FREDERICK SWYNNERTON (1858-1918).

LIST OF WORKS / BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES / FAMILY TREE

Frederick Swynnerton was born in the Isle of Man in ?1860. He was a brother of Joseph Swynnerton, Annie’s husband. His earlier life appears to have based in the Isle of Man, where he had a keen interest in archaeological matters, something he continued with throughout his life wherever he lived. Professionally he was a dedicated artist, studying in Rome and Paris, and in the late 1880s moving to India to make a name as a portrait artist amongst the high society of the Raj. He expressed a love of Rome and would have probably returned there in his latter years with his Anglo-Italian wife – Louisa Angelo, whom married in 1892 – but sadly died in 1918, aged about 60 [different sources give different birth dates], in Bombay while on a trip to Rome.

I’ve located only fourteen images of works by Frederick (auction catalogues, old publications), plus a single work – a watercolour – viewed at auction. There are known to be a number of works surviving in private collections in India (private communication).

See further biographical notes at bottom of page.

LIST OF WORKS.

ACCESSION DURBAR.

Image: (see History: 2012 below).

  • Media: ?
  • Dimensions: ?
  • History:
    • 1893 – painted.
    • 2012 – Illustrated in Jagtej Kaur Grewal (2012) Looking at an Indian Court Through Western Eyes: Painting at the Kapurthala Durbar (c. 1890-1920), in The Panjab Past and Present, vol. 43, part 1 (April 2012, serian no, 85), pp65-7:
  • Location: ?

A STREET SCENE IN SIMLA, INDIA.

Image: www.artsy.net.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Dimensions: 31.5 x 29.8 in / 80 × 101 cm
  • History:
    • 1905 (www.artsy.net).
    • 2017 – Exhibited India Art Fair* – Swaraj Art Archive, 2-5 Feb.
  • Location: Swaraj Art Archive, Noida, Mumbai.

* “In the age before photography, the huge output of paintings and watercolours by European artists provides India with an invaluable historical visual record – albeit seen and interpreted through European eyes – of the Indian landscape, its architectural heritage and its people” (India Art Fair).

BRUGES.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Dimensions: 80 x 61 cm.
  • History:
    • 2016 – Auctioned Domanic Winter, South Cerney, 3 Mar, lot 243.
  • Location: ?

BY THE TEMPLE.

Image: Sotheby’s catalogue.

  • Media: ?
  • Dimensions: “42 by 32in; 107 by 81.5cm”.
  • History:
    • Date? Signed.
  • Location: ?

JEMADAR JANGIA THAPA, 5TH GURKA REGIMENT.

Image: artuk.org.

MOUNTAIN SCENE.

Images/photos: Wotton Auction Rooms/Jonathan Russell.

The label on the back reads “COTTON & MORRIS, / THE EXCH[AN]G[E ]SIMLA. / DEALERS IN PICTURE MOULDINGS AND MOUNT[S,] / PICTURE GLASSES, / &c, &c, &[c.]”.

  • Media: watercolour on card.
  • Dimensions: card 7 x 10 in. / 17.8 x 25.4 cm, frame 12¼ x 15 x ¾ in. / 31.1 x 38.1 x 1.9 cm.
  • History:
  • Location: private collection.

The mountain scene was one of two watercolours sold togeather. The second, a finely executed river scene, had no signature or any marks internally or externally identifying it’s origin (was able to remove back of frame and examine mounting, back of picture and frame-concealed edges of watercolour) – “WHATMAN’S WATER COLOUR SKETCHING BOARD / WINSOR & NEWTON, Ltd., LONDON, ENGLAND” printed on the back of the card the watercolour was painted on, along with the stamp “S. J. WISEMAN, / FIne Arts Repository, / 54, ABOVE BAR, SOUTHMPTON“. The business S. J. Wiseman was present at that address from 1887 to 1939. No provenance information for either work. Apart from belonging to the same era as the mountain scene, being sold with it and of a similar skill level, there is no evidence to attribute the river scene to Frederick. The WISEMAN stamp on the card suggests the work was painted in the UK, although the card could have been taken or posted abroad, of course.

Many thanks to the staff at Wotton Auction Rooms for their assistance.

OTTOMAN SCENE.

Images: Bidsquare.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Dimensions: 11½ x 16½ in.
  • History:
    • 30 Jul 2022 – Auctioned Peterborough Auctions LLC, Peterborough, NH, USA, lot 198, “c. 1900 … Swynnerton achieved some acclaim painting portraits in England in the 1880’s, and moved to India some time aroud 1890, where his brother Charles was a chaplain in the Indian army, and where he sought to paint portraits of Indian nobility and scenes of daily life. He married Louisa Oldfield Angelo in 1892 in Bengal, and started a family … [Provenance:] an old estate in Malta”, passed.
  • Location: ?

PORTRAIT OF A. M. KER, ESQ., SIMLA, INDIA.

Image: www.bonhams.com.

“A M Ker worked for The Alliance Bank in Simla, which folded in 1923” (www.bonhams.com).

PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Size: 74 x 57 cm.
  • History:
    • 2020 – Auctioned Mallams, 13 Aug, lot 93, “‘Portrait of a gentleman’ oil on canvas, signed lower right”, passed.
    • 2020 – Auctioned Mallams, 17 Sep, lot 356, “‘Portrait of a gentleman’ oil on canvas, signed lower right”, sold: hammer £50.
  • Location: ?

PORTRAIT OF MARGERY AUGUSTUS ANGELO SWYNNERTON.

X

Images: www.royprecious.co.uk.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Size: 38 x 31.5 x 2¼ in. / 96.5 x 80 x 5.5 cm.
  • History:
    • 1917 – Signed and dated.
    • 2020 – Mallam’s, 13 Aug, lot 92, “‘Portrait of a lady’ oil on canvas, signed lower right”, sold: hammer £420.
    • Oct 2020/Jan 2021 – For sale at Roy Precious Antiques and Fine Art (for sale, price £2,950 (Oct 2020/Jan 2021 archive.org), sold sometime before Jun 2025.
  • Location: ?

A fine quality portrait of an attractive young woman, the artist’s daughter, painted in 1917 when she was 23; in its original frame. Signed and dated lower right. / FREDERICK SWYNNERTON (1858-1918) was a painter of some distinction. Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man, he was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and lectured on Manx prehistoric remains. / He was taught painting first in Rome, where he lived in the ménage kept by his older brother, the sculptor Joseph William Swynnerton and his wife, Annie, the painter and suffragette, who was elected to the Royal Academy. He bought the wall-paintings of the Domus Aurea whilst in Rome; they are now in the British Museum. / He went on to the Académie Julian in Paris and then set out for India, to make a career for himself as a portrait painter. He married the daughter of an Anglo-Italian fencing and soldiering family, Louise Oldfield Angelo, and lived with them in Simla. Louise died in 1941. / Swynnerton painted portraits of many of the important Europeans in India. He died suddenly in Bombay in 1918, the year after he painted this portrait, and is buried at the Sewri Christian Cemetery. / MARGERY AUGUSTUS ANGELO SWYNNERTON, was born in Delhi, Bengal on the 15th August 1894. She died in the UK in 2000. She was also an artist. / When this portrait was painted in 1917, her father had visited her in Bombay where she was recovering from pneumonia, caught in Mesopotamia, present day Iraq, whilst nursing wounded troops along with a small group of similarly strong-minded British nurses. They became the first British women to care for Indian soldiers, not on the Western Front but in the searing desert heat of Mesopotamia. Conditions were hellish, temperatures up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and conditions primitive in the extreme; more than half the nurses became ill, often with dysentery. / Seeing the far-away look in Margery’s eyes, as she sat in safety, her father painting her, as she convalesced, one cannot help but wonder what she was thinking. The horrors she had seen were not long ago, and the war continued…… / SIZE:38 x 31.5 x 2.25 inches including the frame. / PROVENANCE: by direct descent in the family. / Verso: Old storage label for Allen’s Depository, Colwyn Bay, and the handwritten name ‘Angelo’.

www.royprecious.co.uk (downloaded 11 Jun 2025).

PORTRAIT OF AN ARAB GENTLEMAN.

[NO IMAGE.]

  • Media: ?
  • Size: ?
  • History: ?
  • Location: ?

RIVER SCENE.

Image: www.ericlefevre-expert.fr.

  • Media: oil on canvas (assumed).
  • Size: 60 x 84 cm.
  • History:
    • 2024 – Auctioned by Eric Lefevre Expert at Hotel des Ventes de Bayeux, 14 Jul, lot 38.
  • Location: ?

SELF-PORTRAIT.

Image: www.lrb.co.uk.

  • Media: ?
  • Dimensions: ?
  • History:
  • Location: ?

THE MAHARAJA OF KAPURTHALA.

Image: ArtNet.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Dimensions: 90.5 x 51.5 in / 232 x 130 cm.
  • History:
    • 1890 – “signed and dated “1890” lower right, titled on Plaque”.
    • 1978 – Part of private collection (shown in Country Life magazine) at Acton Round Hall, Bridgenorth, Shropshire.
    • 2003 – Auctioned Neal Auction Company, New Orleans, Louisiana, 4 Oct, lot 388, 7 ft., 6 1/2 in. x 51 1/2 in., in a period carved giltwood frame. Provenance: The Estate of James Williams, Mercer House, Savannah, Georgia, sold: hammer $32,000, premium $36,800 (c. £19,200/£22,199).
  • Location: ?

Image (computer-rectified): www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk.

▲ The work on display at Acton Round Hall, Bridgenorth, Shropshire, in 1978 – “In the Hall … [a] giant portrait of the Maharajah of Kapurthala, painted in 1890 by Frederick Swynnerton” (Country Life [magazine], 9 Mar 1978, p614).

THE MILKMAID.

Image: unattributed source.

  • Media: oil on canvas.
  • Dimensions: 20 x 26 in / 50.8 x 91.4 cm.
  • History:
    • 2004 – Auctioned Christie’s, London, 4 Mar, lot 648, “signed «F Swinnerton» lower right / Illustrated on page 199 of the catalog”, sold: hammer £1,300, premium £1,553.
  • Location: ?

WOMEN IN A COASTAL LANDSCAPE.

Image: www.mutualart.com.

▼ 1888 – Illustration “Colour section showing relative position of cists and flint earth Port St Mary 1888.”

▼ Undated illustration.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

British Museum: Frederick Swynneton was born in Douglas, Isle of Man, in 1858. Painter of some distinction, elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and lectured on the prehistoric remains on the Isle of Man. Bought wall-paintings of the Domus Aurea while on a stay in Rome, later sold to the British Museum. [See also Ancient Worlds Manchester (copy).]

Inigo Thomas, London Review of Books, 21 Jan 2016: [Frederick Swynnerton] was taught first in Rome, where he lived in the ménage kept by his older brother Joe and his wife, Annie Swynnerton … He went on to the Académie Julian in Paris and then set out for India, hoping to make a career for himself as a portrait painter. (He never entirely got over his time in Rome. He revisited the city years later and acquired part of a mural from Nero’s Golden House, which depicts Leda waiting for her swan. He sold the fragment to the British Museum in 1908 … He married the daughter of an Anglo-Italian fencing and soldiering family, and lived with them in [Oakwood Place, Simla] … In 1917, he went to Bombay to see his daughter Margery, who had been a nurse in Iraq where she caught pneumonia … She, like her father, was a painter and shared his belief in the therapeutic powers of [champagne] … Fred died suddenly in Bombay in 1918 and was buried at the Sewri cemetery. He had been on his way [to] Rome.

1870 [age 12] – letter to his brother, Mark: 60 Port Street / August 14 1870 / Douglas, / Isle of Man / Dear Mark, / I hope that you are well at present. Father took ill on Sunday last, but is now much better. He got ill with eating plwnbs. Godfrey is gone to Shrewsbury yesterday for he has got a situation there. I am going to a Mr (?) Gluckacres School, but now I have got a sore foot. Are you ever thinking of coming home. Would you mind trying to collect for me a few foreign stamps. Have you got any more curiosities, write and tell you if you have. Joseph has won two medals, a first class one and a second class medal. Father is just now facing me writing a letter to Joseph, Mother is sitting on my left reading the Daily Courier. We are in the Drawing Room. I was fishing down on the jetty and caught a good many fish. I remain your affectionate brother. / Frederick Swinnerton / PS. Please excuse my bad writing.

  • 1886 – ‘A Street Scene in Segui, Italy’ exhibited in the Simla Exhibition.
  • 1888 – Illustration “Colour section showing relative position of cists and flint earth Port St Mary 1888.” [Shown at bottom of this web page.]
  • 1888 – letter of 30th October [to] his brother, Mark, ‘at the end of my year here I calculate upon making a start in London, where as you perhaps know Joseph and wife are flourishing.”
  • 1889 – “THE EARLY NEOLITHIC LISTS AND REFUSE HEAP at Port St. Mary, Isle of Man. Read before The Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society, November 5. 1889.
  • c. 1889 – Went to India.
  • 1890 – “Mr. Frederick Swynnerton, and artist from Paris and Rome, whose pictures have attracted much attention at the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition this year, is engaged, we hear, on a large portrait of His Honour the Lieutenant-Govenor [of the Punjab]” [Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore), 5 Sep 1890, p3].
  • 1890-1903 – “Swynnerton worked for the Kapurthala durbar between 1890-93” [Grewal (1012)].

From Jagtej Kaur Grewal (2012) Looking at an Indian Court Through Western Eyes: Painting at the Kapurthala Durbar (c. 1890-1920), in The Panjab Past and Present, vol. 43, part 1 (April 2012, serian no, 85), pp65-7:

Another British painter Frederick Swynnerton (1849/57-1918?) was commissioned to paint two works for the durbar. Swynnerton came to India around 1889 and stayed in the country for more than two decades spending considerable time in north India. He painted different subjects like portraits of princes and the British in India, military figures and battle scenes. The artist, resident at Simla for a while, also participated in the annual exhibition of the Simla Fine Art Society. It was usual for the artists to congregate in Simla in the summer months when the British and the princes came here, hoping to make a mark through the annual art exhibition and in the process brightening their chances of winning commissions for paintings.

Swynnerton worked for the Kapurthala durbar between 1890-93 painting a portrait of Jagatjit Singh in 1890 and a scene of the accession durbar in 1893. In the portrait [The Maharajah of Kapurthala, he is] attired in a richly embroidered red jama worn over a gold-coloured achkan, stands with his right hand resting on the hilt of a sword and the left hand is placed on the armrest of a sumptuously carved throne with a draped curtain in the backdrop, a setting that approximates the background seen in photographs. He wears a bejewelled crown that is placed over the turban, a large diamond studded belt buckle glistens and many necklaces of large sized pearls adorn his neck. The pose, the imperious look and the bejewelled splendour of the Maharaja are employed by the artist to present a dignified image of a potentate and the ruler of the destiny of his subjects. Indian rulers were increasingly conscious of the slow yet inexorable undermining of their authority and their gradual relegation to the role of ceremonial figures under the British and in works like these they seem to deny this reality.

The second work a large sized painting titled ‘Accession Durbar’ captures the solemnity of the investiture ceremony and the splendour of the court. The focal point of the composition are the figures of Jagatjit Singh, who is seated, and the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab James Lyall who stands beside him. On either side are ranged the courtiers and British dignitaries attending the ceremony. Behind the Maharaja is a green-gold canopy under which are placed two thrones approached by a set of red-carpeted steps. The figures are portrait likenesses and Swynnerton employs the device of turning a few heads towards the viewer thus drawing us effortlessly into the scene. This work evokes the real equation as it prevailed in the relations between the native rulers and the British with the officer of the raj placed on an equal footing with the Maharaja.

  • 1890s – Collected and donated a number of stone tools collected from Bombay to Manchester Museum.
  • 1891 – PRE-ARYAN REMAINS at GLEN WYLLIN, Isle of Man. Read January 13th 1891.

Marriage.

  • 1892 – “SWYNNERTON – ANGELO. – At Christ Church, Simla, India, by the Rev. G. Nicolls, chaplain. Frederick Swynnerton, artist, to Louisa Oldfield, second daughter of Colonel Fisher Angelo (Count by right of descent from Pescatore Angelo de Trememondo Malevolti, Marquis of Naples, and sometime Private Secretary to Warren Hastings), of Naini Tal” [The Isle of Man Times and General Advertiser, 27 Dec 1892].

  • 1908 – Gifted wall painting fragment from Rome to the British Museum.
  • 1909 – FINDS IN RUSHDEN: PRE-HISTORIC REMAINS. Read February 27th 1909.
  • 2 Nov 1917 – Frederick’s son was “appoined to the Indian Army Reserve of Officers … Infantry Branch … Frederick Swynnerton [junior]” [The Gazette of India, 10 Nov 1917].
  • 1918 – “DEATHS … SWYNNERTON. – On the 18th December, at the War Hospital Colaba, Bombay, after a severe operation, Frederick Swynnerton of Simla. (Lieut., I.A.R.O., Censor’s Office, Bombay), youngest son of the late Chas. Swynnerton, Port St. Mary, Isle of Man. Aged 61 years” [Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore), 28 Dec 1918, p1].

SWYNNERTON FAMILY TREE.

  • CHARLES SWYNNERTON (sculptor and stonemason; c. 1813 [Liverpool] – 1907) = MARY CALLISTER (1809 [Malew, Isle of Man] – 1874).
    • MARK SWYNNERTON (sculptor and stonemason; c. 1840-<1907) = SARAH GARRETT of Glenwood, Iowa.
      • CHARLES / MARY / SARAH.
    • Rev. CHARLES SWYNNERTON (antiquarlian, churchman and author; 1843-?) = MAUD (?-1882), daughter of Maj. H. W. Massy of Rosanna, Co. Tepperary.
      • CHARLES FRANCIS MASSY SWYNNERTON, CMG (naturalist; 1877-1938) = NORA
        • RODGER JOHN MASSY SWYNNERTON (1911-2001).
        • GERALD HENRY SWYNNERTON (1913-1959).
      • GERTRUDE MARY MASSY DOBELL (1882-1935) = RALPH DOBELL.
    • ROBERT SWYNNERTON (jeweller; 1845-<1908) = OLIVIA ‘SYLVIAN’ ELIZABETH (1849-?).
    • JOSEPH WILLIAM SWYNNERTON (sculptor and stonemason; 1848-1910) = ANNIE LOUISA ROBINSON.
    • GODFREY LLOYD.
    • FREDERICK SWYNNERTON (artist, author; 8 Jun 1860* [Douglas, Isle of Man] – 18 Dec 1918) =[1892. Christ Church, Simla]= LOUISA OLDFIELD SWYNNERTON (née ANGELO; 1869 [Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh] – 1941).
    • KATHERINE MARGARET = ROBERT PLATT BLAKELEY.
      • CHARLES / GERTRUDE / KATHERINE / EDITH / MAUD.

* Another source has 1858.

Page last updated 14 Jun 2025.