Portrait of Queen Caroline seated on a red armchair wearing a black dress with frilled collar and a black feather hat.
Drawings Un58 no. 98 Box D166
Acquired July 2023
Profile portrait depicting the young traveller Henry Bunbury wearing an academic gown and mortar board. This drawing was used as the basis for Thomas Patch’s conversation piece of the interior of his Florentine studio painted in 1770 and now in the collection of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington.
Drawings P294 no. 2 Box D205
Acquired September 2023
Full-length portrait of a woman, likely to be Mary Anne Clarke, wearing a white neoclassical dress and standing on a balcony with a curtain drapped from the left corner.
Drawings B922 no. 1
Acquired November 2022
Half-length portrait of Lucy Walter, turned slightly left and looking at the viewer; wearing a pearl necklace, pearl earings, and a blue gown adorned with strings of pearls.
Drawings H263 no. 7 Box D125
Acquired October 2022
A presumably incomplete set of ten transformation playing cards, drawn by Thomas Dyer, with caricatured figures of his family as stated in a 1852 note by William Hylton Dyer Longstaffe mounted to the side of the 3 of hearts. Each figure is drawn to incorporate the shape of a heart, diamond, or spade and then tipped onto brown card. Some of the cards were copied or adapted from the Nixon-Fuller set which was published circa 1811; one, for example, shows two men seated across a table with a candle jug and pipe resting upon it, which according to Longstaffe’s note features a self-portrait by Thomas Dyer (smoking) and a portrait of his father William Charles Dyer (either snoozing or contemplating). Other cards represent a range of subjects: a courtroom drama, guardsmen, two seated women (one of whom is reading to the other), a man with a goatee beard, a clergyman holding a baby and a couple standing on either side of him, and a scene with two people playing cards. Other Longstaffe’s notes provide the provenance and custodial history of the cards; “I beg your acceptance of the enclosed. The drawings on the cards are by the late Thomas Dyer caricaturing his family. Charles Dyer to me, 27 Dec. 1852.” Another note reads: “‘I beg your acceptance of the enclosed cards, which I only found this morning. They belong to the former ones I sent. Thomas Dyer gave them to his Aunt Elizabeth, from thence they descended to my aunt Emma.’ Charles H. Dyer to me, 5 Mr. 1853.”
The set also includes a full-length portrait of a Georgian gentleman, drawn on an oval piece of paper that has been mounted to a rectangular card mount with gold paper.
Drawings D996 no.1
Acquired October 2021
Three half-length sketches of men in two rows, two on the top row are shown bust-length facing left, while the one below is shown half-length playing a bassoon. Only the portrait on the top right is identified by the artist
Drawings N736 no. 10
Acquired January 2020