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拍品專文
The present pastel is one of the most important and best preserved of Hamilton's rare full-length portraits and a moving testimony of the friendship between two young men.
Hamilton, who had followed the migration of his wealthy sitters to Rome circa 1782 was already in Italy when Brooke embarked on his Grand Tour in 1783 with his tutor Rev. John Parkinson. At the beginning of 1784 he arrived in Naples to meet with an old college friend and close aquaintance Sir James Graham, 1st Bt. (1761-1824) travelling with his mentor, the Rev. Thomas Brand.
Brooke and Graham joined one another in Naples and in the weeks that followed toured the sights of Rome. On 19 May they left for Venice and spent another two weeks there when Hamilton began the present portrait. John Ramsay, son of the artist Allan Ramsay, records in his Diary that Brooke 'sat to Mr Hamilton for his picture' on 28 May 1784 (see Diary, National Library of Scotland). This is confirmed by the records of the Rev. John Parkinson, Brooke's companion.
Together Brooke and Graham took a course in antiquities with other friends making the tour. After Venice the two friends went their separate ways, Graham set off for Geneva and Brooke travelled to Milan. This departure was to mark the end of their great friendship, for Brooke died of a fever in his rooms at the Auberge Impériale on 19 July 1784.
Brooke is shown here leaning on a tomb which is inscribed in Latin 'Sir James Graham did this for Brooke his best and rarest friend', a reference to the fact that Graham almost certainly undertoook the completion of the portrait in his friend's memory. A putto carved on the tomb extinguishes the flame of his torch on a rock. In the background a brook makes a gentle allusion to the sitter's name. Beyond that, the Tomb of the Plautii can be seen among the trees a reminder of the time the two men spent together in Rome.
The tone of the work, poignant and Romantic, reflects Hamilton's development as an artist since he first achieved success in London during the 1770s. In 1778 he moved to Rome and immersed himself in the city's atmosphere of decayed grandeur. It was an atmosphere that particularly suited the English aristocratic fashion to affect a sort of etiolated melancholy. And whilst many of Hamilton's clients required nothing more from him than a small-scale likeness of themselves, a few allowed the artist to give vent to his imaginative powers in full-length pictures. Inspired by the Grand Tour portraits made fashionable by the artist Pompeii Batoni, Hamilton produced his greatest masterpieces. Few painters of the last quarter of the 18th century captured a feeling of the emerging Romanticism in portraiture better than he. And nowhere did Hamilton, achieve a more perfect expression of Gothic melancholy than here, where the young man who dies in the flower of his youth is elegantly posed by his own memorial.
For two further portraits by Hamilton, see lot 109.
Hamilton, who had followed the migration of his wealthy sitters to Rome circa 1782 was already in Italy when Brooke embarked on his Grand Tour in 1783 with his tutor Rev. John Parkinson. At the beginning of 1784 he arrived in Naples to meet with an old college friend and close aquaintance Sir James Graham, 1st Bt. (1761-1824) travelling with his mentor, the Rev. Thomas Brand.
Brooke and Graham joined one another in Naples and in the weeks that followed toured the sights of Rome. On 19 May they left for Venice and spent another two weeks there when Hamilton began the present portrait. John Ramsay, son of the artist Allan Ramsay, records in his Diary that Brooke 'sat to Mr Hamilton for his picture' on 28 May 1784 (see Diary, National Library of Scotland). This is confirmed by the records of the Rev. John Parkinson, Brooke's companion.
Together Brooke and Graham took a course in antiquities with other friends making the tour. After Venice the two friends went their separate ways, Graham set off for Geneva and Brooke travelled to Milan. This departure was to mark the end of their great friendship, for Brooke died of a fever in his rooms at the Auberge Impériale on 19 July 1784.
Brooke is shown here leaning on a tomb which is inscribed in Latin 'Sir James Graham did this for Brooke his best and rarest friend', a reference to the fact that Graham almost certainly undertoook the completion of the portrait in his friend's memory. A putto carved on the tomb extinguishes the flame of his torch on a rock. In the background a brook makes a gentle allusion to the sitter's name. Beyond that, the Tomb of the Plautii can be seen among the trees a reminder of the time the two men spent together in Rome.
The tone of the work, poignant and Romantic, reflects Hamilton's development as an artist since he first achieved success in London during the 1770s. In 1778 he moved to Rome and immersed himself in the city's atmosphere of decayed grandeur. It was an atmosphere that particularly suited the English aristocratic fashion to affect a sort of etiolated melancholy. And whilst many of Hamilton's clients required nothing more from him than a small-scale likeness of themselves, a few allowed the artist to give vent to his imaginative powers in full-length pictures. Inspired by the Grand Tour portraits made fashionable by the artist Pompeii Batoni, Hamilton produced his greatest masterpieces. Few painters of the last quarter of the 18th century captured a feeling of the emerging Romanticism in portraiture better than he. And nowhere did Hamilton, achieve a more perfect expression of Gothic melancholy than here, where the young man who dies in the flower of his youth is elegantly posed by his own memorial.
For two further portraits by Hamilton, see lot 109.