For the past week we have been playing host to Captain Henry Skillicorne (1678–1763).

It’s all thanks to Jenny Ogle, the Queen of the Friends of The Wilson (Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum). Jenny heard on the grapevine that a Cheltenham hotel was selling off some of its pictures, including a forgotten three-quarter length portrait of the Captain, one of Cheltenham’s founding fathers, which had graced a bar there for many years. Jenny was stung into action, and she and Hilary went off to the auction with a view to securing the portrait for the public to own and see at The Wilson.

The dashing sea-captain Henry Skillicorne (1678–1763) came from the Isle of Man and spent his career in Bristol running merchant ships for Mr Jacob Elton to and from Zante (Zakynthos) and the “Currant Islands” in the Ionian Sea – and further afield – in the early eighteenth century. When he retired from a life on the ocean wave, Henry met and married Elizabeth Mason in Bristol (his second wife) and through her inherited property in Cheltenham, at the spot where the first mineral springs were found. He moved to Cheltenham in 1838 and set about marketing the town as a spa, building a pump to regulate the flow of spring water, and generally contributing to the development of Cheltenham’s elegant central walkways.

And the painting? Jenny and Hilary secured it for The Wilson, and after lodging with us for a week it’s now undergoing some minor restoration before it graces the walls of Cheltenham’s art gallery…