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With his long hair and loose shirt, and holding his jacket nonchalantly over his arm, the eight-year-old Richard Heber shows the signs of that "naturalness" that was such a desideratum of British portraiture toward the end of the eighteenth century. The paraphernalia of cricket underlines the idea that this is a boy who enjoys healthy sport and the outdoors. Looking fearlessly toward the bowler's end, leaning on his bat and holding the ball-which means that play cannot start until he chooses-he strikes a pose that combines ease with control.
The portrait was commissioned by the boy's father, the Reverend Reginald Heber, Rector of Malpas in Cheshire, a well-to-do, intellectually-minded clergyman who had been a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Richard's mother, Mary Baylie, had died shortly after his birth. At about the time the portrait was painted, in the summer of 1782, the father remarried; it is tempting to speculate that the two events were in some way connected, although exactly how remains elusive. Despite the references to cricket in the portrait, there is no record of any athletic tendency on the part of the sitter, and the ruling passion of his life was to be the distinctly indoor pursuit of book collecting. Even at the age of eight, when he posed for the portrait, he had not only books but enough of a collector's mentality to have compiled a catalogue of them. He was to be one of the leading bibliophiles of his generation, dubbed by his friend Walter Scott "Heber the magnificent, whose library and cellar are so superior to all others in the world." From his father he inherited estates in Shropshire and Yorkshire. He represented Oxford University in Parliament from 1821 to 1826 and in 1824 was one of the founders of the Athenæum Club. His search for rare volumes, especially editions of English poetry and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, led him to travel widely at home and abroad. In addition to his country properties he owned houses in London, Oxford, Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent. When he died, unmarried, in 1833, these were found to contain a total of some 150,000 volumes. Heber is credited with the saying: "No gentleman can be without three copies of a book: one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers."
From the cricketing point of view, perhaps the most intriguing feature of the portrait is the wicket with its bail dislodged, which is difficult to explain or interpret. Surely the artist would not have wished to imply that Heber has been bowled out. Perhaps the previous batsman has been bowled, and he is the next man in, although he would be unlikely to be holding his jacket if that were the case. In the end, the portrait hardly stands up to such a literal, narrative reading and was probably never intended to show a particular moment in a game. As the implausible setting of woods and stream makes clear, the boy's cricketing is notional rather than actual. The cricketing objects are included more as emblems, like the attributes of a saint in an altarpiece, and the wicket may be shown with its bail down only to signal its function in a general sense. It may even be down for purely compositional reasons: in other words, because the artist felt that a diagonal would work better than a horizontal at this point in his design. It is just possible, however, that it is biographical, the image of a motherless childhood: dependent on his father as a single parent, the boy is like a dislodged bail leaning on a single stump.

Malcolm Warner

Malcolm Warner, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 106, no. 39, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)