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Lot Essay
Dating to circa 1781, this enchanting depiction of a young girl in a mob cap is a superb example of the character studies of children painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the late 1770s and 1780s. During the previous decade he had cemented his position as the leading portraitist of Georgian England. Between 1769 and 1779, he exhibited over 100 pictures at the Royal Academy, including portraits of Dr Samuel Johnson and Dr Oliver Goldsmith (1770), Giuseppe Baretti (1774) and David Garrick (1776). He also produced the remarkable self-portrait in doctoral robes, painted for Somerset House following the receipt of an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford in 1773, and made another in celebration of his election to the Florentine Academy in 1775. However, it was to character studies, known as fancy pictures, to which he increasingly turned his attention over the course of the decade.
The Mob Cap takes its inspiration from the central figure in Reynolds’s Infant Academy, at Kenwood, London, which is perhaps the most ambitious of his fancy pictures. Infant Academy was painted immediately after Reynolds’s return from Flanders in 1781 and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782 alongside his Portrait of Lavinia, Countess Spencer (Althorp), two remarkable full-lengths of Lady Elizabeth Compton (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art) and Lady Talbot (London, Tate Britain), his flamboyant Colonel Tarleton (London, National Gallery), and his Portrait of Mrs Baldwin (Private collection). Critics at the Royal Academy exhibition detected a new Rubensian richness in Reynolds’s palette, and the St. James's Chronicle of 30 April 1782 noted: ‘He seems to have recollected at the time all the Beauty & Force of Colouring, so characteristic of the Flemish School.’
The Mob Cap displays much of the same fluency of handling as The Infant Academy. Like in the larger painting, the child sports a large, fashionable white muslin mob-cap decorated with a silk bow and bordered by a broad ruffle. The mob-cap came en vogue in the eighteenth century and was designed to accommodate the rising hairstyles of the 1780s. Often gathered, with a puffed crown, the cap was typically made of a white gauze or a light muslin fabric, with the edges left as ruffles or frill. Reynolds reused the motif later in the decade in 1788 for his celebrated portrait of Penelope Boothby, aged three, who wears a mob cap (Private collection).
Early in the nineteenth century, The Mob Cap formed part of the collection of great English portraitist and landscape painter, Richard Westall, who is perhaps best known for his portraits of Lord Byron (one is in the National Portrait Gallery, London; another is at Hughenden Manor; and a third is in the House of Lords). It later belonged to Samuel Rogers, who enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poet and a discriminating art collector.
The Mob Cap takes its inspiration from the central figure in Reynolds’s Infant Academy, at Kenwood, London, which is perhaps the most ambitious of his fancy pictures. Infant Academy was painted immediately after Reynolds’s return from Flanders in 1781 and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782 alongside his Portrait of Lavinia, Countess Spencer (Althorp), two remarkable full-lengths of Lady Elizabeth Compton (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art) and Lady Talbot (London, Tate Britain), his flamboyant Colonel Tarleton (London, National Gallery), and his Portrait of Mrs Baldwin (Private collection). Critics at the Royal Academy exhibition detected a new Rubensian richness in Reynolds’s palette, and the St. James's Chronicle of 30 April 1782 noted: ‘He seems to have recollected at the time all the Beauty & Force of Colouring, so characteristic of the Flemish School.’
The Mob Cap displays much of the same fluency of handling as The Infant Academy. Like in the larger painting, the child sports a large, fashionable white muslin mob-cap decorated with a silk bow and bordered by a broad ruffle. The mob-cap came en vogue in the eighteenth century and was designed to accommodate the rising hairstyles of the 1780s. Often gathered, with a puffed crown, the cap was typically made of a white gauze or a light muslin fabric, with the edges left as ruffles or frill. Reynolds reused the motif later in the decade in 1788 for his celebrated portrait of Penelope Boothby, aged three, who wears a mob cap (Private collection).
Early in the nineteenth century, The Mob Cap formed part of the collection of great English portraitist and landscape painter, Richard Westall, who is perhaps best known for his portraits of Lord Byron (one is in the National Portrait Gallery, London; another is at Hughenden Manor; and a third is in the House of Lords). It later belonged to Samuel Rogers, who enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poet and a discriminating art collector.