George James Cholmondeley (1752-1830)

Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (Plympton 1723 - London 1792). Oil painting on canvas, George James Cholmondeley (1752-1830), by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (Plympton 1723 - London 1792), 1785/90. A half-length portrait of a man, turned to the left, gazing at the spectator with a red curtain behind. He wears black with a white stock. One of the last of Reynold's portraits, shown at the Royal Academy in 1790. It was painted for William Windham III. George James Cholmondeley was the grandson of the 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley, and elder son of Rev. the Hon. Robert Cholmondeley, Rector of St. Andrew’s, Hereford, Receiver-General of Excise, and of Mary Woffington, sister of the celebrated actress. Married (1) in 1790, Marcia (†1808), daughter of John Pitt of Encombe, by whom he had one son; (2) in 1814, Catherine (d.1823), daughter of Sir Philip Francis, who bore him no children; and (3) in 1825, Mary, daughter of 2nd Viscount Sidney, who bore him another son and three daughters. Cecilia Forrest was his mistress before he said farewell to his “life of vanity and voluptuousness” and married Marcia Pitt in 1790, and she, after whom Windham had long pined, married the latter in 1798. Cholmondeley was his greatest friend, and in the will that he drew up before attempting to cross the Channel by balloon in 1784, he left Felbrigg and most of his estates to Cholmondeley, and, after the latter’s death, to his eldest son by ‘Cecy’, with a remainder to his other children by her; only later did he make the Lukins his chief heirs. Ellis Waterhouse, in the catalogue of the Arts Council exhibition, writes of the picture: ‘As [Reynolds’s] eyesight became enfeebled in his last years, he left the accessories of his larger pictures more and more to assistants, and concentrated on what was to him of passionate interest, the head. One of the very last of such heads to be exhibited at the Academy was the G.J. Cholmondeley, shown in 1790. It has already the vitality and alertness of the coming age, and pictures such as this became the model for the generation of Hoppner and Lawrence.’ Its influence on the succeeding generation of portrait painters is also noticed by Oliver Millar. Graves & Cronin quote various contemporary laudatory references to the portrait on the occasion of the 1790 exhibition. Horace Walpole, for instance, thought it “very good”!. Felbrigg, Norfolk (Accredited Museum)