Henry Tanworth Wells, R.A.

As a young man Henry Tanworth Wells was known for his sensitive miniature portraits but with the advances in photography depleting the demand for miniatures by the late 1850s he turned to making coloured chalk portraits for wealthy patrons; there are several hundred of his portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. He was close friends with the Pre-Raphaelites, with Rossetti, Millais and Ruskin among his intimates and he married Joanna, the talented sister of the watercolourist George Price Boyce. He probably met James Stewart Hodgson when they were both members of the Hogarth Club in London, and two portraits were commissioned of Hodgson and his wife, drawn three years apart.

According to The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1900 ‘James Stewart Hodgson was a merchant, magistrate and collector, who was born in 1827, and was the younger son of the later Mr. John Hodgson of The Elms, Hampstead and Caroline Delamain, and the brother of Kirkman Daniel Hodgson, sometime Governor of the Bank of England, and M.P. for Bristol. Mr. Stewart Hodgson had for many years lived at Haslemere, where he built himself a noble house on Lythe-hill, one of the loveliest positions in the South of England, and where, in his days of great prosperity, his kindliness of heart and his wise generosity made him universally beloved.’ In 1862 he married Gertrude Agatha, daughter of William Forsyth Q.C. and together they became friends and patrons of many artists, notably Frederic Leighton whose masterpiece The Daphnephoria they commissioned. Sadly their fortune was lost; ‘Mr. Hodgson, as a man of business, was always on the side of caution, but (like the other Baring partners) he was overborne by the stronger will of the late Lord Revelstoke, and, of course, had to share with him the responsibility for the great collapse. He bore this sudden adversity with great courage; left Lythe-hill, sold all cherished treasures, moved into the small manor house, and, though he was already fairly advanced in years, set himself to aid the liquidation with all the strength at his command. It is satisfactory that his efforts, and those of his associates, met with remarkable success. He died on July 14, 1899.’