Early Georgian Portraits Catalogue: Parsons
James Parsons (1705-70)
Physician and antiquary; MD, Rheims, 1736; FRS 1741 and its foreign secretary c.1750; FSA, LRCP, 1751; practised in London; published medical treatises and other works.
560 By Benjamin Wilson, 1762
Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (762 x 635 mm); pale blue eyes, grey eyebrows, full lips slightly parted, fresh complexion, white wig; light gold-brown coat, white cravat; gilt-tooled book inscribed Analo;greenish-brown background shading to dark brown.
Inscribed on the back of relining canvas: Doctr. Jams. Parsons F.R.A.S. [1] / Aetat 60 anno, / quo Benj. Wilson pinxit 1762.
By virtue of its bequest to the British Museum by Dr Knight, an intimate friend of the artist's, and on stylistic grounds the attribution given in the inscription may be accepted as correct. Analo on the book refers presumably to the sitter's work Philosophical Observations on the Analogy between the Propagation of Animals and that of Vegetables which appeared in 1752.
Condition:slight retouching to side of face, lower right, and to wig; surface cleaned and varnished, 1879, 1896 when also relined, and 1898.
Collections:transferred, 1879, from the British Museum to whom bequeathed by Dr Gowin Knight (d.1772).
Iconography
A portrait by 'Wells' which belonged to the sitter's widow Elizabeth (d.1786) and a conversation piece of Parsons and his wife with their son and Elizabeth's sister, are mentioned by J. Nichols [2] Neither of these nor the whole length of a Dr Parsons engraved by Dighton, [3] listed by A.E. Evans [4] has been traced.
The only appropriate artist recorded by the name of Wells is a miniaturist noted by Vertue in 1741. [5] A portrait of Mary Black-Hat was engraved by Wells after Wells and O'Donoghue also lists a portrait of Sir J. Burland engraved, 1778, by Wells after an unknown artist. The only other painter with a similar name is James Wills (seeThomas Birch, and William Stukeley, Iconography).
Notes
1. Fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies (?).
2. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 1812, V, p.487.
3. Presumably Richard (1795-1880), son and pupil of Robert Dighton (c.1752-1814).
4. Catalogue of a Collection of Engraved Portraits [1829-34], I, p.263.
5. Vertue, III, p.101 and note.