As a rule, you can’t tell how people earn their money by looking at them. Even Thomas Hibbert could not be seen what his “family business” was. In a red coat, under which a white ruffled shirt peeks out, the friendly-looking face and the wavy hair powdered in the style of the time, he stands casually leaning against a tree root in an idyllic, romantic landscape. That he himself, like his ancestors, made his fortune with the slave trade – no, you can’t tell by looking at him.
The Hibberts from the north of England achieved wealth and influence in the 18th century – thanks to their trade connections to the Caribbean and the associated slave economy. Thomas, born in 1744, worked in his uncle’s company in Kingston, Jamaica, from 1766 to 1780. After the death of his uncle, he returned to England and from then on led a rather secluded life at his newly acquired and lavishly remodeled country home, Chalfont Park, in Buckinghamshire. In 1784 he married Sophia Boldero, who came from a London banking family, and soon commissioned two portraits from one of the leading portrait painters in British society, Thomas Gainsborough. When the marriage was dissolved in 1796, each of the two took their portrait with them.
Since 1978 the portrait of Sophia Hibbert by Thomas Gainsborough has been in the collection of the Neue Pinakothek on loan from the Munich Pinakothek Association.
(Photo: Bavarian State Painting Collections)
Since 1978 the portrait of Sophia Hibbert has been in the collection of the Neue Pinakothek on loan from the Munich Pinakothek Association. The elegant lady – undulating and powdered, wearing a feather hat and a pastel-colored dress – sits in a setting very similar to that of her former husband: a landscape whose perspective opens backwards. A trick that Thomas Gainsborough liked to use to depict sophistication and closeness to nature in the style of that time.
Recently, Mrs. and Mr. Hibbert have been reunited in a Munich museum. Freshly framed – based on the model of the frame on a male portrait – both look at the visitors of the Alte Pinakothek. And again it was him Pinakothek Associationwho made the acquisition possible. As CEO Elisabeth zu Sayn-Wittgenstein explained when presenting the portraits, it was Gainsborough’s House, a museum in England, that approached the Pinakotheks-Verein and offered Thomas Hibbert’s portrait. In addition to the association itself, several donors from the board of trustees and from among the sponsors and members contributed to the financing, as did the Rudolf August Oetker Foundation and the Dr. Helmut Roeschinger.
The collection of British paintings in the Neue Pinakothek is one of the largest on the European continent, according to the Pinakothek. It now owns five works by Thomas Gainsborough, more than any other European museum outside the British Isles.