English School 19th Century Portrait of George Osbaldeston 1786 - 1866 Known as "Squire Osbaldeston"

English School 19th Century

Portrait of George Osbaldeston 1786 - 1866 known as "Squire Osbaldeston"

oil on canvas

30 x 25 cm. (11.3/4 x 9.3/4 in.)

frame measures 44 x 39 x 6 cm. Together with a book titled "Squire osbaldeston, his autobiography, edited by E.D.Cuming and an introduction by Sir Theodore Cook".

George Osbaldeston, (1786–1866), sportsman, was born on 26 December 1786 at Welbeck Street, London, the only son of the five children of George Osbaldeston (1753–1793), previously Wickins, landowner and MP for Scarborough, and his wife, Jane (d. 1821), daughter of Sir Thomas Head. His parents, who were from ecclesiastical, academic, and political families, were from the south of England, but in 1770 Osbaldeston's grandfather had inherited half the Yorkshire estates of his wife's uncle Fountayne Wentworth Osbaldeston (1694–1770), on condition that he took the Osbaldeston name. The family lived in the Osbaldeston house at Hutton Buscel, near Scarborough. When his father died, the estate was left in trust for six-year-old George, whose mother squandered much of it.

Osbaldeston lived at Hutton Buscel until he was nine years old, from which time he attended successively the schools run by the Revd Carr and the Revd Wallington, both at Ealing, London, and then Eton College (1802–3), where sport was his sole interest. Following a wild spell at Brighton (1803–4), he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1805, but sport took precedence over study and he left in 1807 without a degree. His wealth qualified him to be commissioned lieutenant-colonel of the 5th regiment North Riding local militia from 1809 to 1811, and family connections enabled him to be elected as a whig MP for East Retford, Lincolnshire, from 1812 to 1818, although he rarely attended parliament. The appointment as high sheriff for Yorkshire, in 1829, was more to his taste, as it involved much socializing.

Osbaldeston's obsession was to be the best at competitive sports; he was skilled at billiards, cricket, shooting, rowing, tennis, horse-racing, carriage-racing, and especially fox-hunting. He was sixteen when he first bought hounds; they were Southern hounds, and were too slow for him, so he bought Lord Jersey's dwarf foxhounds and built kennels, to Beckford's design, at Hutton Buscel. In 1810, when a fire destroyed Hutton Buscel Hall, he rented a house with his mother, the Palace, Lincoln, where she could entertain, and he hunted the local Burton country, after purchasing the late Lord Monson's pack. He was reputed to have a son, by a Miss Green, a Lincoln prostitute, but the child was sent abroad. For the next twenty-four years he was an itinerant master of foxhounds, serving nine hunts, including the Atherstone (1815–17), the Quorn (1817–21 and 1823–7), and the Pytchley (1827–34), usually subsidizing the cost; he may have been tolerated only for this reason, as he antagonized all ranks of society by his self-centred, arrogant attitudes and his persistent belief that people cheated him. W. Sparrow has suggested that Osbaldeston's great reputation as a huntsman and hound-breeder was mainly due to the skill of his whipper-in, Tom Sebright: after they parted company, Osbaldeston's hunt declined considerably, and he overworked his hounds (Sparrow, xviii). At cricket, he first played at Lord's in 1808 and bowled and batted for the All England team. He rowed competitively, with success from boyhood to middle age. He was a famous shot, both at game birds and at live pigeons, released from traps, at the Old Hat and Red House clubs, although the bore of his gun was 1½ inches, so he may not have been particularly skilful.

Horse-racing was an obsession that Osbaldeston pursued in many forms. Nicknamed the Squire by the press, he was only 5 feet 6 inches tall but weighed 11 stone and was a powerful man, who rode wel