The Trusty Servant is an emblematic figure in a painting at Winchester College and the name of the college's alumni magazine.
The wall-painting called The Trusty Servant was painted by John Hoskins in 1579.[1] It was reworked by William Cave in 1809, giving the painting now on display there.[2] It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England.[3]
The American author Arthur Cleveland Coxe (1818-1896) described "the time-honoured Hircocervus, or picture of 'the Trusty-servant,' which hangs near the kitchen, and which emblematically sets forth those virtues in domestics, of which we Americans know nothing. It is a figure, part man, part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth, and various other symbols in his hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable character."[4]
The painting of The Trusty Servant had a didactic function: it is accompanied by allegorical verses that associate the servant's various animal parts with distinctive virtues that the students of Winchester College were meant to follow.[5]
| Latin | English |
|---|---|
Effigiem servi si vis spectare probati, |
A Trusty Servant's Portrait would you see, |
Legacy
In 2014 Winchester College commissioned a medal by Old Wykehamist Anthony Smith to be awarded to staff in recognition of "Long And Loyal Service". The medal features a relief sculpture of The Trusty Servant as it appears in the painting.[7]
The Trusty Servant is the name of the Winchester College alumni magazine.[8]
There is a Trusty Servant Inn at Minstead in the New Forest.[9]
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18th century engraving of The Trusty Servant -
References
- ^ Pattern Histories: The Trusty Servant Archived 2008-12-04 at the Wayback Machine accessed 29 May 2007
- ^ Pevsner, Nikolaus; Lloyd, David (1967). Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Yale University Press. p. 703. OCLC 850028671.
- ^ a b "A good servant, represented as a hybrid creature combining a man, a pig, an ass and a deer, carrying cleaning implements and having a padlocked mouth. Engraving, 1749, after J. Hoskins". Wellcome Collection. Retrieved 4 November 2022.
- ^ Coxe, Arthur Cleveland (1874). Impressions of England. J. B. Lippincott. p. 249.
- ^ Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing "monsters" in Shakespearean drama and early modern culture (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 139.
- ^ Combe, William (1816). The history of the colleges of Winchester, Eton, and Westminster. London: R. Ackermann. pp. 43–44.
- ^ "Trusty Servant Medal". Anthony Smith Sculpture. Retrieved 30 October 2016.
- ^ "The Trusty Servant Archive". Winchester College. Retrieved 4 November 2022.
- ^ "The Trusty Servant Inn: Est. 1896". The Trusty Servant. Retrieved 4 November 2022.
This page was last edited on 31 December 2023, at 09:28