Daniel’s white shirt and voluminous collar are unbuttoned, and his gold-lined hat is cast to the side in favour of the musical instrument resting on the floor. Donning a subtle smile, the young boy appears to pause in the middle of banging his drum, seemingly caught “off-guard” as the artist his likeness. Daniel’s parents almost certainly chose Chamberlin to paint their only son’s portrait on account of his prominence within the Society of Artists and as portraitist of choice for the rising merchant class within the City of London.

Daniel Giles the younger (1761 – 1831), named after his father Daniel senior (c.1725 – 1800), is perhaps best remembered for his involvement in politics, and more specifically the Whig party, as well as his development of the Youngsbury estate, which, along with a £170,000 fortune, he inherited upon his father’s death in 1800. His reputation was that of ‘a pleasant, hospitable bachelor’; [1] indeed, he died at the Albany, within a newly formatted apartment that was especially rented to prominent bachelors, on Piccadilly.[2] His careful stewardship of Youngsbury – in addition to the lands accompanying Thundridge Manor, purchased in 1811, and bordering Youngsbury[3] - had a lasting impact on the estate.[4] His family's continued ownership of the land ensured that Youngsbury remained a symbol of his influence, even as the world around him changed with the advent of industrialization and the shifting political landscape. Giles’s life reflects the values and concerns of the landed gentry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—an era that saw a blend of traditional rural practices and the early stirrings of modernity.

Daniel Giles Snr (c.1725 – 1800), who probably commissioned this portrait, was the grandson of Protestant emigrees from Caen, France and was a self-made man who rose to the impressive role of Governor of the Bank of England. Indeed, he brushed shoulders with many of the cultural elite of the eighteenth century, including, John Julius Angerstein whose collection of art galvanised the founding of the National Gallery, London. Giles Senior purchased the Youngsbury estate in 1795, though sadly died five years later.

The Youngsbury estate consisted of 175 acres of woodland and parkland and was first owned by the influential Youngs family in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was then bought by the landowner Richard Wytherall in 1545. It eventually passed to David Poole, who, in about 1745, built a new mansion on high ground to the north of the old one, which he had demolished; it is believed that the architect James Paine was commissioned to work on the new building.[5] In 1769, Poole's widow sold the manor to David Barclay, who improved and enlarged the house (Fig. 1). The celebrated Capability Brown was commissioned to produce a plan for improving the park.[6] Although we do not know for certain who commissioned Capability Brown to undertake the landscaping - as the surviving plan has no name or date inscribed – Mrs Poole or her son Josiah might also have employed Brown, but David Barclay or a Colonel Monson (who had been living in the house prior to the sale), seem more likely.[7] The project was completed by 1793, when the estate was bought by William Cunliffe Shaw. Three years later, the estate was sold to Daniel Giles, and it remained in the family throughout the nineteenth century until it was possibly sold to F.W. Parrish in 1946, and then to Robert Cecil Byng (1904 – 1984), 7th Earl of Strafford (who might also have been a tenant). In the 1950’s Youngsbury spent time in the hands of the Arkwright family until it was acquired in 1969 by The Hon. Charles Anthony Savile (1934 – 2018).

Like the estate of Youngsbury, our portrait of Daniel Giles remained with his descendants; upon his death, the estate and its contents passed to his sister – given that he had no children of his own - and from there remained with her branch of the family. More recently, the painting hung at Moigne Combe House owned by the late the Major General Mark Bond, the last Bond family member in residence at this property (Fig. 3). Prior to Moigne Combe the Bonds were residents of the now derelict Tyneham House. It has been suggested that a Bond family ancestor, rumoured to be an Elizabethan spy, may have inspired the titular character of Ian Fleming’s famous books.[8]

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Our portrait was painted by Chamberlin in the mid-1760s. Born in the Bishopsgate area of the City of London in 1722, Chamberlin was orphaned at a young age and apprenticed to Jeremiah Pearce, a freeman of the Salters’ Company. At an early stage, Chamberlin swapped his apprenticeship for formal artistic training, most likely with the versatile portrait painter Francis Hayman (1708 – 1776), who specialised in conversation pieces. Eventually he opened his own portrait studio in Spitalfields, from where, during the 1760s, he would send approximately three paintings a year to be exhibited at the Society of Artists. In 1762, he received the commission to paint what would become his best-known work: a portrait of one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790). Although it was painted fifteen years before the Declaration of Independence, Franklin was already an internationally revered intellectual and its commission indicates the esteem in which Chamberlin was held at the time in London.[9]

Chamberlin’s most successful portraits are honest and lacking in pretention, the sitters usually of the professional and merchant classes. In 1768, Chamberlin joined with the country’s other leading artists and architects in petitioning the King to approve the foundation of a Royal Academy of Arts, becoming a Founder Member when it was approved later that year. He exhibited there exclusively for the rest of his life, his presentation piece being a portrait of the academy’s first Professor of Anatomy, Dr William Hunter (1718 – 1783). He spent the last years of his life living at 10 Bartlett’s Buildings in Holborn, where he died in 1787.[10]

[1] See: The History of Parliament: https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/giles-daniel-1761-1831#footnote1_uo7gzw2

[2] Anon., “Obituaries” from The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 102 (January 1832), p. 82.

[3] Sylvanus Urban Gent., The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, From January to June 1832, vol. 102, Pt. I, pg. 82.

[4] Interestingly, Dorothy Stroud makes note that it was Daniel Giles, Esq. who commissioned “An updated proposal by Lancelot Brown for the improvement of Youngsbury after remarking that Nature had do[ne] so much that little was wanting, but enlarging the river’, is now in Herts. C.R.O. The present course of the river corresponds roughly to that proposed on the plan”.

D. Stroud, Capability Brown, 1975, pp. 245 – 246.

[5] See: https://www.cowpergriffith.co.uk/youngsbury

[6] N. Pevsner and B. Cherry, The Buildings of England: Hertfordshire, 1977, p. 364.

[7] D. Spring, Hertfordshire Garden History: Gardens pleasant, groves delicious, 2012, vol. III, p. 110.

[8] The Bond family motto is ‘non sufficit orbis’, which translates as ‘the world is not enough’. This is James Bond’s fictional family motto in The World Is Not Enough. Fleming attended Durnford Preparatory School in Langton Matravers, Dorset, close to the Bond family home.

[9] C. Fox, Mason Chamberlin, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2004.

[10] See: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/mason-chamberlin-ra