Oil painting, 'Medallion Portrait of the Right Hon. Edward Cardwell', President of the Board of Trade, 1852, 1858-1859, Frederick Bacon Barwell, 1862-1871

Oil painting of a medallion portrait of the Right Hon. Edward Cardwell.

Commissioned for the decoration of the South Kensington Museum, 1862-1871

Historical significance: This medallion painting 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 Right Hon. Edward Cardwell (1813-1886), Liberal MP for Oxford City between 1853 and 1874, who held the position of President of the Board of Trade from 1852 to 1855. He was Colonial Secretary 1864-6 and Secretary of War under Gladstone 1868-74, when the purchase of army commissions was abolished.

All the portraits for the frieze, with the exception of that of the Marquis of Salisbury, were painted by F.B. Barwell, a London-based painter who exhibited genre subjects, mostly small domestic scenes and interiors, at the Royal Academy between 1855 and 1887. In 1868 Barwell was also commissioned to execute one of the lunette paintings for the National Competition Gallery on the theme of art training and practice.

Most of the mosaics were executed by the South Kensington mosaic class and manufactured by the Minton Hollins tile factory in Stoke-on-Trent.

751-1870