The marine artist Nicholas Pocock (1740-1821) had eight surviving children. This inscribed drawing shows his four elder sons at play with a wooden hobby-horse on wheels, on which the youngest ('Johnny') is riding, 'Billy' pulling and 'Nick' pushing. Isaac (eldest survivor after a previous Isaac was an infant death) is supervising with a toy whip raised in his right hand. Since he is shown 'unbreeched' in skirts, as they all are, he would have been about five at most when this was drawn and John Innes Pocock, the youngest, about two. At back right there is a rigged ship model, shown on keel-blocks and supported by shores, as if in dry-dock. It represents a small Royal Naval sloop with a Union jack on a jackstaff forward, a standard tricolour commissioning pennant at the main and a red ensign on the ensign staff astern. Although there is no other background, the fact that the model is not in a glazed case suggests the drawing may have been done in Pocock's studio in Bristol (unless done quite separately from the children): the family only moved to London in 1798 and an unprotected model would only be where small children were being watched. Isaac Pocock (1782-1835) had an early career as a painter, initially as one of the last London pupils of George Romney and then of Sir William Beechey: he mainly did historical subjects and portraits but by 1810 was becoming better known as a prolific and popular writer of stage melodramas. These included 'The Miller and his Men' (1813) which became a staple of the 19th-century toy theatre, while his 'Rob Roy MagGregor' (1818), one of many adaptations by him and others from the novels of Sir Walter Scott, gave the great actor William Charles Macready his first notable heroic role: it was also praised by Scott when he saw it at Edinburgh. Also in 1818, on the death of his uncle Sir Isaac Pocock (like Nicholas senior a former Bristol sea captain but knighted in 1786 as High Sheriff of Northampton) Isaac inherited his Ray Lodge estate at Maidenhead: he spent the rest of his life there as a country gentleman, JP and Deputy Lieutenant of Berkshire, but continued playwriting and sometimes did sketches for sets and costumes to aid productions. William Innes Pocock (1783-1836) became a much travelled warrant officer in the navy during the Napoleonic War and was also a good painter in watercolours. He published two collections of views from his voyages, notably a set of St Helena in 1815 after Napoleon was exiled there, from sketches he had made of the island on the return leg of a China voyage of 1807-10. He was commissioned lieutenant in 1811 and, after winning considerable prize money in the Adriatic, came ashore permanently in 1814 and lived near Isaac at Reading and Bray in his later years. Little detail is yet known of the younger Nicholas and John Innes Pocock: they were born in Bristol, Nicholas on 29 August 1784 and John on 27 August 1785, and both were baptised there at St Stephen’s Church on 25 July 1787 (about the same time as this drawing was done). Nicholas became captain of HM Packet 'Princess Mary' and died at Lisbon on 28 April 1819. John was articled as a clerk to two separate London solicitors, successively, in 1800 and 1801 and became a prosperous lawyer whose effects were noted as worth nearly £60,000 when he died at Puckrup Hall, Twyning, Gloucestershire on 25 February 1865, aged 79. Shortly before his own death, Isaac in a letter to William appears to mention him as 'tremendous John', suggesting he was by then becoming rather fat or grand - or both. Later children not shown here were George, also a lawyer, Mary Ann, Peter (who became captain of HM Packet 'Lapwing' and died at Falmouth on 31 December 1817) and Elizabeth, called or 'Betsy'. Mary Ann married the Revd Samuel Fripp of Queen's College, Cambridge, and two of their sons became artists. Their parents and the younger children also lived with Isaac at Ray Lodge from before August 1819. Nicholas Pocock, his wife Ann (nee Evans, d. 1827), Isaac and other family who died there are buried and at Cookham, with monuments in the church: Sir Isaac's is a fine example by John Flaxman. This drawing is on a sheet of writing paper that has been heavily folded, possibly for Nicholas to carry with him: it has been flattened out and mounted on a thin conservation backing but when this was done is not known. The backing may be more recent than the unfolding and the original sheet has slight head studies on the reverse, with modern MS notes. [PvdM 3/20 - provisional entry subject to further sight].