Wright, Joseph: American buyer paid a record £3.8m for portrait

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The recent sale of a Joseph Wright portrait for a record £3.8m has prompted Maxwell Craven to delve into the history of the man pictured, a member of the well-heeled yet left-leaning Milnes family who made their money as lead and cloth merchants and went on to become mayors, MPs, colonial governors and even viceroys.

IT seems to have escaped attention locally that a major Derby record was broken last month.

A record price was obtained at auction for a Joseph Wright portrait – a whopping £3.8m – seven times the estimate.

Not only is the artist our very own Joe Wright but the sitter was a man of impeccable Derbyshire ancestry too, although he was described as a Yorkshireman in the catalogue.

He was Robert Shore Milnes, of Wakefield, pictured as a young captain of The Blues – the Royal Horse Guards – a commission which he had just purchased when the portrait was done in 1772.

The 25-year-old Milnes is shown attired and ready for action, waiting in a sun- dappled glade for his groom to bring up his charger. He had bought a commission – sub-lieutenant – as was inevitable in those days, in 1770, and he remained in the regiment until just after 1788, by which time he had risen to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

He then entered the colonial service, becoming Governor of Martinique, later of Lower Canada and, after the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars, the acting Governor of Quebec.

The latter was something of a bed of nails as the French majority of that province, reluctantly bundled into the British Empire by virtue of Wolfe’s victory there in 1759, were being greatly stirred up by the divided allegiances the war provoked.

Milnes, however, made a success of it and in 1801 was rewarded with the baronetcy of Gaulby (now Galby), Leicestershire, although I can find no evidence that he ever lived there. He died in December 1837, one of the few Wright sitters to live into the Victorian age.

The family were long rooted in Derbyshire and Robert was only a Wakefield man because his grandfather and great uncle, Robert and John, had settled in that town, setting up as cloth merchants in the 1690s.

The two brothers were the sons of Richard Milnes, of Tapton Hall and Chesterfield, who was a rich lead merchant. Richard had four sons and there was probably no scope for all of them in the family lead business, hence the two settling in Wakefield.

The eldest of the four was Richard, Mayor of Chesterfield in 1734, and the other, who stayed in Derbyshire, was James.

The Milneses earliest traceable ancestor was 16th century William, of Ashford, even then trading in lead, in a modest way.

He married an Eyre of Dunston, which greatly helped, and their eldest son acquired a house in Chesterfield and was Mayor there in 1625. A descendant was simultaneously Mayor of Derby and Chesterfield in 1762!

The senior branch held Dunston Hall for generations before passing it to distant kinsmen of mine who now live at Winkburn, Nottinghamshire.

John Milnes, the father of Wright’s sitter, married Mary, the daughter of a Sheffield banker, whose family, like the Milneses, came originally from Derbyshire.

Mary’s brother purchased the Norton Hall estate in Derbyshire, although inevitably this well-heeled parish was eventually snatched by Sheffield in the 1930s in order to boost the city’s rate income.

The Milnes family became exceptionally wealthy in Wakefield, being one of the greatest cloth-exporting houses of the time. Their main trade was with Russia, and it is said that the Milneses had clad the entire Imperial Russian army by the time Catherine the Great died.

They also built four very grand houses along Westgate, Wakefield, at least two of them designed by John Carr of York. Unfortunately, the last was demolished in 1960 after a stint with one wing adapted as the local railway station!

With his siblings and neighbours, the elder John set up the Westgate Chapel in 1752, for they were Unitarians. As with so many people come into serious money, they had the leisure to be ferociously radical and sufficient wealth to endow them with a social conscience.

Both Milnes brothers supported the American Revolution and the earlier parts of the French one, although, in common with Erasmus Darwin and his circle, they were quickly repelled by the excesses of the Terror.

Robert Shore Milnes’s brother John Jnr – also painted by Wright in 1776 and one of the painter’s most important patrons – was actually in Paris thrilling to the drama of it all in 1791-92.

In fact, he fathered a natural son by a local bluestocking in 1992 whom he named, in a fit of revolutionary zeal, Alfred Mirabeau Washington Milnes!

Perhaps this is why, when sold by the 12th Duke of St Albans, the picture was acquired by the Louvre, in Paris.

Later generations of the family sat in parliament as radical Liberals. Richard Milnes, Robert Shore Milnes’s uncle, acquired the fortune of a Liverpool slaver, bought the Friston Hall estate not far from Wakefield and his grandson, Richard, became the first of four generations of radical Milnes MPs.

The last was Robert, whose stint as Viceroy of Ireland earned him the Earldom of Crewe. He later went on to be a cabinet minister under Asquith, ending up 1st Marquess of Crewe.

The picture was bought this time, not by a Paris gallery but by the London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni on behalf of an American. Perhaps this anonymous collector was influenced by the family support for the American colonists in 1776-1782!

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