Warner Lewis II (1747-1791)

Warner Lewis II was the son of Warner Lewis I and Eleanor Bowles Lewis. He was a student at Oxford and apparently commissioned a portrait while in England. According to a family historian, this portrait was destroyed in the 1916 fire at Rosewell Plantation. Although the family claimed that he was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, this cannot be confirmed. He married Mary Chiswell. He was painted as a young boy by John Wollaston in a double portrait with his sister and he was painted in the 1770s by Charles Willson Peale along with his wife. That portrait descended in his brother James’s family.

Reference: According to the family, “He was sent to England when a young man to be educated, and studied at Oxford University. During his stay abroad, his portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and he is quoted to the effect that this portrait cost his father the sum of one hundred guineas. This portrait was lost in 1916 in the burning of “Rosewell”, home of Judge Fielding Lewis Taylor, to which it had been removed upon the sale of Warner Hall.”

See: Merrow Egerton Sorley, Lewis of Warner Hall: The History of a Family (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, Co., 1935), 70.