Canvas Stamps on the back of the Rice Portrait

During the late eighteenth century, like all linen, artist’s canvas was subject to taxation.The law stated that prepared linen was required to be stamped with three different marks - firstly a frame mark showing the size of the cloth, secondly a crown stamp and thirdly a stamp showing the name of the printer, stainer, painter or dyer of the cloth. Because the Rice Portrait has at some point been cut down one side, only a fragment of the crown stamp remains and the frame mark which would have shown the dimensions is absent altogether. The name of the linen supplier remains; the stamp is indistinct but appears to read:

Wm. Legg

High Holbo[u?]rn[1?]

LINEN

The canvas stamp was revealed when the Rice Portrait was restored and relined in 1985 but it was not until March 1994 that the restorer wrote a report in which she mentioned that there was a linen stamp on the back of the Rice Portrait which read Wm. Legg, High Holborn, London.

Jacob Simon, Regency Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, made the assumption that the stamp on the back of the Rice Portrait was made by the same individual whose stamp had been identified on two other paintings dating from the early nineteenth century, which bore the stamp of ‘Wm & J Legg, High Holborn, London’. These individuals were William and John Legg, brothers from Reading who traded from 161 High Holborn for a short period at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the death of the previous occupant, the colourman James Poole, who died on 6 July 1801. According to the NPG website, their successor, Thomas Brown, was in occupation at 161 High Holborn by late 1806. As Jacob Simon notes on the NPG website, it was in the period 1801/1802 until 1805/1806, and only in this period, that the Leggs, whether William, John or James, were trading in High Holborn. The National Portrait Gallery continue to deny the Rice Portrait is correct, solely on the basis of this linen stamp.

The Rice Portrait is painted by Ozias Humphry and therefore must have been painted before 1797 when failing eyesight meant Humphry stopped painting. So how can the Legg stamp on the back of the portrait be explained?

There are several possibilities. The stamp could belong to a different individual. It could be the same individual trading in High Holborn at an earlier date. Or the stamp may have been placed on the canvas at some point after it was painted. We examine each of these possibilities below.

It is a different William Legg

The stamp could belong to a different William Legg, trading in High Holborn at an earlier date. This is not as unlikely as first appears. High Holborn was the centre of the linen district in eighteenth century London; there were hundreds of linen sellers trading in the area at that time and records from before 1800 are extremely patchy. For example, allthough the NPG’s directory of artist suppliers is very comprehensive, there are at least four colourmen trading on High Holborn at the end of the eighteenth century who are not in the NPG’s records and we only know about those because they took out insurance with a company who happened to keep the records or because they left a will. Many more would have left no record whatsover.

It could be an older relative. The Legg brothers had an uncle called William Legg living in London. Or it could be another William Legg from a different family altogether. A prominent family by the name of Legg traded at 70 Cornhill in London from at least 1726 as woollen drapers at ‘the sign of the Legg’. It is possible that a William Legg from that family traded in linen at High Holborn in the late eighteenth century. There was also a William Daniel Legg, ‘a Citizen and Haberdasher’, trading in London at the time. As Thomas Woodcock from the College of Arms wrote to Henry Rice in 2008, ‘Legg was a surprisingly common surname in the 18th century.’

Different linen suppliers often had similar style stamps so the fact that Wm Legg and W&J Legg’s are similar is not surprising - compare, for example the linen stamp of William Legg on the Rice Portrait (far left) with the stamps of James Poole, W&J Legg and Thomas Brown (below).

the same WILLIAM LEGG TRADED at high holborn at an earlier date

The Legg brothers only traded in High Holborn for a short time and during that time it is his older brother, John, not William, who is listed on the records; there is no evidence whatsoever that William Legg traded alone at high Holborn between 1801/2 and 1805/6.

Before the Legg brothers took over the business, 161 High Holborn was occupied by the colourman James Poole, who died on 06 July 1801. It ts curious that the Legg brothers were building coaches in Reading, then came to London in 1801 and ran the colourman’s business, then reverted to coachbuilding after three or four years, when Thomas Brown took over the colourman’s business. It is possible that they ran the business merely as caretakers until a suitable buyer could be found.

It is interesting that later, in 1842, ‘Young’ Thomas Brown claimed that he, his father who was also Thomas Brown, and his father's predecessor, James Poole, had between them supplied all the Royal Academy’s Presidents up to that time. That the short period when the Legg brothers ran the shop was ignored further suggests that the Legg brothers’ tenure was only ever temporary. See NPG website HERE under Canvases and Canvas Suppliers.

The first record of James Poole trading at 161 High Holborn was 1785; he does not appear on any records before then. This was exactly the same year that William Legg’s father George died and William and John took over their father’s coachmaking business in Reading. We have no records for William Legg between his birth in Reading in 1760 and his taking over his father's business in 1785 at the age of 25. It is at least a possibility that he was trading as a linen supplier in High Holborn prior to 1785 but returned to Reading to take over his father's business in that year. This would explain why he was chosen with his brother to return to London after Poole's death to run the business on a temporary basis.1785 was only three years before we believe the Rice Portrait was commissioned - it is possible that Ozias Humphry bought his canvas in High Holborn before he left for India at the end of 1784 but didn’t use it until 1788.(Or that he re-used it as was often the case, linen being expensive at that time.)

The stamp is not contemporaneous with the portrait

As noted above, linen was taxed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and there was strict legislation in place governing the stamping of linen. Three stamps were required, a frame mark, a crown stamp and a name stamp. Usually these stamps are to be found close together as would be expected if the three stamps were all applied at the same time.

This can be seen in the following examples:

However in the case of the Rice Portrait, the crown stamp and the name-stamp are not close together, but are around 12 inches apart:

The legislation governing linen duty was very clear. Not only were stamps required at the time the linen was sold but the legislation governing linen duty specifically required the re-stamping of canvasses where the original marks had been obliterated or removed. It is possible that the name stamp for William Legg on the Rice Portrait was not applied at the same time as the picture was painted but was added later, perhaps on its being lined or re-sized for a new frame. If that work involved the destruction of the original marks, then according to law the canvas would have had to be re-stamped by the person carrying out that work. This would explain the unusual positioning of the stamps relative to one another.

While it is true that the portrait would have been less than twenty years old at that stage, it could easily have been worked on and then re-stamped at a later date. The diary of Joseph Faringdon, a contemporary of Ozias Humphry, records that works by Joshua Reynolds were cleaned and significantly restored by his former assistant Marchi, only four years after Reynolds’ death. Faringdon also reports that Ozias Humphry accused Marchi of causing damage to a painting Humphry had sent to him for cleaning. Any number of interventions could have resulted in the canvas needing to be re-stamped.

Time, repair and restoration have taken their toll and only fragmentary evidence now remains. But that the stamp was applied later seems to us to be a much more likely proposition than the National Portrait Gallery’s insistence that the presence of a stamp for Wm Legg on the Rice Portrait MUST mean that the portrait dates to after 1801.

CONCLUSION

Ozias Humphry’s signature has been identified on old photographic plates of the Rice Portrait by a leading forensic expert. Two experts have independently corroborated that Humphry’s monogram is on the painting and several art experts have stated that the Rice Portrait accords with Humphry’s style. Humphry was known to be a friend of the Austens and painted other members of the family. The painting has solid provenance back to Jane Austen’s generation and to people that had known her personally. To deny all this evidence on the basis that there is a canvas stamp on the back of the portrait, the presence of which can be accounted for by several alternative explanations, is patently absurd.