Thomas Heaphy, Portrait of a Cadet from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1803–6

Chicago:

Maggie Keenan, “Thomas Heaphy, Portrait of a Cadet from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1803–6,” 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. 3, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1420.

MLA:

Keenan, Maggie. “Thomas Heaphy, Portrait of a Cadet from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1803–6,” 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. 3, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1420.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Recent research and a newly discovered interior inscription have refined our understanding of this miniature by Thomas Heaphy, once titled Portrait of an Officer. Shown in three-quarters profile, the young sitter wears a uniform resembling those worn by cadets at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England.¹ Founded in 1741, the Royal Military Academy relocated from the barracks at Warren to Woolwich Common in 1806.² The required dress included a blue coat, red collar and cuffs, black stock, and lace ruffles.³ The epaulette seen here on the sitter’s left shoulder may indicate a merit promotion.⁴

The sitter’s style of dress, collar, and hair—cropped close at the sides and brushed forward at the crown—place the miniature within the first decade of the 1800s. Heaphy inscribed a card inside the miniature with an address he lived at from 1802 to 1806.⁵ The inscription also identifies Heaphy as official portraitist to the Princess of Wales, an appointment made in 1803.⁶ This further narrows the date of the miniature to 1803–6.

Although the sitter’s identity remains unknown, his boyish features and rosy cheeks suggest a young age. Indeed, Woolwich accepted cadets between the ages of fourteen and sixteen for a two- to three-year term, suggesting a rough age for the Nelson-Atkins sitter of between sixteen and nineteen.⁷ Cadets studied mathematics, fortification, drawing, geography, history, French, and German.⁸ Following training, they typically became commissioned officers in the British Army.⁹ This miniature is one of several military portraits by Heaphy, who served as staff artist to the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War (1808–1814).¹⁰

Notes

1. Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, “The Shop”: The Story of the Royal Military Academy (London: Cassell, 1900), 20, 22, 63. This discovery is thanks to Christopher Bryant, who compared the sitter’s uniform to that of a cadet at the Honourable East India Company (HEIC) at Addiscombe. Although the uniforms at Addiscombe were similar to those at Woolwich, Addiscombe did not open until 1809. Prior to this, HEIC cadets were trained at the Royal Military Academy. Bryant to the author, December 6, 2019, NAMA curatorial files.

2. “It was originally known as the Woolwich Warren, having begun on land previously used as a domestic warren in the grounds of a Tudor house, Tower Place”; J. M. Bourne, “The East India Company’s Military Seminary, Addiscombe, 1809–1858,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 57, no. 232 (Winter 1979): 206–22; Guggisberg, “The Shop,” 1, 42, 74; Brigadier Hogg, The Royal Arsenal Woolwich, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); Colonel H. M. Vibart, Addiscombe: Its Heroes and Men of Note (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1894), 3. The cadets’ barracks were located along the southern boundary wall of the Warren.

3. René Chartrand, “Royal Military College, Great Marlow 1903, 1807,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 62, no. 252 (Winter 1984): 248. This uniform existed at Woolwich between 1782 and 1807, at which point the collar color changed to blue.

4. According to a British Army document titled, “The History of RMA Sandhurst,” published in 2009, https://docplayer.net/6413152-The-history-of-rma-sandhurst.html. Unlike other military institutions, the Royal Military Academy (RMA) offered promotions according to merit, rather than through purchase. Typical cadet uniforms at the RMA were unadorned. An epaulette on the right shoulder typically denoted a corporal. No descriptions of the uniform relate an epaulette on the left shoulder, as seen in this miniature. For more information, see Guggisberg, “The Shop," 20, 22, 64, and pl. 3.

5. Heaphy lived at 83 Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place, between 1802 and 1806. See Jacob Simon, British Artists’ Suppliers, 1650–1950, 3rd ed. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2011), https://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/directory-of-suppliers/; “Tottenham Court Road and Neighbourhood,” part 3 of Survey of London, vol. 21, The Parish of St. Pancras, ed. J. R. Howard Roberts and Walter H. Godfrey (London: London County Council, 1949); Henry Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions (London: John Murray, 1891), 151–52; and William Whitley, Thomas Heaphy (1775–1835): First President of the Society of British Artists (London: The Royal Society of British Artists’ Art Club Publications, 1933), 29. In the late eighteenth century, Rathbone Place became a popular address for artists and artists’ suppliers. Fellow residents included the miniaturists Joseph Francis Burrell (1770–1854), Ozias Humphrey (1742–1810), and Nathaniel Hone (1718–1784).

6. Whitley, Thomas Heaphy (1775–1835), 12. It is unclear how long he retained this post, although he painted a portrait of the Princess of Wales as late as 1815; see Thomas Heaphy, Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, 1815, watercolor, 19 1/2 x 15 in. (49.5 x 38.1 cm), National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1914(19), https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01252/Princess-Charlotte-Augusta-of-Wales.

7. Guggisberg, “The Shop,” 63; Sir John Smyth, Sandhurst: The History of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, the Royal Military College Sandhurst and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, 1741–1961 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). Cadets entered the Academy between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, completing their studies in two to three years. Most cadets were the sons of military officers and members of the upper classes. The “gentleman cadets,” as people called them, trained to become junior officers.

8. Edward Mogg, “Victorian London—Entertainment and Recreation—Museums, Public Buildings and Galleries—Woolwich and Woolwich Arsenal,” Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights (London: Edward Mogg, 1844); Great Britain Army, Remarks on the Education of the Royal Artillery (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1848).

9. Guggisberg, “The Shop,” 74; official public examinations were deferred from 1793 to 1811, due to the high demand for cadets to join the army. In 1807, twenty-one cadets gained commissions for the Royal Artillery. This more than doubled the next year, when forty-nine cadets received commissions.

10. National Army Museum, London, “Napoleonic Wars: Peninsular War,” accessed December 14, 2021, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/peninsular-war; National Portrait Gallery, London, “Peninsular and Waterloo Officers: Watercolour Drawings by Thomas Heaphy, 1813–14,” accessed December 14, 2021, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/set/242/Peninsular+and+Waterloo+officers%3A+by+Heaph; Whitley, Thomas Heaphy (1775–1835), 20–22.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 193, as Unknown Officer (possibly Artist’s Son).

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 193, p. 65, (repro.), as Unknown Officer (possibly Artist’s Son).