Sir Hubert Von Herkomer, 1849 - 1914 Portrait of General William Booth 1829–1912, Founder of the Salvation Army

Sir Hubert Von Herkomer, 1849 - 1914

Portrait of General William Booth 1829–1912, founder of the Salvation Army

oil on canvas

31 x 23 cm (12 x 9 in.)

This portrait is likely to be a studio Modello Portrait painted by Herkomer. The large full scale portrait of William Booth after Sir Hubert Von Herkomer at the William Booth College.

William Booth, (1829–1912), founder of the Salvation Army, was born at Sneinton, a suburb of Nottingham, on 10 April 1829, one of five children of Samuel Booth (1775–1842), a speculative builder, and his second wife, Mary Moss (b. 1791). He was sent to Biddulph's School, Nottingham, but it failed to turn him into either a gentleman or a scholar; at thirteen, because of family poverty, he was apprenticed to a pawnbroker in a squalid part of Nottingham. Although he proved an able assistant to his employer, he spoke of this experience in later life with bitterness. Soon after his apprenticeship began his father, whose business affairs had gone from bad to worse, died; the family, struggling to make ends meet, moved into a shop. Booth's ‘blighted childhood’, as he always called it, left a powerful impression on his mind.

Booth drifted out of the Church of England, but there was little to suggest any marked change in his religious thinking before his father's death. He seems to have been stirred politically by the oratory of Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor (1796–1855), who visited Nottingham during the election of 1842. Deeply affected by the daily spectacle of ragged children crying for bread in the streets, Booth ranged himself on the side of the Chartists. A frequent attendant at Nottingham's Wesley Chapel, he was also coming under the sway of Methodism; in 1844, with his conscience tortured by a piece of sharp practice in which he had overreached some of his fellow assistants at the pawnbroker's shop, he made public confession of his sin and underwent conversion. Had it not been for his conscience, and the effect of confession, he might have become a radical. As it was, religion made him, from a political point of view, a die-hard conservative.

The impressionable teenager came under the spellbinding oratory of the American Methodist James Caughey, who visited Nottingham in 1846. Booth joined a group of revivalists who conducted religious services in the streets of the city. He was then seventeen and distinguished by his height, pale face, black hair, and eloquence. In 1849 he moved to London in search of better paid work, but failing to find it he was obliged to go as assistant to a pawnbroker in Walworth. He took at this time several religious vows, which reveal an uncompromising spiritual intention, and almost starved himself in order to send money back to his mother and sisters. He devoted his leisure to religion and began to attract the attention of local Methodists, one of whom, E. J. Rabbits, a rich boot manufacturer, persuaded him to become a lay preacher. It was this boot manufacturer who introduced him into the family of a carriage builder living in Clapham, where he met the woman who was so powerfully to influence his subsequent career.

Catherine Mumford (1829–1890) [see Booth, Catherine], the daughter of the carriage builder, was an invalid who spent most of her time on a sofa. She had a cultivated mind to a degree unusual among people in suburban circles: while she admired Booth's character, she deplored his lack of culture. A child of the dissenting chapel, her religion was respectable, if not conventional. She criticized Booth's sermons, gave him devotional books, and tried to steady his religious ardour. He admitted his lack of learning, but not even her persuasions could tame his ‘love for souls’, which was the master passion of his life. In return, Booth gave her a wider outlook and gradually weaned her mind from its subservience to convention: the suburban