National Portrait Gallery Publishes New Book on Later Stuart Portraits 1685 – 1714

LONDON.- This important reference work is the latest in the series of thoroughly researched, impressively detailed catalogues raisonnés of the National Portrait Gallery‘s Collections. It catalogues the entire Collection of portraits in all media of those active in the period 1685 and 1714, and includes new research from the Gallery’s curators and art historian John Ingamells.

This volume revises and updates David Piper’s Seventeenth-Century Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery (1963), and like its predecessors, forms a bedrock for research on British portraiture of this period.

This disturbed period of British history spanned the reigns of the last Stuart monarchs, James II, William III with Mary II and Queen Anne, a period of enormous political upheaval, at the heart of which was the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Yet it was also a time of huge achievement. Included in the catalogue is the famous military leader the Duke of Marlborough, builder of Blenheim; the wonderfully named Admiral Cloudesley Shovell; and Archbishop Sancroft, who led the Seven Bishops in their revolt against James II. Intellectual figures include John Locke, Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren. There are besides the fearsome Judge Jeffreys, the composer Henry Purcell and the diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Writers include John Dryden, Matthew Prior and Joseph Addison and painters, Godfrey Kneller and Michael Dahl (whose portrait is handsomely presented on the cover).

The catalogue not only contains essential information on over 300 later seventeenth century portraits in the Gallery’s Collection, but also, in keeping with other Gallery catalogues, includes extensive iconographies of all sitters represented in these portraits. The iconographies are annotated, chronological lists of other portraits of the sitter – outside the Portrait Gallery’s Collection – giving the reader an overall view of each sitter’s portraiture during his or her lifetime. The catalogue also contains useful sections on falsely identified portraits. The wealth of essential factual information is enlivened by contemporary anecdotes and descriptions of the sitters.

John Ingamells is a Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre. He was Director of York Art Gallery from 1967 to 1978 and Director of the Wallace Collection from 1978 to 1992. He has researched and written catalogues on the work of eighteenth-century artists Philip Mercier, Andrea Soldi and Allan Ramsay and on the collections of York City Art Gallery, the Wallace Collection and Dulwich Picture Gallery as well as the catalogue of Mid-Georgian Portraits for the National Portrait Gallery (2004).

Related posts:

1. National Portrait Gallery announces Lucian Freud portraits exhibition in February 2012
2. Previously Unseen Portraits of Susan Boyle and Tony Blair Go on Display at National Portrait Gallery
3. National Portrait Gallery in Washington Presents “Calder’s Portraits: A New Language”
4. Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery hosts The Black List: Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
5. Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London