John Smart, Portrait of Major William Davy, 1775

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “John Smart, Portrait of Major William Davy, 1775,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 4, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1538.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “John Smart, Portrait of Major William Davy, 1775,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 4, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2025. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1538.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This portrait of William Davy was painted at the time of his marriage to Harriet Preston on September 4, 1775, at St. Margaret’s Church, a fashionable venue for society weddings in eighteenth-century London.¹ It seems Davy had returned from London briefly, probably for the purpose of finding a wife to bring back to India, as he had been serving in the Bengal Army, beginning as a cadet, since March 31, 1767.² The son of Elizabeth Townsend and William Davy, an attorney who served in the prominent role of Prime Serjeant at Law to the King, the younger William Davy was rumored to have run away from Eton College to the West Indies as a teenager.³ The cadetship secured by his father in 1767 seems to have had a steadying effect, for Davy rose swiftly in prominence among the British in India for his scholarship and skill in the Persian language, now known as Farsi.⁴

This miniature is one of several portraits of sitters with close connections to India that Smart painted a decade before he himself departed for Madras (now Chennai). Despite water damage that has impacted the paint surface in the upper right, Davy’s portrait remains crisp and beautifully painted, with flesh tones rendered in shades of red and yellow. Smart’s use of blue-gray shadowing, particularly around the sitter’s eyes and his upper lip, may reflect the late nights often demanded of a devoted civil servant, although it is also akin to the flat, cool tones Smart had used to paint flesh in the 1760s. Davy sat twice for India-based portraitist Tilly Kettle (1735-1786), probably while both were in India, on one occasion wearing the same Bengal Army uniform painted by Smart, including the iconic British red coat and epaulettes denoting his rank as major.⁵ In the second portrait, in Davy’s professional role as a translator and intermediary, he has a Mughal mustache and wears a form of traditional Persian dress called “khalat,” which Beth Richards has argued was worn by Honourable East India Company representatives as a “symbolic metaphor for the Company” (Fig. 1).⁶

In 1781, Davy’s reputation as a translator and scholar of Persian studies was such that he was appointed Persian Secretary to Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal. The following year, he became Confidential Assistant to Major William Palmer at Lucknow.⁷ He was forced to resign his position in January 1784 due to ill health.⁸ He died on the ship home to England on June 12, 1784, leaving behind his widow, Harriet; their five young children;⁹ and a daughter born out of wedlock, to whom he left five hundred pounds in his will.¹⁰ The miniature was reframed or given a new case back after his death, with an inscription on mother-of-pearl—a material often used in mourning jewelry—marking his premature death at the age of thirty-nine years old.

Notes

1. St. Margaret’s is on the grounds of Westminster Abbey. Registers and Books of St. Margaret’s Church, ref. MA/01/03/003, The Dean and Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter, Westminster, London, digitized on ancestry.com. I am grateful to Jim Markland for his invaluable insight on William Davy; 2021–2022 correspondence in NAMA curatorial files.

2. Davy may have been born on February 20, 1742, according to a birth and baptismal record at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, that corresponds closely to his and his parents’ names, aside from the spelling of their surname as “Davie,” not uncommon at a time when the spelling of names was not yet standardized. However, the inscription on the back of the case suggests a birth year of 1745. Westminster Church of England Parish Registers, ref. STM/PR/8/14, City of Westminster Archives Centre, London, digitized on ancestry.com.

3. See the entry for his portrait attributed to Tilly Kettle, Major William Davy, Bengal Native Infantry, ca. 1780, oil on canvas laid down on board, 13 11/16 x 11 9/16 in. (34.8 x 29.4 cm), National Army Museum, London, accessed August 24, 2024, https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1981-01-21-1.

4. Davy’s contributions to scholarship include a translation, published posthumously, of the Tuzukat-i Timuri by the Mughal historian Abu Talib al-Hussayni: Abu Talib al-Hussayni, Institutes, Political and Military, of the Emperor Timour, trans. Major Davy, ed. Joseph White (Calcutta: Daniel Stuart, 1785).

5. Davy had risen to major, the Honourable East India Company’s highest rank, by February 1782. Beth Richards, “The East India Company’s Engagement with Indian Dress in England” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2019), 81. For the Kettle portrait, see n. 3.

6. Richards, “The East India Company’s Engagement with Indian Dress in England,” 22; see also 77–94. Davy also wears Persian dress in a 1772 group portrait, indicating that his adoption of Mughal costume was part of a longer-term habit of cultural performance. Tilly Kettle, Suja-ud-daulah, Nawab of Awadh, with Four Sons, General Barker and Military Officers, 1772, oil on canvas, 111 13/16 x 95 11/16 in. (284 x 243 cm), Victoria Memorial, Kolkata.

7. Major Palmer, who was ostracized by xenophobic British colonists for his marriage to a Mughal royal, Princess Bibi Faiz Bakhsh, was painted with his family by Johann Zoffany (1733–1810) during his time in India: Johann Zoffany, Major William Palmer with His Second Wife, the Mughal Princess Bibi Faiz Bakhsh, oil on canvas, 39 15/16 x 322 9/16 in. (101.5 x 127 cm), British Library, London, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/major-william-palmer-with-his-second-wife-the-mughal-princess-bibi-faiz-bakhsh-191213.

8. Major William Davy to Major-General Stibbert, January 20, 1784, National Archives of India, New Delhi, https://indianculture.gov.in/archives/letter-major-william-davy-major-general-stibbert-requesting-permission-resign-service-and.

9. Their children were Harriet (1777–1796), Elizabeth (1778–1835), William Gabriel (1779/80–1856), Edwin (b. 1780), and Charles William (1781–1855). “Gordon-Postma Family Tree-1,” digitized on ancestry.com.

10. Her name has been variously described as Zenut, Zeimat, or, most likely, Zemat, as Davy writes in his will: “I give and bequeath to my natural daughter Zemat Davy born at Benares in the East Indies now residing at my house in the City of Gloucester of the age of seven years or thereabouts the sum of five hundred pounds.” “Will of William Davy, Major of Infantry in the Service of the Honorable East India Company of Saint James Westminster, Middlesex,” PROB 11-1144-229, National Archives, Kew. She was born in about 1773, prior to his marriage to Harriet Preston. A woman whose name is recorded as “Zennet Davy,” born in 1773, died on June 21, 1853, in Barrackpore, Bengal, India. India, Select Deaths and Burials, 1719–1948, FHL film no. 498991, digitized on ancestry.com.

John W. (1905–2000) and Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1965;

Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1965.

Tilly Kettle, Major William Davy, Bengal Army, Persian Secretary to the Governor-General, in Persian Dress, ca. 1780, oil on board, 13 3/4 x 19 11/16 in. (35 x 50 cm), National Army Museum, London.

Tilly Kettle, Major William Davy, Bengal Native Infantry, ca. 1780, oil on canvas laid down on board, 13 11/16 x 11 9/16 in. (34.8 x 29.4 cm), National Army Museum, London.

John Smart—Miniaturist: 1741/2–1811, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 9, 1965–January 2, 1966, no cat.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 101.

John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, December 21, 2024–January 4, 2026, no cat., as Portrait of Major William Davy.

Daphne Foskett, John Smart: The Man and His Miniatures (London: Cory, Adams, and Mackay, 1964), x, pl. X (repro.).

Daphne Foskett, “Miniatures by John Smart: The Starr Collection in the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum,” Antiques 90, no. 3 (September 1966): 354, (repro.).

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 101, p. 39, (repro.),

Jim Markland, My Name is William Davy: Major Davy Sahib, the Munshi of Gloster, a Tale of Life, Love, and Loss (Cheltenham: printed by the author, 2021), 56, 73, 107, (repro.).