Oil on canvas, 'Medallion Portrait of the Marquis of Salisbury', John Griffiths, 1865

Oil on Canvas. Medallion Portrait of the Marquis of Salisbury

Commissioned for the decoration of the South Kensington Museum, 1865

Historical significance: This is a design for one of a series of eleven mosaics commissioned in the 1860s and 1870s for the new buildings of the South Kensington Museum. The mosaics formed a frieze of portrait heads of the Lords President of the Council (a British cabinet position), and their immediate predecessors, the Presidents of the Board of Trade. This frieze was positioned in the cloister on the ground floor which ran between the North and South Courts, which themselves were subject to an extensive programme of decoration at this time.

This portrait represents the 2nd Marquis of Salisbury, Lord President of the Council from 1858 to 1859. The mosaic was executed by Laetitia M. Cole, daughter of Henry Cole, at the South Kensington mosaic class. It was manufactured by the Minton Hollins tile factory in Stoke-on-Trent.

John Griffiths (1837-1918) had been a student at the South Kensington school of art. In the same year he executed this design he became Professor of the Bombay School of Art, of which he was later made Principal. The Colonial Service called upon him to design the decoration of many of Bombay's new public buildings.

All the other portraits for the frieze were painted by the London-based genre painter F.B. Barwell.

This medallion painting was a commissioned design for one in a series of mosaics. The mosaics formed a frieze of portrait heads of the Lords President of the Council (a British cabinet position), and their immediate predecessors, the Presidents of the Board of Trade, and were used in the decoration of the South Kensington Museum, later the V&A. All the portraits, with the exception of this one, were painted by F. B. Barwell.

232-1870