Anthony Scrope

Location

Country: Japan
City: Tokyo
Place: British Embassy

This portrait of Anthony Scrope attributed to Thomas Hudson (1701-1779), one of the most fashionable London portraitists of the 1740s and ‘50s, is something of a mystery. Although we have his name and image, nothing more of the sitter is known to date. The portrait of the young man is enclosed within an oval illusionistic frame and he is depicted wearing a rich, red velvet coat.

Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) was a portrait painter and an art collector from Devon. He was a pupil of the English artist and collector Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745), whose daughter Mary he had married by 1725. Hudson worked primarily in the West Country prior to Richardson’s retirement from painting in 1740; after this date his reputation grew in the capital as he inherited Richardson’s former clients. He is thought to have painted around 400 portraits over the course of his career, an output which was aided by his employment of the Flemish artist working in England, Joseph van Aken (c.1699–1749). He also later employed his brother Alexander (1701–1757) as a drapery painter. Hudson was one of a number of prominent artists who met at Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in London in the mid 1740s, at a time before formal artistic academies had been established in Britain. Other painters who frequented the coffee house include William Hogarth (1697–1764), Francis Hayman (c.1708–1776), Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), and the sculptor John Michael Rysbrack (c.1684–1770). Hudson also travelled to France and the Low Countries in 1748 with Hogarth, Hayman and van Aken. In 1752 he visited Rome, as many British artists were increasingly to do, with the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac (1695–1762).Among the list of Hudson’s apprentices are Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), and John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779). After the mid 1760s Hudson received less work and soon retired to Twickenham, where he died in 1779.

People

Anthony Scrope

Places

Subjects

male portrait, man, 18th century costume, coat, waistcoat, cravat

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting, feigned oval

Artist

Thomas Hudson (1701 - 1779)

Title

Anthony Scrope

Date

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 76.00 cm, width: 63.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased 1947

Inscription

none visible

Provenance

Collection of Mrs. Braund; by whose executors sold through Christie's, London, ‘Old Pictures: Prop. of Mrs. Braund, Charles Stirling and Old Pictures and Drawings from Other Sources’ sale, on 17 January 1947 (Lot 5), for £8.8.0, as by ‘School of Kneller’; from which sale purchased by ‘Wingrove’ on behalf of the Ministry of Works

GAC number

278