Lot 143
William Hamilton of Bangour, poet and Jacobite - Strange, Sir Robert
Jacobite, Stuart, and Scottish Applied Arts
Auction: 13 May 2015 at 12:00 BST
Description
William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-54) engraved by Sir Robert Strange, after Jean-Baptiste Descamps (1706-91), Rouen: 1747-8, 23 x 27.5cm including mount (not laid-down)
Footnote
Note: Both the original oil and the engraving were done in Rouen in 1747-8 (not in Rome, as stated in 'Notices of the Life of William Hamilton of Bangour, Esq, Communicated by James Chalmers to David Laing', Archaeologia Scotica. Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, III,1831, pp. 255-66). The present image, as engraved by Strange after Descamps, was re-engraved for the article in Archaeologia Scotia, but that version bears the sitter's name and indicates the ownership of the original oil (Threipland of Fingask Castle). This small print is rare, only a few copies being known. One was presented by the 11th Earl of Buchan to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1782 (now in SNPG). Another was in the collection of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. Besides the re-engraving for Archaeologia Scotica in 1831, the print appeared again, in poor lithographic form, as frontispiece to James Paterson's edition of the poems and songs of William Hamilton of Bangour, Edinburgh 1850. See p. xvii of this work for the scarcity of the original print. This print is not in the National Portrait Gallery, London, nor is it in the Walter Biggar Blaikie Jacobite Collection (National Library of Scotland).