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Lot Essay
The Hon. Richard FitzPatrick was an Anglo-Irish soldier, poet and Whig politician, who sat in the House of Commons for 39 years (1774-1813). The younger son of John FitzPatrick, 1st Earl of Upper Ossory, and Lady Evelyn Leveson-Gower, daughter of the 1st Earl Gower, he was educated at Eton, where he met Charles James Fox, a lifelong friend – FitzPatrick’s epitaph would declare him 'for more than forty years the friend of Mr. Fox'.
Richard FitzPatrick’s sister Lady Mary FitzPatrick (1746-1778) married Charles James Fox’s brother, Stephen Fox, 2nd Baron Holland and they had a son, who became the 3rd Baron Holland and a daughter, the Hon. Caroline Maria Fox (1767-1845). After a military career which saw service in the American Revolutionary War in 1777, Richard FitzPatrick returned to England where he cared for his sister Lady Holland during her fatal illness. He became MP for Okehampton and, in what was to be a long political career, served as Chief Secretary for Ireland (1782-1782), and Secretary at War (1783, and again later 1806-1807), and was promoted to the rank of general by 1803.
Richard and Mary’s half-sister by their mother’s second marriage to Richard Vernon (1726-1800), Henrietta Vernon, married George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick (1746-1816) in 1776. They had four children, the oldest of whom was Henry Greville, later 3rd Earl of Warwick, styled Lord Brooke from 1786-1816. It is he who is named on the base of the bronze and it was to him that the bronze was given by his cousin Caroline Fox – she clearly held their shared uncle in great esteem, not least as the one who had cared for her mother in her final months.
It is not known whether Richard FitzPatrick went on the Grand Tour (he is not recorded in the Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800), however, this bronze would almost certainly have been bought by FitzPatrick or one of his contemporaries at the workshop of Giacomo (c. 1731–1785) and Giovanni Zoffoli (c. 1745–1805), one of the most important in Rome during the 18th century. Specialising in the reproduction of small bronzes for the Grand Tour Market, their foundry was located in the via degli Avignonesi, off the strada Felice, and was a great favourite of English collectors.
Whilst the intervening provenance for the bronze has not thus far been traced, it is likely that it formed part of the celebrated collections at Warwick Castle.