Sir John HOPPNER R.A. (1758-1810, English)
Portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton
oil on canvas
30 x 25 inches
In the original gilded frame
Price: Sold
Sir John Hoppner was an English portrait painter, much influenced by Reynolds, who achieved fame as a brilliant colourist.
Hoppner first exhibited at the Royal Academy In 1780. His earliest love was for landscape, but necessity obliged him to turn to the more lucrative business of portrait painting. At once successful, he had throughout life the most fashionable and wealthy sitters and was the greatest rival to the growing attraction of Thomas Lawrence. He rarely attempted ideal subjects, though a Sleeping Venus, Belisarius, Jupiter and Io, a Bacchante and Cupid and Psyche are recorded among his works. The Prince of Wales visited him especially often, and many of his finest portraits were hung in the state apartments at St James's Palace, notably those of the prince himself, the Duke and Duchess of York, Lord Rodney and Lord Nelson. His other sitters included Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington, Henry Bartle Frere and Sir George Beaumont.
According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica:
Competent judges have deemed his most successful works to be his portraits of women and children... He was confessedly an imitator of Reynolds. When first painted, his works were much admired for the brilliance and harmony of their coloring, but the injury due to destructive mediums and lapse of time which many of them suffered caused a great depreciation in his reputation. The appearance, however, of some of his pictures in good condition has shown that his fame as a brilliant colorist was well-founded. His drawing is faulty, but his touch has qualities of breadth and freedom that give to his paintings a faint reflection of the charm of Reynolds.
In 1803 he published A Series of Portraits of Ladies, engraved after his paintings by Charles Wilkin, and in 1805 a volume of translations of Eastern tales into English verse.
Unusually Hoppner painted the background and perhaps more of a full-length portrait of Charlotte, Countess Talbot by Thomas Gainsborough in 1788, the year in which Gainsborough died. It is now in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.