Artware Fineart has dated this 18th Century Portrait Painting to the 18th Century.
Portrait of William Sandeman 1722-1790 of Luncarty Perthshire
Signed/Inscribed:
on the frame " WILLm SANDEMAN ESQ / By All.....R..MSAY La....t."
oil on canvas
32 x 24 cm. (12.3/4 x 9.3/4in.)
Provenance
Private Collection New York, USA
Notes
For instance in 1782 alone, Perthshire produced 1.7 million yards of linen worth £81,000. Linen manufacture became by the 1760s a major Scottish industry, second only to agriculture. He was one of the pillars of the Scottish enlightenment.
William was born in 1722 in Luncarty just north of Perth, Scotland the fifth child of David Sandeman and his second wife Margaret Ramsay. David Sandeman was a merchant and magistrate (1735–63) of Perth .William with his first wife Christina Fleming had two children. With his second wife Mary Anderson he had a further 14 children (five of whom married five of the 20 children of Hector Turnbull, his bleachfield's business partner). In 1740, Robert and William Sandeman started a weaving business together, though Robert's expanding church duties in Dundee and Edinburgh removed him from the family business.William was exposed to the Glasite faith after the Perth meeting house first opened in 1733. He was later elected an elder of the Perth congregation for several years. In this position, he was expected to lead the congregation in both the worship and community service. As part of his Glasite obligations, he journeyed with his brother Robert in the first attempt to form a London Sandemanian congregation in 1761. When Robert extracted himself from the family business, William found another willing partner in Hector Turnbull. He was buried in the Greyfriars graveyard Perth with the inscription "William Sandeman manufacturer Perth and bleacher at Luncarty".
He manufactured linen in Perth and nearby Luncarty, for instance with an order of 12,000 to 15,000 yards of "Soldiers' shirting". In 1752 he leveled 12 acres (49,000 m2) of bleachfields in Luncarty. By 1790 when William died, the Luncarty bleachfields covered 80 acres (320,000 m2) and processed 500,000 yards of cloth annually. Second only to agriculture, linen manufacture was a major Scottish industry in the late 18th century — linen then became less important with the introduction of cotton.From an initial 12 acres, the works expanded, for nearly 250 years to occupy around 130 acres. In the 19th century the Luncarty Bleachfield works was the largest linen bleachfield in Scotland, supporting fine linen manufacture from the central belt of the country. Approximately 500,000 square yards of linen was bleached and finished at the works every year.
The bleaching at Luncarty was done by laying linen cloth out on grass in a Bleachfield in the sun. Chemical bleaching may have been introduced after the commercialisation of chlorine bleaches in the late 1800sThe bleaching at Luncarty was done by laying linen cloth out on grass in a Bleachfield in the sun. Chemical bleaching may have been introduced after the commercialisation of chlorine bleaches in the late 1800s.
In the early 1760s, William Sandeman opened two further linen centres: Milntown (now Milton) in Easter Ross and Fortrose on the Black Isle near Inverness. By 1765, these had almost 1000 spinners.
By the 1780s, cotton was replacing linen. In November 1784, Sandeman visited Lancashire cotton mills and Richard Arkwright the inventor who had pioneered cotton-spinning machinery in Derbyshire. Sandeman, Arkwright and others established the Tay River–powered cotton mill in Stanley (just north of Luncarty, Perthshire) in 1786/7 with 3200 spindles. The mill was originally water-powered but was later converted to steam and finally to electric power. For most of its histo
Artware Fineart has dated this 18th Century Portrait Painting to the 18th Century.
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Allan Ramsay, 1713 - 1784 Portrait of William Sandeman 1722-1790 of Luncarty Perthshire
