Andrew Carrick Gow, R.A. (1848-1920)

The Kit-Cat Club was the best known of the many clubs that sprang up in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries, where men could meet to discuss politics, literature and the news of the town. The group, whose avowed aim was to uphold the Protestant succession following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, first met in a tavern near Temple Bar owned by Christopher Cat, whose mutton pies or 'Kit-Cats' gave the club its name. Its fame endures owing to the series of portraits of members now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, each measuring 36 x 28 inches - a format that became a stock size known as a 'kit-cat'.

It was the custom of the club to drink an annual toast to a lady. The Duke of Kingston one year proposed his daughter, and while members initially had misgivings on account of her youth, they were delighted when they saw her: Lady Mary Wortley Montague, was later celebrated as a wit, beauty and masterly letter writer. The subject appealed to other artists: William Frederick Yeames exhibited his version at the Royal Academy in 1884, no. 332.