Near the start of this blog, on April 24th, 2021, I posted a photo of a painting which had hung on our living room wall from the late 1960s. It was believed to be my great grandfather William Leyland Hunter. It seems to me that is who were told it was, and over the years we just accepted it. The painting was passed around; from my mother to me when she passed away, then to my daughter Donna Michelle, then her daughter Brianna and eventually back to me. As I began to dig into it, I wondered where it came from? Who exactly had given it to my mother? Another thing that bothered me was that the man appeared to be older than what my GGF would have been as he’d died at the age of 50. He also died broke so I wondered how a painting would have been commissioned! At least one of his brothers, from the same time period, had a photo, so why would he be different?
So, recently, with the aid of my daughter, I tackled my storage locker and uncovered some very interesting items. One was a letter to my grandfather Tobias Hunter, written in 1966 making reference to a painting of “John Hunter” As I had suspected at one point, the painting was not of William Leyland Hunter, but actually his father, John Hunter, who was a partner at Binyon’s Tea in Manchester, England. John Hunter was certainly more affluent and he lived until the age of 67, which more accurately matched the age of the gentleman depicted in the painting. John died at Ulverston, Lancashire in May of 1882. With this recently discovered written testimony, the mystery of the painting has been solved. There is more to this story but I’ll save it for a later post.