George Dawe, 
British 1781-1829- 
A pair of portraits: Ebenezer Fuller Maitland; Bethia Fuller...

George Dawe, 
British 1781-1829- 

A pair of portraits: Ebenezer Fuller Maitland; Bethia Fuller Maitland (née Ellis) and their son William; 

oils on canvas, each 238 x 147.5 cm., a pair (2). 

Provenance: 
The sitters, and thence by descent. 

Exhibited: 
London, Royal Academy of Art, 1817, no.247 (Mrs Fuller Maitland and her son). 

Note: 
Ebenezer Fuller Maitland FRS (1780-1858) was an English landowner and politician. He was the only son of Ebenezer Maitland, a London businessman and Bank of England director, and his wife Mary. In 1807, he changed his name to Ebenezer Fuller Maitland in accordance with the bequest of his wife's unmarried aunt, Sarah Fuller, who left him her fortune in 1810. In 1804, Maitland served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Reading Volunteers. He was elected Member of Parliament for Lostwithiel in 1807, for Wallingford in 1812, and for Chippenham in 1826, holding the latter seat until 1830. He was Sheriff of Berkshire in 1825–26, Sheriff of Breconshire in 1831-32, a director of the South Sea Company from 1815 until his death, and in 1829 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 

Ebenezer's wife Bethia (1781-1865) was heiress to the banker William Fuller, said to be one of the richest men in England. They had twelve children, of whom four sons and four daughters married. His eldest surviving son and heir was William Fuller Maitland (1813-1876), shown here as the little boy. William was an avid picture collector who journeyed frequently to Italy, where he encountered the works of the early Italian masters, whose paintings, alongside English landscapes, formed the basis of a major part of his collection. From the time of his first marriage in 1842 until his death, he lived at Stansted Hall in Essex. He was father to the MP and cricketer William Fuller-Maitland (1813-1876). 

As well as two large London houses, Ebenezer and Bethia owned country estates at Shinfield Park and Park Place in Berkshire, Stansted Hall at Stansted Mountfichet in Essex, Garth near Builth Wells in Breconshire, and High Barcaple in Kirkcudbrightshire. The portrait of Bethia and William shows Park Place in the left background. At the time of painting in c.1816, Park Place in fact belonged to Ebenezer's cousin Henry Piper Sperling, who had recently purchased the property at auction, and who in 1824 swapped it for Ebenezer's estate Norbury Park in Surrey. When Fuller Maitland died in 1858, Queen Victoria visited Park Place with the intention of purchasing the estate for the Prince of Wales. Ebenezer's wife in fact remained in the house until her death when their son William took over ownership. An attempt to sell by auction was made in 1866, but the eventual sale took place in 1867, to Charles Easton of Whiteknights, Reading – a speculator, purchased with the intention of dividing the then 800-acre estate. In 2012, it was sold to Russian businessman Andrey Borodin for a record £140 million, making it the hitherto most expensive house sale in the United Kingdom.