拍品專文
RELATED LITERATURE:
C. C. Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture, New Haven, 1962, pp. 414-426
This portrait of Benjamin Franklin was painted by the young Joseph Wright in France in 1782. The artist originally trained under the distinguished Benjamin West and John Hoppner in London and exhibited at at the Royal Academy at the age of 24. It was from there that he travelled to Paris, where Richard Oswald, representative of the King of England to the peace negotiations in Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War, originally commissioned him to paint Franklin as a token of respect and good will.
Because of Franklin's popularity, Wright painted a series of portraits for sale. He used as a prototype, the famous pastel by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, but added his own artistic stamp with changes in the color of the sitter's dress, his chairback and the lines of the sitter's face bringing Duplessis' image into a more contemporary portrayal. Because the artist probably did not keep a matrix painting from which to produce other replicas, it is probable that each example was painted, at least in part, from actual sittings. In a letter dated August, 1782, Wright wrote, referring to Franklin, that "... he must be tired of seeing me so constantly." (Sellers, p. 414)
The current example is one of seven known portraits of Franklin by Joseph Wright. The first, commissioned by Oswald, was lost in a shipwreck on the way to America. The other five versions are in the permanent collections of Yale University Art Gallery, the Boston Public Library, the Royal Society of London, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
A letter dated April 11, 1971, from Charles Coleman Sellers, discussing this example, accompanies the lot.
C. C. Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture, New Haven, 1962, pp. 414-426
This portrait of Benjamin Franklin was painted by the young Joseph Wright in France in 1782. The artist originally trained under the distinguished Benjamin West and John Hoppner in London and exhibited at at the Royal Academy at the age of 24. It was from there that he travelled to Paris, where Richard Oswald, representative of the King of England to the peace negotiations in Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War, originally commissioned him to paint Franklin as a token of respect and good will.
Because of Franklin's popularity, Wright painted a series of portraits for sale. He used as a prototype, the famous pastel by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, but added his own artistic stamp with changes in the color of the sitter's dress, his chairback and the lines of the sitter's face bringing Duplessis' image into a more contemporary portrayal. Because the artist probably did not keep a matrix painting from which to produce other replicas, it is probable that each example was painted, at least in part, from actual sittings. In a letter dated August, 1782, Wright wrote, referring to Franklin, that "... he must be tired of seeing me so constantly." (Sellers, p. 414)
The current example is one of seven known portraits of Franklin by Joseph Wright. The first, commissioned by Oswald, was lost in a shipwreck on the way to America. The other five versions are in the permanent collections of Yale University Art Gallery, the Boston Public Library, the Royal Society of London, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
A letter dated April 11, 1971, from Charles Coleman Sellers, discussing this example, accompanies the lot.