John Fane, 10th Earl of Westmoreland
Details
The story
The museum puts this at around 1806 and rests that date on no document. By then John Fane, 10th Earl of Westmorland, had been Lord Privy Seal for eight years, and he would stay in the cabinet for nearly thirty. Lawrence painted him standing at full length in the crimson and ermine robe a peer wore to Parliament, with the blue garter of England's oldest order of knighthood buckled below his left knee and its French motto running along it, honi soit qui mal y pense. He had been given the Garter in 1793, near the end of four years spent governing Ireland as the king's viceroy.
The thing people remembered about him had happened earlier. In 1782 he took Sarah Anne Child, the only child of the London banker Robert Child, up to Gretna Green and married her there. Her father rewrote his will so that the bank and the fortune would skip her sons and pass to her daughters instead.
An English peer at full length is an unexpected thing to meet in Madrid. This one is here because the Prado bought it from a London dealer in 1958.
