I started to look into the life of artist William Wood when I realised how little recorded biography there seemed to be about him. This was a surprise to me, given his status today as one of the finest portrait miniaturists of the Georgian era. Engleheart and Smart have several books written about them and Cosway has been widely studied. At the time of writing, though, William Wood doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
I approach this as a writer and genealogist, but primarily as an admirer of Wood’s work, which resonates deeply with me for reasons I would struggle to explain. What follows here records my journey to find his grave and to put names and dates to his immediate family. I would welcome any comments on this or other posts, and I’m always keen to learn more. Based on what I have learned so far, I’m also posting a separate piece about Wood’s mother, tied into a recently discovered portrait. Further pieces will follow hopefully, looking at other aspects of Wood’s brief but fascinating life.
Beginning with the fee books
Much of what is understood about William Wood’s life comes from art historian Dr. George C. Williamson, whose brief biography of the artist seems to have been passed on unchallenged. In his 1921 book, The Miniature Collector, he writes the following about Wood, without stating sources, ‘We know that he was born at Ipswich in 1768, or at least either in the town or near to it, and he is declared to have come from an old Suffolk Catholic family.’ Williamson himself seems dubious about the claim of a Catholic family, and phrases like ‘We know that’ and ‘he is declared to’ always merit a bit of examination.(1)
Surnames like Brown, Smith or Wood can be frustrating for a researcher, however. It can be hard to know that we have the right William Wood, especially in the Georgian era, when William and George were such popular names. Wood’s fee books are helpful here. Among his records of the 1,212 miniatures he painted between 1790 and 1808 are several entries which serve to light our path.(2)
Wood’s fee book entries start from #5000, for reasons that only he could tell us. Entry #5917 is for Sophia Abington, who Wood describes as ‘my niece’. He notes that he began her portrait on May 4th, 1802, when little Sophia was just one year old, and that it was ‘altered and advanced at various times, until 1806; when she became 6 years old.’ Should this portrait re-emerge, it will be interesting to see whether William was successful in his attempts to advance a child from one year old to six within a single image. Children were tricky subjects to paint at the best of times.
Abington is a distinctive name, and it does not take much digging to establish that the young Sophia Abington was the daughter of Sophia Wood and William Abington, a senior officer in the East India Company. William Abington also appears as a subject in Wood’s records, painted under entry #5567, with a note “East India House”. Sophia Wood and William Abington were married on April 6th, 1799 at St George’s church, Bloomsbury. At the time of her marriage, William Wood’s sister Sophia was a resident of the parish of St James, Westminster, presumably still at the family home. A familiar signature, ‘Will Wood’, appears as a witness on their marriage record, reassuring us that we are on the right path.(3)
Confirming sister Sophia’s details unlocks the rest of the family. Sophia Abington died in 1838, and she was interred alongside her parents and brother at Bunhill Fields, London’s old religious dissenters’ graveyard near Old Street.
Bunhill Fields
Researchers exploring Bunhill Fields today owe a debt to the remarkable work of a Victorian pastor, Dr. Rev. John Rippon. In 1869, fifteen years after the cemetery’s closure for new burials, Rippon made it his work to catalogue every grave, to record every legible name and inscription, and to document the location of all those interred. London was changing fast during the nineteenth century and Rippon shared the concern of many that the city’s old past would be swept away by progress and encroaching development. Rippon’s record is held today at the nearby London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), which also houses the interment books, account books and other ephemera from the Bunhill cemetery. Some are now on microfilm and others are the original, vellum-covered Georgian tomes. There are curious parallels between the obsessive depth and intensity of Rippon’s records of Bunhill and the detail of William Wood’s own fee books. There is reason to suspect that the two men might have got on rather well.
Book Three of Rippon’s “Record of Inscriptions on Gravestones” reveals more than we could have realistically hoped to find. William Wood, his sister Sophia and their two parents, William Sr and Bethiah, are buried in section 10, plot 168, at the western edge of the cemetery, close to Bunhill Row. Rippon transcribed key details from the family’s gravestone as follows:(4)
Mrs Bethiah Wood of Cork St (74th) 11 July 1805
her son William Wood an eminent Artist (40th) 15 November 1809
above William Wood Senior (84th) 7 March 1816
Sophia Abington wife of W Abington of the East India House and only daughter of before mentioned William Wood Senior, Bethiah his wife (75th)
Other Bunhill records in the LMA collection tell us more about the plot and each of the Wood family’s burials. Plot 10/168 was marked by an upright headstone at a cost of one pound five shillings. The family originally purchased the plot for William’s mother, Bethiah, who died on July 11th, 1805, after a few hours illness. Her funeral was held on Tuesday 16th, at five o’clock.(5)
William’s childhood
It may indeed be that William’s parents had historical ties to Suffolk or Ipswich, as George Williamson had understood, his father perhaps, but it seems that William’s deepest roots were more firmly in London.
Both of William’s parents, certainly at the point of their marriage in 1761, were Londoners. Their marriage banns were read at St Mary’s, Whitechapel, in the city’s East End, where Bethiah Townsend was resident, and her future husband William Wood Sr was a resident of the parish of St Mary Magdalen Old Fish Street, to the west, between the Thames and St Paul’s. Their wedding took place on September 12th, 1761 at St Mary’s, curate Henry Mayo performing the service.(6)
William and Bethiah Wood appear to have had three children, rather than the two named in Rippon’s headstone transcription. Sophia was the eldest, born in 1764. She married William Abington, at St George’s, Bloomsbury, on April 6th, 1799. Sophia is recorded as a resident of St James, Westminster at the time of her wedding.
Then Phebe, about whom very little is known. She was christened at St Andrew’s church, Holborn on September 12th, 1767, where her parents gave their address as Fetter Lane. After that, she vanishes from the record. Her absence suggests she is likely to have died young, although further research may confirm otherwise. We know only that she was not buried in the same grave as her parents and siblings at Bunhill Fields.
William was the youngest of the three, born on March 19th, 1769. The most reliable record of his date of birth seems to be on his entry into the Royal Academy Schools. He was baptised on May 28th at St Mary at Lambeth, the chapel in the grounds of Lambeth Palace on the south bank of the Thames.(7) In later life, William lived either with or close to his parents in Cork Street, immediately behind the Royal Academy, before a short spell in Golden Square in the years before his death. But that is for a different day.
William Wood himself died on November 15th, 1809, just four years after his mother’s death, in his forty-first year, from causes not yet known. In the days after his passing, his body lay at his home in Golden Square before being brought to the cemetery. The burial took place on Thursday, November 23rd, at twelve o’clock. His age on his death in 1809 varies between in his ‘40th year’ on his grave inscription and ‘41st year’ in his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The date of birth recorded on his entry to the Royal Academy in 1785 agrees with his obituary.
William Senior outlived his artist son by six years, dying on March 7th, 1816, and was buried on Saturday, March 16th at twelve o’clock. The plot lay untouched for a further thirty-three years until the death of sister Sophia in December 1838, aged 84. At two o’clock on Saturday, January 5th, 1839, Sophia was interred alongside her mother, father and brother, presumably on her wish, rather than with her husband Captain Abington, who would die the following year and whose remains lie alongside those of his father in Paddington, as instructed in his will.
Postscript: A visit to Bunhill
Two hundred years after William’s death, a visit to the cemetery shows that Reverend Rippon was right in his understanding that nothing, not even the sanctity of a burial, lasts forever. The cemetery remains as an important and widely visited feature of London’s history, but it is greatly changed from its closure in 1854, when the cemetery was finally deemed full after an estimated 123,000 bodies had been interred.
I arrived not knowing what to expect, and I had been warned not to expect too much. Some areas of Bunhill Fields have been damaged or altered at different times in London’s busy history. The site now exists as much as a city garden as a cemetery. Public pathways paved with old headstones run between sections of burial plots, their surfaces worn smooth by countless Londoners’ footsteps. Significant sections of the burial ground remain intact though, fenced off with iron railings. Many of the human remains have been removed, and others, such as William Blake’s vault, stand in different locations to their occupants’ graves.
It was a dark and cloudy afternoon in early December 2022 when I visited, the air cold and damp. I met Tony, Keeper of Bunhill Fields for the last six years, and explained why I was there. Together we looked for plot 10/168. Section 10 is in the far western corner, closest to Bunhill Row. Tony opened the gate and told me that he is used to people like me turning up in the hope of finding a particular stone. He was interested to know who I was looking for and why.
Away from the path, the ground was soft and mulchy, heavy with fallen leaves. We found the headstone easily enough, seemingly untouched in the two hundred years since it was erected, tall and simple in design, and still standing impressively straight.
London’s air and two hundred years of weather have not been kind to the inscriptions, however, and the day’s weak light made reading them harder. Only fragments were immediately legible. Bethiah’s details have gone but the names of her husband William Senior, daughter Sophia and her son William, the eminent artist, can still be made out. Rippon’s transcriptions focus on names and dates, not the wording of inscriptions themselves. Photos show very little of what is there. On a warmer, dryer day, there is probably an afternoon to be spent with a notepad, sat among the moss and leaves, figuring out what else the headstone can tell us.
Selected sources:
(1) Dr. George C Williamson, The Miniature Collector. A guide to collectors of old portrait miniatures, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1921 (p163)
(2) All fee book references relate to V&A. Memorandum of miniatures painted and finished by William Wood, vols. 1-3 (MSL/1944/433-435)
(3) London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1938. Camden / St George, Bloomsbury. 1799-1812 (Accessed via Ancestry)
(4) LMA. CLC 271 MS00897 003. Book Three of Rippon’s “Records of Inscriptions on Gravestones”.
(5) LMA. CLC 271 MS01092. Bunhill Interment Books
(6) London and Surrey, England, Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1597-1921. Ms 10091/106 (Ancestry)
(7) London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 (Ancestry)
