Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Thomas Giffard (1764 - 1823) of Chillington Hall, Staffordshire, 1784

1784

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

249 × 180.4 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-149622

This magnificent portrait was painted in Rome in 1784 and it must be considered among the masterpieces of Batoni’s late portraiture. It is a picture of particular poignancy, for not only does it have the distinction of being the last full-length portrait that Batoni was to paint of an English sitter, patrons who had provided him with the most important section of his clientele in Rome for over thirty years, it was also to be the very last that he painted in his career, for within three years of its completion he had died. The sitter, Thomas Giffard, was the eldest son of Thomas Peter Giffard (1735 – 1776) of Chillington Hall in Staffordshire and his second wife Barbara (1737 – 1764), daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton 4th Bt. (1702 – 1791), and his second wife Catherine Collingwood. This portrait was commissioned in Rome during Giffard’s brief Grand Tour in 1784, when he was just twenty years old, and was much the most important and ambitious commission he made during its course. Described by the great Batoni scholar Anthony Clark as ‘among the most beautiful of all Batoni portraits’, this portrayal of a young recusant Catholic ‘Milord’ posing for posterity beside the symbols of ancient Rome has few equals in the later part of Batoni’s long and successful career. It has, moreover, passed by unbroken family descent for over two hundred and forty years, having been exhibited in public only once in all that time, and has never before been offered for sale.