- Title
- Portrait of Hugh Montgomerie, Later Twelfth Earl of Eglinton
- Date Made
- 1780
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- Canvas: 94 1/2 × 59 3/4 in. (240.03 × 151.77 cm)
Frame: 106 1/2 × 69 1/2 × 6 in. (270.51 × 176.53 × 15.24 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.68.74
- Collecting Area
- American Art
- Curatorial Notes
Exhibition Label, 1997
This portrait of a Scottish officer who fought in the French and Indian Wars brilliantly evokes the internationalism of 18th-century British life and culture. Copley was already the foremost portraitist in the American colonies before he moved to England in 1775. He abandoned the New World for political reasons; however, the move enabled him to paint more elevated themes than the American portrait trade had afforded him. In London he demonstrated his virtuosity by abandoning his tight, linear brushwork for the greater bravura and flair of fashionable London portrait painters such as Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Copley’s depiction of Hugh Montgomerie also demonstrates the artist’s success in the new field of contemporary history painting. Montgomerie served in the 77th Regiment of Highlanders, who fought at Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain and Fort Duquesne in present-day Pittsburgh. Copley presented Montgomerie on the heroic scale of grand-manner portraits and posed him after one of the most famous statues of antiquity, the Apollo Belvedere. The palette of deep greens, reds, and blacks and the threatening clouds enhance the drama of the gruesome scene in the lower left.
- Selected Bibliography
- Esguerra, Clarissa, and Michaela Hansen. Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022.
- Esguerra, Clarissa M., Michaela Hansen, Katie Somerville, and Danielle Whitfield, editors. Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022.
