John Smart, Portrait of John Wynch, 1784

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of John Wynch, 1784,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 4, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1568.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “John Smart, Portrait of John Wynch, 1784,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 4, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1568.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

John Wynch sat for this handsome portrait the year of his return to India. He had resigned from the Madras Civil Service in August 1782 and departed for London after receiving word of the death of his father the previous May.¹ News traveled slowly, as did people. On April 22, 1783, Wynch requested permission to return to his position in the Madras Civil Service after settling his affairs.² In October of 1784, he wrote again of his plans to return “on one of the ships of this season.”³ It was probably around that time that John Smart painted this portrait, which may have been intended as a keepsake for Wynch’s mother, Florentia Wynch, whose nine children and six stepchildren were scattered between England and the Indian subcontinent.⁴

Wynch appears dressed rather soberly, befitting a civil servant, in a high-collared brown coat accented with brass buttons, with some flair shown in his fluffy white cravat and generous dusting of hair powder at his shoulders. Smart, who is distinguished among his colleagues for his unsparing depictions, has included what appears to be a purple birthmark, rendered in diffuse purple hatch marks at the center of the sitter’s face. It is perhaps a port-wine stain, named in the early eighteenth century for the Portuguese dessert wine popular among “English middling men.”⁵

The Wynch family was well connected in colonial India. John Wynch was born on August 6, 1757, at Fort St. George, Madras (now Chennai), the year before his father, Alexander Wynch, was appointed Deputy Governor of Madras. Alexander was later appointed Chief at Masulipatam, and from 1773 to 1775 he served as Governor of Fort St. George.⁶ Three of his sons, including John Wynch, served the Honourable East India Company, and a third joined the Madras Army. John Wynch began his career as a free merchant before serving as an ensign in the 1st Madras European Regiment. On September 4, 1775, he was transferred to the Madras Civil Service.⁷ In 1777, he was appointed Paymaster at Walajahbad, Arnee, and Vellore.⁸ He died on June 28, 1797, and was buried in Vellore’s Old Cemetery, mourned in his epitaph by the “British officers of the garrison of Vellore, as a tribute due from them to the memory of their late worthy Paymaster . . . sincerely and universally regretted, aged 40 years.”⁹

Notes

1. Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras (London: Asian Educational Services, 1913), 3:5.

2. John Wynch to the General Court of the East India Company, April 22, 1783, British Library, London, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/b90ed9c0-a794-4f66-b553-044267902460.

3. John Wynch to Thomas Morton, October 27, 1784, British Library, London, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/97bd0059-abe4-4395-93f6-d12b2b367988.

4. John Wynch’s father, Alexander (1721–1781), married his first wife, Sophia Croke (1727–1754), on June 1, 1748, at Fort St. George, Madras. Sophia was well connected among British colonials; her sister Frances Johnson (née Croke), known as “Begum Johnson,” was a celebrated doyenne of Calcutta (Kolkata) society. (Begum or begam means “wife” in Hindi or Urdu.) Alexander and Sophia Wynch had six children between 1749 and 1754. In 1754, the year of Sophia Wynch’s death, Alexander Wynch remarried to Florentia Cradock (1737–1802), in December at Fort St. George, Madras. Her children were John’s half-brothers William (1750–1819) and Alexander (1751–1813), who also served in the Madras Civil Service. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1:319.

5. Charles Ludington, The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 125.

6. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 4.

7. Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 4–5.

8. The East India Kalendar (London: J. Debrett, 1798), 104.

9. “Burial record,” June 28, 1797, Global, Find a Grave Index for Burials at Sea and other Select Burial Locations,1300s–Current, digitized on ancestry.com.

Elsie Gertrude Kehoe (1888–1967), Cliffe Dene, Saltdean, Sussex, England, by June 15, 1950;

Purchased from her sale, Objects of Vertu, Fine Watches, and Portrait Miniatures, Sotheby’s, London, June 15, 1950, lot 174, by Leggatt Brothers, London, probably on behalf of Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, 1950–1965 [1];

Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.

Notes

[1] Archival research has shown that Leggatt Brothers served as purchasing agents for the Starrs. See correspondence between Betty Hogg and Martha Jane Starr, May 15 and June 3, 1950, NAMA curatorial files. The Starrs purchased numerous miniatures in Elsie Kehoe’s sale, including a pair of portraits by Smart of Charlotte and Josias Du Pré Porcher.

The sale catalogue describes the lot as “a miniature of John Wynch, by John Smart, signed and dated 1784, head and shoulders, three-quarters sinister, gaze directed at spectator, powdered hair en queue, in white vest and frilled cravat, dark brown coat, oval, 2 1/8 in. John Wynch, of the Madras Army, born in 1757, was the son of Alexander Wynch, Governor of Madras Florentia [sic], and his wife; see lot 147 above.” Lot 147 in the same sale contains miniature portraits of Wynch’s parents, Alexander and Florentia Wynch. They are described as follows: “Mrs. Florentia Wynch, by George Engleheart, head and shoulder three-quarters sinister, a white veil over her profuse grey hair and a black fichu over her white dress, in pearl-bordered frame, 2 in.; and a Miniature of her husband, Alex Wynch, by Nathaniel Hone, in blue coat with gold facing, small oval, 1/14 in. Alex Wynch, Governor of Madras from 1773 to 1775, married Florentia, daughter of General Craddock, in 1754.”

John Smart—Miniaturist: 1741/2–1811, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 9, 1965–January 2, 1966, no cat.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 113.

John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 21, 2024–January 4, 2026, no cat., as Portrait of a John Wynch.

Catalogue of Objects of Vertu, Fine Watches, and Portrait Miniatures (London: Sotheby’s, June 15, 1950), 23, (repro.).

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 265, as John Wynch and formerly as F58-60/136.

Daphne Foskett, John Smart: The Man and His Miniatures (London: Cory, Adams, and Mackay, 1964), 77.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 113, p. 41, (repro.).