Hesitant would-be buyers of the Bligh portrait on its various appearances on the market said there was no evidence that Bligh was a freemason although he was shown wearing Masonic medals. However, subsequently it has been argued that members of his family were and he could have been freemasons.
Both portraits are by John Webber if only in the case of the Bligh still “attributed" to Webber rather than signed off by him.
But the doubts about the sitter being Bligh now appear to accord with the change in history's re-examination of the man's nature.
When it was passed in at auction at Christie's in 1994 the Masonic medallions he was wearing and the leisurely nature of the portrait appeared to preclude the certainty that the sitter was Bligh. Recent scholarship suggests he was not the monster old movies made him out to be.
A suggestion that Bligh was such a ship-shape person that he would not have allowed such a "casual" portrait to be painted, appeared to be based on the now discredited notion of a finicky, mean Bligh.
The notion that Bligh's eyes were blue, not brown, is drawn from a romantic source and receives only modest support from one other portrait, its apologists say.
It is also of a younger man not so embittered, perhaps, with experience.
So the portrait has been purchased, again through Christie's, by private treaty with some of the issues then raised addressed.
The purchase marks the continuing activity of Christie's in sales to Australian institutions long since its departure from auction sales Down Under. It comes on top of around $7 million in sales to the Mitchell Library of NSW of early colonial drawings from the Earl of Derby's collection.
Both portraits, if they are entirely what they are believed to be, help offset might well have been at home in the National Maritime Museum in London.
But Captain Cook slipped out in 1984 gracing one of Sotheby's Australia's first art sale catalogues in Sydney. Bligh appears to be part of the Powderham Castle collection of Bligh material that was being added to in the 1970s.
In October, 1979, the portrait sold at Christie's for £12,000 to a buyer in the “West Country“ which is where Powderham is located.
It had previously appeared at Christie's auctions in London where the price seems to have been an impediment to its sale. The portrait has been around at least twice since.
Acquired with a donation from the Liangis family, who own many landmark buildings in Canberra, it will be listed as "Portrait of William Bligh, in master’s uniform c. 1776, Attributed to John Webber RA (1751–1793) oil on canvas. 76.0 x 62.0 cm."
The acquisition may have filled one important hole in its collection but has opened another one. That is, will the gallery proceed to acquire the much more delightful portrait of Mrs Bligh which was last reported to be in the hands of a most celebrated collector of the 1980s, Peter Wilkie, a man well known around the big end of town in the 1980s?
This portrait is reported to have been knocked down to Melbourne art dealer Mr John Playfoot and subsequently acquired by Peter Wilkie, a former director of BHP and James Hardie Industries,
Purchased by Melbourne dealer Mr John Playfoot for the equivalent of $70,000 in 1994, John Webber's portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Bligh, who never left Britain during her lifetime, sold for $116,380 at Christie's in London in 1999
The director of the National Portrait Gallery Mr Angus Trumble said the gallery had been working on the acquisition for some time.
“Bligh has become for Australians a mythic figure. There has been a bellwether William Bligh in every phase of Australian history—the martinet versus the brilliant cartographer and genius of navigation; the deeply misunderstood versus the merely blinkered man; the blackguard versus the gentleman and officer of the Royal Navy, steeped in its sometimes brutal disciplinary code; the angry tyrant versus the lonely husband and victim of circumstance, stoutly defended again and again, as a matter of principle, by their Lordships of the Admiralty."
Mr Trumble said "This portrait represents a different William Bligh. Here he is represented at the age of about 25, several years before his marriage, wearing the uniform of sailing master, already skilled in navigation and seamanship, no doubt ambitious for himself, his men and his vessel, shortly before he was hand-picked by James Cook to go aboard H.M.S. Resolution, on which the artist John Webber also sailed".
Could it now be that the National Maritime Museum which last year stepped in to secure a ban the export of a portrait of a kangaroo and a dingo by the 18th century English artist George Stubbs from leaving the UK (thought to be to Kerry Stokes) and also from an old West Country house, might now have regrets about not blockading the Bligh?
It evidently smarted when the Cook portrait appeared at Sotheby's to substantially launch the long career of the first Sotheby's Australia in London.
