Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand

Margaret Sarah Carpenter was born Margaret Geddes in Salisbury, Wiltshire; the daughter of a retired army officer. She studied under a local artist and copied Old Master paintings at the Earl of Radnor’s Longford Castle. The Earl helped fund her move to London in 1813, following which she won three gold medals at the Society of Arts. In c.1815 she was a pupil of Thomas Lawrence. She married William Hookham Carpenter and had eight children, three of whom died in infancy. Three surviving children would become painters. She lived in Marylebone before moving to the British Museum in 1852, her husband being Keeper of Prints and Drawings. She received over 100 commissions from Eton College and produced some 1,100 works in total, exhibiting 263.
Samuel Cousins was a well known mezzotint engraver of portraits and decorative subjects after his contemporaries and 18th-century British artists. Born in Exeter, he was the pupil of, and assistant to, the engraver S. W. Reynolds. Cousins set up his own business in London in 1825 and would later become the first engraver to be elected a Royal Academician. He engraved plates after the foremost artists of his day including Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873), Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) and Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873). His younger brother Henry Cousins (c.1809-1864) was also a mezzotint engraver.

People

Coleridge, Sir John Taylor

Places

Subjects

book, reading (as Subject), male portrait, legal costume, wig, judge, Privy Counsellor, armchair

Materials & Techniques

mezzotint

Artist

Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793 - 1872)
Samuel Cousins (1801 - 1887)

Title

Sir John Taylor Coleridge (1790-1876) judge

Date

Medium

Mezzotint

Acquisition

Purchased from Mrs Dorothy Lane, February 1958

GAC number

4512