Sir Wadham Wyndham

Portrait of Sir Wadham Wyndham (1609-1668), Justice of the King’s Bench three-quarter-length, in judge’s robes and black coif, a scroll in his left hand, inscribed and dated ‘1660/CMNX’, his right hand resting on a table covered with the turkey carpet. Studio of John Michael Wright (1617-1694). This portrait has double-significance. The sitter was a distinguished judge at a time of political, cultural and social change; the artist, born and buried in London, worked for the English court and was appointed Picture Drawer in Ordinary to the King in 1673. Sir Wadham Wyndham (29 October 1609 – 24 December 1668) born at Orchard Wyndham, Somerset, was the ninth son of Sir John Wyndham (1609-1668). Educated at Wadham College, Oxford, he entered Lincoln’s Inn in October 1628 and was called to the Bar in May 1636. He was made a Serjeant-at-Law by royal authority in 1660, and took part in the prosecution of the regicides. In 1660 - the date on the scroll in the portrait - Wyndham was appointed a Judge of the King’s Bench (24 November) and was knighted by Charles II (4 December). After the Great Fire of London in 1666, questions arose concerning landlords, tenants, and occupiers of buildings destroyed in the fire. An Act of Parliament (18 & 19 Chas. II, c. 7) established the ‘Court of Fire Judges’, in which Sir Wadham, along with his brother Sir Hugh (and 20 other judges from the King’s Bench, Court of Common Pleas and Court of Exchequer), presided. The Court sat at Clifford’s Inn and focused primarily on deciding who would pay for a property to be rebuilt. The cases were usually heard in rapid succession, with the verdicts given on the same day; effectively avoiding complex legal disputes which would otherwise have dragged on for years. The judges worked for free, three to four days a week and in recognition of their great service to the victims, City and nation, the Court of Aldermen ordered on that ‘their portraits be taken by a skillfull hand and kept in some publique place of the Citty for a greatefull memorial of this good office’(19 April 1670). The artist charged with this great work was John Michael Wright and it is possible that the earlier portrait of Sir Wadham, was used as a model for the full-length portraits which he completed in one year. Just two of the portraits (those of Sir Matthew Hale and Sir Hugh Wyndham) remain in the Guildhall’s collection today, the remainder having been destroyed or dispersed.

Sir John Hawles (c.1645-1716) Solicitor-General from 1695, commented that Sir John Wyndham was ‘the second best judge which sat in Westminster Hall since the King’s restoration.’ (State trials, 9.1003). The Museum has in its collection, the Fire Court Judges’ table from Clifford’s Inn, so the portrait could be shown with it in a Great Fire display at the new museum. Alternatively, Wyndham’s links with the trials of the regicides offers possibilities for display in a section on the Civil Wars and Restoration capital. John Michael Wright (1617-1694), the son of a London tailor with Scottish associations, was apprenticed in Edinburgh in 1636 to the portrait painter, George Jamesone. After a lengthy stay in Rome in the 1640s during which he became a Roman Catholic, he worked for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, before settling in London in 1656. Wright worked on occasion for the court and was appointed Picture Drawer in Ordinary to the King in 1673, but his clients increasingly came from the margins of the court and particularly from the catholic nobility and gentry. One of the most distinctive British-born painters of the seventeenth century, Wright had a confident approach to his sitters and a subtle sense of colour. He is the only British painter to have become a member of the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome.