Roy Precious - Antiques & Fine Art has dated this piece to the 18th Century.
The unknown sitter is in a characteristic pose much favoured by Batoni; the red jacket and waistcoat, with simple gold lace decoration, are also of a type and colour that occur many times in the artist's portrait of English gentlemen on the Grand Tour.
POMPEO GIROLAMO BATONI (25 January 1708 – 4 February 1787) was an Italian painter who displayed a solid technical knowledge in his portrait work and in his numerous allegorical and mythological pictures.
Batoni won international fame largely thanks to his customers, mostly British of noble origin. Such Grand Tour portraits by Batoni were in British private collections, thus ensuring the genre's popularity in Great Britain. One generation later, Sir Joshua Reynolds would take up this tradition and become the leading English portrait painter. Although Batoni was considered the best Italian painter of his time, contemporary chronicles mention his rivalry with Anton Raphael Mengs.
In 1760 the painter Benjamin West, while visiting Rome would complain that Italian artists "talked of nothing, looked at nothing but the works of Pompeo Batoni".
In addition to art-loving nobility, Batoni's subjects included the kings and queens of Poland, Portugal and Prussia, the Holy Roman Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II (a fact which earned him noble dignity), as well the popes Benedict XIV, Clement XIII and Pius VI, Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria, and many more. He also received numerous orders for altarpieces for churches in Italy (Rome, Brescia, Lucca, Parma, etc.), as well as for mythological and allegorical subjects.
Batoni's style took inspiration and incorporated elements of classical antiquity, French Rococo, Bolognese classicism, and the work of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and especially Raphael. As such Pompeo Batoni is considered a precursor of Neoclassicism.
SIZE: 28 x 22.75 inches framed.
PROVENANCE: An East Sussex private collection, purchased more then 50 years ago from 'a large London auction house'.
Roy Precious - Antiques & Fine Art has dated this piece to the 18th Century.
Roy and nadine precious: specialists in portraiture from the 16th to the 20th century. Established in 1972.
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Portrait of a Nobleman C. 1768; Studio or Circle of Pompeo Batoni.
