William Stanley Goddard (1757-1845) was a Quirister and then Scholar of Winchester College, 1771-1776, and Commoner of Merton College, Oxford. He returned to Winchester as Commoner Tutor, 1781-1784; Second Master, 1784-1793; Headmaster, 1793-1809. In 1814 he was made a prebendary of St Paul’s and in 1829 a canon of Salisbury. He also held the living of Wherwell, near Andover, for a number of years. The Goddard Scholarship was founded in his memory, and the Goddard Society for major donors is named after him.

This portrait was commissioned by the Warden and Fellows of Winchester to commemorate Goddard’s gift to the College of £25,000. The label on the frame has generated a good deal of confusion. It names John Lucas as the artist and records that the work was painted in 1810. This inaccurate information may be based on a passage in Henry Adams’ Wykehamica (1878), which records that a portrait by Lucas was presented to Goddard by his pupils ‘on his retirement from office’. Lucas’s portrait is in fact Ao69, which was actually painted c. 1832, several decades after Goddard’s retirement from Winchester.

 

Literature: T.F. Kirby, Annals of Winchester College (London, 1892), p. 419; R.D.H. Custance, ‘Goddard, William Stanley (1757–1845)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

Provenance: Commissioned by Winchester College in 1836 for 180 gns (£189)

Location: College Hall