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Painted at the height of George Richmond’s maturity as a portraitist, this self-portrait distils the assurance of an artist whose practice had been shaped over several decades. Preserved in pristine condition, it stands as a touchstone in his oeuvre and one of his most romantic self-portraits.
Born in London in 1809, the son of the miniature painter Thomas Richmond, George Richmond entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1824, where he met Henry Fuseli and formed his lifelong friendship with Samuel Palmer. As a teenager, he entered the tight circle of young artists gathered around William Blake, later known as the Ancients. With Blake as their informal leader and 'Interpreter’, Richmond, Palmer, Edward Calvert and their companions looked towards the art of the past as an alternative to the increasingly industrialised world around them.
After his marriage in 1831, portraiture became the practical foundation of Richmond’s career, and over the following decades he built a formidable...
Painted at the height of George Richmond’s maturity as a portraitist, this self-portrait distils the assurance of an artist whose practice had been shaped over several decades. Preserved in pristine condition, it stands as a touchstone in his oeuvre and one of his most romantic self-portraits.
Born in London in 1809, the son of the miniature painter Thomas Richmond, George Richmond entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1824, where he met Henry Fuseli and formed his lifelong friendship with Samuel Palmer. As a teenager, he entered the tight circle of young artists gathered around William Blake, later known as the Ancients. With Blake as their informal leader and 'Interpreter’, Richmond, Palmer, Edward Calvert and their companions looked towards the art of the past as an alternative to the increasingly industrialised world around them.
After his marriage in 1831, portraiture became the practical foundation of Richmond’s career, and over the following decades he built a formidable clientele. Charlotte Brontë, John Ruskin, John Henry Newman and John Keble were among the many figures who sat to him. Around this date he became particularly celebrated for drawings in chalk and watercolour, a medium in which the exactness of his draughtsmanship could be combined with great delicacy of modelling. His election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1857, followed by full membership in 1866, formalised the position he had long occupied at the centre of artistic and intellectual society.
The circumstances surrounding the production of the present portrait are unusually well documented. Richmond’s account book records the painting under 1863: “My own portrait for Grillions in oil – given to John Giles Esq” [fig. 1].[1] The reference was to Grillion’s Club, the exclusive but deliberately non-partisan dining society founded in 1812, frequented by many of the leading politicians and public figures of nineteenth-century Britain. Portraiture became an integral part of the Club’s identity through a tradition which originated in the private collection of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, one of Grillion's founding members, who had commissioned Joseph Slater to draw likenesses of his friends in crayon. In 1826 the Club formalised the practice, resolving that each member should have their portrait engraved from Acland's drawing and distribute impressions among his fellow members. The resulting engravings were assembled into volumes and a set was subsequently framed for the Club's dining room. Richmond succeeded Slater as the principal artist in the 1840s, producing the original drawings from which the majority of the second series was engraved. The original drawings remained separate from the Club’s engraved collection, making Richmond’s contribution unusual: instead of the customary drawing, he produced an oil self-portrait, which served as the source for William Holl Jr’s engraving before being given to John Giles.
Richmond shows himself bust-length set against an expansive sky, his dark-clad torso turned obliquely across the canvas and his head turned in contrapposto towards the viewer. One hand rises to his chin, seemingly in a pose of reflection. His ruddy cheeks and slightly furrowed brow are described without the softening conventions frequently demanded by commissioned portraiture. Most arresting are the eyes which meet the viewer with an unusually direct intensity, lending the portrait a sense of psychological depth.
Particularly striking is the illusionistic treatment of the lower edge, where Richmond’s arm rests upon a ledge and appears to project beyond the picture plane into the viewer’s space. The device recalls the Renaissance tradition of the portrait parapet, developed particularly in Venetian painting and familiar from works by Titian [fig. 2]. Perhaps a nod to the sitter’s antiquarian sympathies, or simply a means of aligning his image with an authoritative tradition of portraiture, the allusion is intriguing.
Richmond returned to his own likeness repeatedly throughout his life, though this feels arguably the most romantic. The National Portrait Gallery records a sequence of his self-portraits extending from a miniature of 1830, painted at the close of his association with the Ancients, through paintings and drawings of the 1840s and 1850s to more formal self-portraits of the later 1860s.[2] Painted in 1863, the present work occupies a revealing middle position between the youthful self-image of 1830 and the more official portraits of 1867–68, in which Richmond appears clad in a formal doctoral cap and gown.
[1] George Richmond, Account Book, entry for 1863, National Portrait Gallery Heinz Archive.
[2] ‘Early Victorian Portraits Catalogue: George Richmond’, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw05326/George-Richmond.
