A full-length portrait of a male figure, shown standing in Windsor Uniform with insigna of the Order of the Garter. Windsor Castle can be seen in the background.

This portrait belongs to a large group of drawings in the Royal Collection by Henry Edridge, the prime versions of which were commissioned by George III. Several versions of the same portrait, with small variations, were made by Edridge, doubtless as a result of further royal commissions.

As a young man Edridge was apprenticed to the portrait engraver William Pether. He later attended the Royal Academy Schools, and from 1786 he exhibited as a miniaturist at the Royal Academy. It is for small full-length portrait drawings that he is best known. These are as evocative of their period as are those by Ingres of sitters in early nineteenth-century France or Rome.

In his diary the landscape painter and Royal Academician Joseph Farington records the two periods of sitting which George III, Queen Charlotte and their children granted Edridge, the first in summer 1802 and the second early in the following year. Farington records that on 20 June 1802 Edridge was at Windsor making drawings of the Princesses, ‘but is obliged to wait their time & has them not to sit more than an hour in a day’. Of the later sitting, Farington noted on 25 January 1803: ‘Edridge has been at Windsor 7 weeks making drawings of the Royal family.’ In this portrait, evidently made in the summer of 1802, the King’s fifth son,

Prince Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, is depicted against the fortifications of Windsor Castle. He wears Windsor Uniform, a form of dress which was introduced by George III in 1779, comprising a tail coat of dark blue cloth with scarlet collar and cuffs; he also wears insignia of the Order of the Garter.

In the Royal Residences (published in 1819) Pyne describes a group of these ‘whole-length portraits in small’ hanging in the Yellow Bed-Room at Frogmore: ‘Upon the walls of this chamber are several drawings in that tasteful and light manner of uniting the brilliancy of coloured flesh with the freedom of the black-lead pencil, which distinguished the work of Edridge before he adapted his present rich and more elaborate manner’.

Signed and dated Edridge 1802

Catalogue entry adapted from George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London, 2004