A Wrongly Catalogued Print of the Prince of Wales (Later, King Edward VII)

Mitchell and Powney talk about a wrongly catalogued print of 'The Prince of Wales'. They are carrying out research into the author Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon, later Mrs Disney Leith, who lived from 1840 to 1926, and her family. In the catalogue of the British Museum Print Room, they noted the catalogue entry relating to her paternal grandfather, Sir James Willoughby Gordon, is something of a puzzle. On looking at the entry, it became clear that there was a cataloguing error. The title in the Acquisitions Book is given as 'The Prince of Wales' and the print is stated to be 'after Sir J W Gordon'. This clears up the identity of the subject: the facial likeness is very similar to others of the Prince of Wales as a young man. The original portrait was evidently not of Sir James Willoughby Gordon, but of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and was made when he was wearing subfusc academic dress either at Christ Church, Oxford, or Trinity, Cambridge.