A descendant of Jonathan Couch, the Polperro surgeon and naturalist, recently came across a hitherto unknown miniature portrait of him as a young man.

A note attached to the glass case which housed the miniature portrait gives the date as 1808 and Jonathan Couch’s age as 19. It is almost certainly the miniature he referred to in an account inserted into his Private Memoirs, written in January 1811 shortly after the death of his first wife Jane Prynn Rundle. In 1809, he secured a place at the combined Guy’s and St. Thomas’s teaching hospitals in London and corresponded regularly with his first love Jane who lived at Porthallow above Talland Bay. Couch appears to have commissioned the work by the Italian miniaturist Joseph Pastorini.*

‘When in London her letters breathed the most ardent and constant affection; about two months after I had been there I transmitted to her, by the hands of George, then going down the county from Devon, my miniature which I had promised her. It was drawn by Pastorini and the hair on the reverse is hers…’

Couch’s passionate courtship of Jane Rundle continued throughout his time as a medical student in London. The couple were very much in love when, early in 1810, Jane discovered she was expecting a baby. Her parents may well have persuaded her to withhold the news from him until he had finally completed his medical studies and returned to Polperro later that year. In any event, they were married at Talland in August but tragically Jane died shortly after giving birth to a baby girl in October.

In later life, Jonathan Couch often reflected: ‘In twelve months I was a young man, a married man, a father and a widower’.

His first daughter, also named Jane, went on to marry and have six children of her own. Couch himself remarried twice, becoming the father of eleven children and living until the age of 81. Today, he is remembered as a pioneering man of medicine and the natural world, the author of many books and articles as well as a noted local historian.

*Joseph Pastorini (1775-1839) exhibited at the Royal Academy in London 1812-1834.