Six Georgian portraits found in Shropshire attic to go on public display

The surveyor was looking for woodworm. What he found, behind a water tank in the roof space of a Shropshire country house, was a stack of six canvases wrapped in army-issue horse blankets and tied with baling twine, which conservators now believe to be a complete set of Georgian family portraits unseen by anyone outside the household for at least 80 years.

The paintings, which show a man, his wife, three daughters and a son in the dress of the early 1770s, will go on display at a regional gallery in Shrewsbury from next month after 14 months of cleaning and research. They are thought to depict the Pountney family, wool merchants who bought Ercall Hall near Wellington in 1768 and whose descendants still own it.

“They had simply been forgotten,” said Dr Helen Masefield, the gallery’s curator of historic art, who led the research. “The house was requisitioned in 1940 and a lot of things were put in the roof to keep them away from the soldiers. The family who came back after the war were not the family who had put them there, and nobody went up a ladder behind a water tank for 80 years. Why would you?”

The portraits are unsigned, and Masefield is careful about attribution. Stylistic analysis and the discovery of a 1773 receipt in the county archive for “six pictures, £63” paid to “Mr Hoare of Bath” suggest they may be the work of a provincial portraitist working in the manner of the fashionable London studios, rather than of a major name. “I would love to tell you they are Gainsboroughs,” she said. “They are not. What they are is a remarkably complete record of a particular kind of family at a particular moment, and that is rarer than people think.”

The cleaning revealed details hidden under two centuries of varnish and soot: a spaniel at the feet of the youngest daughter, a view of what appears to be the Wrekin through a window behind the father, and, on the back of the son’s portrait, a pencil inscription reading “Thos. aged 11, took the smallpox the following spring”. Parish records confirm that a Thomas Pountney was buried in 1774.

The current owner, who asked not to be named, has lent the paintings to the gallery for three years and said the family had “no intention” of selling them. “They’ve been in the house for 250 years, one way or another,” he said. “It would feel like evicting someone.”

The exhibition, Found: A Shropshire Family, opens on 7 November. Admission is free.