Portraits in disguise - NPG 1485
John Simpson
by Angelica Kauffmann
circa 1777
NPG 1485
Portraits in Van Dyck dress were fashionable throughout the eighteenth century, the most famous example being Gainsborough's, The Blue Boy (Huntington Art Gallery, Los Angeles), exhibited at The Royal Academy in 1770. John Simpson (1751-1817) wears a similar outfit and reclines in a chair close to a large classical vase on which we see a woman weeping. The portrait is close to that of Thomas Noel Hill, 2nd Lord Berwick, which Kauffmann painted in Rome. In other portraits the sitter appears as a thoughtful intellectual, evoking Van Dyck's melancholy cavaliers of the Stuart era, one hundred and fifty years earlier. Kauffmann spent fifteen years working in Britain, and was one of the two founder women members of the Royal Academy. Her own portrait appears in the 'Nine Living Muses' by Richard Samuel (see No.8).
Sir William Hamilton
by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776-1777
NPG 680 (Detail)
This
gentleman wears a suit consisting of a velvet 'frock' with matching
breeches and waistcoat and white embroidered silk stockings ad
buckled shoes with blocked toes. He wears the Order of the Bath.
