Follower of Gavin Hamilton, R.A.

The present composition is based on an untraced painting by Gavin Hamilton, formerly in the collection of his loyal patron Sir William Hamilton (listed in his inventory of pictures at the Palazzo Sessa in Naples in 1798). Hamilton's painting was included in the 1801 sale of his collection, along with a pendant work, as "The Genii of Painting & Poetry".¹ Appealing to a contemporary taste for the Italian classical tradition, the female personification of Painting, crowned with a laurel wreath, holds a sketch of the Belvedere Torso and Mount Vesuvius simmers in the background. Moreover, these classicizing details invoke Sir William Hamilton's personal interests as an antiquarian and vulcanologist. Though the original pair of paintings remains untraced, they are known today from surviving copies by Hamilton's followers--including the present work--and a 1779 engraving by Raphael Morghen (1758–1833).²

¹ For a more detailed discussion of Hamilton's untraced original and its pendant, see F. Forster-Hahn, "After Guercino or After the Greeks? Gavin Hamilton's 'Hebe': Tradition and Change3 in the 1760's," in The Burlington Magazine 117, no. 867 (June 1975), pp. 364-371.

² Raphael Morghen, after Gavin Hamilton, La Peinture, Philadelphia Museum of Art, inv. no. 1985-52-12780.