Attributed To Enoch Seeman Portrait of William Shippen Esquire MP oil on canvas bears inscription upper right 'William Shippen/Esquire. MP./ Pope's 'Downright Shippen', Born 1672/M.P. for Bramber 1707/A Leader of the Jacobite Party,/committed to the Tower 1717, Died 1743' bears exhibition label verso 126 x 100.5 cm. Provenance: F.Laybourne Poppan Private Collection Melbourne William Shippen (1673-1745), was a barrister, MP for Newtown, near Warrington, Lancashire, and a well known Augustan wit and poet. A Tory and moderate Jacobite he found himself in opposition to the Hanoverian-Whig government, and in 1717 suggested that a royal speech seemed rather too calculated for the meridian of Germany than of Great Britain, and that the king was a stranger to our language and constitution, for this indiscretion George I had Shippen committed to the Tower of London, winning him immortality in Alexander Pope's 'Imitations of Horace' as 'downright Shippen'. Sitter is identified by a document on the table in the portrait this work, attributed to the Georgian portraitist Enoch Seeman (1694-1745), was formerly in the collection of the Leybourne-Popham family of Littlecote House Wiltshire, and was included in the encyclopaedic National Portrait Exhibition at South Kensington Museums in 1866-67 Exhibited National Portrait Exhibition, 1867 cat G.I (bears label on reverse)