Huntingdonshire

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, is the greatest of the men of small Huntingdonshire, smallest of English counties after Rutland and Middlesex. He was born at Cromwell House ( I ) , in Huntingdon, in the last year of the sixteenth century. Samuel Pepys (2) (1633-1703), a gayer character, lived as a boy at Brampton, near Huntingdon, where he went to school. The seal of Huntingdon (3), a huntsman, a tree, hounds and a deer, assumes that the name had to do with hunting and forests. It means either “the hunter’s hill” or the hill of an Anglo-Saxon named …

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Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, is the greatest of the men of small Huntingdonshire, smallest of English counties after Rutland and Middlesex. He was born at Cromwell House ( I ) , in Huntingdon, in the last year of the sixteenth century. Samuel Pepys (2) (1633-1703), a gayer character, lived as a boy at Brampton, near Huntingdon, where he went to school. The seal of Huntingdon (3), a huntsman, a tree, hounds and a deer, assumes that the name had to do with hunting and forests. It means either “the hunter’s hill” or the hill of an Anglo-Saxon named Hunta. We associate this little county rather with fen and reed and willow and yellow water-lilies and the slow winding water of the Ouse, and church spires cutting into the sky. Fluttering over the river are two of the rare butterflies of the Huntingdonshire natural reserves of Wood Walton Pen and Monks Wood, the Large Copper (4), re-introduced at Wood Walton in 1927, and the Black Hairstreak (5) of Monks Wood. Skates (6) are a reminder of the fen skating centre at Earith. In osier baskets (7) are plums ‐ the variety Czar to the left, and Rivers’ Early Prolific to the right ‐ from the greensand area of small orchards north of St. Ives, on the edge of the fens. At Little Gidding in this county, near Stilton, the saintly Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637), lord of the manor, maintained his famous religious community.

This painting was one of six commissioned from Richard by Shell-Mex and B.P. Ltd. to use as illustrations in their guides and calendars. The painting here was a replacement for an earlier version after there was an objection to the inclusion of Oliver Cromwell's death mask. This version was accepted and used in the 1962 calendar for March. See the calendar below and an image of the first version, also in the catalogue under the name of Huntingdon Through History . The "Huntingdon Through History" version stayed with the estate for a while, was eventually sold privately and later resold …

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This painting was one of six commissioned from Richard by Shell-Mex and B.P. Ltd. to use as illustrations in their guides and calendars. The painting here was a replacement for an earlier version after there was an objection to the inclusion of Oliver Cromwell's death mask. This version was accepted and used in the 1962 calendar for March. See the calendar below and an image of the first version, also in the catalogue under the name of Huntingdon Through History . The "Huntingdon Through History" version stayed with the estate for a while, was eventually sold privately and later resold at two auctions, firstly at Bonhams in 2005 where it was titled "Huntingdon Through History", and next at Sotheby's in 2006 where it was given the title "Huntingdonshire". There is some chance of confusion here with both the first and second versions being titled "Huntingdonshire" in some contexts. We know that the first version was sold to a private collector, but there is no record of where the second version depicted above has gone. Several of the RE paintings in the Shell collection were auctioned at Sotheby's in 2002, but "Huntingdonshire" was not among them.