Mary Esther Sibthorp (1778–1861) married John Hawkins (TN46) in 1801 and was the daughter of Humphrey Sibthorp (1744–1815), MP for Lincoln. Her half-brother was the botanist Dr John Sibthorp, who was accompanied by John Hawkins on a plant-collecting expedition to Greece in the mid-1790s. Mary Hawkins, like her husband and half-brother, was a keen botanist.

Henry Edridge was a portrait painter and landscape draughtsman. He was in business at 10 Dufour’s Place from 1790 to 1799, when his reputation was being established, and also worked from a cottage he had purchased at Hanwell, Middlesex. In 1789 Edridge had become acquainted with the landscape watercolourist Thomas Hearne and went sketching with him, adopting a little of his style and technique. Through Hearne he met Dr Thomas Monro and after 1794 attended Monro’s unofficial drawing school in Adelphi Terrace in company with J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Girtin. But Edridge was already becoming well known for the style of portraiture that combined the delicacy of miniature painting with breadth of draughtsmanship and also included landscape. His earliest (anonymous) biographer stated, ‘It was only of late years that he made those elaborately high-finished pictures on paper, uniting the depth and richness of oil paintings with the freedom and freshness of water-colours, and of which there is perhaps scarcely a nobleman’s family in England without some specimens.’¹