Portraits with West Indian soldiers and attendants seeking attributions
Lieutenant Colonel (Deputy Adjutant General) Coote Manningham and two attendants. Image: The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum
The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum at Winchester has in its collection two full-length portraits of Major General Coote Manningham (1765-1809) and his brother Lieutenant Colonel Boyd Manningham (1766-97). They were received from descendants of these two brothers by the Rifle Brigade Museum in 1956. Framed, they are apparently unsigned and undated.
The two pictures appear to represent these officers in a landscape of a Caribbean island. However, unusually for the probable dates of paintings, the main subjects of both pictures are accompanied by West Indian soldiers. One figure in the Boyd Manningham picture (see below, in navy jacket) appears to have been modelled by the same person who is the ‘groom’ in the Coote Manningham picture (see left). The second figure in the former portrait represents a sergeant in the West India Regiment wearing a scarlet jacket and holding a halberd.
Coote Manningham returned to England from the Caribbean in 1798 and became an Equerry to George III. It is believed that the portraits were painted between 1798 and 1800 when he became Colonel of the Rifle Corps. He subsequently became a Major-General and died in 1809. In the portrait he is portrayed wearing the uniform of a deputy adjutant-general in the rank of lieutenant-colonel, a rank he continued to hold as an Equerry.
Lieutenant Colonel Boyd Manningham (below) died in Haiti in 1797 of tropical illness.
Lieutenant Colonel Boyd Manningham and two attendants. Image: The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum
It has been suggested that the choice of horse colour in Coote Manningham’s picture is also subtly highlighting the skin pigmentation of the various sitters: white/grey for Coote Manningham, black for the Caribbean groom and bay (reddish-brown) for the possibly indigenous West Indian sergeant.
Lieutenant Colonel (Deputy Adjutant General) Coote Manningham and two attendants. Image: The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum
The museum is seeking to identify the artist of these two pictures and would be particularly interested to hear from any other museum that may have portraits representing service in the West Indies during the period 1793 to 1815, or with West Indian soldiers as part of the composition. For more information please contact Blair Southerden, Volunteer researcher at [email protected] or David Lambert, Professor of History, Warwick University at [email protected], or leave a comment below.
Close up of groom standing behind the horse of Coote Manningham and who also appears in the
portrait of Boyd. Image: The Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum
