The Fourdrinier Family, c.1786, attributed to John Downman. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 6091. Henry Fourdrinier Snr is shown seated centre, his arm around the waist of his daughter Jemima. Charles is standing back far left, next to Henry Jnr; Sealy is standing front right, next to the sitting John Rawson. (Click to enlarge.)
Low down on a wall of Room 19 in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) there hangs a small oil-on-copper portrait of the London paper-maker Henry Fourdrinier and his family. It measures just over 24 x 18 inches (615 x 460 cm), is dated c.1786, and is attributed to the artist John Downman (1750–1824). It is a charming portrait, the product of a relatively unknown painter, and it conceals a mesh of interesting, interwoven histories, some of which have direct links with Wandsworth and its past. These include:
- the persecution of French Protestants
- Wandsworth’s Huguenot cemetery
- a Putney historian
- the industrial revolution
- an eminent Anglo-Catholic churchman.
The extended catalogue entry for the portrait on the NPG’s website contains the following sentence: ‘The setting is probably intended to convey the gardens of the Fourdrinier home in Stratford Frove [sic], Putney.’ This is doubtful since a) no record has been found of the family having lived in Putney; b) Stratford Grove, Putney wasn’t built until the early 1850s; and c) neither the map of Rocque (c.1743) nor the one by Corris (1787) shows any buildings such as houses in the locality where Stratford Grove would subsequently be built. Indeed the area was largely market gardens in the eighteenth century.1
The author of this article has, however, found several internet references to Henry having died in 1799 at his home in Stamford Grove, Stamford Hill, north London.2 The NPG tentatively accepts this supposition,3 though an extensive search of the Hackney Archives has failed to confirm it. His home and/or office appear to have earlier been in Lombard Street in the City of London, and his eldest child Henry Jnr was baptised, and Henry Snr buried, in the nearby church of St Mary Woolnoth.4 It is conceivable, however, that he retired to north London, and that the writer of the NPG’s website note confused Stamford Grove and Stratford Grove; the alleged Putney address is therefore exceedingly unlikely.
Windsor Castle, supposedly shown in the distance through the gap in the trees, was of course not visible from either location and was probably a symbolic homage to the monarch, George III.
Henry (1730–99) was the fifth of the eight children of the noted engraver Paul Fourdrinier (1698–1758) and Susanna née Grolleau (1693–1748). Both of them were born in Groningen in the Netherlands — children of French Huguenot families, originally from Caen in Normandy, who went into exile following Louis XIV’s 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Paul came to England in 1720 and married Susanna in 1721, though they had probably met years earlier in their home city.5
The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland estimates that 50–60,000 Huguenots fled France to the Netherlands after 1685, and around 50,000 came to England. The booklet Huguenots in Wandsworth, locally published in the 1980s,6 states that Paul ‘… most likely lived at Wandsworth …’ and certainly he, his wife, and other members of their families were buried in Mount Nod, Wandsworth’s Huguenot cemetery on East Hill. Henry was baptised ‘Henri’ on 29 February 1730 in the Protestant/Huguenot chapel of ‘Les Grecs’ in Hog Lane, Soho (later Crown Street and Little Edward Street).7
The 1730 baptism of ‘Henri Fourdrinier’ as recorded in the registers of the Chapel of Les Grecs, Soho. (Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland.)
One of the surviving tombs in Putney Old Burial Ground is that of the explorer, archæologist, author and MP Robert Wood (c. 1717–71), who in his later years lived at Lime Grove, Putney, the birthplace of historian Edward Gibbon. In 1750–51, he undertook a major expedition to the Levant, largely financed by two wealthy young Oxford graduates, James Dawkins (1722–57) and John Bouvérie (1723–50), and accompanied by an Italian draughtsman, Giovanni Battista Borra (1712–86).
One of the aims of the expedition was to explore the ruins of the ancient cities of Palmyra and Baalbek (both then in Syria, in the Ottoman Empire), which they reached in March/April 1751 — sadly without Bouvérie, who had died of a fever in Turkey the year before. Back in England, Wood published two influential and richly illustrated books, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart [sic] (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec, otherwise Heliopolis, in Cælosyria (1757). Paul Fourdrinier engraved most of the plates for both publications.8
Plate 24 from The Ruins of Palmyra, an example of the stunning engraving talents of Paul Fourdrinier.
Henry was a paper-maker and stationer, and the Fourdrinier machine, the first to make continuous rolls of paper and the one from which most modern machines are descended, was introduced to this country by two of his sons, Henry Jnr (1766–1854) and Sealy (1773–1847). The design, by Frenchman Louis-Nicholas Robert, was brought to England in 1799 by his brother-in-law John Gamble and adapted, improved and patented by Henry and Sealy, with the help of the engineer and inventor Bryan Donkin. In the portrait at the NPG Charles is standing, back far left, next to Henry Jnr, whilst Sealy is standing, front right, next to the sitting John Rawson. Charles Fourdrinier (1768–1841) later joined his brothers in the family paper-making business.9
The only brother who did not join the family firm was John Rawson (1770–1836), who, perhaps significantly, is shown in Downman’s portrait sitting on the ground with a music score on his knee and holding a flute. The daughter Jemima (1772–1836) married the Lombard-Street banker John Newman in 1799, their first child being John Henry, later Cardinal Newman (1801–90). Had he been alive in 1900 the musically-minded John Rawson would surely have approved of Edward Elgar’s much applauded setting of his nephew’s 1832 poem The Dream of Gerontius.
In the Fourdrinier portrait, Henry Snr is shown seated with his arm around the waist of his daughter Jemima, whilst seated on his right is his older, unmarried sister Mary. His wife Jemima née White, who was born in 1730, had died in 1781 and she is commemorated by a symbolic urn (back right), on which there appears the following inscription.
J. F. / Ob. 5 Septr. 1781 / Æt. 51. / Her good qualities / were known / to you all. / Follow her / example and / be happy
Henry Fourdrinier Jnr, patentee of the family’s paper machine, shortly before his death in 1854. (Illustrated London News)
Leaning on the plinth of the urn is Minerva Manning (b. 1763), daughter of Jemima Snr and her first husband, William Manning, and seemingly the only one of their seven children to have survived infancy. The memorial to Henry and Jemima in the church of St Mary Woolnoth also records two sons, Edward and Randolph, ‘who died in their infancy’ but of whom no birth record has been found.
Though Putney, it seems, cannot claim to have one of its gardens adorned with eminent expatriate Huguenots, as depicted in the NPG, Downman’s portrait nevertheless serves to remind us of the significant contribution made to the industries, arts and economy of the Wandsworth area by these skilled artisan refugees. France’s loss was our gain.
Notes
- According to Northamptonshire Records Office, who hold the originals of the Corris maps, the relevant plot on his 1787 Putney map was owned by Messrs Jerrydot, Hankey and John Chalwood – a note based on information obtained via the Wandsworth Heritage Service.
- Examples include ‘MacFadyen-Parker History’, Henry Fourdrinier: http://genealogy.mcfadyen.ca/getperson.php?personID=I4592&tree=mcfadyen; and ‘Genealogia familiae’, Henry Fourdrinier: http://www.nuestroarbol.org/arbol/family.php?famid=F1291&ged=familia.ged.
- Per an email of 23 Jan. 2019 from Erika Ingham, Assistant Curator (Reference Collection), NPG: ‘What I have found online concurs with what you have discovered …’
- Baptism and burial registers of the church of St Mary Woolnoth. www.ancestry.com. There is a marble memorial to him and his wife Jemima on a wall of the church, though all bodies were removed from the crypt and reburied in Ilford Cemetery in 1892/93, as the space was needed for the building of Bank underground station.
- Boyd’s Inhabitants of London & Family Units 1200–1946 (www.findmypast.com); ‘Pedigree of Fourdrinier and Grolleau’, Rev. F G Lee, Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, N.S., vol. 3, p. 385.
- R. A. Shaw, R. D. Gwynn & P. Thomas, Huguenots in Wandsworth (Wandsworth Borough Council, 1985).
- Baptism register: www.ancestry.com.
- The plates were engraved in England from on-site drawings by the Piedmontese draughtsman Giovanni Battista Borra. P. J. Evison, ‘Putney Old Burial Ground’, WH 103 (2017), pp. 18–23. The complete books are accessible via www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/.
- Peter Simpson, The Forgotten Fourdrinier: the life, times and work of Paul Fourdrinier (AuthorHouse, 2017).