Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Painted Portraits - Later Eighteenth Century

Francisco Goya
Portrait of a man in a brown coat
ca. 1790
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Thomas Lawrence
Portrait of William Lock of Norbury
1790
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of a Lady, possibly Mrs Pigott of Chetwynd
before 1792
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Joshua Reynolds
Mrs Richard Hoare holding her child
ca. 1763
oil on canvas (unfinished)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of Maria, Lady Eardley
before 1788
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of John Eld of Seighford Hall, Stafford
ca. 1775
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Landscapeople

Long desired, the journey is begun.  The suppliants
Climb aboard the damaged carrousel:
Some have been hacked to death, one has learned
Some new thing, and all are touched
With the same blight, like a snowfall
Of moments as they are read back to the monitor
Which only projects.

                                  Some can decipher it,
The outlines of an eddy that traced itself
Before moving on, yet its place had to be,
Such was the appetite of those times.  A ring
Of places existed around the central one,
And of course these died away eventually.
Everything has turned out for the best,
The "eggs of the sun" have been returned anonymously,
And the new ways are as simple as the old ones,
Only more firmly anchored to the spectacle
Of the madness of the seasons as it unfolds
With iron-clad rigidity, filling the sky with light.
We began in an anonymous sensuality
And lived most of it out before the difference
Of time got in the way, filling up the margins of the days
With pictures of fruit, light, colors, music, and vines,
Until it ceases to be a problem.

– John Ashbery, from As We Know (Viking Press, 1979)

Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of Mrs Thomas Mathews
ca. 1772
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of Mrs Edmund Morton Pleydell
ca. 1765
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Adolf Ulric Wertmüller
Portrait of the sculptor Jean-Jacques Caffieri
1784
oil on canvas (Salon reception piece)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Choice of Prides

To tell the truth, it would have its points
(Since fall we must) to do it proud:
To ride for your fall on a good mount
Hung with honors and looped garlands,
Moved by the crowd's flattering sounds,
Or to advance with brash din, banners,
Flights of arrows leaping like hounds.

But from a choice of prides I would pick
(Or so I hope) the bare cheek
To amble out, innocent of arms
And alone, under the cocked guns
Or what missiles might be in season,
And this in the pure brass of the act
Attired, and in no other armor.

Considering that, of every species
(I should reason) mine is most naked,
For all its draperies enacting
As a pink beast its honest nature,
I will take in this raw condition
What pride I can, not have my boast
In glad rags, my bravery plated.

And I should think myself twice lucky
(Stuck with my choice) if I could be sure
That I had been egged on by nothing
But neat pride, and not (as is common)
Brought to it by the veiled promptings
Of vanity, or by poverty
Or the fecklessness of despair.

– W.S. Merwin, from The Drunk in the Furnace (Macmillan, 1960)

George Romney
Mrs Billington as Saint Cecilia
1787-88
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

George Romney
Portrait of Miss Matilda Lockwood
ca. 1784-86
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

George Romney
Portrait of Two Girls (Misses Cumberland)
ca. 1772-73
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Mrs Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell)
1772
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Mrs Timothy Rogers (Lucy Boylston)
1766-67
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Nathaniel Sparhawk
1764
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston