A SWIFT PROFIT IN PORTRAIT OF FAMOUS WRITER

Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull have just sold the earliest supposed likeness of one of the greatest writers in English, Jonathan Swift, for a hefty £81,250. The portrait came to the market by direct descent from Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, who acquired it in 1801 as “a small portrait of Dean Swift”, and was offered for sale for the first time in 200 years.

Attributed to the Irish artist Thomas Pooley, the picture is a half-length portrait of Swift as a student in Dublin College. It was estimated at £30,000-£50,000.

First exhibited at South Kensington in 1867, for the next century it drifted in and out of public view. In 1898 the Dictionary of National Biography stated that its whereabouts were unknown.

It reappeared in the mid-1960s in the collection of a descendant of Percy’s and came to the attention of Swift scholars, at which point there first emerged an attribution to Thomas Pooley whose family had married into the Swift family.

Since then various experts have identified both the sitter and the painter, and the market certainly appears to agree with them.

Dublin-born Swift was an early AngloIrish writer and pamphleteer, and is best known today for Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, published in 1726. It is better known today, of course, as Gulliver’s Travels.

As with his other writings, Gulliver’s Travels was published under a pseudonym. A 2017 analysis of library holdings data revealed that the book was the most widely held work of Irish literature in libraries globally.

The portrait of Jonathan Swift.