Note Type
1992 Inventory NotesNote
1992.20.17 Admiral Sir George Somers. Friend of Sir Walter Raleigh. Father of Bermuda. Original oil painting, canvas measures 45 x 35, in lavish wood and gilded 54.5 x 43.25 frame by the 17th-century Dutch artist Paul Van Somer.
The paintings of Sir George and Lady Somers were purchased in 1932 by the Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust from Miss E. Winifred Bellamy, of "Woodside Cottage", Plymouth, Devon, England, a descendant of the Somers. They had been handed down from generation to generation in England through a collateral branch of the Somers family.
The existence of these paintings was first made known to Bermudians by Major-General Sir John Henry Lefroy, RA, CB, KCMG, FRS, etc., one-time two-term Governor of Bermuda and eminent historian who, in the 1882 edition of the famous Sloane MS (see below) he edited, added "an original and unpublished portrait of Admiral Sir George Somers which Miss Bellamy of Plymouth (England) has inherited from her ancestor, Dr. Bellamy, MD, who was connected with the Somers family."
This painting is also reproduced on page 11 (shown as then the property of the above-mentioned Miss Bellamy) in the superb book Historye of the Bermudaes or Summer Islands, edited from the MS in the Sloane Collection, British Museum, by Lefroy, RA, CB, KCMG, FRS, etc, author of Memorials Of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands. (A copy of this book, published in MDCCCLXXXII, by the Hakluyt Society as No. LXV, is also in the collection of the Society).