Elias Needham, Portrait Painter (1765-1800)

I found myself researching Elias Needham as I have been working on the Nottingham artist Thomas Barber (1771-1843) and it seems that Barber knew Needham and may have been influenced by him.

As far as I know Needham is nothing to do with this Beaumont Archive.

At first I could find very little solid information about Needham. However I am fairly confident that he was born in late 1765 and was christened both at Wormhill and at Chesterfield. His father, also Elias, was a lawyer in Chesterfield. Needham, who was the eldest of several (but a number of his siblings may have died young), was articled to his father in 1783 but surely did not complete his legal training.

He went off to London where he exhibited pictures at the Royal Academy in the late 1780s.

How he learned to paint such good portraits is a mystery to me.

In 1786 and 1788 he exhibited at the Royal Academy from addresses in London (17 Red Lion Street Holborn in 1786) (19 Dean Street Canterbury Square [Southwark] in 1788) and in 1787 and 1790 from Chesterfield. All five pictures being of unidentified people: 1786 a young gentleman, 1787 a lady, 1788 a girl reading, and a lady, and 1790 a boy.

In 1788 he painted a portrait of the clergyman and antiquary Samuel Pegge, also a Chesterfield man. 

The 1786 young gentleman, or the 1790 boy, could be the one of a youth that I found online.

Needham's father died in late 1788.

Needham became enamoured of a teenage girl called Anne Burgoyne Fernell, who lived at Spring House, Calow, just outside Chesterfield. She was the eldest of several, and her father too had recently died - aged only 38. His name was John Burgoyne Fernell, and he was only about 15 years older than Needham, and without any evidence I have a bit of a hunch that Needham may have known him from childhood and been introduced by him to London contacts.

I am intrigued too by references to a certain John Fernel in the late 1790s and later, a portrait- or miniature-painter in Liverpool but have not had time to see if there seems to be any family connexion between him and J B Fernell.

The young couple went off to London together "on a matrimonial expedition" as one newspaper put it, and are said to have married at Tottenham on 7 June 1790. I don't know how or indeed whether this wedding actually happened. The papers say the girl was 17 but I would not be surprised if she was even younger!

Needham was then working in Sheffield in 1791 but is untraced for several years after that until in 1797 he is said to be in Nottingham. This is known only from a newspaper notice on 29 April that year when Richard Bonington announced the establishment of a "public drawing school at his lodgings at Mr. Needham's, the Portrait Painter, in Houndsgate." 

This then is a time when Bonington, Needham, and Barber must all have met.

Heather Williams says that the Cutlers' Hall in Sheffield commissioned Needham in 1797 to paint portraits of Colonel Robert Athorpe and the Reverend James Wilkinson. Engravings of these can be found online and these suggest that Needham's style was somewhat more old-fashioned than that of Barber.

Needham died in Sheffield in late May 1800 and was buried at Chesterfield. His wife's mother having also died, the Fernell family home was being let out as a school for a few years but Anne may eventually have gone back to live there with her younger brother William Burgoyne Fernell. She remarried in 1811 to a certain David Champion of Sheffield, and as Mr Champion's widow she died at her house at Chesterfield in March 1821. No mention of the Needhams having any children has been found.

Perhaps Needham's death in 1800 at the early age of about 35 helped Thomas Barber's career - removing a serious competitor not merely in Nottingham (a small enough market anyway in portrait-painting terms) but someone who would - by birth as it were - also have had influential connections in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire.

I think Elias Needham had a younger brother Samuel who is seen in various Chesterfield references but I have not researched those.

NB Needham is a frequently-seen surname in Derbyshire.  I did find some conflicting information but at least some of the above is right! Sometimes his name seems to be rendered as Ellis and there were certainly others of that name but the references I have collected do seem to make a pattern of the biography I am suggesting. As always, I am keen to say that one new fact may change everything.

Main sources:

Newspapers in the BNA (mainly Derby Mercury and the Sheffield papers)

Unfortunately the Nottingham papers from the 1790s are not available in the BNA and the reference from 1797 is from Heather Williams' thesis.

Graves, Algernon, Catalogue or Dictionary of Royal Academy Contributors / Exhibitors, Vol. 5 p.347

Williams, Heather, Thesis on Lives and Works of Nottingham Artists pp.299-300, pp.791-2. 

Williams referred to B.H. Hoole, Sheffield Portraiture, but I have not been able to find a copy of that.

British Museum website (portraits of Athorpe, Wilkinson, and the youth)

Needham family one name website