Edward Hawke Locker (1777-1849) RMG BHC3165

Edward Hawke Locker (1777-1849)
A half-length portrait facing to the left, in a black coat, within a painted oval. The sitter was the youngest son of Captain William Locker (1731-1800), ultimately the Lieutenant-Governor of Greenwich Hospital. Educated at Eton, he entered the civil side of the Navy and in 1804 became secretary to Sir Edward Pellew (later Viscount Exmouth) a post he retained until 1814. In 1819 he became secretary of Greenwich Hospital and civil commissioner in 1829, a post he held until his retirement in 1843. Locker ws a major reformer of Hospital affairs, and a significant establishment figure with many friends in artistic and literary circles including Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott and Sir Thomas Lawrence.In the early 1820s he founded a counter-radical journal called 'The Plain Englishman' and in 1823-24 he carried through the project originally thought of by his father to have a 'national gallery' of naval pictures and portraiture in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. Its opening in April1824 predated that of the Angerstein Collection in Pall Mall (the founding core of the National Gallery) by about three weeks, making it the first national historical gallery in England. This portrait was presented to Greenwich Hospital by his family in 1872.

Edward Hawke Locker