Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

About the Painting

Audio player

Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

Label

Audio player

Audio by Hood Museum of Art

This Portrait of Robert Clements, the son of the Irish Deputy Vice-Treasurer of the Exchequer, and later First Earl of Leitrim (1732-1804), is one of two portraits in the Hood collection by Pompeo Batoni, the most celebrated portrait painter in Rome during the mid eighteenth century.

While the pose of Robert Clements in Batoni’s oil painting of 1753 is nearly identical to that shown in Lord Dartmouth’s portrait, the setting is entirely different. Clements was portrayed indoors in front of a classically designed pilaster and next to a sculpted bust. Apparently this was the painter’s first use of an antique sculpture to suggest the sitter’s appreciation of ancient art (Russell 1973: 1609). The bust of Homer was carefully arranged on a pedestal and positioned almost as though the great poet were directing his gaze toward his admirer. The sculpture, one of a large number of replicas of the most celebrated of the invented portraits of antiquity, corresponded in all essential details with the one in the Farnese collection in Rome. For many readers of this era, Homer perfectly mirrored an ideal, heroic world that resonated with the one described by early-eighteenth-century British travelers writing about their own journeys to Italy. The inclusion of the bust of Homer here in fact suggests more than the sitter’s immediate aesthetic response to the age and artistic qualities of the sculpture. For a number of contemporary observers, the ancient Greek author embodied the classical — and primarily male — virtues that visitors to Rome sought to revive and imitate.

Although there is no specific documentation indicating that Batoni’s sitters instructed him about how they would like to be portrayed, undoubtedly the painter would have discussed in detail the proposed composition and other issues associated with a client’s attitude, attire, and accessories. With regard to the latter, selections were most likely based on the preferences of the sitter, but they also often reflected the values and tastes of the leading figures promoting the aims of the Grand Tour. In addition, even though an earlier generation of Italian artists had included landscapes and antiquities in their portrayals of foreign visitors to rome, Batoni popularized this particular type of portraiture, eventually creating an iconic image of the British traveler.

T. Barton Thurber