Lot 105
£77,700
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Session | 7th December 2023 at 18:00
Oil on canvas, and a companion, a pair, Queen Charlotte Wearing a Scarlet Dress
Provenance: Miss K. Jones
A. Ackermann & Son, Chicago
Malcolm Innes Gallery, Edinburgh 1981
Private Collection, Scotland
Exhibited:
Musée Masséna, Nice, Les Anglais dans le Comte de Nice, 1934, no. 339 (lent by Jones)
Literature:
Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Yale University Press, 1999, pp.90, 121, 86b and 193b
Allan Ramsay played an instrumental role in establishing a national identity for British art. His precise and sensitive portraiture earned him widespread acclaim, aided by his prodigious intellectualism and social flair which ingratiated him with an elite stratum of patrons; amongst his friends he counted David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell (Dr Johnson reflected that there was no man ‘in whose conversation there is more instruction, more information, and more elegance, than in Ramsay’s’). His ascension to Principal Painter to the King in 1767 promoted him amongst a prestigious cohort which included Anthony van Dyck, Peter Lely, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence. In this capacity, and under the prolific patronage of George III, Ramsay’s royal portraiture established an iconography that would define the monarch’s reign across the world for generations to come.
The most pivotal commission of his career came from the 3rd Earl of Bute in 1757, who employed Ramsay to execute a full-length portrait of the Earl’s pupil George, the Prince of Wales (later King George III). The resulting likeness was deemed so satisfactory that George, in turn, commissioned a portrait of his teacher. Ramsay thus established a fruitful relationship with George, who would prove one of the most enthusiastic patrons of the arts since Charles I. Upon George’s 1761 Coronation he engaged Ramsay’s services as ‘One of his Majesty’s Painters in Ordinary’, his first charge being to produce a pair of resplendent full-length Coronation portraits of the King and Queen. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office required numerous copies of these paintings to be distributed to Ambassadors and Governors of the Old World and the New, a task that would occupy Ramsay and his studio assistants for the rest of his life.
In around 1761-2 Ramsay recorded working on smaller pendant portraits showing King George and Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in profile ‘for the coinage’. George is presented in dignified regal splendour: he wears the star and ribbon of the Garter, and tucks his hand into his jacket causing its golden embroidery to glimmer in the light. Queen Charlotte is equally refined, draped all in lace with pearls affixed at her throat with a cream ribbon. Newly arrived from Germany, she rests her arm on the second volume of David Hume’s 1757 History of Britain, as if an assurance to her subjects of her preparedness for the British crown. The principal versions of these portraits were commissioned by the Earl of Bute at around the time he became Prime Minister, and further versions are rare, with only three listed in Alistair Smart’s catalogue of Ramsay’s works.