English: John Smart (1741-1811)

Nathaniel Edward Kindersley (1763-1831), in blue coat with gilt buttons, white cravat, powdered wig worn en queue

Signed with initials and dated JS / 1787 / I for India (lower right)

On ivory

Oval, 56 mm. high, gold frame, the reverse engraved ‘NEK’, with lock of hair on plaited hair panel

The sitter was born at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the son of Nathaniel Kindersley (1732-1769) and Jemima Kindersley, née Wicksteed(1741-1809). Nathaniel was one of many members of the Kindersley family who were associated with India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He married Hannah Butterworth on 3 July 1786 at Tangernaikpuram, India and had two children, Sir Richard Torin Kindersley (1792-1879) and Nathaniel William Kindersley (1794–1844). He died on 16 February 1831 at Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Kindersely joined as a writer at Fort St George in 1780. Two firms in India were associated with his name: Kindersley, Watts & Co. and Torin & Kindersley. By 1789 he was a secretary of the Committee of Police, a member of the Board of Trade, a director of the Carnatic Bank, a superintendent of Cutcherry Court and had served on the committee for establishment of 'an Institution for the relief of Orphans and other distress'd male Children of the Military' at Madras. Kindersley wrote Specimens of Hindoo Literature, London, 1794, while working for the East India Company at Madras.

A silhouette painted on plaster, c.1792 of Nathaniel Edward Kindersley by John Miers from the collection of the late C. F. Sainsbury was published by S. McKechnie, British Silhouette Artists and their Work 1760-1860, London, 1978, p. 661, illustrated no. 1327.

A plumbago by Thomas Worlidge (1700-1766) of Kindersely’s mother, Jemima, is in the Victoria & Albert Museum (inv. no. EVANS.341). Jemima was known affectionately as Pulcherrima, a reference to her beauty. Her book, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies, 1777 is considered one of the earliest travel books by a woman.