Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Hester Jane Ogle, 1775/76–1817) and Her Son (Charles Brinsley Sheridan, 1796–1843) by John Hoppner
John Hoppner painted this portrait of Hester Jane Ogle and her son Charles in 1798. It now hangs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but for nearly a hundred years nobody knew where it was.
She was married to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the most celebrated comic playwright of his age and the owner of Drury Lane Theatre. He was also, famously, a disaster with money. When the theater burned to the ground in 1809, he reportedly sat in a coffee house across the street, watching it go up, and remarked that a man might surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside. The joke did not save him. He died in debt, and bailiffs seized the family home.
The portrait was thought lost until 1934, when it appeared in a London auction catalog. Somewhere along the way, a dealer had carefully cut the canvas to remove Hoppner's signature, presumably to obscure its identity and dodge the original estate's claims. The painting had passed through hands that knew they were hiding something.
Charles was a child when the portrait was made and a young man when his father's ruin scattered the household. He never had a chance to inherit the image of his mother holding him close. The painting survived the scandal, the debt, the knife, and the silence. Now it takes up a whole wall.
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Transcript
This portrait disappeared for nearly a century. She was married to the most talked-about playwright in London. Her husband, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, burned down his own theater. Look at her hands, painted to signal grace under pressure. After his death, debt collectors seized everything. The painting vanished. In 1934, it resurfaced at auction, with a fake signature. A dealer had cut off Hoppner's name to hide the theft. The boy grew up with no portrait of his mother.