JOHN FERNELEY, SEN. (BRITISH, 1781-1860)

The sitters are the children of George Marriott (1774-1848), the ‘Sporting Draper’ of John Ferneley’s native Melton Mowbray and a popular figure in the Quorn Hunt (Major G. Paget and L. Irving, The Flying Parson, Leicester, 1934, p. 21). Yet, despite being a ‘very heavy weight’, George was described by legendary huntsman Dick Christian as one of the ‘Blue Coats’: ‘such crashers, they’d hardly wait for hounds to get on the scent’ (op. cit., pp. 21, 207). Ferneley knew the Marriotts well and made several paintings of Marriott and his family between 1815 and 1849, including one painted in 1844 of ‘Old George’ leaping a fence, now in the collection of the Earl of Kintore, another of Mrs Marriott and a third of Mrs Marriott’s horse (see Major G. Paget, The Melton Mowbray of John Ferneley (1782-1860), Leicester, 1931, pp. 149, 151, nos. 549, 640 and 604, respectively).