Lot Essay
An unrecorded portrait of Bruce, post-dating his travels in Africa and the portraits of the sitter produced by Batoni in 1762 in Rome when Bruce was en route to take up his position as British consul at Algiers.
Bruce, a Scot claiming ancestry from King Robert, the conqueror of the English at Bannockburn, was one of the first to put Africa on the map with his extensive travels in Abyssinia, related in his Travels to discover the Sources of the Nile in the Years 1768 ... 1773 published in five volumes in 1790. While Bruce claimed to have found the source of the Nile, he had in fact only reached the spring of its main tributary, the Blue Nile. It would be left to Speke, on Burton's expedition to strike the Nile sources via the eastern coast, to be the first European to set eyes on its true source, the vast lake he named for the Queen, Victoria Nyanza, in 1858.
Bruce's extravagant tales of the interior were met with some scepticism by polite society on his return to London in 1774, and after a short period of some celebrity (to which the present portrait probably dates), he returned to his patrimonial estate in Scotland. Fanny Burney gave a contemporary description of Bruce in a letter to Samuel Crisp: 'Mr Bruce's grand air, gigantic height, and forbidding brown awed everyone into silence'. If Bruce's tales were met with muted disbelief in London, Africa itself did become the talk of the town, leading in 1788 to the formation of 'an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior parts of Africa' which in turn instigated the first concerted expeditions of Houghton and Mungo Park to Africa in the 1790s.
Bruce, a Scot claiming ancestry from King Robert, the conqueror of the English at Bannockburn, was one of the first to put Africa on the map with his extensive travels in Abyssinia, related in his Travels to discover the Sources of the Nile in the Years 1768 ... 1773 published in five volumes in 1790. While Bruce claimed to have found the source of the Nile, he had in fact only reached the spring of its main tributary, the Blue Nile. It would be left to Speke, on Burton's expedition to strike the Nile sources via the eastern coast, to be the first European to set eyes on its true source, the vast lake he named for the Queen, Victoria Nyanza, in 1858.
Bruce's extravagant tales of the interior were met with some scepticism by polite society on his return to London in 1774, and after a short period of some celebrity (to which the present portrait probably dates), he returned to his patrimonial estate in Scotland. Fanny Burney gave a contemporary description of Bruce in a letter to Samuel Crisp: 'Mr Bruce's grand air, gigantic height, and forbidding brown awed everyone into silence'. If Bruce's tales were met with muted disbelief in London, Africa itself did become the talk of the town, leading in 1788 to the formation of 'an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior parts of Africa' which in turn instigated the first concerted expeditions of Houghton and Mungo Park to Africa in the 1790s.