Lydia Pigott Thresher: The Fareham Woman Who Owned a Copley
Lydia Pigott Thresher (1766–1844) is remembered in St Peter & St Paul’s churchyard, but an unexpected part of her story survives today more than 3,500 miles away in Detroit. The churchyard record gives her dates as 1766–21 July 1844.
Lydia was the daughter of Revd James Pigott and married William Thresher of Fareham. Her family possessed an important portrait by the celebrated Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley, one of the leading portrait painters of the eighteenth century.
The painting, completed in 1779, depicts Elizabeth Legge Gayton, wife of Admiral Clark Gayton. After Elizabeth’s death, the portrait passed to her husband Revd James Pigott, and then to his daughter Lydia in Fareham. The Detroit Institute of Arts records the chain of ownership specifically as “Lydia Pigott [Mrs. William Thresher] (Fareham, Hampshire, England).”
The portrait remained in the Thresher family for generations before eventually being sold in the twentieth century. In 1927 it entered the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where it remains today. The museum describes it as an important example of Copley’s London portraiture.
Lydia’s husband William was himself a prominent Fareham figure. Records show him serving as a local magistrate, regularly dealing with cases at the Fareham sessions during the early nineteenth century.
Lydia’s grave therefore connects Fareham with an extraordinary journey of an artwork: painted by John Singleton Copley in Georgian London, inherited by a Fareham family, kept here for generations, and eventually preserved in one of America’s major art museums.
