Concordia Magazine 2025

At Merchant Taylors’ the lack of portraits of Mulcaster and Hilles has always proved problematic, confirming the key role that portraits have in providing staff and students with a sense of identity of their founders.

and Royal Academician George Spencer Watson (1895) has always hung in the Senior Common Room since its presentation marking Vialls’s 40 years at the School. Another portrait by Watson, of Revd Richard Frederick Hosken MA, may be found in the Old Merchant Taylors’ Pavilion. The former pupil Arthur Pond (1705–58) was a gentleman artist, portrait painter, engraver and ‘virtuoso dealer and collector’. 12 His ‘Self Portrait’ (1739), in the School Archive, is an enchanting etching showing his arms crossed, with his head and body turned slightly to the viewer, in a style very reminiscent of Rembrandt. 13 Finally, Nathaniel Dance (later Sir Nathaniel Holland, Bt, 1735–1811) entered MTS in 1744 at the age of nine. 14 Although his work is not in the School collections, it is important to recognise his prominence as a fashionable portrait painter and his role in the formation of the Royal Academy in London.

Many long-serving members of staff have had their portraits painted, often by colleagues or former pupils. The former pupil Sydney Prior Hall (1842–1922) was a well-known Victorian portrait painter and illustrator. His portrait of Mr Airey was commissioned by 1886 and showed Airey in

F.J. Vialls, 1895: by George Watson

his cap and gown, ‘demonstrating with chalk in hand the method of tracing curves in the Differential calculus’. 11 A portrait of Mr F.J. Vialls (MTS 1855–95) by the former pupil

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Arthur Pond, Self Portrait, etching, 1739