings of vanity or material existence and the image is arresting in its deliberate plainness.

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  • Title: Richard Gildart
  • Creator: Joseph Wright (of Derby)
  • Creator Lifespan: 1734/1797
  • Creator Nationality: British
  • Creator Gender: Male
  • Creator Death Place: Derby, Derbyshire, England
  • Creator Birth Place: Derby, Derbyshire, England
  • Date Created: 1768
  • tag / style: Joseph Wright (of Derby); portraiture; Richard Gildart; merchant; sugar; old man; wig; chair; seated; walking stick; uncompromising; shadows; jacket
  • Physical Dimensions: w1000 x h1250 cm (without frame)
  • Artist biographical information: Joseph Wright of Derby played an important part in Liverpool‘s artistic history. Following an apprenticeship in London to the portraitist Thomas Hudson, Wright established from the late 1750s an extremely successful practice in his native Derby, with his literal and rather forthright portraits, often of leading Midland industrialists, and with his famous ‘candlelight’ views of scientific experiments. Between late 1768 and summer 1771 he was based in Liverpool where he depicted several of the port’s leading slave-owning merchants as well as wealthy landowners from the Lancashire hinterland. ‘Richard Gildart’, a former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, ‘Fleetwood Hesketh of Meols’ and his wife ‘Frances Bold’, the coal heiress, are among the finest of this group. Wright was a friend of Joseph Tate, an early member of the sugar-plantation dynasty. Wright’s presence in Liverpool helped galvanise local artists and contributed to attempts to set up a local Academy. To find out more about this artist please follow this link: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/featuredartists/josephwrightderby/index.aspx
  • Additional artwork information: Joseph Wright of Derby’s Liverpool Portraits were the subject of an exhibition held at the Walker Art Gallery in 2007. Please follow this link to find out more; http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/wrightofderby/
  • Type: Oil on canvas
  • Rights: Purchased in 1988
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

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