Frederick Richard Say

[1]The Say family was notable in the early Middle Ages (Geoffrey de Say was one of the barons who made King John sign Magna Carta).

Say attended the school that the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon ran from 1815 in direct competition with the classes at the Royal Academy.

[4] His teaching method was heavily directed towards correct anatomical representation, and his students spent much time drawing from bodies at Sir Charles Bell’s surgery.

It may be this anatomical experience that led to a major undertaking by Frederick and his father, to draw and engrave a series of detailed pictures of specimens of diseased human organs for Dr Richard Bright (1789–1858) in the latter 1820s.

Another early notable commission was a portrait of Sir William Pitt Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst (another friend of John Parker), for Christ Church, Oxford, completed in 1830.Another work from c.1830 was “Little Wanderers”, a romantic portrayal of the sisters Alice and Edith Acraman, daughters of Daniel Wade Acraman (1775–1847), a rich iron manufacturer of Clifton, Bristol.

In the early 1840s, Say was commissioned by Sir Robert Peel to paint several portraits for the “Statesmen’s Gallery” that he was constituting at his home, Drayton Manor in Staffordshire.

These portraits included those of Henry Pelham Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Edward Stanley, Lord Stanley (later 14th Earl of Derby and several times Prime Minister), Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough (Governor-General of India, 1842–44), (these three being on display at the London National Portrait Gallery), Sir Frederick Pollock (Privy Councillor and Lord Chief Baron), Walter Francis Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Privy Seal, and a second portrait of Sir William Webb Follett.

The second portrait, of an adult, dark-haired Frederick, by the famous miniaturist Sir William Ross, is undated, and shows him looking distinguished and prosperous.

By the time Say stopped painting in about 1862, his classical style of portraiture was going out of fashion, and photography was making inroads into the market for pictures of people.