ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS GIBSON (LONDON C. 1680-1751)

A grandson of the 4th Earl of Bedford, Admiral Edward Russell was a distinguished Royal Navy officer and politician. Following a brief education at St John’s College, Cambridge, he entered the Navy in 1666, aged thirteen, and saw action at the Battle of Solebay in 1672. Most notably, Russell was one of the ‘Immortal Seven’, the group of English noblemen and senior military commanders who in 1688 issued the Invitation to William, a letter to stadtholder William III, Prince of Orange, promising allegiance and military support in his attempt to depose King James II. Russell was well-rewarded for his role in the Glorious Revolution; the following year he joined the Privy Council and assumed the lucrative role of Treasurer of the Navy.

Russell’s decorated career reached its apex in 1690 when he was appointed Admiral of the Fleet, and then Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, in which capacity he led the Anglo-Dutch fleet that destroyed the French fleet at the battles of Barfleur and La Hogue in 1692. He later commissioned Willem van de Velde the Younger to immortalise these naval memories in paint (see lots 51-54). In England, Russell would go on to serve as MP in three seats, for Launceston, Portsmouth, and Cambridgeshire, and in 1697 was created Baron Shingay, Viscount Barfleur and Earl of Orford. He had acquired Chippenham Park in Cambridgeshire from a distant relative in 1688, which he remodelled and expanded at great expense. In 1691 he married his cousin, Lady Margaret Russell, youngest daughter of the 5th Earl of Bedford. He died, without issue, at Covent Garden in 1727 and was buried in the Russell family vault at St Michael’s Church in Chenies, Buckinghamshire.

The head in the present work appears closest to a three-quarter-length painting given to Thomas Gibson, in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (inv. no. BHC2991).