By Emily J. Peters, Curator of Prints and Drawings
Prized for its good coloring and matte floor, the pastel medium was applied by artists in Europe as early as the 16th century. But it was the 18th century that noticed the zenith of the medium, coinciding with the monumental increase in acceptance of portraiture as an creative genre. Manufactured of powdered pigments formed into a paste or crayon, pastels ended up deemed particularly fitting for portraiture provided their suitability for blending and developing delicate skin tones and a wide variety of textiles and landscape features.
Patrons of the 18th century regarded pastel portraits as distinctive, partly due to the fact they available distinct viewing encounters than portraits produced in other media. English pastel artist Frances Cotes (1726–1770) explained their effects as such:
Crayon [pastel] images, when finely painted, are superlatively stunning, and decorative in a really significant diploma in apartments that are not too significant for owning their floor dry, they partake in visual appearance of the effect of Fresco, and by candle light-weight are luminous and attractive past all other photographs.[1]
Intended for intimate domestic areas these types of as sitting or breakfast rooms, pastel portraits became popular additions to collections of family portraiture accrued by rich Europeans. Favorable to this increase, as effectively, was the truth that pastel crayons could be easily transported and needed no drying time, as a result providing the versatility and rapidity of execution prized by both artists and patrons.
The Cleveland Museum of Artwork recently additional to its assortment of 18th-century pastels a large, whole-duration portrait depicting George Clavering Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”), 3rd Earl Cowper, executed by Irish artist Hugh Douglas Hamilton in 1785 (fig. 1). The British vogue for pastel portraiture was in comprehensive swing by the 1780s, when the earl sat for Hamilton in Florence, Italy, exactly where he had resided for lots of decades. Florence was a demanded quit for any Grand Vacationer browsing the continent from the British Isles — and for the expat artists hoping to get their patronage.
Born in Dublin, Hamilton first gained recognition for his pastel portraits of the trendy upper lessons of Dublin and at some point London, where he was celebrated in the well-liked push for capturing solid likenesses of his sitters. Early on, he specialised in small oval-structure portraits, which could be executed and framed in just one sitting for a mounted fee. Hamilton’s significant, whole-duration pastel portraits appeared only when he traveled to Italy in his forties, remaining for many a long time in Rome and Florence. In Rome, he turned near good friends with Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova and English painter John Flaxman. His interaction with these artists, and his publicity to the total-length oil portraits by Pompeo Batoni, inspired him to develop numerous comprehensive-duration pastels of British tourists before landscapes, classical architecture, and ruins.
When Hamilton arrived in Florence in 1783, the English-talking press observed his “correctness of . . . style, . . . excellent harmony of . . . colouring, and . . . striking resemblances.”[2] He was so esteemed that he was elected a member of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Style) in October 1784.
Cowper, for his element, was a commanding existence among the cultural group in Florence. He lived splendidly in a sequence of rented palazzi and was a committed patron of the arts and sciences. He championed the audio of George Frideric Handel by keeping performances of his operates in Florence, collected Renaissance masterworks by Raphael, and even sponsored scientist Alessandro Volta’s operate on electromagnetism. For Hamilton, winning the patronage of this very well-related paragon of tradition in Florence constituted a prestigious profession win.
Hamilton portrayed Cowper in a vivid pink coat, buff breeches, and a expensive gold-trimmed waistcoat, which prominently shows the sash and star of the Get of Saint Hubertus. Cowper experienced been inducted into the order in March 1785, possibly with the sponsorship of his close buddy Pietro Leopoldo, the Hapsburg Grand Duke of Tuscany. Saint Hubertus was a knightly buy of aristocratic hunters from all through the Hapsburg empire whose motto was “Honoring God by Honoring His Creatures.” Hamilton’s depiction of an substantial woodland landscape, consisting of comfortable brown and turquoise tones describing trees, hills, and a sparkling stream, supports the plan that the portrait was designed in honor of the earl’s induction into the purchase. Enhancing the wildlife theme is the earl’s splendid looking canine, an Italian cane corso with cropped ears wearing a boldly rendered, shining metal collar inscribed with the name Cowper (fig. 2). The pet dog gets a tender pat on the head. Hamilton’s system emphasizes linear clarity and shows a variety of marks ranging from great blending on the confront to much more broadly used strokes and unblended spots in the landscape (fig. 3).
A person trace of the artist’s apply is ideal appreciated with raking light shone throughout the floor of the pastel (fig. 4). The earl’s head, hat, and cravat ended up executed on a independent sheet of paper, which can be witnessed in the a little raised, irregular shape of the paper surface area. Hamilton hence took the likeness of the earl’s experience on a small sheet in the earl’s existence, later on adhering it expertly to the bigger sheet before completing the rest of the determine and history. The generous application of powdery pastel was ideally suited to conceal the edges of such an insert. Following the likeness and presumably a sketch of the proportions of the overall body had been taken, Hamilton could comprehensive the composition in his studio utilizing a mannikin posed in the wanted posture.
The rather synthetic but grand positioning of the earl’s arms completely suited the taste of Hamilton’s patrons and is standard of up to date portraits, these as the CMA’s Portrait of Colonel Charles Heathcote by Joseph Wright of Derby. The domestic scale of the two the Wright of Derby portray and the Hamilton pastel supplies a contrast to the massive Grand Way portraits on exhibit in the CMA’s British gallery by Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence, and Joshua Reynolds, which have been intended for large halls or galleries. The Hamilton portrait will be a part of these operates in the British gallery in the coming months, wherever website visitors can see for themselves the qualities unique to pastel portraits that made them so interesting to 18th-century audiences.
