File:Portrait of Elizabeth Hills, later Mrs Thomas Theophilus Cock and Mrs Rand (1765-1853) (by Daniel Gardner).jpg

English: This remarkable portrait was painted on the 10 June 1784 and shows the nineteen year old Miss Elizabeth Hills in a peaceful woodland clearing. Elizabeth was born in 1765 to a prominent southern Essex family. Her father was Thomas Hills of Hutton, while her mother, Elizabeth Rand, grew up at Rand’s Place, Messing.

With her sumptuous silk dress and over-sized hat, decorated with an ostrich feather, she appears to us as the very personification of a fashionable young lady in the prime of her life. She must have had many admirers, but all failed apart from one, Thomas Theophilus Cock, whom she married on 16 May 1786 at St Mary Le Bone, Marylebone, London. On 10 June 1786, less than a month after the wedding, Thomas visited Daniel Gardner’s studio in Bond Street, London and commissioned from him his own portrait (see the following lot), to serve as a pendent to the present portrait, which had been executed exactly two years earlier. Thomas was the son of David Cock of Bedford Row, London. A lawyer, he enjoyed early success and in 1776 was appointed Attorney of the Court of King's Bench. Perhaps as a result of his marriage to Elizabeth, he moved to the village of Messing in Essex and in 1788 he became High Sheriff of that county. In 1796 he was made Deputy Lieutenant of Essex and in 1798 he was promoted to Captain of the Essex Troop of Gentlemen Yeomen. He died at Broad Clyat in Devon in April 1811 and, in his memory, Elizabeth installed a stone plaque in Messing Church, which emphasized his philanthropic and honourable nature.

Elizabeth was only forty-six at the time of Thomas’ death and the following year she changed her name to Rand (her mother’s maiden name), in order to inherit the estate of her first cousin, Thomas Rand of Messing. She was clearly a lady of great energy and spirit as in 1827, aged sixty-two, she embarked on an extensive tour of the West Country and Wales with one of her cousins, a Mr Haselfoot. In later life she lived at Clifton, near Bristol and it was there that she died, in her eighty-eighth year.

Daniel Gardner was born in Kendal in the north of England and received early tuition from George Romney. Upon moving to London in 1770 he joined the Royal Academy Schools, before becoming attached to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s studio. Although heavily influenced by that great painter’s compositions and theories, Gardner chose pastel and paper as his preferred medium. Over time, he perfected a technique in which he worked with finely ground pastel pigments to describe his sitter’s flesh tones, while then playing with the different textural qualities of both watercolor and gouache when completing his compositions. These highly original combinations of techniques proved very successful and they gave him the advantage over his rivals: so much so that he has been described as the most successful English pastellist of the 18th century, ‘surpassing Reynolds in freedom and spontaneity and John Downman in attaining finer color.’1

Both the present portrait and its pendent (lot 174) show Daniel Gardner working at the height of his powers. Indeed, when the celebrated art-historian Kenneth Clark, Baron Clark of Saltwood (1903-1983) studied the works in 1932, he described them as ‘remarkably brilliant and well preserved.’2

The portraits have remained in the sitter’s family since they were commissioned. In the mid-19th Century, the Cock family changed their name to Haselfoot and the pictures have belonged to a number of prominent members of that family, including the barrister and translator, Frederick Kneller Haselfoot (1828-1905) and his son Charles Edward Haselfoot (1864-1936), the distinguished physicist and fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. Between 1932 and circa 1937 they were placed on loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, since when they have remained hidden from public view.