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John Lucas (1807-1844) John Lucas was born in London in 1807. He became a portrait painter and engraver and established a successful practice as a fashionable society portraitist. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1828 through to his death in 1874. Included in these exhibitions were ninety-six portraits of royalty and well-known scientists, politicians and statesmen. A number of his paintings were copied for engravings or
lithographs and his portrait of Hardwicke is included in this
group. It was lithographed by Louis Haghe and published in
1831 and used as the frontispiece for Illustrations of
Indian Zoology. Lucas died at his home in St. John’s
Wood Road, London in 1874.
Major-General Thomas Hardwicke (1756-1835) There is no record of Thomas Hardwicke’s exact date and place of birth but as some of his close family were established in the Fen District of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire it is thought that his origins are from this region. It is known that at the age of twenty-two, in 1778, he entered the military service of the Honourable East India Company, enrolling as a Country Cadet. His years in the service saw a great deal of military action in which he was wounded at least once. By 1819, Hardwicke had risen through the ranks to become Major- General and from 1820 was Commandant of Artillery until his retirement in 1823. On his retirement Hardwicke returned to England to live in London and devoted his time to the pursuit of science, particularly natural history. He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1804 and the Royal Society in 1813. He was also an active member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Royal Asiatic Society of London. His interest in natural history led him to become a firm supporter of Sir Stamford Raffles in his struggle to form the Zoological Society and Hardwicke became one of its founding members in 1828. Thomas Hardwicke amassed a large and splendid collection of natural history books, specimens and drawings during his years in India and in his retirement in London. He possessed specimens of animals, insects and birds from around the world as skeletons, skins and in spirit jars. He also had cabinets of shells, fossils, minerals and rocks. The greater part of his collection numerically was of birds from around the world and these formed part of his “Museum room” at his house in Lambeth. His collection of drawings was equal to that of his specimens and it was from this collection that Hardwicke selected images for the plates in his work Illustrations of Indian Zoology, published in 1830-1834 in collaboration with John Edward Gray. Hardwicke died in Lambeth in 1835. He never married but did
father five children during his years in India, and it is
known that at least two of these children married and came
to live in England. In his will he left an annuity of four
hundred Rupees to a woman named Fyzbuhsh, who resided in India.
It is understood that this woman was probably the mother of
his children. He also bequeathed in his will, his natural
history collections to the British Museum.
Hardwicke sat for three portrait artists. The first portrait was by William Hawkins and presented to the British Museum by John Gray, Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum from 1840 to 1874. Another by Daniel Maclise was executed in 1828 and a third was by John Lucas, very probably completed some time between 1828 and 1830. It is this third painting that is exhibited here.
Exhibition and publication details Thackray, J. C. A. (1995) A catalogue of portraits, paintings and sculpture at the Natural History Museum London. Mansell: London. 70pp.
References and further reading Dawson, W. R. (1946) On the History of Gray and Hardwicke’s Illustrations of Indian Zoology, and Some Biographical Notes on General Hardwicke. The Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, Vol.2 Part 3, pp.55-69. Matthew, H. C. G. ; Harrison, B. (eds.) (2004) John Lucas
(1807-1874). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Vol.34, pp.681-682. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
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