drawing
- Museum number
- 1850,0713.13
- Description
-
Portrait of an unknown gentleman; whole-length study of a young man standing in a landscape, his right hand resting on a cane, a tree-trunk at left and fields and hills beyond. 1797
Graphite, with grey wash
- Production date
- 1797
- Dimensions
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Height: 263 millimetres
-
Width: 178 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- The following text is from S. Lloyd and K. Sloan, 'The Intimate Portrait' (exh. SNPG & BM, 2008-9), cat. no. 124:
In the 1790s, Edridge moved away from miniature portraits and began to develop a new type of full-length portraiture executed in pencil with touches of grey wash, the figures shown seated or standing, with a landscape view beyond. Cosway had introduced this type of portrait and exhibited them at the Royal Academy, London in the 1780s but, as Patrick Noon has noted, Edridge's technique owed little to Cosway's and more to the drawing style associated with the Monro school of landscape artists. Not surprisingly, given the strong friendship between Thomas Hearne and Edridge in the 1790s, this becomes particularly clear in the landscapes, which increase in prominence as the decade progressed. The blending of grey washes with soft broad pencil lines is particularly close to Hearne's technique. Edridge's portraits of the 1800s employ more watercolour in the figure and landscape, as his own separate attempts at landscape painting in watercolour progressed (see ‘Baron Farnborough’, 1805 and ‘Marquis of Anglesey’, 1808 in NPG). However, in the 1790s, as seen in the present work of 1797, Edridge was still finding his way, and relied strongly on the pencil for drawing detail in the face and shading in the figure.
We do not know the identity of the young man in this portrait; his riding coat and pantaloons with tasselled Hessian boots were a very new fashion at this time when most men were still wearing breeches. He is undoubtedly a member of the aristocracy and the lake and landscape beyond are not an ideal landscape but a portrait of his estate. Edridge was to employ his landscape skills in this way in his full-length portraits from about this date, as seen for example in his portraits of the Earl and Countess of Sheffield of the following year (NPG).
KS
SELECTED LITERATURE: LB 8; P. Noon ‘English Portrait Drawings and Miniatures’, New Haven 1979, pp. 84-6; J. Ingamells, ‘NPG: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790’, 2004, pp. 426-7
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2008/9 Oct-Jan, Edinburgh, SNPG, 'The Intimate Portrait', no. 124
2009 Mar-May, London, BM, Room 90, 'The Intimate Portrait', no. 124
- Acquisition date
- 1850
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1850,0713.13