To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com

The finished miniature, taken from this drawing of Henry Skrine, the traveller, was destined (according to notes on the reverse of the sketch) for a bracelet. It is not clear for whose wrist this bracelet might have been destined – but Henry had entered Christ Church, Oxford, in January 1774, at the age of nineteen and this may have been commissioned by his proud mother, Elizabeth (1726-1800).

Although Henry studied hard at Oxford and was called to the bar in 1782, it is not clear that he ever practiced law. Instead, his inherited wealth allowed him to travel widely around the British Isles and record his experiences.

Skrine's inherited wealth enabled him to spend his time chiefly in travelling as a ‘rational’ entertainment, and recording his descriptions of both urban and rural Britain. His first published work, Three Successive Tours in the North of England, and Great Part of Scotland (1795; 2nd edn, 1813), included his journal of a tour through Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Yorkshire undertaken during the 1780s, together with journals of his two tours to Scotland, in 1787 and 1793. In the first of these Scottish tours he described his journey from the Vale of Trent through the Lake District and the south-western highlands of Scotland to Loch Tay, Perth, Edinburgh, and then south through Durham to Manchester, terminating in south Wales. In the second tour, he travelled from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, Inverness, Fort William, and Blair Atholl, returning south through Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the borders. In his later Two Successive Tours throughout Wales, with Several of the Adjacent English Counties (1798; 2nd edn, 1812) he compiled the journals of several tours pursued over successive summers during the 1790s, and described the landscape, inhabitants, and condition of most of Wales. His final publication was another topographical work, A General Account of All the Rivers of Note in Great Britain (1801).[1]

This portrait of him dates to the mid-1770s and may have been recommissioned from this sketch by his first wife, Marianne Chalié (1767–1788), eldest daughter of John Chalié, a wealthy wine merchant of Wimbledon, Surrey. She died in April 1788 after the birth of a son and heir, Henry. His second wife was Letitia Sarah Maria Harcourt (1762–1813), daughter and heir of John Harcourt of Dan-y-parc, Crickhowell, Brecknockshire. They had two sons and five daughters. The family lived at Dan-y-parc, which his wife had inherited, but later moved to Pyports House, Cobham, Surrey, where he was remembered as 'Mr Skrine, “the tourist”' (this name is also the one inscribed on the reverse of this drawing). In 1796/97 he moved to Walton-on-Thames where he died a few years later in 1803 and was buried near the south porch of the parish church.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography lists a portrait in a private collection, which may be the portrait miniature taken by Smart from this sketch.

[1] Taken from the online edition of the ODNB (accessed March 2020)