This elegantly painted oval portrait exemplifies the basis for Pompeo Batoni’s reputation as the most sought-after portraitist working in Rome during the eighteenth century.
From the later seventeenth century, there was an increasing expectation that wealthy young men from Britain and Ireland, after they had reached manhood, would spend prolonged periods on the Continent, particularly in Italy, studying the rich heritage and artefacts of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. By the mid-eighteenth century, this custom became an even more widespread phenomenon, with the wealthy British elite travelling in their hundreds to the great cultural sites of the Italian peninsula. Initially working as a history painter, from the 1750s onwards Batoni capitalised on the influx of British travellers, perfecting the genre of the ‘Grand Tour portrait’.
Batoni was evidently a shrewd businessman and maintained a relatively level pricing structure for his commissions, consistently less than the amounts demanded from society portraitists working in Britain, like Sir Joshua Reynolds or Allan Ramsay. In 1774, John Thorpe (1726-1792), an English ex-Jesuit living in Rome, wrote that Batoni ‘values himself for making a striking likeness of everyone he paints (E. Peters Bowron, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome, exhibition catalogue, London and Houston, 2008, p. 37). While this was certainly valued by his patrons, Batoni’s portraits were more than simply accurately rendered, as Thorpe went on to say, they were ‘vivid and memorable’, imbued with character and expression (ibid., p. 38).
The painter’s ability to accommodate the changing fashions his sitter’s dress was also an important element of his success. Travelling on the Continent, wealthy Tourists were able to indulge their tastes for refinement, with Italian fashions providing a far greater array of colours and ornament than native English clothing, generally at a much lower cost. The present sitter’s double-breasted coat with the large collar suggest that the painting likely dates to the end of the 1770s, when the fashion for broader lapels became more prevalent. Beneath the sober colour of his coat, the sitter wears a brilliant pink waistcoat of figured silk.