Overall: 81cm (32in) x 53cm (21in)
Mezzotint. Full length portrait of James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and Kincardine (1811-1863). Engraved by James Faed, after Francis Grant. Published 1864 by Henry Graves & Co. Sheet: 72.6 cm (28.8in) x 43.3cm (17in). Framed and glazed.
James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-1863) was educated at Eton and Oxford and was successively governor of Jamaica and Canada (1847-1854). However he is known to history for ordering the destruction of the Summer Palace, near Peking, vilified by many as an uncivilised act of vandalism. He was then High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary in China whose job it was to go to Peking and see that the Treaty of Tientsin was honoured. To the mind of George MacDonald Fraser’s anti-hero Harry Flashman, Elgin ‘was the shrewdest diplomatic of his day, hard as a hammer and subtle as a Spaniard’ for acting in retaliation for the torture and deaths of 20 Europeans and Indians by Qing dynasty officials.
Elgin oversaw the Second Opium War, and subsequently submitted the Qing dynasty to the unequal treaty of the Convention of Peking, adding Kowloon Peninsula to the British crown colony of Hong Kong. in 1862, he became first Viceroy of India directly appointed by the Crown, and as subject to the Secretary of State for India, tried to hold the Dutch in Sumatra in check, and marched a force to the Peshawar border to enforce earlier treaties. He suffered a fatal heart attack while crossing a swinging rope and wood bridge over the river Chadly, and was buried in the churchyard of St. John in the Wilderness in Dharamshala.