General, The Hon. William Hervey (1732-1815)

attributed to Johann Zoffany, RA (Frankfurt am Main 1733 - Kew 1810). Oil painting on canvas (oval), General, The Hon. William Hervey (1732-1815), attributed to Johann Zoffany, RA (Frankfurt am Main 1733 - Kew 1810), 1766. An oval three-quarter-length portrait of a man, turned and gazing to the right, standing in a landscape, wearing a scarlet uniform of the 1st Guards with black lapels and silver frogging, his right hand on his hip, his left hand holding a stick; short dark brown hair; landscape background. Inscribed 'Colonel William Hervey' centre top. Hw was the fourth son of John, Lord Hervey (1696-1743) and Mary Lepel, daughter of Brig.-General Nicholas Lepel. Unmarried. He accompanied General Braddock’s expedition to North America as a volunteer in the 44th Essex Regiment in 1755, returning in 1763, when for a few years he represented Bury in Parliament. Captain and Colonel 1st Guards in 1776. He was made a general in 1798. His 58 small notebooks, which cover the years 1755-1815, and which were edited by S.H.A. Hervey and published in 1906, reveal him to have been a great traveller but an ‘impersonal and limited, though immensely curious about everything,’ observer. He spent a month in the Veneto, as part of an extensive European tour in 1766, and made a longer visit to Italy from April 1772 to June 1773, when he enlisted in one of James Byre’s courses in Rome (with John Staples, Richard Neville, and Thomas Orde – but he has never been identified as one of the protagonists in the Roman Conversation-Piece by John Brown, of which there are versions at Springhill [NT] and Audley End). In 1787 Carlo Labruzzi dedicated to him a series of engravings of figures suitable for insertion into landscape paintings, and in 1788-90 he made a final sojourn in Rome. His notebooks reveal him to have been a generous and charitable figure to the poor and unfortunate. Ickworth, Suffolk (Accredited Museum)