Thomas Bardwell

The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Work by Thomas Bardwell is recorded in the collections of National Portrait Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, Laing Art Gallery, Ashmolean Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum.

Bardwell initially earned his living initially as a painter of decorative panels for his family's business in Bungay, Suffolk. His earliest known portraits are two conversation pieces dated 1736; one, possibly showing the Brewster family of Beccles, is in the collection of the Geffrye Museum. In 1746 he was commissioned by the artillery company in Norwich to paint a portrait of William Crowe (who became mayor the following year), breaking the monopoly on civic portraiture in the city held until then by the German-born John Theodore Heins. It became the first of nine portraits by Bardwell that were to be hung in St Andrew's Hall in Norwich. He painted several portraits in London during the 1740s and 1750s. One, Joshua Ward Receiving Money from Britannia (and Bestowing it as Charity on the Needy) (1748) is an allegorical work, showing Ward, a London doctor, with symbolic figures of Britannia and Charity and a crowd of patients. Now in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, it once hung in the Ward's parlour in Whitehall. There is an engraving after it, of 1748-9, probably by Bernard Baron. In 1752-3 Bardwell carried out a large number of commissions in Yorkshire and Scotland. Eventually, in 1759, he settled permanently in Norwich. An obituary in a Norwich newspaper was to describe him as "an eminent portrait painter of this city, who principally through the power of genius and dint of application, acquired a degree of perfection in his art, which would have been deemed excellent, even had it been accompanied with a liberal tuition." According to A General History of the County of Norfolk, published in 1829, "the best of his portraits are at Langley; Mr. Turner and Mr. Carr, both of [Norwich] have historical subjects by him."