George Richmond, R.A., and Mr. Dupont of Sudbury has two unfinished portraits of him, also by Gainsborough.
His principal painting is a large picture, twenty feet long, representing the elder brethren of the Trinity House, which is in the court-room of that corporation on Tower Hill, and for which he received 500l. A half-length portrait of William Wyndham, lord Grenville, prime minister in 1806–7, is in the possession of Earl Fortescue, and a head of William Pitt in that of Lieutenant-colonel Fortescue of Dropmore, Buckinghamshire. Valentine Green, in his plate of ‘The British Naval Victors,’ engraved after Dupont the head of Earl Howe, and Earlom engraved that of William Pitt. Other portraits by Dupont have been reproduced in mezzotint by Dickinson, Murphy, and John Jones.
[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists of the English School, 1878; Edwards's Anecdotes of Painters, 1808, p. 143; Chaloner Smith's British Mezzotinto Portraits, 1878–83, i. 237–42; Fulcher's Life of Thomas Gainsborough, 1856; Royal Academy Catalogues, 1790–5.]
DUPORT, JAMES, D.D. (1606–1679), master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, was son of John Duport, D.D. [q. v.], master of Jesus College in that university, by Rachel, daughter of Richard Cox, bishop of Ely (Cooper, Athenæ Cantab. i. 442). He was born in the master's lodge at Jesus College in 1606, and educated at Westminster School under the care of Dr. John Wilson. In 1622 he was elected one of the Westminster scholars annually sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, where for nine years he was under the tuition of Dr. Robert Hitch, afterwards dean of York. In January 1626–7 he took the degree of B.A., and in October 1627 he was elected a fellow of Trinity. He commenced M.A. in 1630, and took orders shortly afterwards. He became one of the public tutors of his college, and continued to take pupils for above thirty years with unrivalled success and reputation. In 1637 he proceeded to the degree of B.D.
In 1639 he was elected regius professor of Greek in the university. A difficulty immediately arose, however, respecting his admission. The statutes of Trinity College directed that any fellow who became regius professor of divinity, Hebrew, or Greek should resign the emoluments of his fellowship; and Duport declined to accept an office the salary of which was only 40l. if it were necessary that he should quit the position which he held in his college. The point being referred to the master and seniors was, after some demur, decided in his favour, and he was accordingly admitted to the professorship 13 July 1639. This favourable interpretation was probably founded upon the words of the statute, ‘deinceps Socii nomen solum teneat,’ which certainly admitted of the professor's retaining his pupils as well as his rank among the fellows, forfeiting only the statutable stipend and other inconsiderable emoluments. He was collated to the prebend of Langford Ecclesia in the church of Lincoln and to the archdeaconry of Stow in the same diocese, 14 Aug. 1641 (Le Neve, Fasti, ed. Hardy, ii. 81). For this preferment he was indebted to Bishop Williams, the late lord keeper, who became himself next year archbishop of York. On 13 Nov. 1641 he exchanged his prebend for that of Leighton Buzzard in the same cathedral. In 1643 Cambridge underwent the parliamentary visitation of the Earl of Manchester. Duport was a royalist, but, though ejected from his prebendal stall and resigning his archdeaconry (1641), retained his residence in Cambridge, and delivered his public lectures in the Greek schools during the heat of the civil war. He lectured upon the ‘Characters of Theophrastus’ and some of the orations of Demosthenes. He was elected by the heads of houses the Lady Margaret's preacher at Cambridge in 1646, an appointment which obliged him to deliver annually at least six sermons in the dioceses of London, Ely, and Lincoln. In 1654 the ‘commissioners for reforming the university’ compelled him to resign the Greek professorship on account of his refusal to subscribe to the ‘engagement for maintaining the government without king or house of peers;’ and they caused the professorship to be conferred on Ralph Widdrington, fellow of Christ's College. Trinity College elected Duport a senior fellow almost immediately afterwards. In 1655 he was chosen vice-master, to which office he was re-elected annually during his residence at Trinity. He still continued tutor. Among the young men educated under his care were Isaac Barrow, John Ray, and Francis Willoughby, the naturalists, and two sons of the Earl of Bedford, the youngest of whom, William, was the distinguished and ill-fated Lord Russell.
On 20 May 1660, being the Sunday next but one before the Restoration, he preached a sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral at the special invitation of Sir Thomas Alleyne, lord mayor. Thus he was one of the first divines who publicly hailed the revival of the national church after a proscription of eighteen years. A few years before he had in his capacity of Lady Margaret's preacher delivered a sermon in St. Paul's, wherein he expressed himself in terms of complaint and indignation at the manner
