The Town Clerk of Brecon and His Family (verso)

This verso painting of a Town Clerk of Brecon and his family, now at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, shares its support with another composition on the recto. The double-sided painting suggests either Hayter’s economy with materials or a later reuse of the panel. The subject’s identification with Brecon connects the painting to the Welsh provincial world that supplied many of the lesser-known sitters in Hayter’s parliamentary portrait project. George Hayter was the preeminent British history and portrait painter of the early Victorian era, appointed Principal Painter in Ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1841.

The family group is composed with Hayter’s characteristic competence, the figures arranged in a domestic interior with attention to individual likenesses. The paint surface shows the constraints of working on the verso of an existing painting.