Engraving. This group portrait, shows the Beaconsfield Cabinet of 1874 assembled in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing Street. Included are the then Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield; Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, Foreign Secretary (and son of a former Prime Minister Edward Stanley); and future Prime Minister Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury, then the Secretary of State for India.
In 1878 an exhibition of some 60 or 70 works painted by Charles Mercier, including â€The Beaconsfield Cabinet’, was held, at least in part, to raise funds for the Wigan Infirmary in Greater Manchester. Two years later, the â€Manchester Times’ noted that printmaker Henry Lemon had completed this line engraving of the painting, which â€had occupied Mr. Lemon for four years’. The painting was again mentioned in the press in 1883, when it was on show at â€the fine art saloon of Mr. Murray’ in Nethergate, Dundee. â€The Dundee Courier & Argus’ reported:
â€This is the only instance in which a Cabinet of British statesmen in Council have been actually painted from life, while the picture contains the only full-length portrait in oil of the late Lord Beaconsfield. The canvas is 8 feet, by 5 feet 8 inches.’
